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Wayland in 2021

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Re: Wayland in 2021

#101

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

addicted wrote: post #98
rnhmjoj wrote: post #84

I think Wayland, and the modern desktop in general too, has forgot about a few good ideas that the original X system had. I will miss them once Wayland has taken over: - A unified way to change applications settings. All old X apps used to read the X resources database (xrdb): you could set a global color scheme, fonts, window geometry and what not, all in one place using a simple but powerful text format. - The simp…

> The simplicity of the window managers, hotkey daemons and other X clients. You can implement a functional wm in a few hundred lines of C[1] because the X server takes care of most of the stuff. In comparison a compositor has much more work to do and it's difficult to implement one, unless using a big library like wl_roots. This sounds like they simply extracted some of the work X used to do into an external library…

Why is a library any better? Not even disagreeing; I can't see why to prefer either approach.

Re: Wayland in 2021

#102

Post by sprash »

sergeykish wrote: post #95
sprash wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the process to become a release manager for X11 without forking it? I assume you can't just walk in there and say "I'll do that".

Who would risk stability? And what is the issue with forking? ffmpeg/libav, openssl/libressl managed fine. No fork is the symptom.

The other forks you are mentioning are a completely different problem because there were inherent philosophical differences among developers.

X11 just needs "a release" so that package maintainers and distros can push updates. If you fork it you only make things worse.

Re: Wayland in 2021

#103

Post by shmerl »

solarkraft wrote: post #87
shmerl wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't expect them to ever work properly. Basically, if you care about good Wayland user experience and proper desktop integration, you should be using AMD or Intel GPU already. Waiting for Nvidia to fix this mess is pointless. Nvidia will be DOA as long as they refuse to upstream their driver or to support Nouveau to begin with. And they didn't show any interest for years.

Nvidia have been extremely bad to work with in the past (hasn't Linus said something about this?), but their recent efforts are giving me some hope. They seem somewhat interested in supporting the Linux desktop nowadays.

I don't think they are interested a lot more. Same glacial pace of support. I don't expect it to improve until their driver will be in the upstream kernel.

There was some brief announcement about some kind of open sourcing news a while ago which could be it, but nothing came out of that.

So you can still apply the take of Nouveau developers themselves - simply use AMD.

Re: Wayland in 2021

#104

Post by shmerl »

ucosty wrote: post #29
shmerl wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't expect them to ever work properly. Basically, if you care about good Wayland user experience and proper desktop integration, you should be using AMD or Intel GPU already. Waiting for Nvidia to fix this mess is pointless. Nvidia will be DOA as long as they refuse to upstream their driver or to support Nouveau to begin with. And they didn't show any interest for years.

Easier said than done, given it's nearly impossible to buy AMD GPUs at the moment (and has been for a while now)

That's a good point, but applies equally to Nvidia which is also impossible to buy. I'm myself waiting to get a new AMD GPU.

Re: Wayland in 2021

#105

Post by my123 »

solarkraft wrote: post #88
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this due to CUDA being a technically superior product, or is it just that it's entrenched? OpenCL/AMD is a usable and mature platform, right?

I've been told that OpenCL is in a whole different league than CUDA due to a worse API and much smaller ecosystem. I have, however, seen attempts to use Vulkan for compute. Could that be a viable way forward?

Using Vulkan for compute is still a much worse developer experience, it isn't really a reasonable alternative.

Re: Wayland in 2021

#106

Post by nialv7 »

rnhmjoj wrote: post #84

I think Wayland, and the modern desktop in general too, has forgot about a few good ideas that the original X system had. I will miss them once Wayland has taken over: - A unified way to change applications settings. All old X apps used to read the X resources database (xrdb): you could set a global color scheme, fonts, window geometry and what not, all in one place using a simple but powerful text format. - The simp…

> A unified way to change applications settings.

This is not true anymore even on X. Also, if you use GNOME or KDE, both of them has unified settings

> because the X server takes care of most of the stuff. ... , unless using a big library like wl_roots.

So you are fine with X server takes care of most of the stuff, but not fine with wl_roots do the same thing?

> A base graphics API based on drawing primitives like the original X, SVG or Cairo, rather than just bitmaps.

I don't get this point. You can still use Cairo or similar graphic libraries on wayland too.

Re: Wayland in 2021

#107

Post by nialv7 »

Decabytes wrote: post #39

I don’t know how I feel about Wayland. On the one hand it’s being made by x11 devs so I think they more than anyone else know why they would need to start from scratch over improving x11. On the other hand, moving away from x breaks so many things and I haven’t heard anyone singing it’s praises yet about how happy they are to use it. I understand apps are breaking because they relied on features of x that were securi…

> ... over improving x11

They have literally been improving X11 for several decades.

Re: Wayland in 2021

#108

Post by sergeykish »

rnhmjoj wrote: post #84

I think Wayland, and the modern desktop in general too, has forgot about a few good ideas that the original X system had. I will miss them once Wayland has taken over: - A unified way to change applications settings. All old X apps used to read the X resources database (xrdb): you could set a global color scheme, fonts, window geometry and what not, all in one place using a simple but powerful text format. - The simp…

- I've never seen xrdb used outside of terminal configuration

- You have to link against X11, dwl (dwm for Wayland) implemented in 2500 LOC [1]

Plan 9 /dev/draw is simpler yet, somehow it was not reason against X11.

[1] https://github.com/djpohly/dwl

Re: Wayland in 2021

#109

Post by MaxBarraclough »

solarkraft wrote: post #88
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this due to CUDA being a technically superior product, or is it just that it's entrenched? OpenCL/AMD is a usable and mature platform, right?

I've been told that OpenCL is in a whole different league than CUDA due to a worse API and much smaller ecosystem. I have, however, seen attempts to use Vulkan for compute. Could that be a viable way forward?

I'd say OpenCL is a pretty good API, it's just that because it's in C and it allows for quite fine-grain control, it takes a bit of orchestration to get anything off the ground. If you want more convenience, there are a few wrappers for it, in various languages.

It's true that its ecosystem is sadly lacking.

Re: Wayland in 2021

#110

Post by TacticalCoder »

sergeykish wrote: post #108
rnhmjoj wrote: post #84

I think Wayland, and the modern desktop in general too, has forgot about a few good ideas that the original X system had. I will miss them once Wayland has taken over: - A unified way to change applications settings. All old X apps used to read the X resources database (xrdb): you could set a global color scheme, fonts, window geometry and what not, all in one place using a simple but powerful text format. - The simp…

- I've never seen xrdb used outside of terminal configuration - You have to link against X11, dwl (dwm for Wayland) implemented in 2500 LOC [1] Plan 9 /dev/draw is simpler yet, somehow it was not reason against X11. [1] https://github.com/djpohly/dwl

> - I've never seen xrdb used outside of terminal configuration

Terminal and Emacs are the two I'm using it for.

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