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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)

#101

Post by josteink »

mindcrime wrote: post #48
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... http…

Thanks for the links!

Reading those though, I’m kind of underwhelmed.

You have to have a dedicated Windows Terminal Server installation (which I’m sure has expensive and complicated licensing), on that you have to “publish apps” (which seems like a process in itself), on the client you need to subscribe to feeds.

And after about 100 such individual steps... magic.

With X11 I just forward a socket, launch a normal program normally, and everything just works.

That’s just so much simpler, so much easier to work with and easier to understand. I can do it casually, on demand, when I need it. No preparation needed.

That Windows thing... looks expensive and something you which takes planning.

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

#102

Post by floatboth »

simion314 wrote: post #73
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…

X is good enough for majority of the users, even if the architecture is not perfect.

Screen tearing, bad performance, bad touchscreen support (not independent of mouse cursor), and especially important these days: no real HiDPI support (practically impossible to support different scales for different monitors). It's not good enough.

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

#103

Post by bsder »

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 problem is actually Linux.

Linux development is quite fine--until you have a problem that crosses domain boundaries. Then you have hot flaming hairballs of failure.

This is why video, audio, Bluetooth, SoC detection/driver installation, etc. all suck on Linux.

Nobody giving Linux the spec for video chipsets just adds to the misery.

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

#104

Post by DonHopkins »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #54
DonHopkins wrote: post #31

>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 w…

I'm not sure what protocol they used for remoting NeXTSTEP's native WindowServer, but I don't think it was X11. Some people did tunnel Display PostScript over X11, but that wasn't the only option and it was pretty kludgy.

That's right. DPS wasn't used for handling input events, or implementing the user interfaces widgets, which instead were implemented in Objective C running in another client process (usually running on the same machine), instead of PostScript running in the window server. DPS didn't handle events with PostScript in the DPS window server. Instead, it would ping-pong events over the network from the window server, to the Objective C client, then send PostScript drawing commands back to the window server. (Typically generic low level drawing commands, not a high level application specific protocol.)

So NeXTSTEP suffered from the same problems of X, with an inefficient low level non-extensible network protocol, slicing the client and server apart at the wrong level, because it didn't leverage its Turing-complete extensibility (now called "AJAX"), and just squandered PostScript for drawing (now called "canvas").

So for example, you couldn't use DPS to implement a visual PostScript debugger the way you could with NeWS, in the same way the Chrome JavaScript debugger is implemented in the same language it's debugging (which makes it easier and higher fidelity).

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-oct...

>The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989

>Abstract

>The PSIBER Space Deck is an interactive visual user interface to a graphical programming environment, the NeWS window system. It lets you display, manipulate, and navigate the data structures, programs, and processes living in the virtual memory space of NeWS. It is useful as a debugging tool, and as a hands on way to learn about programming in PostScript and NeWS.

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

#105

Post by floatboth »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #35

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 focus…

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

Originally it only wrapped libwayland. Now it offers both libwayland and a pure Rust implementation, togglable with the Cargo features client_native and server_native.

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

#106

Post by codedokode »

stormbrew wrote: post #91
DonHopkins wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Shell script also has dependencies: specific version of shell and CLI utilities. Shell script is a good thing when you need to write something quickly with hacks but it is not a good foundation for init system or build system. They easily break if you redefine variables like IFS, add command aliases or use names with spaces or special characters.

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

#107

Post by bsder »

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…

> 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.

And, yet, in ALL this time, not a single substitute arose?

We have multiple web browsers, GUI toolkits, IDE's, etc. all with far larger codebases and yet X11 never got replaced properly. And some really brilliant minds worked on it.

So the question you need to ask is "If X is so bad, WHY hasn't it been replaced?"

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

#108

Post by floatboth »

impostir wrote: post #19

I recently switched back to Arch and decided to try out Wayland. So far, I have only had some problems with Firefox, which could be solved I'm just being lazy. My one wider complaint is no autokey support, which isn't planned on being added. Overall, solid replacement to X11

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by autokey, but you can implement various keyboard tricks on various levels…

If you have a compositor that supports plugins, such as Wayfire, you can write a plugin: https://github.com/myfreeweb/numbernine/blob/master/wf-plugi...

You can also do things on the evdev level by listening to keys and emitting new keys from a virtual device. My tool for that: https://github.com/myfreeweb/evscript

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

#109

Post by floatboth »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #90
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.

DRI/DRM makes the assumption that your GPU is plugged in the one and only machine hosting all your apps. This wasn't that crazy in 1998, but today the GPU is under my desk while myriad app hosts are racked in datacenters (where a GPU might be an expensive addon, but probably doesn't exist) and good remoting is so neglected that the industry is using web browsers as display servers to fill the gap.

No, web browsers are used as an application platform, not a display server. Especially with SPAs ("thick" clients).

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

#110

Post by ocdtrekkie »

DonHopkins wrote: post #94
0xfaded wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would argue that this is true of most of Microsoft Office as well. When did they really add a new feature to PowerPoint that you had to have?

And it's no surprise both Adobe and Microsoft have pushed people towards a subscription model for this software: Nobody in their right mind would pay for upgrades otherwise. Arguably Office you need every ten years to ensure you have security updates because of the amount of foreign content you process with it, but Adobe? Psh.

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