Renewed Talk Of User-Space Consoles, Accelerators In The DRM Subsystem

[billyswong]

I don't think that everyone need the full unicode support with font anti aliasing. Mostly want a lightweight terminal that works *in a reliable way* even when the system is in critical condition (eg. low memory and/or after a crash of the kernel to watch the log).

Consoles under X11/Wayland with full unicode support already exists and are good enough for the day by day use.

The true is that the needing of KSMC is more for the kernel developer to get rid of old code, than for the user. For me it was enough the classical linux console, the few times that I need it. However now it is near unusable due to the scroll back removal.
This is one the reason why I looked to KSMC; but it is over-complicated for my needing.


I don't think that the windows console (without graphics) is better than the linux one.... if exists at all

Yeah, I doubt if it is really a good idea to put the fallback terminal which most of us want to *always* work to depends on harfbuzz. If we want the fallback terminal to function in a more standalone way, we have to limit the amount of unicode support. It's just a matter where to draw the line. ASCII? Any glyphs from "simple" scripts that fit in "half-width" character grid? Any scripts that don't need to deploy complex text layout? Any scripts that support monospace font?

For my personal convenience, I would of course like the fallback terminal support East Asian text, which would require support of "full-width". But I also understand East Asian text especially the Kanji / Chinese characters can never be fully supported in a standalone way, because the character input part requires a complete IME ecosystem. One just can't naively assume that an IME framework is supported, installed, *and* properly setup for the user already when one is sitting in front of a broken computer. The "properly setup" may be the hardest part, as there is no one single universal Chinese input method that every Chinese computer user is fluent in. The ecosystem is extremely fragmented. Most modern IME frameworks also don't support overlaying themselves on console framebuffer.

[cj.wijtmans]

Good luck when wayland crashes for possibly numerous reasons. Terrible idea. Migh as well stick to windows. linux should program in a blue screen of death next.

[arQon]

Yeah, there's just too much wrong with this to even try to deal with.

> Once you think through all the paths and things you want supported, you realise the best user console is going to be one that supports emojis and non-Latin scripts.

No it @#$%ing isn't, and saying it is only shows how much this is a goal for personal reasons, not technical ones. Mind you, given the gutting of scrollback it's not like we didn't know the terminal was going to go from "nearly useless" to "just not there at all".

> This probably means you want a lightweight wayland

ROFL. Yes, because what you really want for the one piece of the system that absolutely *must* work reliably is... an artificial dependency on a giant steaming pile that still isn't ready after 15 years, and clearly never will be.

Let's absolutely weld *that* into the kernel too, because we're REALLY pissed that some distros are still managing to avoid our systemd land grab, and we want to make sure no-one but us ever has any say in such things again. In fact, we should probably reconsider not making it part of systemd after all: then we can make it depend on gnome too so that you can't have a bootable system unless you use our DE. I mean, that approach has never ever caused problems in Windows, and we're as bankrupt creatively as we are ethically, so why not just copy the last few pieces we're still missing?