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Wayland on OpenBSD

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Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#21

Post by badsectoracula »

themerone wrote: post #3
kelnos wrote: post #2

I know this is just a "hack it together" effort, but I wonder if it even makes sense to emulate/support libevdev and libinput on non-Linux OSes. While the Wayland protocol does reuse some libinput names/enums/etc., I don't believe there's anything in it that requires those particular implementations or APIs (that is, wl_pointer and wl_keyboard doesn't have to be populated by libinput). Maybe wlroots should have OpenB…

I think this is about preparing for a post X11 future. As Wayland continues to mature, classic X will attract fewer developer resources. I think it will eventually start to suffer benign neglect, and stop keeping up with new hardware.

> I think it will eventually start to suffer benign neglect, and stop keeping up with new hardware.

At least on Linux, Xorg and Wayland compositors use the same underlying APIs, so the chances of Xorg not running somewhere Wayland runs are pretty much zero - unless said new hardware is only exposed via a new kernel API and nobody bothers to update the modesetting driver for it and/or to write a new Xorg driver for the new API.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#23

Post by jmclnx »

dagenix wrote: post #17
shrubble wrote: post #11

I as a user haven't seen any reason to care about Wayland. And losing/dropping X11's network transparency seems rather surprising in a heavily networked world...

In my experience, running X11 over a network worked very poorly. There is significant overlap between former X11 developers and Wayland developers. They didn't drop it because they are incompetent which seems to be what your are implying. The people that decided to drop it are probably the people that know X11 the best.

>In my experience, running X11 over a network worked very poorly.

Well in my experience, running X11 applications using network transparency works perfectly fine. It can be a life saver when your server is a proprietary UNIX, these are still in many Fortune 500 companies.

I have/still use network transparency as: Linux/BSDs BSDs/Linux and Linux AIX.

I even ran a few (Xlib/Motif) applications as "Linux Linux AIX" where the middle Linux was a pass through server without any issues.

So, No issues with network transparency, that is why I will avoid Wayland as long as I can.

To the article, Wayland on OpenBSD looks like a very extremely project, wish you luck.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#24

Post by badsectoracula »

edgyquant wrote: post #13
hist_thr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is a replacement for X11 in the same way that a tricycle is a replacement for a tractor. They have thrown everything difficult out of the spec and only implemented the most trivial functionality around a security model which you must actively break to get actual work (like screen shots) done. That Wayland is 10 years old and still barely usable should tell you how far software developers have fallen in the la…

This has been a talking point since wayland was announced. No one is buying it. Wayland is a very clear successor to X11 and OSs are going to choose one or the other at the end of the day.

> OSs are going to choose one or the other at the end of the day.

Aside from specialized distros, i don't see why they have to choose only one or the other instead of providing both. Most distros - especially the Debian derivatives - have a ton of alternatives for projects that do more or less the same thing and a bunch of obscure projects, having an X server surely isn't that much of a deal.

Of course those that provide a default DE or whatever out of the box will most likely need to choose a default setting, but that is just that: a default setting. Just because my openSUSE Tumbleweed installation came with KDE doesn't mean i had to stick with it instead of replacing it with Window Maker.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#25

Post by badsectoracula »

jmclnx wrote: post #23
dagenix wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, running X11 over a network worked very poorly. There is significant overlap between former X11 developers and Wayland developers. They didn't drop it because they are incompetent which seems to be what your are implying. The people that decided to drop it are probably the people that know X11 the best.

>In my experience, running X11 over a network worked very poorly. Well in my experience, running X11 applications using network transparency works perfectly fine. It can be a life saver when your server is a proprietary UNIX, these are still in many Fortune 500 companies. I have/still use network transparency as: Linux/BSDs BSDs/Linux and Linux AIX. I even ran a few (Xlib/Motif) applications as "Linux Linux AIX" wher…

I haven't tried it (because i do not really need network transparency and i'm using Xorg anyway) but supposedly this project[0] implements the Wayland protocol on top of Xorg in a way that integrates mostly seamlessly with X11-based desktops (instead of creating a window and running Wayland inside it as if it was a monitor isolated from the rest of the desktop).

It might be useful to be able to run Wayland applications remotely.

[0] https://sourceforge.net/projects/twelveto11/

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#26

Post by hist_thr »

rodgerd wrote: post #6
hist_thr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is a replacement for X11 in the same way that a tricycle is a replacement for a tractor. They have thrown everything difficult out of the spec and only implemented the most trivial functionality around a security model which you must actively break to get actual work (like screen shots) done. That Wayland is 10 years old and still barely usable should tell you how far software developers have fallen in the la…

The software developers who were maintaining X? Perhaps you could show them how it's done, since apparently you can do a better job. They've certainly been clear that they're happy for anyone who wants to take over Xorg, yet no-one from the peanut gallery ever does.

[dead]

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#27

Post by hist_thr »

zamalek wrote: post #8
hist_thr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is a replacement for X11 in the same way that a tricycle is a replacement for a tractor. They have thrown everything difficult out of the spec and only implemented the most trivial functionality around a security model which you must actively break to get actual work (like screen shots) done. That Wayland is 10 years old and still barely usable should tell you how far software developers have fallen in the la…

> They have thrown everything difficult out of the spec Not exactly, they have thrown out everything that almost nobody uses - such as networking. They have, however, added things that most people do care about - such as different HiDPI across multiple monitors and an extremely thin (low latency) render path. > That Wayland is 10 years old and still barely usable And that has changed in the past 2 years (with excepti…

>Not exactly, they have thrown out everything that almost nobody uses - such as networking.

And color calibration.

>such as different HiDPI across multiple monitors

I had this working with multiple X11 servers 20 years ago.

>And that has changed in the past 2 years

I was told that exact same line 5 years ago. I guess it will be just as true in 5 years again.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#28

Post by kiwijamo »

hist_thr wrote: post #4
themerone wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is about preparing for a post X11 future. As Wayland continues to mature, classic X will attract fewer developer resources. I think it will eventually start to suffer benign neglect, and stop keeping up with new hardware.

Wayland is a replacement for X11 in the same way that a tricycle is a replacement for a tractor. They have thrown everything difficult out of the spec and only implemented the most trivial functionality around a security model which you must actively break to get actual work (like screen shots) done. That Wayland is 10 years old and still barely usable should tell you how far software developers have fallen in the la…

I use Wayland daily and haven't run into the issues you mention. It has worked better than X11 as a daily driver for a few years now. I appreciate may not work for some To be honest I associate 'barely usable' more with X11. I haven't forgotten the good old days when I had to hack various configuration files just to get a working desktop and then hack some more to work around issues with tearing, video acceleration, etc.

Wayland on the other had has just worked right out of the box since Debian 11. I have not touched a single file, line or character to get Wayland to work optiminally. That is a remarkable achievement IMHO which X11 took years and years to achieve.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#29

Post by csande17 »

badsectoracula wrote: post #21
themerone wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is about preparing for a post X11 future. As Wayland continues to mature, classic X will attract fewer developer resources. I think it will eventually start to suffer benign neglect, and stop keeping up with new hardware.

> I think it will eventually start to suffer benign neglect, and stop keeping up with new hardware. At least on Linux, Xorg and Wayland compositors use the same underlying APIs, so the chances of Xorg not running somewhere Wayland runs are pretty much zero - unless said new hardware is only exposed via a new kernel API and nobody bothers to update the modesetting driver for it and/or to write a new Xorg driver for th…

> unless said new hardware is only exposed via a new kernel API and nobody bothers to update the modesetting driver for it

And this is actually really unlikely for Wayland, isn't it? The whole idea is that each desktop environment implements its own display server using the modesetting API. That's why there's all kinds of drama about Nvidia "not supporting Wayland"; their kernel driver exposes some nonstandard APIs, and they can patch Xorg to support those APIs, but they can't patch every Wayland compositor in the world.

I guess Xorg could hit bugs in the modesetting driver that the most popular Wayland compositors don't hit. IIRC that was an issue for Asahi Linux's Apple M1 video driver.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#30

Post by zajio1am »

dagenix wrote: post #17
shrubble wrote: post #11

I as a user haven't seen any reason to care about Wayland. And losing/dropping X11's network transparency seems rather surprising in a heavily networked world...

In my experience, running X11 over a network worked very poorly. There is significant overlap between former X11 developers and Wayland developers. They didn't drop it because they are incompetent which seems to be what your are implying. The people that decided to drop it are probably the people that know X11 the best.

> In my experience, running X11 over a network worked very poorly.

In my experience, when combined with SSH compression (ssh -XC) it works well enough that even running Firefox over Internet is usable (although with noticeable latency). Without compression, it is unusable (for Firefox) even on gigabit LAN.

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