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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)

#91

Post by stormbrew »

DonHopkins wrote: post #37
jolmg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Shell scripting languages generally make certain common tasks easy that most other scripting languages do not. Namely, process management and especially piping information through those processes.

If that's most of what a program is doing I would 10000 times rather read a script written in bash doing it than a python script that pulls in 800 dependencies just to get halfway to making these sorts of tasks take less than 5 lines for each invocation of a thing that takes less than 1 line in bash.

That's not to say that bash is perfect, but it is very good at what it does.

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

#92

Post by rjsw »

newnewpdro wrote: post #25

This rant would be better directed at the landscape of cheap, poorly-supported ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi and its clones. These manufacturers should be developing proper GPU drivers for mainline with full KMS/DRM/mesa support before they even sell their boards to the public claiming Linux support. Wayland and Xorg work just fine on Intel integrated graphics, Intel has been setting the standard here for over a…

At least the Raspberry PI has documentation for its GPU.

The rant should be directed at ARM itself for not providing documentation for Mali.

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

#93

Post by jolmg »

Can I just say that I think it's great that we now ceased to have a monoculture in display servers for Unix-based systems? It was the last one, I believe.

I mean, we've had choices for text-editors, for shells, for programming languages, for GUI toolkits, for desktop environments, for window managers, for remote-desktop servers and viewers, for ssl/tls implementations, for web browsers, and even for kernels.

The only thing everyone using Unix-based systems all had in common was that they had to use X for graphics. I think we had choices for implementations for X (Xf86?) before we ended up just using Xorg, but now we even have the choice to not use the X protocol.

Having choices is good. Having diversity is good. I hope we stop trying to see this one as everyone converging to using only one. We can have both, like we do now. I think that's the best.

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

#94

Post by DonHopkins »

0xfaded wrote: post #67
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…

I've been reading through the Vulkan spec, which is in way similar in that OpenGL has been extended since its introduction in 1992 with more and more features to support new graphics capabilities as they evolved. I've seen Vulkan called the successor to OpenGL, but reading the spec it seems more like the end game for raster graphics card programming. OpenGL 4.0 was released in 2010, and since then changes have been i…

Photoshop pretty much got it right a couple decades or so ago, and they've just been porting it, smearing on new lipstick, and figuring out how to make more money with it ever since.

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

#95

Post by keldaris »

Last time (which was when Fedora first shipped it by default) I looked at Wayland, it took me less than an hour to run into several showstopper issues and move right back. The ones I remember include being incompatible with the proprietary Nvidia drivers (and no plan to ever fix that), huge input lag (apparently stemming from the, um, "interesting" idea to make the compositor responsible for all input) and lots of random stability issues. Have these things been fixed? Apart from a general dislike of X11, what are the reasons one should consider a switch nowadays?

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

#96

Post by gpderetta »

jolmg wrote: post #93

Can I just say that I think it's great that we now ceased to have a monoculture in display servers for Unix-based systems? It was the last one, I believe. I mean, we've had choices for text-editors, for shells, for programming languages, for GUI toolkits, for desktop environments, for window managers, for remote-desktop servers and viewers, for ssl/tls implementations, for web browsers, and even for kernels. The only…

Exactly, I mean, there was one thing that all the various slightly incompatible Linux distros agreed on. Finally we have fixed that.

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

#97

Post by russed »

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…

This is exactly what I think when I hear "worse is better". Some software just needs to be right the first time.

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

#98

Post by DonHopkins »

jolmg wrote: post #26
petepete wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 (…

I just use ssh/screen/emacs to work on remote servers. Why would I ever want an xterm?

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

#99

Post by hollerith »

cbdumas wrote: post #69
hollerith wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is encouraging. What distro are your swaywm and Firefox running on?

I'm running Arch, which I find to be the most frictionless when you're trying to do sort of "bleeding edge" stuff like this.

It is time for me to give desktop Linux another try (which will be my first serious try in 10 years).

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

#100

Post by dyhtf »

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 everything else in the world of software. You begin with a specification and then you start writing code.
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