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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)

#111

Post by sam_lowry_ »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #44

Wayland was designed to solve a very specific set of use cases and nothing more. The number of times I have read "wayland doesn't do that" or "that's not wayland's job" or "wayland is just the compositor" are telling. Of course a stack that is compositor + windowing toolkits is going to miss countless mission critical use cases in countless workflows, not to mention that it is an even further regression from composab…

Right, X11 made it possible to have literally hundreds of window managers written to fit all possible tastes.

With Wayland, the ecosystem of window managers will never be as rich, because a window manager has to implement too many things to be usable.

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

#112

Post by floatboth »

tinus_hn wrote: post #78
michaelmrose wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it does actually support keyloggers while breaking the concept of global keybindings. It's like the worst of both worlds.

It’s a red herring anyway. All processes owned by a user can influence all other processes owned by that user, either directly or indirectly. It’s basically impossible to prevent. Don’t run code you don’t trust and don’t let things you don’t trust connect to your display server.

Well, you don't have to run an untrusted program as your user account, you can sandbox. If you run something in a jail and pass it a wayland socket, it will be able to display, but won't be able to modify your files.

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

#113

Post by all2 »

dyhtf wrote: post #100
all2 wrote: post #10

I think it is important to point out that Wayland is a specification [0] and not some blob of software. [0] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/apa.html

So is everything else in the world of software. You begin with a specification and then you start writing code.

Well, sometimes. Paul Graham and others from the lisp-ness crowd talk about coding without a clear idea of where to go. I'm not in a place where I 'speak' any language clearly enough to write without a plan.

I suppose for most enterprise stuff what you say is true (how else will we commit to coding targets we won't hit for prices we can't afford on timelines that make dog races look slow? - I suppose I'm a little early in life to be jaded, but I am familiar with bureaucratic nightmares that value image over substance).

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

#114

Post by emersion »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #44

Wayland was designed to solve a very specific set of use cases and nothing more. The number of times I have read "wayland doesn't do that" or "that's not wayland's job" or "wayland is just the compositor" are telling. Of course a stack that is compositor + windowing toolkits is going to miss countless mission critical use cases in countless workflows, not to mention that it is an even further regression from composab…

What are your use-cases not addressed by Wayland?

The sway compositor has been standardizing protocols for screenshots, screen recording/streaming, composable desktop components and so on.

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

#115

Post by DonHopkins »

bsder wrote: post #107
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…

> 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…

That's like asking "If Trump is so bad, WHY hasn't he been impeached?" Just because something's hard to remove, doesn't mean it's not doing something bad.

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

#116

Post by emersion »

michaelmrose wrote: post #66
cbdumas wrote: post #56

I've been using swaywm on my laptop (XPS 13) with XWayland disabled for a few months now and have had very few problems with it. As far as I can tell Firefox works perfectly, except for some very strange behavior if I try to enable hardware acceleration. I love how easy it is to configure via config files, external monitors work great, scaling on HiDPI displays has been totally painless. My days off fiddling with xor…

Without hardware acceleration doesn't watching video in the browser pretty much destroy your battery life and use most of your cpu time?

Note that on X11 hardware acceleration isn't enabled by default in Firefox.

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

#117

Post by floatboth »

newnewpdro wrote: post #25

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…

There is a mainline driver for the RPi with full Mesa support. On e.g. Arch Linux ARM, you can just install a wayland compositor and run it.

It's just the conservatism of distros like Raspbian. 32-bit, old kernel, proprietary blobs, old packages (stable debian).

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

#118

Post by NullPrefix »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #110
DonHopkins wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't know when it was added, but I recently found out that you can have multiple synchronized Word windows of the same document.

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

#119

Post by DonHopkins »

jolmg wrote: post #93

Can I just say that I think it's great that we now ceased to have a monoculture in display servers for Unix-based systems? It was the last one, I believe. I mean, we've had choices for text-editors, for shells, for programming languages, for GUI toolkits, for desktop environments, for window managers, for remote-desktop servers and viewers, for ssl/tls implementations, for web browsers, and even for kernels. The only…

Why not just use a full screen direct-to-hardware web browser as the window manager, and talk to clients, servers and other screens via HTTP, WebSockets, two-way streaming video and screen sharing via RTP, etc?

The reason X-Windows sucks is that it's not extensible, and Wayland is only incrementally and quantitatively better than X11 (like X12 or Y), not radically and qualitatively better (like NeWS or AJAX).

Wayland has the exact same fundamental problem that X-Windows suffers from. It's not extensible, so it misses the mark, just like X-Windows did, for the same reason. So there's not a good enough reason to switch, because Wayland failed to apply the lessons of Emacs and NeWS and AJAX. It should have been designed from the ground up around an extension language.

Web browsers are extensible in JavaScript and WebAssembly. And they have a some nice 2D and 3D graphics libraries too. Problem solved. No need for un-extensible Wayland.

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

#120

Post by cbdumas »

hollerith wrote: post #99
cbdumas wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm running Arch, which I find to be the most frictionless when you're trying to do sort of "bleeding edge" stuff like this.

It is time for me to give desktop Linux another try (which will be my first serious try in 10 years).

Yes definitely! Things have come a long way in 10 years, in my opinion. If you are looking for something more "set up and forget about it" though I would definitely recommend Ubuntu over Arch. I use Arch because I (usually) enjoy tinkering and customizing and setting things up exactly how I want.

Edit for a little more detail: I used Ubuntu for a long time on my desktop and actually did quite a bit of gaming on it. Mostly stuck to games that have native Linux support but from what I hear the compatibility layer that Valve has released is actually really good. If gaming is your thing.

All this is to say, things that were once supposed to be impossible on Linux are now very much possible.

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