Wayland's Wild Decade From v1.0 Release To Usable GNOME/KDE Desktop Support

[duby229]

duby229 Wayland’s simplicity is a deliberate design feature. Besides technical merits it comes with many other benefits. Gone are the days where protocols need to deal with other desktop compositors’ quirks and poor design.

No more bastardizing “standards”. Just pure Mutter. And it comes with no downsides. The remaining desktop X resources just moved to work directly on Mutter instead.

Go ahead and name some technical benefits of wayland then. I'd bet most or all you can name are of Mutter. Wayland's scope is so narrow it just doesn't do much.

[duby229]

duby229 There’s no misconception. Mutter on Wayland Just Works(tm). There’s a lot of code and mindshare between Mutter and Weston so that’s kind of expected. I have no problems with Wayland. It’s well architected and doesn’t suffer from scope creep.

People should stop blaming Wayland for their poor choice of Wayland compositors.

Wayland=simple.
Compositor=complex.

I'd like to say it's the inverse of scope creep. Wayland is so simple it doesn't do hardly anything a compositor might want a display protocol to do.. I don't mean to knock on Mutter, it's amazing that they managed to get a mostly functional compositor working. Just that attributing that to wayland is super asinine. It's more like they managed to do it despite wayland, certainly not because of it. Wayland can't do most of what a compositor needs, so most of what Mutter does is waaaay beyond the scope of wayland.

[starshipeleven]

EGLStreams is a standard.

created by NVIDIA on the fly and not used by anyone else but them. Technically right but in practice it's bullshit.

[starshipeleven]

KDE added EGLStreams support.

More like NVIDIA developers added that in KDE and it was merged.

[duby229]

That's true, I have two friends that are into image recognition and ML and they both tell me virtually any framework worth anything is CUDA-only.

But to be fair, Nvidia support is not a problem with Wayland, but with Wayland implementations. Weston used GBM and somehow the whole world got stuck on that. That's the real problem. Gnome yielded eventually and implemented EGL Streams support, but I think KDE still doesn't want to do that.

Yeah because Weston was the reference compositor. I remember reading about how it was decided to keep technical documention to a minimum and release code as documentation instead. I don't remember all the details, but it was something about how too much technical description is bad for projects and so reference projects would be considered documentation instead. That was Weston's entire purpose. But it doesn't mean that other developers had to use that code line for line, it was just meant to be an example compositor to show documentation.

[duby229]

kenjitamura Wayland is fully functional on GNOME. Stop blaming Wayland in general.

See this misconception irks me so bad, but you're not the only one. You can't say wayland is fully functional on Gnome, all you can say is that Gnome is almost fully functional when using Mutter's wayland support. Wayland is not the thing, Mutter is the thing. Wayland is an extremely minimal display protocol, Mutter implements wayland along with quite a lot of other things so that Gnome can be complete.

EDIT: The same is also true in reference to KDE, kwin is the thing. Wayland is implemented, but there is quite a lot more work that needs done so that kwin is fully functional with wayland support so that KDE can be complete.

[CommunityMember]

Until Nvidia follows proper standards ....

EGLStreams is a standard. So is GBM. So both are proper standards. There are certainly some projects that don't want to implement both standards, and that is their right, but they also need to own that decision (i.e. state they don't want to implement all the standards). And in any case, nvidia contributed code for both Gnome and KDE so both now work in current releases.

[Britoid]

Ok, that's progress.


And that's consistency, I guess.

I reworded it, was missing my coffee.

[kenjitamura]

Here's to looking to ten more years when Wayland as a fully functional default display server is only another 10 more years out from that point! Wayland 2040.

[bug77]

KDE added EGLStreams support.

Ok, that's progress.

It just works really poorly and XWayland works really poorly under Nvidia at the moment (no hw acceleration).

And that's consistency, I guess.