MATE Developers Are Considering Mir-Over-Wayland

[bregma]

WAT?!
So you say that porting Mir to Wayland is still easier than making a compositor from scratch? That's nice.
Now go in the same cell as UBPorts guys and start hacking, my slave.

The UBPorts devs are trying to make a Mir compositing display manager be a Wayland client, and have it render its output to some other, so far vaguely specc'd compositing display server instead of the hardware.

The MATE devs are talking about adding Wayland protocol support to the Mir compositing display server so that they don't have to write a complete compositing display server from scratch, or use Mutter and give in to the GTK+3 embrace-and-extend that they eschewed as the founding notion of their project, or convert to Qt to use KWin.

Those are exact opposites.

Even if they broke down and used Mutter at the other end of the client-server socket because it already supports Wayland, they would need to do a whackload of customization to Mutter and the client libraries to get the same functionality already supported out of the box by Mir. The entire philosophy of clients doing their own decorations and window management that is at the heart of Gnome3 is functionality the opposite of what Gnome2 did.

Nope, I have to agree with them: bolting on Wayland protocol support to the Mir server would be the smartest thing both the MATE and the UBports devs could do. Dunno if it will fly upstream with the Mir devs though.

[Mystro256]

That actually exists, I think GNOME calls it the classic mode or some such thing, and gnome-shell frippery enabled much of that all the way back in 2011 shortly after GNOME 3.0 was released. I used gnome-shell frippery for years, then switched to Cinnamon because I could get everything into one panel. Only thing is, gnome shell did use and Cinnamon still uses a directory full of js scripts to set up the DE. That is painfully slow, as JS was never meant to run an entire desktop environments.

Thus my switch to MATE. If you want a traditional DE, why not use code meant for that job rather than meant for another, different job with bolt-on changes? MATE is C code which is compiled once, then run without further compilation required. Right there you pick up a lot of speed. The GNOME 2 code never had to support integrating the main menu and an overview into the window manager, so code in GNOME 3 that is redundant for a GNOME 2 mode is avoided altogether.

MATE does the same job as Cinnamon (especially with recent versions) or GNOME with classic mode/frippery but with far lighter code actually designed for the job. No matter how big your system, you are saving CPU cycles and probably electricity as a result. Not much power savings per user, but multiply by millions of computers and it adds up.

Assuming I'm not misinformed in how GJS works, I feel like gnome should have a AOT compilation for JS scripts. I don't exactly imagine the JS scripts changing often enough to justify using JIT every time, at least with the scripts provided by the distro, i.e. in /usr. Plus, the distros can bundle in AOT binaries into the gnome-shell packages. Less CPU use, less power use, likely faster start up: I see no disadvantage to this.

[BaronHK]

Enjoy taking on the task of maintaining it then once Canonical drops the ball (again).

There's only really one wart that keeps MATE from being the best spin of Ubuntu, and that's the lack of proper HiDPI support. HiDPI support is best in Gnome and Cinnamon at the moment and passable in Unity and KDE. Everywhere else, it's a no-go. Believe me, I've tried. The user will care more about proper scaling of the desktop than which display system is running invisibly in the background. In fact, Wayland can go on the back burner for a while anyway. XWayland still has touch and performance problems and the majority of apps will be using X for some time anyway. They have two or three years to get Wayland right, but people who need HiDPI support can't use Ubuntu MATE right now.

Xfce was my preferred desktop for several years after the early Unity and early Gnome 3 fiasco, but now that I have a 3200x1800 display, nothing really works right except Gnome and Cinnamon. KDE has issues. For example, their SDDM login manager doesn't scale properly, and the desktop doesn't automatically scale like Gnome or Cinnamon does, and the inline spell check doesn't work on HiDPI because of font scaling issues.

I'd probably be using MATE right now except that (1) Fedora's MATE spin is not good, (2) MATE doesn't do HiDPI right on any distribution, (3) on Ubuntu MATE still seems to suffer from all of Ubuntu's app indicator crap, but I think those patches will eventually be dropped and MATE won't need to support anything but proper systray functionality. This issue also affects Kubuntu, which had to develop an app indicator plasmoid to deal with these things. Ubuntu was actually going around removing systray support from apps just because they could, even when the app could detect what desktop it was in and use either method.

So, I was poking around with Ubuntu Mate, and it doesn't seem to have the Bluetooth problems that their Gnome and Unity spins do. I think where they broke A2DP is in the desktop Bluetooth app in those spins, because Blueman works fine.

I don't think that Canonical really knows what it is doing. The Bluetooth bug has been in there for like three releases now. I don't trust Canonical to get the core OS right. They're approaching the OS components the same way that Google did Chrome. If you don't like something, just fork it and try to carry your patch forever. Most of the breakage obviously happens in whatever is the default desktop of Ubuntu at the time. Now that they don't care about MATE, maybe users can have a high quality desktop with classic desktop metaphors for the first time in a long time.

[Cerberus]

Xfce was my preferred desktop for several years after the early Unity and early Gnome 3 fiasco, but now that I have a 3200x1800 display, nothing really works right except Gnome and Cinnamon. KDE has issues. For example, their SDDM login manager doesn't scale properly, and the desktop doesn't automatically scale like Gnome or Cinnamon does, and the inline spell check doesn't work on HiDPI because of font scaling issues.

KDE has the most perfect and flexible HiDPI support of all desktops, but you obviously have no idea how to configure it properly, Gnome on the other hand lacks fractional scaling, something which both Unity and KDE have.

[DanL]

Are you somehow implying that the peanut gallery has any decisional power? Let them chirp, lol.

Yeah, and if MATE announced they were making their own compositor from scratch, then we'd have a bunch of, "Oh no! NIH!" comments. Gotta love Phoronix forums...

[BaronHK]

KDE has the most perfect and flexible HiDPI support of all desktops, but you obviously have no idea how to configure it properly, Gnome on the other hand lacks fractional scaling, something which both Unity and KDE have.

Broken by default and no obvious way to fix KDE does not equal "the best".

Also, littering the system with features that don't work (like inline spell check) is not acceptable.

Also, how do you make SDDM scale? There is no setting to make it scale in the KDE control panel.

KDE is rotting from the inside out. Their last truly great release was 3.5.10. They can't really seem to properly maintain what they currently have, much less take on anything new.

[oleid]

Correct me if i am wrong bit doesnt the Weston library still has the problem that theyd still have to make a good bit of it themselves?

Depends on how you define "good bit". This example doesn't look too bad:

https://github.com/gschwind/libweston_tutorial

It's basically like writing a window manager.

https://lwn.net/Articles/710254/

[Pajn]

Depends on how you define "good bit". This example doesn't look too bad:

https://github.com/gschwind/libweston_tutorial

Because that example implements a full compositor with all features a modern desktop like MATE needs?
Oh, and it's fully tested just like Mir right?

It's basically like writing a window manager.
https://lwn.net/Articles/710254/

Because when writing just a window manager you have to deal with copy and paste, drag and drop between apps, screen locking, and similar things...
And b.t.w. Mir provides a window manager too.

Is the MIR hate so strong that people actually prefer MATE to use a bare minimum weston based compositor that lacks features even compared to WIndows 95 and is such a quality work that the author misspelled Wayland two times on the barley existing repository description?

[GreatEmerald]

Hm, looks like the MATE team is made of necromancers. Should have known all along!

[TheOne]

It is funny, because Wayland is supposed to make everything easier and yet Gnome developers took a lot of time to write a proper compositor for wayland, KDE is struggling to finish the wayland implementation, and every other desktop environment is left to eat dust if they aren't capable of writing a freaking wayland compositor. At least Mir didn't required developers to write full compositors since it used the same client/server strategy that X uses. Also, all that wayland currently does for gamers is introduce lag since xwayland been a layer in top of another layer doesn't helps...

I just hope X keeps improving over the years and this overhyped wayland stuff is left behind like Mir was.