KeithP Looks To Reduce The Latency Of Using The X.Org Present Extension

[bridgman]

Key point here IMO is that there is a big difference between "many apps will run without X" and "enough apps will run without X that X will cease to be a requirement".

I know the idea of saying "hey people can stop working on X because it will be legacy" seems attractive, and it probably is true that the *top* of X (interface between apps / WMs and X) can stop evolving (probably that happened a while ago though, since XCB)...

... but I don't think anyone believes that the emerging non-X environments are going to stop changing. As long as the layer *below* X keeps evolving (which it presumably will for the next 20 or 30 years) then X-over-whatever is going to have to evolve to keep working efficiently on those environments.

[dungeon]

Thing is X greatly improve since Wayland started many years ago , kudos to Keith for working on what most people use and will use daily

[89c51]

Not that easy, since you made a few tiny errors. Current Firefox doesn't run on Wayland, but the nearly-ready GTK3 port of Firefox does since it uses GTK3. Gecko was ported to Wayland many, many months ago (browser on my Jolla Phone uses Gecko and Wayland). VLC uses the installed Qt and if you're running Qt 5.4 (for example on Antergos/Arch, like me) that was released a few days ago, then VLC now runs on Wayland since Qt 5.4 added (better) Wayland support. Chrome may not run on Wayland, but Chromium does if you compile it with Wayland support. Wayland support in Chromium was added in 2012, according to Google Code.
Spotify could easily add Wayland support since they already use the Qt toolkit. They just have to update their internal Qt which they ship along with the app to 5.4

"Anything commercial" is also a bit over the top statement 'cause there is commercial software ported to Wayland already, including RealVNC and Eclipse.

Nearly ready/easy to add is not equal to install and run on WL. VLC will have full wayland support in 3.0 and initial stuff in 2.2. I don't think the port to Qt5 is complete yet. Chromium needs a shitload of patches. Firefox surely doesn't run and the gtk3 version seems to take ages. Apart from that it doen't mean that we will get WL ready firefox once the GTK3 stuff i ready AFAIK.

DEs also need some polishing.

If you have a spare PC you can test for yourself.

[Guest]

TBH i was expecting it to reach "bug fix only mode" soon if not already. Anyway.

Why? Xorg matured just a short while ago...

Nowadays X "just works" for 95% of users (4% of rest are bumblebee users),
just few years ago (maybe decade ago, whos counting) we used to configure X manually and it broke every update.



^XKCD even made posts about it.

[xeekei]

This is why XWayland is very needed. Personally I'm waiting on Cinnamon to support Wayland. But it seems they want to take their sweet time, so I might be forced to jump back to GNOME soon. :/

[Guest]

This is why XWayland is very needed. Personally I'm waiting on Cinnamon to support Wayland. But it seems they want to take their sweet time, so I might be forced to jump back to GNOME soon. :/

What exactly would 'force you'?

[xeekei]

What exactly would 'force you'?

My longing for an X-free desktop.

[CrystalGamma]

My longing for an X-free desktop.

That was one of the reasons I switched from XFCE to GNOME as well.
Sadly, I haven't had any luck launching a wayland session from GDM ...
I really hope that once it works, the input handling will be better:
Right now, every once in a while, when some window forces itself in the foreground, the keyboard input will go to the window that was open before that, even if I click on the newly visible window.
Also, after a random amount of time, first the media keys will stop working for VLC, then later, every kind of keyboard input to the VLC window will have massive latency (think 5+ seconds).

[makomk]

Not that easy, since you made a few tiny errors. Current Firefox doesn't run on Wayland, but the nearly-ready GTK3 port of Firefox does since it uses GTK3. Gecko was ported to Wayland many, many months ago (browser on my Jolla Phone uses Gecko and Wayland). VLC uses the installed Qt and if you're running Qt 5.4 (for example on Antergos/Arch, like me) that was released a few days ago, then VLC now runs on Wayland since Qt 5.4 added (better) Wayland support. Chrome may not run on Wayland, but Chromium does if you compile it with Wayland support. Wayland support in Chromium was added in 2012, according to Google Code.

If I remember correctly, VLC renders video directly to X drawables without going through Qt, so even though it's Qt based and Qt supports Wayland it's probably not going to work on Wayland without major changes (and similar changes will be needed in any app that uses libvlc to play video). Firefox and Gecko rely on X embedding support for plugins like Flash and Java, so those don't work under Wayland and never will - they're planning on dropping plugin support altogether in the long term rather than trying to port them.

[nanonyme]

If I remember correctly, VLC renders video directly to X drawables without going through Qt, so even though it's Qt based and Qt supports Wayland it's probably not going to work on Wayland without major changes (and similar changes will be needed in any app that uses libvlc to play video). Firefox and Gecko rely on X embedding support for plugins like Flash and Java, so those don't work under Wayland and never will - they're planning on dropping plugin support altogether in the long term rather than trying to port them.

I'd expect Java plugin to be eventually ported to Wayland but let's face it, Flash on Linux is most likely going to die