Purism Begins Making Their Own Wayland Compositor For The Librem 5 Smartphone

[shmerl]

Can't they help with KWin on Vulkan instead? Sounds like a lot of pointless work duplication.

[samdraz]

i think this is good, since they want to bring new use-case ideas for new wayland protocols(and testing)(maybe). provided this is not their primary interface

[Guest]

I still don't see any mention of GPU driver work.....closest news I know of is what Collabora did last year for that i.mx6

Without proper GPU and hardware acceleration, you cannot have a nice smooth UI, and this will remain a hobby project.

[grok]

What's especially worrying if you read the blog article and can see the videos... is that this game of chess is going to end very quickly and badly

[Serafean]

So they've gone partial canonical...
I can understand the love for gnome, but not refusing to use an existing product that is beyond proof of concept.

[Delgarde]

WTF? Ok, now's the time to worry.

Damn, just focus on Plasma mobile, improve whatever you feel you need to and get over with it.

Focus on *something* at least. Regardless of whether that's Gnome, KDE, or something else, they need to pick one thing and stick to it. It's never a good sign when a crowd-sourced project is being this indecisive after the project has funded... it's the kind of call you make before funding, and you don't change it without compelling evidence that the original plan was no longer feasible...

[nanonyme]

That rotation and scaling sounds like something that might be interesting for desktops too

[blackiwid]

Yes at first few seconds that sound a bit scary, not sure if its the phoronix article that uses maybe slightly clickbait or scandalous wordings, to generate traffic or if its just the facts.

But if you think 2 mins over it, all makes totally sense, except for gnome haters maybe, but that they support gnome is no surprise and was clear from the beginning.

We have to remember what compositor means its not a new mir or something, just basically a new window manager. Which makes totaly sense its easier and more important faster to write some special compositor for this device than try to mainline some code that supports desktops AND this smartphones, you don't have to abstract your code so much, or write 1000 flow control statements in your code.

merging this codes at some point under one name mutter or new name makes probably sense but if you want to be fast you don't want to start that way. Also you would not only have the big abstractions for different input devices and different uis you also have the complete X11 shit in mutter. So again that makes totally sense to do this way.

Also creating their own shell sounds a bit scary, but that is also not that much overhead, canonical did it in 6 months with their ubuntu shell, LTS ready now. So also not that big deal and you still share 90-99% of the codebase and are more or less 100% compatible.

In gnome 2 time it was totaly normal that many window managers worked with gnome together, sawmill and basically every normal 2d window manager. It was at least theoretically no big deal to switch the window manager, if you don't just want 1:1 desktops apps and mouse based desktop on your phone you have to do something like that.

And who wants a phone for what 500 600 dollar, without keyboard, that he can't use outside the home without a connected mouse and keyboard?

[grok]

Sorry but who uses KDE Plasma Mobile? Nobody that is. I remember it was used on an earlier attempt at mobile GNU/linux, and had a beautiful video about concent-centric "activities" or whatever. But there was no hardware and people see running this sort of thing on tablet as "hacking".
For all the bad we can say about Gnome, you can also use it as a dumb window manager whereas KDE seems to want to be the world. Like bash vs emacs : KDE looks like an inner platform and we'd end up with KDE apps on KDE. Or maybe that's what KDE haters think.

Funny thing : GTK desktop users (XFCE, etc.) don't care if their apps are GTK or Qt.

[Guest]

I for one am all for creating a new pure Wayland compositor free of historical garbage but that's not what these guys are doing by basing it on GTK and Gnome libraries.