Yesterday, OMG! Ubuntu! published a news article stating that Canonical are working on their own display server. If you don't understand the technical details of a display server, what it's job is, and how applications talk to it, then you may think this is a good thing. You may think, “Linux is about choice” or “perhaps this will be better than the alternatives”. But you'd be wrong, horribly wrong.
I have so many problems with this
announcement that I thought I'd actually stick my neck out here and
put it down on paper. I've been largely driven to this because I have
this unfortunate habit of reading comments, and some people tend to
comment on topics that they have no knowledge about. This annoys me.
So, let's start from the beginning,
what is a display server?
When you write an application, whatever
it may be, you normally talk to some API that allows you to write the
application without having to get down to the nitty gritty of
actually rendering buttons or creating windows. Depending on personal
choice, application type, and technical decisions you may choose to
use something like Gtk+, or QT or for games SDL.
All of these toolkits talk to what is
called a “display server” to do things like, draw the actual
buttons, or receive input. Basically a display server is a middleware
between your application, and the Linux kernel. But, each of these
APIs needs to know how to talk to the display server, they need to be
able to say “Hey! Display server! Can you draw me a button over
there?” or “Hey! Do you know where the mouse cursor is?” (this
explanation is obviously simplified).
For this reason, the display server
will define a “protocol” or “language” for the middleware to
talk to. All of these APIs talk this language, not only that but
applications that need to talk directly to the display server (e.g.
Wine) also talk this language.
Until recently, there has been one
mainstream protocol called X11, and it's widely adopted. Every
graphical Linux application eventually ends up talking X11 and to the
display server that talks that language: the xserver.
X11 was invented a really long time
ago, and it's served us well, but a lot of the protocol doesn't make
sense anymore on modern computers. So, recently a bunch of the X.org
developers got together and started defining a better, faster,
slicker protocol than X11. This protocol is called Wayland. Wayland
supersedes X11, and is designed for modern hardware, as opposed to
the hardware of the 1970s. The Wayland protocol has been defined
openly, over a couple of years. Everyone has been encouraged to
contribute to its development because Wayland needs to cover all use
cases.
In summary, there are now two
protocols, there's X11 which is heading towards retirement, and
Wayland which is destined to replace it. So, despite all the
diversity in the Linux ecosystem, despite the different toolkits, and
distributions and packaging systems and forks. There has only been
one widely adopted display server protocol at a time, and this is a
good thing! It means your toolkit or application just has to talk one
language and bam, it works across all of the Linux distributions.
Now, Canonical wants to write a new
display server, and that in itself is OK, write a new one that talks
Wayland and everyone is laughing. Except, they've explicitly stated
that Wayland doesn't suit their needs... Wut?
So the protocol that has been defined
in the open for the last couple of years, that needed input from all
areas so that it fitted all use cases, and actually has had at least
one Canonical employee contributing to it doesn't fit their needs?!
This can only imply that they are
writing their own protocol, which means that every application, or
toolkit API will now need to speak another language. Aside from the
legacy X11 and the widely supported Wayland, now everyone will need
to code and maintain support for a new one. And this isn't trivial.
I've worked with the Wine source code and there are 1000s of lines of
code devoted to X11 and I don't think they have even begun to
implement support for Wayland. I've also worked on the SDL source
code, and again, there are 100s of lines of code in there for X11 and
they've already implemented a Wayland backend.
What Canonical is actually doing is not
saying “we're going to write a display server” they're saying
“we're going to break compatibility with the rest of the Linux
ecosystem”. There are two paths forward here, either Canonical
themselves implement all the backends for all the toolkits to talk to
their new display server, or, they'll use their majority market share
to force toolkits themselves to maintain them. Niether of those is
pretty, or a small amount of work. Neither benefits users or
developers. To break compatibility in this way needs some pretty
serious justification.
Going forward I hope that when they
said “Wayland doesn't fit our needs” I'm hoping they meant
“Weston doesn't fit our needs” (Weston is the reference
implementation of the Wayland protocol).
They can by all means implement their
own display server, I just really hope that it talks the same
language!
For clarity, we didn't state that Canonical _are_ working on their own display server, we asked _if_ Canonical are (based on some snippets of answers given by Jono Bacon).
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