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Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

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Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#31

Post by DonHopkins »

>X is the graphical interface for essentially all Unix derived desktops (all other competitors [link to Display PostScript wikipedia page] died decades ago).

Since when was an X-Windows extension a "competitor" to X? Display PostScript was simply a proprietary X-Windows extension that fell out of fashion, not a competitor to X-Windows.

NeWS was a competitor to X-Windows that died decades ago, but Display PostScript was never a "competitor" to X-Windows, just like the X Rendering Extension and PEX were never competitors, just extensions.

But at least the article gets credit for calling it X-Windows instead of X11, to annoy X fanatics. ;)

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#32

Post by iamnothere »

petepete wrote: post #11
altmind wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xorg remoting was poorly designed to accomodate DRI/DRM, video card acceleration and had adequate performance to only display primitives on screen. Thats the reasons of poor Xorg remoting adoption. I dont remember seeing anyone in this decade using it - it hands down lost to vnc/nx and rdp.

I've not seen anyone using VNC or remote Xorg for years. Is it really that important these days?

Remote Xorg is the easiest way to get GUI applications running under WSL on Windows. That's the only recent relevant application I've come across though.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#33

Post by jolmg »

mwfunk wrote: post #9

I enjoyed the article but this quote jumped out at me: "What took thirty years to build isn't going to be replaced in a day." This was in regard to replacing X11 with Wayland. It's funny because it would be closer to the truth to say that X11 took 5 years to build, and for the last 25 years everyone has been trying to get off of it, but in the meantime piling more stuff on top of it since that's easier than starting…

> but I bet the original creators would be the ones most shocked that it's still a thing in 2019.

Couldn't we say the same thing about bash or basically most tools in your typical Unix-based OS? Old code is solid code. If they're to be shocked it's for doing something so right that it's persisted all this time.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#34

Post by DonHopkins »

mwfunk wrote: post #9

I enjoyed the article but this quote jumped out at me: "What took thirty years to build isn't going to be replaced in a day." This was in regard to replacing X11 with Wayland. It's funny because it would be closer to the truth to say that X11 took 5 years to build, and for the last 25 years everyone has been trying to get off of it, but in the meantime piling more stuff on top of it since that's easier than starting…

The reason X11 got pushed through so quickly 30 years ago was that some vendors were threatening to standardize on X10. Maybe they should have just gone with X10, because it would have been easier to eventually replace.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#35

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

This article seems to be mixing up languages, which others have pointed out but not in full.

wayland-rs does not wrap libwayland, but instead offers a pure Rust implementation of the Wayland protocol.

Sway and wlroots are both written in C, but wlroots-rs is a project which wraps the wlroots C library in a Rust wrapper.

There are currently no mature Wayland compositors written in Rust.

Also, this article mainly focuses on the problems with Wayland on the Raspberry Pi, which stem mainly from the old proprietary drivers and the slow pace at which Raspbian gets up-to-date software. For most users, the experience is much better.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#36

Post by michaelmrose »

hs86 wrote: post #15

After reading http://techtrickery.com/keyloggers.html I am not sure if I ever want to have Xorg installed anymore. Wayland is great but it seems like having a fully featured *nix desktop without XWayland installed is still hard to achieve.

Wayland is insufficient in and of itself to prevent keylogging.

https://github.com/Aishou/wayland-keylogger

At present Linux desktops aren't very secure against user installed malicious software. It is however fortunate that most software is installed from curated repos.

It's not clear that just switching to wayland is worth much at this point in time.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#37

Post by DonHopkins »

jolmg wrote: post #33
mwfunk wrote: post #9

I enjoyed the article but this quote jumped out at me: "What took thirty years to build isn't going to be replaced in a day." This was in regard to replacing X11 with Wayland. It's funny because it would be closer to the truth to say that X11 took 5 years to build, and for the last 25 years everyone has been trying to get off of it, but in the meantime piling more stuff on top of it since that's easier than starting…

> but I bet the original creators would be the ones most shocked that it's still a thing in 2019. Couldn't we say the same thing about bash or basically most tools in your typical Unix-based OS? Old code is solid code. If they're to be shocked it's for doing something so right that it's persisted all this time.

Except that X11 isn't doing something so right -- it's still terrible, and it always has been, and we knew it was terrible at the time it was standardized.

But it's funny that you would bring up something as terrible as a shell scripting language like bash to compare to how terrible X-Windows is. Have you ever read through a gnu configure file yourself, or do you just close your eyes and type "./configure"? Who in their right mind would ever write a shell script, when there are so many real scripting languages that don't terribly suck universally available, that don't shit themselves when they encounter a file name with a space in it?

These quotes about X-Windows apply to bash as much as they do to X-Windows:

"Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes." -Jamie Zawinski

"Programming X-Windows is like trying to find the square root of pi using roman numerals." -Unknown

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#38

Post by temac »

altmind wrote: post #3
mindcrime wrote: post #2

Meh. As far as I'm concerned, Wayland is strictly inferior to X, so long as it fails to support network transparency / remoting. Talk to me when they have a real solution for this, besides VNC or supporting RDP.

Xorg remoting was poorly designed to accomodate DRI/DRM, video card acceleration and had adequate performance to only display primitives on screen. Thats the reasons of poor Xorg remoting adoption. I dont remember seeing anyone in this decade using it - it hands down lost to vnc/nx and rdp.

I use ssh -X all the time.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#39

Post by temac »

petepete wrote: post #11
altmind wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xorg remoting was poorly designed to accomodate DRI/DRM, video card acceleration and had adequate performance to only display primitives on screen. Thats the reasons of poor Xorg remoting adoption. I dont remember seeing anyone in this decade using it - it hands down lost to vnc/nx and rdp.

I've not seen anyone using VNC or remote Xorg for years. Is it really that important these days?

I use ssh -X all the time.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#40

Post by e12e »

all2 wrote: post #10

I think it is important to point out that Wayland is a specification [0] and not some blob of software. [0] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/apa.html

So is x11? There used to be a couple of commercial x servers available for Microsoft windows, for example.
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