Chamferwm: A Vulkan-Powered X11 Window Manager

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Chamferwm: A Vulkan-Powered X11 Window Manager

While we have talked about the possibilities of writing a Vulkan Wayland compositor and there was even a short-lived Vulkan renderer for KDE's KWin, it's also possible to write a X11 window manager around the Vulkan interfaces...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chamferwm-Vulkan-WM

[schmidtbag]

Why not Wayland?
Anyway, I imagine something like this could be pretty good for very high-res displays on very low-end systems. The reduction in CPU overhead and PCIe bandwidth ought to be a big help to such devices.

[Weasel]

Why not Wayland?

Because it's garbage.

Anyway, I imagine something like this could be pretty good for very high-res displays on very low-end systems. The reduction in CPU overhead and PCIe bandwidth ought to be a big help to such devices.

I don't think that's a very significant OpenGL overhead, or at all, honestly.

[Sonadow]

Not in favour of this since I got a bunch of low end Nvidia cards which will never see Vulkan implemented on Nouveau. And also a bunch of pre-GCN cards that won't see Vulkan support either.

On top of that, having Plasma Wayland + Nouveau lock up the whole system mean that I am forced to run Plasma Wayland with QPainter instead of OpenGL, which essentially falls back onto llvmpipe, which is only OpenGL 3.3 compliant. Ditto with Weston and Nouveau, which can only work properly when run with the --with-pixman flag.

All major Wayland DEs and WMs should maintain OpenGL and pixel manipulation-based backends (like QPainter and pixman) for at least another decade.

[aufkrawall]

All major Wayland DEs and WMs should maintain OpenGL and pixel manipulation-based backends (like QPainter and pixman) for at least another decade.

No one stops you from using a lightweight Xorg DE with a OGL compositor of your liking. Other people perhaps want to experience progress.

[kpedersen]

Other people perhaps want to experience progress.

Don't mistake progress with unreasonable dependencies and bloat. Sane people will never drag in the requirement of Vulkan just to move around some 2D windows XD.
Projects requiring such dependencies rarely live longer than their KISS counterparts. Is a project that disappears in a few years really progress? Hell no!

As far as I am concerned, even the requirement of OpenGL is too much of a dependency for a sane window manager.

That said, it does not detract from the developers impressive work. It is quite an undertaking and a cool technical feat. I look forward to reading through their work on GitHub.

[Guest]

As far as I am concerned, the requirement of OpenGL is too much of a dependency for a sane window manager.

It is, because normally compositing is offloaded to a compositor, which isn't necessary to have a useful system, you end up lacking some eye candy and possibly end up with screen tearing (unless you tell your software to behave properly).

The fact that this joke of a window system that will never take off (Wayland) happens to not separate these separate problems into separate solutions so people can pick what they actually want, along with the fact that mirroring basic X11 functionality requires a ton of extensions (enjoy legacy software that doesn't work properly and possibly problems with Wine if you don't use virtual desktops).

[jtoaspern]

Why not Wayland?

While I like Wayland, i am still using X11, because XWayland doesnt play nicely with all games. I'd guess I am part of the target audience for window managers like this one.

[kpedersen]

you end up lacking some eye candy

I am quite happy with that because I am not a 13 year old kid

possibly end up with screen tearing (unless you tell your software to behave properly).

So long as *my* software that I wrote behaves properly, I am quite happy to see poorly written stuff tear. I actually find it quite warming to know that Windows 95 and software from that era did a better job at not being crap. It puts my digital life into perspective knowing that lots of developers and their opinions and work ethics are just... crap. I don't feel I need to hide that XD.

The fact that this joke of a window system that will never take off (Wayland)

Agreed.

In 2023 the Wayland project finishes backporting a few of their "innovations" (such as client side decorations) back into Xorg and calls it a day. Wayland disappears into the history books.

[shmerl]

It's a pity KWin developers abandoned Vulkan renderer. I'd surely contribute to crowdfunding such effort.