XWayland Sees Updated Protocol Support To Help WLROOTS & KDE

[duby229]

both firefox and chromium are gtk3 and still using xwayland. because compositor is easy, rewriting every app using x11 is hard

Firefox is -not- GTK3, it uses bits of it embedded in a deeper API called XUL and it only recently achieved wayland compatibility

[duby229]

Xwayland is only a tweak to continue to use Xorg since the applications are not wayalnd native. This causes many issues of compatibility making useless Wayland as well. Why to use wayland if applications continue to be based on xorg? That's the problem!

As already mentioned -any- GTK3 or QT4 app will simply work with Wayland. Apps don't need to support Wayland, only the toolkit does. Wayland isn't about apps, it's about the compositor.

[duby229]

Where does this happen? Were are people failing? Yes we do have at least three serious compositor implementations, Mutter, KWin and wlroots. Sounds like a good number to me, for such a critical part of the ecosystem. IMO much better than being stuck with one X11 implementation. But where are they failing (apart from not accepting hacky and fragile solutions in favour of doing it right from the start)?



Sometimes its better to not have a feature than doing it wrong first, then redoing it later again, but having to support the first solution till the end of time because some app depends on it. The Xorg devs learned that the hard way, which is why they don't repeat that. That's btw. also the reason why we need XWayland now :/

In Wayland, once a good solution is found, it usually gets standardized as a protocol extension (but only after it got successfully implemented and tested). With versioning. Then everyone who needs the feature (window minimizing is not something you need on every platform wayland is targeting, therefore its in the xdg extension, not in the core protocol) can implement it.

Except that all wayland compositors so far, including the reference, -are- hacky and fragile and it's because the protocol doesn't incorporate most of the functionality a compositor needs. If compositor devs simply implemented a Wayland client strictly by the protocol and nothing else, it wouldn't be and couldn't be a compositor.

[beniwtv]

Except that all wayland compositors so far, including the reference, -are- hacky and fragile and it's because the protocol doesn't incorporate most of the functionality a compositor needs. If compositor devs simply implemented a Wayland client strictly by the protocol and nothing else, it wouldn't be and couldn't be a compositor.

What makes you think they are hacky and fragile?
And a Wayland client certainly is not a compositor, a Wayland compositor is.

[treba]

Except that all wayland compositors so far, including the reference, -are- hacky and fragile and it's because the protocol doesn't incorporate most of the functionality a compositor needs. If compositor devs simply implemented a Wayland client strictly by the protocol and nothing else, it wouldn't be and couldn't be a compositor.

In my opinion this comment misses a "in my opinion" or "as I understand things". And to me, this doesn't sound very informed. Do you have practical experience in developing such things? If not, maybe you're not yet ready to judge about this things. You wrote several things in the comments above that are misleading to plainly wrong, so please get better informed or rephrase your language to reflect your incomplete knowledge.

[duby229]

What makes you think they are hacky and fragile?
And a Wayland client certainly is not a compositor, a Wayland compositor is.

That's fair enough, but notice how I mentioned "compositor devs". I guess in hindsight not all Wayland clients need to be compositors, certainly xwayland isn't and shouldn't be one.

But, yes I do believe that all current Wayland compositors are hacky and fragile, I mean anyone who's attempted to use any one of them at any time in the past ten years will certainly have noticed the missing features or the missing driver implementations or the buggy behavior and most likely all of the above. Like I said just because Gnome is ahead of the other compositors doesn't mean they didn't already have to go through all of that. It may be convenient to look at the present and assume that the past didn't happen, but it did.

[duby229]

In my opinion this comment misses a "in my opinion" or "as I understand things". And to me, this doesn't sound very informed. Do you have practical experience in developing such things? If not, maybe you're not yet ready to judge about this things. You wrote several things in the comments above that are misleading to plainly wrong, so please get better informed or rephrase your language to reflect your incomplete knowledge.

I may not have experience in developing Wayland compositors, that's true, but I have eyes and I can read. I have a keyboard and mouse and I can install and test others work. I can draw my own conclusions based on what I've experienced and based on what I've read.

There is nothing I've said that's wrong, quote me.

[beniwtv]

But, yes I do believe that all current Wayland compositors are hacky and fragile, I mean anyone who's attempted to use any one of them at any time in the past ten years will certainly have noticed the missing features or the missing driver implementations or the buggy behavior and most likely all of the above.

I don't experience any issues with Wayland and Gnome for my use case. And the only feature I miss is direct rendering for VR, which already is very close to working. And I've been using Wayland for the past two years, on 3 PCs (two AMD GPU ones, one Intel iGPU/AMD dGPU laptop).

In fact, I have *less* issues on Wayland than I have in X. No tearing issues in games, for example. And I have a secure lock screen for my laptop, which X doesn't have to date and can't have. And apps can't just spy on other apps because they feel like it, like it's possible on X. And I have none of the full screen issues that X has, for example, where a game can completely grab all input and no alt+tab or meta key will work if the game ever freezes. Or where where you can alt+tab, select a window but the game will still be in the foreground and refuse to minimize / go to background.

For me that is anything but "hacky" and "fragile".

Like I said just because Gnome is ahead of the other compositors doesn't mean they didn't already have to go through all of that. It may be convenient to look at the present and assume that the past didn't happen, but it did.

No one ever claimed the past didn't happen. No one ever claimed everything was bug-free, sunshine and roses from the beginning. Every software has bugs in the beginning, or corner case issues. Or even stuff it doesn't support right from the start. X was and is no different to that, and in fact, still has lots of bugs and architectural issues that can't be fixed, or legacy apps will stop working. So that last point is rather moot, or I didn't understand what you mean.

---

See - people have different needs, different hardware and software configurations. Not everyone's experience with a software is gonna be the same - just because you had issues with software X or Y doesn't mean another person runs into the same issues. If you had said, "Hey, Wayland for me is still quite buggy and I am missing some features I really need" there would be no issue - in fact, we developers *need* to know about issues, we need to know about missing features users want, we can't know every desire users may have or experience every bug.

Instead, you just say "Wayland is hacky and fragile" - see the difference and how this makes you sound like?

If you really experience issues with Wayland - and I don't doubt that you may be - I encourage you to report these. If you're missing features, I encourage you to open feature requests / proposals. And in the meantime, there's no shame in using X, it won't go away for a while.

This FOSS thing only works if we work together

[Charlie68]

so where kde was all this decade?

Plasma 5 had to wait for the arrival of Qt5 to be able to start working on Wayland, Qt4 did not have the support of Wayland, even Gnome started to work on it with the arrival of the Gtk3, every desktop and tolkin have their times. One cannot expect such a radical change to take place in a few years on a platform like Gnu / Linux! It will take many more years before Xorg will be abandoned by the various distributions and DE.

[treba]

There is nothing I've said that's wrong, quote me.

...-Every- compositor needs to reinvent their own interfaces individually and then -every- driver needs to implement them individually...

...Minimize for example,...

I don't think mesa implemented wayland minimizing for every compositor in different ways. Actually they didn't implement it at all. It's purposely part of a protocol extension which is standardized and implemented by the major compositors . Just how it should be.

So you did write things that are plainly wrong. And you were told multiple times in this thread. And you don't seem to realize.

I'm not saying that there are no things to criticize in the Wayland ecosystem. But if there is something, let's try to be precise so we can come up with better solutions were fit. Until now, I'm not aware of a better protocol proposal than Wayland. And the fact that Gnome, KDE, Mesa and Xorg developers seem to agree on that says something IMHO.