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On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 10:25 AM, Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote: |
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> On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 10:51 AM, Ian Zimmerman <itz@××××××××××××.org> wrote: |
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>> On 2017-07-11 09:02, Rich Freeman wrote: |
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>> |
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>>> > I use GNOME with Wayland for some time and I actually didn't notice |
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>>> > that I switched until I tried to get synergy working ( mouse sharing |
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>>> > software, which only works on X ), seems like GDM automatically |
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>>> > chose Wayland since some upgrade. XWayland works pretty seamlessly |
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>>> > as well, so I'll just stay with Wayland for now, but it might be |
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>>> > more annoying to use it with other DEs/WMs. |
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>> |
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>>> > However, I have less screen tearing with fullscreen applications |
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>>> > with Wayland than I had with X ( with radeon + mesa ). |
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>> |
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>>> My sense is that this is probably what people would see. It will |
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>>> probably work fine for any of the major DEs, but you'll find these |
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>>> little cases of tools that aren't ported. One BIG area that will be |
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>>> affected is X11 forwarding. I'm not sure if that works over ssh or |
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>>> not with wayland, but wayland in general doesn't support network |
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>>> sockets. |
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>> |
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>> What about "3rd party" window managers like openbox? From my limited |
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>> understanding of wayland, that functionality just goes out of the window |
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>> (OOPS, sorry); window management becomes a responsibility of the toolkit |
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>> and there is no way to plug in a different one. |
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> |
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> I'm going out on a limb a bit here, but my understanding is not so |
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> much that it is impossible for arbitrary applications to talk to |
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> wayland (that seems silly - it is just an API). Rather, the major |
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> toolkits simply have already done all the hard work so that if you use |
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> one of those toolkits then your application will work. |
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> |
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|
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I don't think it's been mentioned explicitly yet, but Wayland pretends |
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to be X11 in the same way your terminal emulator can pretend to be a |
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VT100. |
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|
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This choice was made because otherwise applications would have to be |
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explicitly rewritten for Wayland before most people would switch, and |
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that's a barrier to entry that would be very hard to overcome. |
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|
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> I'm sure there is no reason an application that doesn't use qt/gtk/etc |
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> couldn't just make direct calls to wayland. However, it will require |
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> a lot more porting work on the part of upstream, and so it probably |
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> won't happen quickly. |
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> |
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> In the same way an application written to use QT probably can be made |
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> to work on OSX or Windows with very little additional work, because |
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> the toolkits provide a single API across all the platforms. You could |
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> write an application that works on all these platforms without using a |
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> toolkit, but then the developer needs to maintain all the API |
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> abstraction. |
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> |
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> Getting back to openbox/etc, I suspect that you have a couple of extremes here: |
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> |
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> * Full-fledged DEs like Gnome/KDE. They have a ton of functionality |
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> that would be impacted by Wayland, but they also use toolkits that |
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> have probably already taken care of this. |
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> * Very minimal window managers (think fvwm/twm/etc). They may not use |
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> a toolkit that was ported, but on the other hand their functionality |
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> is minimal and porting might not be so hard. Also, there seems to be |
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> some effort to port more minimal toolkits like motif to wayland. |
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> * In-between environments (think xfce, openstep, etc). They don't |
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> benefit from the toolkit but still have a lot of functionality to |
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> port. I heard that xfce is being ported to gtk for just this reason. |
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> |
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> I suspect that Wayland is going to drive adoption of gtk/qt much more |
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> widely. For the effort of directly porting to Wayland you could just |
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> port to gtk and then get coverage on other platforms as well. |
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> |
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>> |
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>> Or does xwayland help with that? I'll be grateful for an explanation of |
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>> this area, as I'm worried about the future of the X server but I'm also |
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>> married to openbox. |
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>> |
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> |
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> I suspect that xwayland would cover some of this, but I haven't messed |
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> with either. |
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> |
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|
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Ah, looks like someone was going to mention it then. |
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|
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|
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In any case if you are asking the question that OP did, I would |
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suggest Wayland might not be for you. You may not receive any benefit |
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from using it unless, for some reason, the differing underlying |
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implementation fixes a bug - but I see this as being a bit of a |
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stretch, because if you don't go out of your way to run Wayland only |
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programs, you will still be running X11 on top of Wayland. |
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Most programs written for Wayland still seem to be at early |
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experimental stages, and are things like tiling window managers. |
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|
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R0b0t1. |