KDE KWin Introducing Item-Based Scenes For Improved Wayland Support

[ssokolow]

We were at this type of architecture many years ago, where distinct GUI objects, in your favorite toolkit, had a native associated windows underneath. It has been abandoned and instead the GUI library uses only one native window and GUI objects are decoupled.

And, from what I remember, the change happened because they couldn't figure out how to ensure that X11's immediate-mode APIs would get all the updates synchronized before the next frame present when you're dragging to resize a window. I imagine Wayland probably fixes that at the API design level, making it viable as a solution for other problems.

[Charlie68]

That presumes for the past 10 years there has been no work that is not case. Also that overlooks that now that X.org X11 on bare metal is basically dead resources can taken away from the development in that area and focused into Wayland.

Development on KDE will start moving faster now in the direction of Wayland support how much faster that a open question. Yes Nvidia finally getting around to do somethings required for proper Wayland support starts this process off as well.

You miss a small detail, Wayland is just a protocol and it took 10 years to reach a stable release, the great work must be done on the composers, they could only start working on it after the release of Wayland stable and only after moving on Qt 5, as qt4 has no Wayland support. The transition from Qt4 to Q45 was very complicated, so it is normal that initially the goal was to have a stable X session and only then start work on the wayland support. The KDE developers are happy if you or anyone else helps speed things up. You can contribute the code or a generous offer, which they are eagerly awaiting. Remember that it's not all due.

[verude]

I finally worked around all the DPI issues I had when using KDE/Wayland just to notice that GTK applications like Firefox don't export global appmenus when launched under a Wayland session. Is there anything that can be done about that?

Firefox doesn't export a menu over dbus, suse has a patchset to accomplish this, unless you have it or something similar then you won't have appmenu on xorg either.

[oiaohm]

[QUOTE=Charlie68;n1250576]You miss a small detail, Wayland is just a protocol and it took 10 years to reach a stable release, the great work must be done on the composers, they could only start working on it after the release of Wayland stable and only after moving on Qt 5, as qt4 has no Wayland support. [QUOTE]

There are nice errors.

QT5.0 with wayland support was released 2012-12-19 and Wayland 2010. If you look at the extensions in Wayland stable a lot of them have come from KDE developers 2013 and Wayland protocol stable now.

So yes you have to move to Qt5.0 if you are wayland targeting but we are talking something that was released at least 7 years ago.

To add a Wayland extension you could not just write a document and submit it you had to have a functional implementation of that extension. Basically if developer were working in the direction of Wayland before Wayland got to stable the stable was never going happen.

The largest problem here has been Nvidia. If Nvidia was only going to work right X11 this has mandated gnome and KDE split their focus between Wayland and X11. Nvidia problem hopefully should get out way this year.

Yes the fact QT4 applications will not have direct wayland support and lots of them need opengl acceleration on rendering to work right(software rendered opengl does not cut it but you are not need a ultra big gpu) the lack of Xwayland support from Nvidia has been a big road block.

Charlie68 like it or not the start of work in kwin and plasma for Wayland support Jan 2013 less than 3 years after the first release of Wayland.

The stall has not been Wayland stable release bit. Its been Nvidia. eglstreams has not been as functional as the gbm/dmabuf combination. The lack of Nvidia closed source features made it very hard to strip out the old X11 rendering method because that old method may be required to make eglstreams backend work and the kwin/plasma maintainers were not wanting to maintain two backends.

[Charlie68]

[QUOTE=oiaohm;n1250655][QUOTE=Charlie68;n1250576]You miss a small detail, Wayland is just a protocol and it took 10 years to reach a stable release, the great work must be done on the composers, they could only start working on it after the release of Wayland stable and only after moving on Qt 5, as qt4 has no Wayland support.

There are nice errors.

QT5.0 with wayland support was released 2012-12-19 and Wayland 2010. If you look at the extensions in Wayland stable a lot of them have come from KDE developers 2013 and Wayland protocol stable now.

So yes you have to move to Qt5.0 if you are wayland targeting but we are talking something that was released at least 7 years ago.

To add a Wayland extension you could not just write a document and submit it you had to have a functional implementation of that extension. Basically if developer were working in the direction of Wayland before Wayland got to stable the stable was never going happen.

The largest problem here has been Nvidia. If Nvidia was only going to work right X11 this has mandated gnome and KDE split their focus between Wayland and X11. Nvidia problem hopefully should get out way this year.

Yes the fact QT4 applications will not have direct wayland support and lots of them need opengl acceleration on rendering to work right(software rendered opengl does not cut it but you are not need a ultra big gpu) the lack of Xwayland support from Nvidia has been a big road block.

Charlie68 like it or not the start of work in kwin and plasma for Wayland support Jan 2013 less than 3 years after the first release of Wayland.

The stall has not been Wayland stable release bit. Its been Nvidia. eglstreams has not been as functional as the gbm/dmabuf combination. The lack of Nvidia closed source features made it very hard to strip out the old X11 rendering method because that old method may be required to make eglstreams backend work and the kwin/plasma maintainers were not wanting to maintain two backends.

Dates are numbers and you need to know how to read them objectively. Qt6 is released but KDE will take at least a year to bring everything to Qt6, also because the first versions of Qt are never complete and important things are missing. This happened for all versions, the transition from Qt4 to Qt5 was problematic and remember the first versions of Plasma 5 were at the limit of usable.
This led to having to make a choice, which was the priority at that moment. Wayland still has nothing that can screen record, apart from the stupid semi-invisible application of Gnome. There are still missing APIs for a full DE to work. This is why while you continue to criticize KDE for making the effort, other major DEs are nowhere near ready, such as XFCE, waiting for the bulk of the missing work to be done by KDE.
If only Gnome has managed to switch to Wayland, if the major distribution (Ubuntu), it has not yet released its release with Wayland default. Ask yourself a question and give yourself an answer. Maybe something went wrong ...
This is not a criticism, I am not criticizing Wayland, but you need to give the various DE time to do the work, the alternative is to help, with money so you can pay people to work on the integration in Wayland or with the code .
Complaining to every article, does not benefit anyone unless it is the usual pretext of the childish DE war!

[JackLilhammers]

Clearly Wayland is not ready yet.
I'm not disputing that's better than X11, but until it reaches feature parity it's a no go.
It's almost there, but not yet.

eg: my company is using AnyDesk and they are still not supporting Wayland. I'm sure they will, but it's going to take time.
I think it's a lot like Apple arm cpus. Many things work, but still not enough to deem it ready.
Wayland will be ready when users won't need to know about it.

Ask yourself a question and give yourself an answer.

I'm afraid I'm the only one appreciating the quotation

[oiaohm]

Wayland still has nothing that can screen record, apart from the stupid semi-invisible application of Gnome.

OBS just released with Wayland support for screen record. This is not the only one moving now.

https://feaneron.com/2021/03/30/obs-studio-on-wayland/

xdg desktop portal screen capture path is the agreed solution for screen record. Part of the reason why this has taken so long is Nvidia. Now that Nvidia is agreeing to use DMABUF like everyone else implementing screen capture has come a lot more simple.

Still this will not be screen capture implemented inside Wayland protocol.

10 years in disputes with Nvidia vs everyone else this kind of stalled progress in quite a few areas.

eg: my company is using AnyDesk and they are still not supporting Wayland. I'm sure they will, but it's going to take time

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1131921/anydesk-remote-server-display-not-supported-e-g-wayland

To be correct AnyDesk has been breaking since 2018 on different default installs.

[JackLilhammers]

oiaohm
On Wayland it'll break all default installs until they support it.
I've no doubt that in due time they will support it, but it's an example of missing piece and, as most users, I don't care about Wayland or X11, I care about having the tools I'm used to.
As already said, I look forward to the day when these discussions will be over because the display server will be transparent to the user

[oiaohm]

oiaohm
On Wayland it'll break all default installs until they support it.
I've no doubt that in due time they will support it, but it's an example of missing piece and, as most users, I don't care about Wayland or X11, I care about having the tools I'm used to.
As already said, I look forward to the day when these discussions will be over because the display server will be transparent to the user

There is another reality here. As we doing more remote desktop sharing the ability to control what can be shared remotely will come important to system security.

There have been quite a few goof up this year with people having popups for personal emails that have end up shared with their coworkers on zoom calls and the like.

The security problems that wayland is attempting to address over X11 have come lot more important to address.

[JackLilhammers]

oiaohm
No doubt about that, but until everything works flawlessly features are more important than security.
And if security is paramount, probably you shouldn't be sharing your desktop anyway