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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)

#161

Post by torqueTorrent »

DonHopkins wrote: post #37
jolmg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I bet the original creators would be the ones most shocked that it's still a thing in 2019. Couldn't we say the same thing about bash or basically most tools in your typical Unix-based OS? Old code is solid code. If they're to be shocked it's for doing something so right that it's persisted all this time.

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…

On one hand, there are some things that are simply too complex to attempt implementation with bash a script.

otoh, there are many things that could or even ideally should be kept simple such that a bash script is the best practice, most simple, proven, reliable solution.

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

#162

Post by sevensor »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #158
floatboth wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> incompatible with the proprietary Nvidia drivers (and no plan to ever fix that) I've heard that Nvidia is fixing this in KDE Plasma and maybe Gnome too. (Fuck proprietary drivers though, and fuck Nvidia.) > huge input lag that's odd. Gnome's compositor is not the fastest, but it generally works okay for many many people. > the reasons one should consider a switch nowadays - No screen tearing ever, every frame is pe…

> (Fuck proprietary drivers though, and fuck Nvidia.) I love nVidia's drivers. They "just work" and I don't need to muck about trying to understand why this version of this video driver doesn't play right with that version of drm or this kms setting. Don't get me wrong, there are benefits to being a proper, native component of a modular display system. But what's the point if none of them work, only support random su…

> none of them work, only support random subsets of the hardware, and crash left and right

Anecdote for anecdote, you just described my experience with NVidia's dreadful hardware / drivers.

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

#163

Post by [deleted] »

jolmg wrote: post #68
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…

> as terrible as a shell scripting language That's a strong opinion. I'm not going to argue for lack of time, but suffice to say that 99% of my interactions with my computer and sometimes with my phone is with a shell scripting language. Shell scripting is awesome. > Have you ever read through a gnu configure file yourself, Yes. Generated scripts make for a boring read. > or do you just close your eyes and type "./co…

[deleted]

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

#164

Post by mondoshawan »

DonHopkins wrote: post #37
jolmg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I bet the original creators would be the ones most shocked that it's still a thing in 2019. Couldn't we say the same thing about bash or basically most tools in your typical Unix-based OS? Old code is solid code. If they're to be shocked it's for doing something so right that it's persisted all this time.

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…

TBH, even humans shit themselves when they encounter monikers with spaces in them.

Can you spot the moniker with spaces in it in this sentence easily without having to go back and re-read? Without context, did I mean "moniker" or "moniker with spaces in it"?

Spaces are a terrible idea in monikers.

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

#165

Post by keldaris »

floatboth wrote: post #123
keldaris wrote: post #95

Last time (which was when Fedora first shipped it by default) I looked at Wayland, it took me less than an hour to run into several showstopper issues and move right back. The ones I remember include being incompatible with the proprietary Nvidia drivers (and no plan to ever fix that), huge input lag (apparently stemming from the, um, "interesting" idea to make the compositor responsible for all input) and lots of ra…

> incompatible with the proprietary Nvidia drivers (and no plan to ever fix that) I've heard that Nvidia is fixing this in KDE Plasma and maybe Gnome too. (Fuck proprietary drivers though, and fuck Nvidia.) > huge input lag that's odd. Gnome's compositor is not the fastest, but it generally works okay for many many people. > the reasons one should consider a switch nowadays - No screen tearing ever, every frame is pe…

> Fuck proprietary drivers though, and fuck Nvidia.

I'd normally agree, but it's far easier for me to pick and choose software than hardware, and Nvidia makes the best GPUs by a huge margin (particularly if you care about power efficiency). Not to mention the issue of CUDA, which HPC and ML applications rely on pretty much exclusively and for which there's no support in open source drivers AFAIK.

As for the reasons to switch, I acknowledge your list as objective advantages. Unfortunately, I happen to be among the people who don't care for high DPI (1440p is more than enough for me), touchscreens (leave those to phones) or touchpads (TrackPoint forever), so I guess I'll be sticking to X11 for the foreseeable future. A guarantee against screen tearing is nice, but I've rarely seen it on the setups I run (admittedly, mostly on high end hardware), whereas low input lag, stability and driver support are things I am loathe to forgo.

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

#166

Post by smallstepforman »

azernik wrote: post #142
0xfaded wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been reading through the Vulkan spec, which is in way similar in that OpenGL has been extended since its introduction in 1992 with more and more features to support new graphics capabilities as they evolved. I've seen Vulkan called the successor to OpenGL, but reading the spec it seems more like the end game for raster graphics card programming. OpenGL 4.0 was released in 2010, and since then changes have been i…

My preferred metaphor is to the RISC revolution. Just like RISC decoupled CPU design from programming language design (in the sense that hardware was often designed to make assembly coding easy), Vulkan has decoupled shader language design from driver writing. OpenGL was designed under the assumption that the general game-dev public would be writing shaders for direct consumption by the driver/hardware combo; Vulkan,…

Vulkan was primarily designed to allow issuing batch based (queue) validated instructions sets, issued from multiple threads. Lessons learned from OpenGL ES 2.0 showed only a subset of techniques is needed, hence the API is smaller. Shaders are precompiled. Smaller, simpler driver.

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

#167

Post by roenxi »

mwfunk wrote: 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 unprivilaged user; and ran smack-bang into the fact that the drivers live in the window system because the Kernel doesn't accept closed source modules and the graphics vendors only support X.

That eventually got fixed with the Intel/AMD graphics graphics open sourcing 2008-2018; at the moment X is becoming a very thin comparability layer for most people and a mandatory pain for Nvidia users as far as I know.

There were a lot of issues like that, and still are with Nvidia. The point is that it isn't replacing X that is hard. The issues is coordinating with Nvidia is hard.

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

#168

Post by m463 »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #111
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.

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

I've used it since its inception, however it has always kind of sucked.

I think it goes to it's basic philosophy: it did not enforce policy.

This let it survive a long time. It was whatever people wanted it to be. But because of this flexibility, it never became great.

It's like the old Lilly Tomlin skit - "I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific."

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

#169

Post by njepa »

jolmg wrote: post #68
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…

> as terrible as a shell scripting language That's a strong opinion. I'm not going to argue for lack of time, but suffice to say that 99% of my interactions with my computer and sometimes with my phone is with a shell scripting language. Shell scripting is awesome. > Have you ever read through a gnu configure file yourself, Yes. Generated scripts make for a boring read. > or do you just close your eyes and type "./co…

> That's a strong opinion. I'm not going to argue for lack of time, but suffice to say that 99% of my interactions with my computer and sometimes with my phone is with a shell scripting language. Shell scripting is awesome.

It really isn't though. (It certainly can be fun however). Switching from shell scripts, and avoiding to do things manually (like ssh), likely increases your success rate at managing *nix by orders of magnitude. All these "configuration management" tools like Puppet, Chef, SaltStack, Ansible etc. are pretty much just to avoid shell scripts and interactive ssh.

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

#170

Post by [deleted] »

asveikau wrote: post #124
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 Yet your windows render and take input, life goes on, etc. I am pretty happy with it on systems where it runs. Some of the old criticisms like it being a resource hog - might have made sense in the specs of, say, 1993 or earlier, but even restricting the comparison to what most of us have loaded in Javascript at any moment it's pretty lightweight…

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