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

[Franz Fellner]

Just porting to a toolkit that "supports" Wayland won't be much help to
window managers. A WM has to implement the wayland server side (compositor)
while applications are clients. The toolkits abstract away the X/wayland
client API calls (E.G. Qt platform plugins) so you simply create your
widgets, setup your (toolkit native) callbacks and are done. But as soon as
you call X-specific functions in your applications things will get harder.
Qt now also implements a wayland-compostior which HELPS creating a wayland
server. But still you need to do quite some work. Porting to gtk3 (xfce...
) will have a similar impact: It won't allow XFCE to automatically run on X
and Wayland. Probably it makes some things easier but in the end there is
not so much the toolkit can abstract away in terms of creating a
compositor/server/WM.

Personally I tried to get running Plasma on wayland several times and while
I finally got it started there were so many crashes (e.g. some applications
esp. those having to run on XWayland, but also systemsettings) and issues
with managing windows that I gave up on it for the moment. Gnome might be a
different thing as they go wayland exclusively and have a working
implementation for a longer time than kde. I also tried enlightenment with
wayland which didn't run more stable than with X :(

2017-07-11 17:25 GMT+02:00 Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o>:

> 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
>
>