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Wayland on OpenBSD

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Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#81

Post by zokier »

AJRF wrote: post #74

I am an outside observer but in any discussion of Wayland I always see this article referenced: https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... It seems like so much stuff is broken but the devs deny it is broken? And even with that situation - every major distro is making in roads to adopting it? Is that a fair characterisation or am I off the mark?

Wayland never was intended to be drop-in replacement for X11, so it's not surprising that it isn't. It's a much smaller scoped, lower level building block, which pushes more responsibility to DEs. It's not just different implementation, it's new model where the hows, whats, and wheres of desktop are getting re-evaluated.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#82

Post by throwawaylinux »

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...

Network transparency at the GUI is not the way the "heavily networked world" is going though. In a lot of ways it doesn't scale. You want to administer and run things in a programmatic way, which means command line or an application specific protocol (which would have front-ends) so you can script and write tools for it and have that work over 1 or N machines.

So very few new things that require remote operation in the past 20 years should have baked in the requirement for a networked GUI.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#83

Post by zokier »

shrubble wrote: post #40
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.

I didn't say anything about competence, just that it seems an odd design choice. Back when X11 was gaining traction the LAN was 10mbps and WAN was 1.5mbps. Now people have true 1Gbit connections to the WAN and can easily have 10gbit or much more on the LAN...

Back then people actually used X11 primitives to draw stuff, these days you get surface and render stuff on gpu yourself.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#84

Post by mrweasel »

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.

X11 over a network, even a LAN is a "last resort" kinda thing for me. It's neat an all, but as much as I dislike remote desktop and VNC, it's still better than X11.

The last time I had it working well was in 2005 using a full desktop session across a local network. The bit about only getting the one application across has always been a bit wonky. That's not to say that you can't do it, but it's not really a daily driver sort of thing.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#85

Post by vetinari »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #60
justinclift wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... if it was ever a real problem in the first place. It definitely used to be a huge pain in the arse. There used to be pages after pages after pages of random "HOW TO ..." style guides for people to configure X11 config files around the net (many just working for specific hw). It was an incredible mess, with pretty much nothing positive about it. ;)

I've been using Linux for 20 years now and I've never needed more than 5 lines of Xorg config, only a couple lines of which has had meaningful information.

I've been using Linux since Slackware 3.0; at the time, there were X servers that were specific to a certain card manufacturers/chipsets and you symlinked the correct one. Then you configured xf86config.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#86

Post by mrweasel »

If OpenBSD manages to get Wayland working just the way they want it, with Pledge, Unveil, privileged separation and what have you, I would not be at all surprised if they also came up with their own compositor / window manager thing and a plan for removing X11 in future releases a few years later.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#87

Post by growse »

nine_k wrote: post #67
growse wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The distro devs are pushing it because it furthers their mission, which on the face of it (for a lot of them) seems to be "ship software that works for people and have them stop bugging us". > However broken the past was, replacing it with something that is similarly broken but in different non-overlapping ways is not the proper way forward. That "opinion" is well founded. Most people don't care about net…

Many, many people care about: - Screenshots and sharing the screen; - Global hotkeys; - Alternative / switchable / tunable keyboard layouts and input methods. Not fancy stuff, just, say, typing Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, and Japanese characters. All these things are is some sort of disarray under Wayland currently. Once they are properly implemented, I may consider switching. I want Wayland to succeed. But it's not enti…

> - Screenshots and sharing the screen;

Here's a screenshot I just took on my plasma / wayland desktop.

https://imgur.com/a/IBI6u3S

Here's a screenshot of me sharing a window in firefox:

https://imgur.com/a/LpdyqIl

> Global hotkeys

I use global hotkeys to switch between keyboard layouts, see the screenshot. Works fine.

> Alternative / switchable / tunable keyboard layouts and input methods. Not fancy stuff, just, say, typing Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, and Japanese characters.

I use global hotkeys to switch between keyboard layouts, see the screenshot. Works fine.

> All these things are is some sort of disarray under Wayland currently

This all basically worked out of the box. I'm really not seeing where this disarray is. Have you actually used wayland, or are you regurgitating taking points from 5 years ago?

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#88

Post by rcxdude »

vetinari wrote: post #80
AJRF wrote: post #74

I am an outside observer but in any discussion of Wayland I always see this article referenced: https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... It seems like so much stuff is broken but the devs deny it is broken? And even with that situation - every major distro is making in roads to adopting it? Is that a fair characterisation or am I off the mark?

It not broken. The complains on the linked gist remind me complaining, how introducing protected memory broke applications. And you couldn't read or write i/o ports directly in our app anymore, you had to go through so-called kernel! So much bloat! So I put wayland is broken, because it doesn't allow what x11 did in the same way, ideally stomping on the others into the same category. For screenshots and capture, ther…

> For global shortcuts, there's an API in the making.

This is kind of the problem, though. X11's model of 'everything can access everything' is obviously bad, but when wayland went with a more restrictive model they didn't provide a means for legitimate functionality like this. That's basically the origin of all the objection: things that worked on X11 don't work on wayland, because wayland's developers seem to be very slow to recognise and provide for things which were extremely common on X11. It's been 14 years and the API for global shortcuts is still in the making!

(And I know there's DE-specific interfaces for a lot of these things. But when you tell app developers this they're either going to implement it for their DE or not bother to implement it at all, as opposed to going through each DE and working it out, especially if it's more complex to support granular permissions and so on. So then users will see that app functionality breaks on wayland, and blame wayland, somewhat fairly)

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#89

Post by gpderetta »

bitwize wrote: post #45
badsectoracula wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 applicatio…

Waypipe can run Wayland applications remotely in a more modern fashion that doesn't suck ass on all but the fastest network links. But this will be a useful stopgap for those who stubbornly cling to X11 (or are forced to, e.g. by NVIDIA hardware) as more and more useful software drops X support and goes Wayland-only.

Which useful software is Wayland-only?

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#90

Post by growse »

orbital-decay wrote: post #76
growse wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The distro devs are pushing it because it furthers their mission, which on the face of it (for a lot of them) seems to be "ship software that works for people and have them stop bugging us". > However broken the past was, replacing it with something that is similarly broken but in different non-overlapping ways is not the proper way forward. That "opinion" is well founded. Most people don't care about net…

This is a strawman. There's a reason I mentioned color management in particular. Most people who aren't aware (even software developers) tend to make two assumptions: - that color management is needed for a tiny subset of users (those weird guys with printers and calibrators...). - that it can be delegated to 3rd parties or implemented later when the time comes. Neither of that is true. Color management is just anoth…

The vast majority of linux desktop computer users are likely using sRGB displays to look at things in the sRGB colourspace.

Should colour management be in Wayland? Sure. Could it have been designed better to cater for it? Absolutely. Wayland's got its warts, sure. But for most people it's good enough, and that's what matters in software. It'll get fixed, and the more people who care about it actually contribute, the faster it'll get fixed. Open source is amazing!

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