Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

We should start with the fact that when you use X on a local desktop, X network transparency is not involved at all. Since quite a long time, local graphics output in X access the graphics card directly. This was first done by the X software itself, and recently some/most of that hardware access was moved to the Linux kernel by means of Kernel Mode Setting (KMS).

The problem for Linux is that the graphics card API for fast 3D graphics is often not published by the hardware manufacturer. I fully agree with you that the state of graphic support is not satisfactory. In fact, I'm more pessimistic than you; some things that worked in my Unix/Linux environments since 1990 is more instable, since that move to KMS. That nowadays the main recommendation for non-working graphic setup is "boot with nomodeset" speaks volumes, IMHO. But I don't blame the developers, hardware has changed too much, and the road they took on the kernel side -- i.e., the hardware drivers -- seems to be a sensible one. Nevertheless I'm still not able to use VMware with 3D acceleration on standard hardware because some OpenGL primitives are not supported. And then I read here that new developments demand full GL support on notebooks, and I shudder.

Thus, I think your conception of problems in the Linux graphics stack is right on spot, it might be even worse than you see it. But that has nothing to do at all with X transparency, and Wayland won't change the situation with non-sufficient hardware documentation/drivers. So you might want to address your rants to issues where they are appropriate and leave network transparency to us who need it daily.

Cheer, and apologies for calling you a troll.

Joachim

PS: Disclosure: I am biased in favor of X, if that isn't clear by now. When I started to use X10 in 1987, and helped to port X11R4 to several architectures in 1988, I always regarded it as a flexible and trustworthy design, and still think an evolutionary X12 would be better than Wayland. We see in the Linux kernel year after year that evolutionary developments are better than big-bang approaches. This is an important lesson that many players in the graphics stack development community should heed, IMNSHO. It doesn't help that I have friends who were active in the X development community for many years, nor does it help that my own open source "home-base" is the TeX community who is equally conservative concerning user-space changes...