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GTK+ Is Becoming Very Usable With Wayland

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  • #31
    Originally posted by Sonadow View Post
    I have my doubts about that though. Based on what we have seen from the exchanges between Mir and Wayland developers, coupled with Michael's reports, seem to suggest that Mir and Wayland retain significant low-level differences even if they try to accomplish the same thing, and that will most likely translate to potential driver incompatibilities, especially binary driver incompatibilities down the road. Sure AMD and Nvidia will be able to create a standard driver 'base' thanks to both Mir and Wayland using EGL, but I's suspect that there there will be different 'special sauces' needed to actually get it to work on their respective display servers.
    I am concerned as well, but I have high hopes the differences between Wayland & Mir wont be a problem. EGL is basically just a library which gives you commands to: create a GPU buffer & create a OpenGL/ES context (and a few other things). If that's all there is too it, then Wayland and Mir can request buffers and GL contexts all day, and they can do as they please with those things and it shouldn't matter at all to Nvidia or AMD's blobs. It looks like both Wayland & Mir are designed to simplify what the "display server" is responsible for in general, so we may never see a need for proprietary driver vendors to go outside the bounds of EGL as long as Wayland and Mir both strictly adhere to that standard. Even if there was differences, they would most likely be very minor.

    Again though, I'm not sure about any of that. I write OpenGL code, but I don't fully know the capabilities of EGL or what is required by driver vendors to support it.


    Then we will have to see how well Canonical can create mirway/waymir shim since the Wayland devs are surely not going to do that job and they cannot just repurpose code like what they did for Xmir.
    My biggest concern here is Steam Box games and the growing number of Windows developers who are interested in Linux. To and entering developer, having two DS targets seems horribly fragmented, and they may end just choosing to support one (and Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro) as not every Linux app uses GTK or Qt. If Valve eventually choose Mir instead of Wayland for Steam Box since Canonical seems to have their ear, then it looks like the community will need to right a mir-wayland backend, since it would be needed to play Steam games on Wayland systems and I doubt Canonical will have much interest in writing it.

    I hope in a few years Canonical will come to their senses and switch to Wayland, but that's completely unlikely at this point. Here's to hoping Steam Box uses Wayland as well.

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