Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Wayland - too early to try?

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 10:51 AM, Ian Zimmerman <itz@××××××××××××.org> wrote:
> On 2017-07-11 09:02, Rich Freeman wrote:
>
>> > I use GNOME with Wayland for some time and I actually didn't notice
>> > that I switched until I tried to get synergy working ( mouse sharing
>> > software, which only works on X ), seems like GDM automatically
>> > chose Wayland since some upgrade. XWayland works pretty seamlessly
>> > as well, so I'll just stay with Wayland for now, but it might be
>> > more annoying to use it with other DEs/WMs.
>
>> > However, I have less screen tearing with fullscreen applications
>> > with Wayland than I had with X ( with radeon + mesa ).
>
>> My sense is that this is probably what people would see.  It will
>> probably work fine for any of the major DEs, but you'll find these
>> little cases of tools that aren't ported.  One BIG area that will be
>> affected is X11 forwarding.  I'm not sure if that works over ssh or
>> not with wayland, but wayland in general doesn't support network
>> sockets.
>
> What about "3rd party" window managers like openbox?  From my limited
> understanding of wayland, that functionality just goes out of the window
> (OOPS, sorry); window management becomes a responsibility of the toolkit
> and there is no way to plug in a different one.

I'm going out on a limb a bit here, but my understanding is not so
much that it is impossible for arbitrary applications to talk to
wayland (that seems silly - it is just an API).  Rather, the major
toolkits simply have already done all the hard work so that if you use
one of those toolkits then your application will work.

I'm sure there is no reason an application that doesn't use qt/gtk/etc
couldn't just make direct calls to wayland.  However, it will require
a lot more porting work on the part of upstream, and so it probably
won't happen quickly.

In the same way an application written to use QT probably can be made
to work on OSX or Windows with very little additional work, because
the toolkits provide a single API across all the platforms.  You could
write an application that works on all these platforms without using a
toolkit, but then the developer needs to maintain all the API
abstraction.

Getting back to openbox/etc, I suspect that you have a couple of extremes here:

* Full-fledged DEs like Gnome/KDE.  They have a ton of functionality
that would be impacted by Wayland, but they also use toolkits that
have probably already taken care of this.
* Very minimal window managers (think fvwm/twm/etc).  They may not use
a toolkit that was ported, but on the other hand their functionality
is minimal and porting might not be so hard.  Also, there seems to be
some effort to port more minimal toolkits like motif to wayland.
* In-between environments (think xfce, openstep, etc).  They don't
benefit from the toolkit but still have a lot of functionality to
port.  I heard that xfce is being ported to gtk for just this reason.

I suspect that Wayland is going to drive adoption of gtk/qt much more
widely.  For the effort of directly porting to Wayland you could just
port to gtk and then get coverage on other platforms as well.

>
> Or does xwayland help with that?  I'll be grateful for an explanation of
> this area, as I'm worried about the future of the X server but I'm also
> married to openbox.
>

I suspect that xwayland would cover some of this, but I haven't messed
with either.

-- 
Rich