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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)

#41

Post by temac »

munchbunny wrote: post #7
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.

After this many years, I think the ambition to support remoting at the per-window level just isn't important. In practice I've actually found it outright confusing when I have two windows operating inside two separate environments, but they're both in the same visual container. VNC/RDP work well enough, and SSH works well enough for when you don't need a GUI.

ssh -X works well (enough) when you need a GUI.

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

#42

Post by Sylos »

Half-offtopic: I find it very interesting that Rasbian sticks to LXDE. I thought that was going to slowly disappear, with LXQt having developer attention and there being no path forward towards HiDPI and well, Wayland (because neither GTK2 nor Openbox support these).

LXQt currently still uses Openbox, but you can replace it with KWin rather easily. I don't know what is then still missing to create a proper LXQt Wayland session, but it seems feasible.

I guess, one does not really need HiDPI on a Raspberry Pi, but yeah, Wayland would be nice.

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

#43

Post by mindcrime »

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 it, so I could care less about your "it hands down lost to vnc/nx and rdp" assessment. And until Wayland has a mechanism that has the flexibility of X remoting, it is a strictly inferior technology - for my purposes.

That doesn't mean that I may not be forced to adopt it due to market forces, but let's not pretend that this isn't a glaring hole in Wayland for many people.

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

#44

Post by hyperion2010 »

Wayland was designed to solve a very specific set of use cases and nothing more. The number of times I have read "wayland doesn't do that" or "that's not wayland's job" or "wayland is just the compositor" are telling. Of course a stack that is compositor + windowing toolkits is going to miss countless mission critical use cases in countless workflows, not to mention that it is an even further regression from composability in the window manager space and no, dbus is not the answer either, you can't make literally every program depend on dbus just to be able to do simple things like take a screenshot, or automatically rearrange windows. Every program having to use a toolkit or implement a message passing system themselves will never happen because few developers have the expertise needed to do so. This is in part why things like X11 were created in the first place, so that there could be separation of concerns. Wayland stomps all over that and thus doesn't even offer something that could become a defacto standard, so it seems that X11 will continue to live on.

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

#45

Post by jolmg »

bitwize wrote: post #30
jolmg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bar for being important enough to not discard when it works and is the only solution to particular problems is not very high. I know of no other method to forward individual programs GUIs to other machines. Abandoning X is abandoning a power we have. You're right that it may not be used as much. Last time I used it was to debug why selenium tests running in chrome were failing in a server with a virtual display (…

> Abandoning X is abandoning a power we have. A power that literally no one uses. Well, no one that matters anyway. For values of "matter" equivalent to "uses a modern desktop". Whatever the case, modern development heavily favors coding for the common case, not supporting a flexible framework that can accommodate fringe cases. And in 2019, your use case is fringe.

> A power that literally no one uses.

I just told how I used it.

> Well, no one that matters anyway.

I don't matter? That's kind of rude.

> Whatever the case, modern development heavily favors coding for the common case, not supporting a flexible framework that can accommodate fringe cases. And in 2019, your use case is fringe.

Are you going to say that accessibility features should also be discarded? Being deaf or blind are not the common case.

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

#46

Post by mattcoles »

miloignis wrote: post #14

Do note that the article is mainly about Wayland on the raspberry pi. Of course Wayland isn't the default most places yet (Fedora being the big exception, I think), though you can install it on most distros. I've been Wayland/Sway on NixOS for a while, and I really like it. One question though - the article seems to say that wlroots is a Rust project, but it seems to very much be a pure C project? ( https://github.co…

What do you like about it?

For general use it seems as if it'll be something that makes no difference to my day-to-day usage of my computer other than a warm fuzzy feeling that the underlying protocol is "right".

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

#47

Post by temac »

Wayland, in practice, couple too much the "compositor" with the driver stack, and the desktop/wm with the "compositor", and THEN the desktop/compositor/wm with applications (e.g. Firefox menus working or not depending on the desktop env in use)

Then end result is that it explodes your test matrix. I won't use it while it stays the case, because I don't have time to fight with basic graphic stuff being broken all the time, and it is ridiculous to expect things to be not broken if the test matrix stays like that.

Plus it is starting to be old yet still missing half of the features, be it existing X features (ex: ssh -X), basic desktop GUI needs (ex: whatever is needed to implement Wine), or modern must-have (ex: colorimetry) (at least if was the situation a few months ago, hopefully there have been some progress since)

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

#48

Post by mindcrime »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #27
josteink wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you got it kinda backwards, but due to confusing naming you wouldn’t be the first. It’s more like I’m logging into a remote server (using stuff like SSH), starting applications there and getting the GUI up on my local desktop, like any other local window/app, due to X-forwarding (back to my Xorg server). It’s not perfect, but it sure is a lot more “natural” and integrated into your desktop than VNC or RDP. I…

RDP has had remote app for a long time now, which is essentially the same thing: run program on remote machine, forward its window to local.

Interesting, I've never heard of that facility before. I guess it wasn't promoted very heavily? Or maybe it's just because RDP comes from the MS world and I try very hard to avoid Windows and anything Windows-centric unless forced to.

Anyway, thanks for sharing that. I'll look into it.

Here's some info on RemoteApp for anybody else who's interested.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Enterprise-Mobility-S...

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/...

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

#49

Post by DonHopkins »

e12e wrote: post #40
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.

Even before Microsoft Windows: Quarterdeck DESQview/X, for example. And of course X-Windows ran on Lisp Machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

>DESQview/X

>Quarterdeck eventually also released a product named DESQview/X (DVX), which was an X Window System server running under DOS and DESQview and thus provided a GUI to which X software (mostly Unix) could be ported.

>DESQview/X had three window managers that it launched with, X/Motif, OPEN LOOK, and twm. The default package contained only twm, the others were costly optional extras, as was the ability to interact on TCP/IP networks. Mosaic was ported to DVX.

>DVX itself could serve DOS programs and the 16-bit Windows environment across the network as X programs, which made it useful for those who wished to run DOS and Windows programs from their Unix workstations. The same functionality was once available with NCD Wincenter.

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

#50

Post by miloignis »

mattcoles wrote: post #46
miloignis wrote: post #14

Do note that the article is mainly about Wayland on the raspberry pi. Of course Wayland isn't the default most places yet (Fedora being the big exception, I think), though you can install it on most distros. I've been Wayland/Sway on NixOS for a while, and I really like it. One question though - the article seems to say that wlroots is a Rust project, but it seems to very much be a pure C project? ( https://github.co…

What do you like about it? For general use it seems as if it'll be something that makes no difference to my day-to-day usage of my computer other than a warm fuzzy feeling that the underlying protocol is "right".

That's true - the two things I really like are no screen tearing ever (be that scrolling Firefox or YouTube videos) and that warm fuzzy feeling.

Edit: I also like Sway quite a bit (over i3/X) - its configuration (outputs, input devices, etc) makes a lot more sense and is a lot easier for me than trying to change stuff in different places and in different ways with X.

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