# Wayland or MIR!



## teo (Dec 10, 2016)

Hello people!

FreeBSD for when to implement Wayland or MIR  in replacement of the obsolete Xorg?


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## scottro (Dec 10, 2016)

I'm not sure about MIR--it seems to only be used in Ubuntu's Unity desktop, meaning that none of the other desktop environments or window managers use it. As for Wayland, Fedora's made it default, but only for their Gnome environment, and judging from their forums, it's still rather buggy.  So, I suspect that it's going to be quite awhile before FreeBSD replaces xorg, which, obsolete or not, works well for millions,  with Wayland or Mir, which are, at present, apparently, somewhat limited in where they are easily used.   At this point, I would guess the average FreeBSD user who makes use of X would prefer them to stay with the less likely to break unexpectedly xorg.  


https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland mentions some work being done on Wayland--if you google a bit, no doubt there is more info about Wayland on FreeBSD out there. It seems to me (from casual reading only) that only Ubuntu is working on Mir, and I suspect they'll abandon it for Wayland.


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## Oko (Dec 10, 2016)

teo said:


> Hello people!
> 
> FreeBSD for when to implement Wayland or MIR  in replacement of the obsolete Xorg?



In spite of the winter weather here in Pittsburgh, after reading your post, I had to check my calendar twice to make sure it is not the first of April.


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## sidetone (Dec 10, 2016)

Here's what I found about Mir display server:

http://arstechnica.com/information-...tus-mir-patch-forces-canonical-to-go-own-way/

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/
It looks like Mir is specific to Canonical or Linux.

I would like to see Wayland on any BSD (*edit) or Minix.


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## Oko (Dec 10, 2016)

sidetone said:


> I would like to see Wayland on any BSD.


Time to switch to DragonFly BSD 

https://marc.info/?l=dragonfly-users&m=146374956029616&w=2


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## fnoyanisi (Dec 10, 2016)

teo said:


> FreeBSD for when to implement Wayland or MIR  in replacement of the obsolete Xorg?





sidetone said:


> I would like to see Wayland on any BSD (*edit) or Minix.



What's wrong with xorg?


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## drhowarddrfine (Dec 10, 2016)

Oko said:


> In spite of the winter weather here in Pittsburgh, after reading your post, I had to check my calendar twice to make sure it is not the first of April.


I thought I stumbled into the wrong forum. Like it was a reddit thing or Linux.


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## getopt (Dec 10, 2016)

Looks like here meet members with some kind of disorientation. It is a disability in which the senses of time (I had to check my calendar twice), direction, and recognition of things, people and places (I thought I stumbled into the wrong forum) become difficult to distinguish/identify.

Mostly these kind of disorientation is temporary and goes away. For the elderly some gadgets like watches and compasses are known to be helpful in all days life.


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## ANOKNUSA (Dec 10, 2016)

fnoyanisi said:


> What's wrong with xorg?



There are a bunch of possible answers to that question. The long-and-short of it is that X11 is carrying around decades of cruft. It functions well enough, sure, and even if Wayland supersedes it in some capacities I imagine it will still be around for some time, since a lot of the lightweight stand-alone window managers don't need Wayland's fancy gimmicks. But X11 was released before PCs were a normal feature of most households, and to my knowledge has just sort of been patched up here and there in the meantime to keep it working rather than undergoing a major rewrite.


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## drhowarddrfine (Dec 10, 2016)

I wish I kept the link but just a few days ago I read a stackoverflow thread, I think, where it was outlined that X11 is just as fast, and even faster, at rendering graphics than Wayland and can do everything Wayland can so performance and capability is not a reason to switch to Wayland. 

Now, please don't argue with me about it cause I'm too far removed from all that now and I don't recall what advantages Wayland brought to the table but it must be remembered that Wayland is a protocol and not a driver.


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## kpa (Dec 11, 2016)

fnoyanisi said:


> What's wrong with xorg?



The biggest problem is that it still has most of the driver code running as part of a user space process. Not only does it violate everything that is taught in every computer engineering course about proper hardware abstractions it is allowed full unrestricted access to the kernel memory (in FreeBSD via the mem(4) device) because that's the only way to keep the performance acceptable for a driver running in a user space process. This is of course a reliability and security nightmare for very obvious reasons.


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## fnoyanisi (Dec 11, 2016)

kpa said:


> The biggest problem is that it still has most of the driver code running as part of a user space process. Not only does it violate everything that is taught in every computer engineering course about proper hardware abstractions it is allowed full unrestricted access to the kernel memory (in FreeBSD via the mem(4) device) because that's the only way to keep the performance acceptable for a driver running in a user space process. This is of course a reliability and security nightmare for very obvious reasons.


Thanks, I was not across deep design details of xorg, that was useful for me.

My point was; porting a software as big as Wayland requires a good deal of resource and I am not sure whether or not there are enough people who can dedicate their time and effort on porting Wayland (unless xorg becomes totally nonfunctional),


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## obsigna (Dec 11, 2016)

fnoyanisi said:


> What's wrong with xorg?


X got its chapter in the UNIX Haters Handbook. Some of the revelations from 1994 seem still to be prevalent perceptions on X.

Anyway, her is a link to a funny reading: The X-Windows Disaster


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## kpa (Dec 11, 2016)

obsigna said:


> Anyway, her is a link to a funny reading: The X-Window System Disaster



Corrected the noob (not yours) mistake 

Edit: Both terms X-Windowing and X-Window System have been used but initially nobody called it "X-Windows", that came later when MS-Windows started to gather more steam and people started calling X as "X-Windows" because they just assumed it's just another "Windows".


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