Wave Hello To WEV - Similar To X.Org's Xev For Event Viewing On Wayland

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wave Hello To WEV - Similar To X.Org's Xev For Event Viewing On Wayland

WEV is a new Wayland utility developed by Drew DeVault of Wayland notoriety for his work on the Sway i3-inspired compositor and the WLROOTS library...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wayland-WEV-Events

[shmerl]

Nice! How does it work though, given Wayland compositors are strict to prevent processes from snooping on each other? Does it need special permissions?

[miabrahams]

Slowly but surely the Wayland haters fall silent as all of their "X can do this and Wayland can't" complaints are coded into irrelevance.

[miabrahams]

Nice! How does it work though, given Wayland compositors are strict to prevent processes from snooping on each other? Does it need special permissions?

XEV (and WEV) work by capturing events sent to a target window. There's no snooping, just a record of what would be visible to the process after any security filters are applied.

[Shaheed]

Slowly but surely the Wayland haters fall silent as all of their "X can do this and Wayland can't" complaints are coded into irrelevance.

I have other things to spend my time worrying about that than the windowing gubbins of my desktop. So if a bunch of people - including some of the folk closely associated with X - rock up with a better thing than X (in ways I largely care little about), I'd be delighted to have my distro switch from X under me when it is ready. However, if gaps are present in the replacement which not only affect me, but which the folks working the replacement seem to blithely ignore then you can bet that I will watch developments closely.

I don't know if that passes your bar for the definition of a Wayland hater, but even if it does not, you can certainly consider me to a "concerned user".

When Wayland codes those concerns into irrelevance, so that if my distro does replace X with it as the default, I won't notice, I'll be delighted to use it and revel in the fact that the folk that care tell me it's better than what I had before. Till then, I'll feel unhappy whenever I see unhelpful language be thrown around (from either side).

[boxie]

I have other things to spend my time worrying about that than the windowing gubbins of my desktop. So if a bunch of people - including some of the folk closely associated with X - rock up with a better thing than X (in ways I largely care little about), I'd be delighted to have my distro switch from X under me when it is ready. However, if gaps are present in the replacement which not only affect me, but which the folks working the replacement seem to blithely ignore then you can bet that I will watch developments closely.

I don't know if that passes your bar for the definition of a Wayland hater, but even if it does not, you can certainly consider me to a "concerned user".

When Wayland codes those concerns into irrelevance, so that if my distro does replace X with it as the default, I won't notice, I'll be delighted to use it and revel in the fact that the folk that care tell me it's better than what I had before. Till then, I'll feel unhappy whenever I see unhelpful language be thrown around (from either side).

All these things!

I definitely want the change to happen (I care about the security thing). I also care about the windowing system not holding me back. My chosen distro and DE are getting close, close enough that I don't mind the occasional inconvenience. And when it does become a problem, there is always the X version

[beniwtv]

I have other things to spend my time worrying about that than the windowing gubbins of my desktop. So if a bunch of people - including some of the folk closely associated with X - rock up with a better thing than X (in ways I largely care little about), I'd be delighted to have my distro switch from X under me when it is ready. However, if gaps are present in the replacement which not only affect me, but which the folks working the replacement seem to blithely ignore then you can bet that I will watch developments closely.

I don't know if that passes your bar for the definition of a Wayland hater, but even if it does not, you can certainly consider me to a "concerned user".

When Wayland codes those concerns into irrelevance, so that if my distro does replace X with it as the default, I won't notice, I'll be delighted to use it and revel in the fact that the folk that care tell me it's better than what I had before. Till then, I'll feel unhappy whenever I see unhelpful language be thrown around (from either side).

I am on board with that reasoning - it's not too much to expect the new display server (or rather, desktop environment on Wayland, since Wayland is no "server" on it's own) to be able to do that you are currently using with X.

However, don't let that hold you back from actually using Wayland for things that already work for you

Desktop environment and Wayland developers need bug reports, and feature requests so they know what's broken and missing still. Not everyone has the same hardware and needs, so without input they won't know you have a bug or are missing a feature that is critical for you.

If everyone just said "I'll only touch it when it's ready" it will never be

Last thing, I *highly* recommend people that are interested in Wayland to follow the Wayland devel mailing list. It's low volume, so it doesn't spam, but you get to see features that are being worked on or fixes otherwise you would miss. For example, in no particular order recently:

- Patches for screen leasing support (useful for VR, for example)
- A network-transparent remote desktop solution (though Author says it has same performance problems as X transparency)
- PipeWire remote desktop solution
- xfway: Compositor inspired by xfwm4
- Allowing of chaning of app ID at runtime (makes possible to group applications in docks, task bars, etc as well as showing a different icon for LO documents like calc, writer, etc...)

Just to name a few

[Shaheed]

If everyone just said "I'll only touch it when it's ready" it will never be

Of course; in this case the issue of network transparency on a per-app basis is well enough known not to need a "me too".

- A network-transparent remote desktop solution (though Author says it has same performance problems as X transparency)

I must confess that I actually use Phoronix as a convenient digest for issues of interest, and so am aware of this from a recent post by Michael. I've even looked into some of the details and though the idea of pixel pushing makes me a tad nervous [1] I'm cautiously optimistic that this represents real progress.

Shaheed

[1] Assuming I read the details right; I'm familiar with the tradeoffs around video-style compression but I do at least hope that modern CPUs and LAN bandwidths will be enough to make this work for me.

[beniwtv]

I've even looked into some of the details and though the idea of pixel pushing makes me a tad nervous [1] I'm cautiously optimistic that this represents real progress.

It's the same for X these days - you push pixels and OpenGL calls over the network. The day where we used X widgets that could be transmitted as instructions is sadly long gone with all the desktop libraries like QT and GTK, let alone compositors. This is why X network transparency is really sluggish these days also.

[yturmisil]

If the plan to make Wayland actually usable is reinventing features of Xorg piece by piece and sticking those together with a band aid we might as well continue to use Xorg.