Mir 2.18 Released With Wayland Server-Side Decorations

[Mez']

This attitude really bugs me. You're literally saying every developer who currently or wishes to write applications for Linux now needs to accommodate a decision by a single radical group ( Gnome ).

To come back to this, those unilateral decisions made by Red Hat and derivatives (Gnome being one of them) is slowly driving a lot of companies, developers and distributions away. Finally, and hopefully more and more get away from the locked self-feeding fake community around Red Hat.

We can think of Unity back then (even though it circled back), and other obvious ones such as System76 or Budgie. And now I just read an article about Wind River eLxr Pro, what their CEO says is another example of Linux actors being fed up with the Red Hat control attempt over the Linux world and their unilateral decisions:

“We took a hard look at the market and the open source community and we decided to move StarlingX to a Debian-based operating system, and we did that to really align to a more pure open source methodology, so that frankly, our business couldn’t be controlled by another enterprise’s desires.” (the enterprise being Red Hat here)

“We generally feel, after spending a lot of time studying that part of the industry and the open source community, that continuing down any type of RHEL path inevitably ties you to the whims of Red Hat”

You can read the whole article here:

https://fossforce.com/2024/09/how-red-hats-bad-actions-led-to-wind-rivers-elxr-pro-linux-distro/

[MrCooper]

Gnome devs forced the issue on NO SSD in the main Wayland protocol with a NAK.

That makes no sense. The core Wayland protocol was created without SSD long before GNOME was involved in any way. And if NAK was used against the decoration protocol extension, it couldn't exist in the XDG namespace.

Meanwhile on every compositor meant to be daily driven SSD is present.

Except one of the most popular ones.

Anyway, this is irrelevant. The fact is that Wayland doesn't support SSD without the decoration protocol, which is optional. Therefore a general-purpose Wayland client can't rely on SSD.

You absolutely nailed what is wrong with people like Mr. Cooper, their closed-mindedness and their will to force everything onto users that are not in demand of those.

I'm just describing reality, not forcing anything on anybody — I wasn't involved in any of the decisions resulting in this reality. Everybody is free to ignore reality, it tends not to care though.

[spicfoo]

That's a bad example. Weston is a reference compositor meant to be used by Wayland developers. It's not meant to be used as a daily driver

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ0ItmvGOQ0

Weston is used in WSL and millions of production devices. It isn't just for Wayland developers although that is a common myth.

[oiaohm]

That's a bad example. Weston is a reference compositor meant to be used by Wayland developers. It's not meant to be used as a daily driver.

Except Weston is a daily driver for anyone using WSL for graphical Linux applications.

https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

x.org X11 server is also a reference implementation so is libreoffice.... There are long list of reference implementations used as daily drivers and weston is no different..

[Mez']

This attitude really bugs me. You're literally saying every developer who currently or wishes to write applications for Linux now needs to accommodate a decision by a single radical group ( Gnome ).

I do not think anyone would have an issue if Gnome forced all of their own apps to use CSD, and built it into their guidelines for third party apps they promote, while still supporting what EVERYONE else wanted to do. I don't hate CSD. I think it makes total sense in some cases. I also think providing a SSD (even as a backup) also makes very sane sense. I just think it's very hostile to the Linux environment that one group is forcing their wants over everyone else and making claims like it was a universal decision that's widely supported.

You absolutely nailed what is wrong with people like Mr. Cooper, their closed-mindedness and their will to force everything onto users that are not in demand of those.
Everyone has a different workflow, Gnome needs to acknowledge that, and adapt. Then and only then will it be a respected DE. For now, everyone except a few kool aid drinkers just laugh about how mediocre it is.

[Mez']

“Increasingly”? GNOME UI design and workflow hasn’t really changed much over the last few years. BTW Unity was still mostly using GNOME apps and itself was built largely around GNOME-y technologies like Clutter.

The whole UI might have been implemented with the same paradigm in mind than Gnome, and was indeed more of a shell on top, yet the paradigm was implemented in all the right ways compared to Gnome intolerant self-absorbed developer pushed vision. Unity was 10 years ahead of Gnome.

[Mez']

It looks like a pet project. Canonical doesn't make money on the Linux desktop and they figured out as many other vendors before them that desktop users are very demanding while offering very little in actual business value and laid off most off their desktop/mobile team and abandoned Unity at the same time. Since then, they have steadily increased back their participation in GNOME.

And they have declined on desktop ever since. That's the Gnome repellent effect right there.

[robojerk]

There's no need for that. If they don't use a toolkit which supports drawing decorations, they can use libdecor.

This attitude really bugs me. You're literally saying every developer who currently or wishes to write applications for Linux now needs to accommodate a decision by a single radical group ( Gnome ).

I do not think anyone would have an issue if Gnome forced all of their own apps to use CSD, and built it into their guidelines for third party apps they promote, while still supporting what EVERYONE else wanted to do. I don't hate CSD. I think it makes total sense in some cases. I also think providing a SSD (even as a backup) also makes very sane sense. I just think it's very hostile to the Linux environment that one group is forcing their wants over everyone else and making claims like it was a universal decision that's widely supported.

[robojerk]

That's incorrect, e.g. Weston doesn't support the decorations protocol either. I suspect there are others.

That's a bad example. Weston is a reference compositor meant to be used by Wayland developers. It's not meant to be used as a daily driver. It lacks SSD because it's supposed to comply with the spec that the wayland devs voted on. Gnome devs forced the issue on NO SSD in the main Wayland protocol with a NAK.

BTW, adding support for this in mutter wouldn't be as simple as you and others seem to think. It would require a major rework.

I never said that.

That's simply not a valid assumption for a Wayland client which is intended to work with all compositors.

That's because of the Gnome devs zealot beliefs that SSD is bad. Every other person not a Gnome dev with voting power on creating the Wayland spec wanted SSD. Meanwhile on every compositor meant to be daily driven SSD is present.

There's no need for that. If they don't use a toolkit which supports drawing decorations, they can use libdecor.

You're making an argument for developers who are looking into bringing their application to Linux to just have one more hurdle to jump through. Windows and MacOS do not FORCE developers to use CSD. I fail to understand why the gnome devs are so zealot about this.

[MrCooper]

Mutter, as far as I know is the only compositor that doesn't have any sort of Server Side Decorations (SSD), not even as a fallback.

That's incorrect, e.g. Weston doesn't support the decorations protocol either. I suspect there are others.

BTW, adding support for this in mutter wouldn't be as simple as you and others seem to think. It would require a major rework.

There have been some issues with some apps that assume the system will provide decorations.

That's simply not a valid assumption for a Wayland client which is intended to work with all compositors.

Why should game devs who want to bring a port to linux now be burdoned to add to their code base by also writing window decorations?

There's no need for that. If they don't use a toolkit which supports drawing decorations, they can use libdecor.