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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)

#171
post #107

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. 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 a…

OTOH, Linux desktop marketshare hovers around 1-2%. So maybe the replacement for X11 has effectively been buying Windows or a Mac.

There is zero reason to suppose that the reason people don't use linux is X11.

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

#172

I totally feel this guy's pain. When I started at Sun there was a 'direct to framebuffer' window system which we called "Suntools" It was fast and pretty much all in the kernel and pretty awesome, except this new thing "X11" allowed you to have a big beefy machine (sort of a Raspi 3 equivalent today :-)) with its fans and noise in some machine room while the display and input was on your desk. There were even people…

Except the two chunks of the user base are not 50:50.

I'd say remote X use has dwindled to a trickle. It's more common to use VNC. Or even a browser (ever checked out novnc?)

I stopped using X completely when I discovered tramp for emacs.

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

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That link is a blatant lie. Redirect each wayland client's stderr to a different term and you will see that the process (keyboard/mice input + graphics output) isolation is still working as intended.

It's not a blatant lie. There is probably no default install in which I would not feel it absolutely necessary to change every credential stored on a system if it ever ran a compromised binary and a new install from scratch.

At best you are hoping that the malicious binary someone tricked you into running didn't also take advantage of an additional vulnerability to compromise everything. Keeping in mind that your adversary has every opportunity to test against the same environment you are running.

The only linux environment that I've aware of that takes isolation really seriously is qubes and even that isolation could be violated in theory.

I want desktop applications to have features that right now require substantial permissions to effect. The primary defense is and will likely remain not to install malicious software in the first place by installing from curated sources.

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

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, Linux desktop marketshare hovers around 1-2%. So maybe the replacement for X11 has effectively been buying Windows or a Mac.

There is zero reason to suppose that the reason people don't use linux is X11.

Sure there is, starting with the difficulty in setting up, getting it to output the correct resolution with your monitor, correct refresh rate, etc..

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

#175
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, VNC is just way better. Even running a local Docker container and using X11 forwarding is extremely slow.

It depends on how you define better. VNC may be faster, but it's just because X carries a lot of historical cruft, I believe. Usability-wise, X is more flexible. I can move individual windows between computers in X. I can't do that with VNC. I wouldn't mind doing the jump to Wayland if it were as flexible as X, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I run proxmox on one system to run a few VMs. I view the vm console displays remotely in the browser using novnc.

I thought it was pretty cool the first time I used it.

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

#176

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…

The Pi is running on a set top box chip that has been "graciously" thrown over the wall by Broadcom. Broadcom are not friends of the open source community.

>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.

Broadcom or the Pi Foundation? One doesn't care and one doesn't have the resources.

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

#177
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I bring up remote Emacs frames (from existing sessions, using emacsclient) over ssh forwarded X11 all the time. I prefer this method over tty-only because of the better keyboard support (tty can't pass through all the modifiers or even all the ctrl combinations), image support and clipboard integration. (better colors used to be another reason but less so now that we have 24 bit color support in tty Emacs) With the f…

Have you tried tramp? I routinely use it to edit files on systems without emacs installed. Also you can edit files belonging to root, etc.

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

#180
post #167
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…

> since that's easier than starting from scratch That is not quite accurate, although it isn't far off. More accurately; the design mistakes that make/made X11 terrible were being enforced at the driver level. Take the fact that for many years X was being run as root on linux. Horrific state of affairs for security. Everyone knows it is bad. Some bright spark tries to write a new window system that runs as an unprivi…

I orbit someone on the nouveau team, so I might be a bit biased with regard to Nvidia

As far as I can tell, Nvidia has two modes of operation with the Linux community, "hostile" and "inept"

Hostile is when they do things like require signed firmware for their GPU's or try to force their will on things like EGLstreams, while everyone else is using GBM

Inept is their situation with things like the Tegra mobile platforms. They simply use nouveau instead I'm told. Even though the two GPU lines of course, share a ton of engineering. For some reason they just decided it's easier to use nouveau on that side, and only that side

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