GNOME's Mutter Makes Another Step Towards X11-Less, Starting XWayland On-Demand

[polarathene]

polarathene latest kwin commits seem dangerous to me.

https://phabricator.kde.org/D17097

it’s like “ship it, the mod emeritus is asleep”.

You're referring to Martin not responding after Nov 2018 to the valid response/questions he was given 3 months later in Feb 2019? It's been another 3 months since then.

Martin has stepped down afaik and is more of an advisory than lead now for kwin isn't he?

The feature doesn't break anything, and based on the discussion it seems fine to merge it, the other devs participating are pretty knowledgeable with what they are doing too.

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Not DE or Linux related, but I came across this PR recently: https://github.com/sequelize/sequelize/pull/10899

That got reviewed/merged somehow while dropping useful/important docs, not as bad as if it were code but still. I've seen other projects do similar things like merging code because they were a core maintainer and could approve it themselves and not wait for the CI tests to all pass, which ended up catching problems/bugs.

[oiaohm]

polarathene I think this leaves a very bad impression. Each wayland compositor needs to implement a lot of features previously handled by x11. Mutter is blessed with a lot of former x11 developers who work on this full time. Basically that’s professionals at work. Other wayland compositors seem to struggle with this. Then complacency kicks in.

144Hz the horrible reality here is a Wayland compositor has to do less than an X11 compositor has todo so it functions correctly. X11 broken API makes creating a X11 compositor a very complex job.

Compositors were a hard problem before Wayland. The difference is really you cannot go the WM route and avoid having to make a compositor that much with wayland. Its simple to forgot the first X11 compositors took 8 to 10 years to reach some what stability and that was without protocol changes or major hardware requirement changes.

There was a nice 2013 presentation on this topic that covered how much crap had been shoved though to the X11 compositor. Reality is x11 if you mean the x.org server in fact when you look at what it was doing once you had a wm and compositor loaded was fairly much being a very bad IPC with stack of broken API to cause more migraines.

libwayland-server fairly much implements everything that x11 server provide to a X11 compositor. The idea that wayland compositor is harder than doing a full X11 desktop with compositor is not true. Wayland compositor is a level harder than doing a X11 Windows manager and a little lighter than doing a fully functional X11 compositor. Of course being X11 compositor level of work does not make it an easy thing.