Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development

[ezst036]

Maybe just maybe it could occur to some people that there's no pressing need to implement 100+ Wayland extensions over and over and instead have a single implementation that splits the whole shebang into a server that renders everything, manages input, clipboard and shortcuts (and a dozen other core features) and window managers that paint window decorations and manage windows' placement and interaction. You know how it's been tried and tested, and actually worked beautifully sans a few features that were well outside the protocol scope and now cannot be implemented properly because it was envisaged over 40 years ago and people couldn't have forseen where and how display tech would develop.

Or we can have what we have now: over two dozen half-incomplete implementations, all with various bugs and present or missing features, where you never know what you're getting and you just cannot depend on anything and use automation how it was done with Xorg. You wanna turn off the monitor using a bash script in Wayland? Good luck writing a script for that that works across all the implementations. And there are dozens of such scenarios.

Why is it that multibillion corporations can only afford having a single display server but extremely underfunded and understaffed Linux wants to have several dozen? It will never work, period, nor there's any need for that. The display server is not something that needs to be reimplemented over and over again. 99.9999% of people in the world don't even know there's such a thing under the Sun.

And while Linux fans continue to press with "multiple implementations are not a bad thing", how many of them have donated a single cent to their favourite Wayland server? Less than a hundred in the entire world with donations below $1000? Who are you kidding when decent software engineers e.g. in the US earn on average over $150K a year or $12.5 a month? Your donations are worth a few full days of work. Do you really think implementing the Wayland spec is all so simple anyone can do that in spare time? Then why of all the Wayland implementations we have just one that is sort of complete, Kwin, then comes Mutter that's lacking some serious new features, and then all the others are just laughably incomplete? I tried Wayfire that is supposed to be the best next independent thing a month ago and it crashed a few times in a row in just one day. All under God bestowed the amdgpu driver mind you and while running Linux 6.10.10.

16 years in and Linux doesn't even have a crucial most important thing implemented for everyone, not for the selected who chose KDE or Gnome as their precious thing. Many of use don't want to touch either. There's nothing in the Wayland spec that says that you must use KDE or Gnome either.

It's just sad.

How come you still haven't forked the X code and done some coding on it?

[WileEPyote]

I'm getting a weird sense of deja vu.

Again, my message to the ones in charge of Wayland.

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[QwertyChouskie]

What if my experimental protocol is approaching the 3 month removal period but I am missing ACKs due to reviewer inactivity?

Contributors engaging in good faith protocol development should not be penalized due to reviewer inactivity. It is advised that experimental protocol authors post memes to the base MR until reviewers become active.

What if an experimental protocol author posts memes to the MR for many months rather than furthering development?

It is expected that protocol authors are seriously attempting to reach staging/ status. If it is determined by members that this is not the case for a given experimental protocol after a three month period has elapsed, the one week removal notice may be invoked regardless of how good the memes may be.

Yep, that's Mike alright :P

[dlq84]

still, Wayland brang a new wave of interesting projects being developed.

Bring, brang, brung?

[fong38]

The big reason desktop Linux has gotten better is because of Valve. Not IBM, Red Hat, systemd etc.

No, they're also a reason the desktop has gotten better. Let's not downplay anyone's involvement because you have a personal vendetta against them please.

[ahrs]

Let's have everyone have to literally build a display server on their own if they want to make a WM, then we'll gimp the protocols with bs so it's hard to do.

It's not hard if you have proper abstractions like GNOME and KDE and XFCE (they have a windowing abstraction library so to port to Wayland they just have to port that to Wayland and then integrate it with their compositor which is what they're currently doing right now). It's only hard if your code is heavily built around X11 with no easy way to port it to Wayland. When you don't have any abstraction and only have the concept of "X11" then you're better off writing a new compositor at that point anyway (e.g Sway is a Wayland version of i3).

There's no shortage of libraries that take care of the compositor part for you, either, e.g Wlroots and Mir being the big two, so if you don't want to care about compositing and just want to write something bare bones then it's definitely possible. People even ported Dwm to Wayland:

https://codeberg.org/dwl/dwl

[Britoid]

You probably mean SSD (server side decorations?). And yes, SSD should be made mandatory for any compositor and Gnome should shut up and implement it.

If it should be mandatory, why doesn't macOS use it?

[curfew]

Gnome developers need to go to hell!

So you dind't even read the article you're commenting under. Even this proposal for speedier protocol development process mentions that protocols can stil be declined on the basis of "being against the spirit of Wayland", i.e. ideological reasons. At no point has the idea been to allow any stupid idea to become a supported protocol.

[ahrs]

If it should be mandatory, why doesn't macOS use it?

Because it actually works there because Cocoa is a single toolkit capable of providing decorations for applications and there are no alternative desktops. It doesn't work on Linux because every desktop does a different thing so if you want to integrate properly into platforms then suddenly you're committing to exponential amounts of code to have to support them all or you use hacks like libdecor and hope that libdecor has a plugin for the desktops you want to support, or you say "Fuck it" and let server side decorations handle it and they'll look and feel exactly as the platform intends them to look and feel (but they'll be broken on platforms which do not support them).

[cynic]

Bring, brang, brung?

😅

edited!

I'm sorry, I speak 4 languages but I often fail to remember the correct form of irregular English verbs