Enlightenment 22 Alpha Strikes With Better Wayland Support, Meson Build System

[raster]

I might try building a desktop around E at some point, since it's the only Wayland compositor I'm aware of which announced crash recovery in one of its updates. I leave my login sessions open for weeks at a time, so being able to keep going after my X11 WM dies or starts to bug out is essential for me.

However, hopefully, KWin will eventually get some kind of support for resetting/recovering everything except the core which keeps the session alive. I really prefer their DWD concept.

FYI it's still iffy. It was working OK at some point but now is mostly broken. Also it only works with EFL apps as it requires the clients to actively reconnect and use the recovery protocol to share their initial compositor-provided UUID per window so the compositor can match things back up to the state it should have stored. But it is of extremely high importance to us to have this work just for sanity of our own usage and development.

[raster]

Yep, e... but more in a manner of total users..

How do you measure users? Number of people who have actively downloaded and installed it manually? Those that just got it as a bi-product of another choice (like being the default DE for a distribution or product)? If you measure total number of running installs of E then it's well over 100 million. If it's users actively choosing to install and run it - our best guess is in the 10's of thousands.

[memeka]

My problem with E is the mix of themes

You've got the E theme, GTK2 theme, GTK3 theme, and if you happen to run some KDE app, the KDE theme as well.... so you end up with 4 different titlebars on your desktop.
This is why I end up with Gnome Wayland and restrict myself to GTK3 apps....

[ssokolow]

FYI it's still iffy. It was working OK at some point but now is mostly broken. Also it only works with EFL apps as it requires the clients to actively reconnect and use the recovery protocol to share their initial compositor-provided UUID per window so the compositor can match things back up to the state it should have stored. But it is of extremely high importance to us to have this work just for sanity of our own usage and development.

Ahh, not as interesting for me then. I rely on a very heterogeneous mix of applications from various desktops, so I suppose I'll just stay on X11 longer while I work to develop my own solutions for session robustness. (I'm already planning to replace most of the stuff that really needs to persist, simply as a side-effect of wanting a data model or interaction model too different to be acceptable as a patch for the upstream project.)

It's not as if I'll be using Wayland soon anyway. Aside from using nVidia binary drivers and being a KDE kind of guy, the upcoming Firefox 57 WebExtensions switch is going to require some keylogger-like input manipulation to trick Firefox into certain types of input rebinding I currently rely on legacy extensions for.

[dkasak]

Best WM I'm running it on my Cubox i4x4 ( tiny arm SOC ). Even with software rendering/compositing, it's impressively fluid. Infinitely configurable. Wayland support coming along nicely. Can't complain ...

[raster]

Best WM I'm running it on my Cubox i4x4 ( tiny arm SOC ). Even with software rendering/compositing, it's impressively fluid. Infinitely configurable. Wayland support coming along nicely. Can't complain ...

Try E in Wayland mode on that... you'll be shocked at how much better it is vs. X11 on ARM. It's even significantly better than Weston (at least an a raspberry pi 3):

Enlightenment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNzp5kBLpaI

vs.

Weston: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6GlpL9t-hk

In X11 GL works but it's also "chuggy" much like Weston is.

[ThiagoCMC]

I can't wait to see the latest Enlightenment on Debian, with VLC, Xine, Wayland and everything else! :-P

[bkor]

FYI it's still iffy. It was working OK at some point but now is mostly broken. Also it only works with EFL apps as it requires the clients to actively reconnect and use the recovery protocol to share their initial compositor-provided UUID per window so the compositor can match things back up to the state it should have stored. But it is of extremely high importance to us to have this work just for sanity of our own usage and development.

Would this be able to become a standard? E.g. could another toolkit implement the same support? If so, this seems highly interesting! It's one of the big drawbacks of Wayland IMO (crash=everything is gone).

[timofonic]

I can't wait to see the latest Enlightenment on Debian, with VLC, Xine, Wayland and everything else! :-P

I would prefer a lot more devs to collaborate on E and adding MPV support (raster and others from E, I'm aware you all are really busy), for example. VLC is overrated from my POV and E not supports Xine.

[raster]

Would this be able to become a standard? E.g. could another toolkit implement the same support? If so, this seems highly interesting! It's one of the big drawbacks of Wayland IMO (crash=everything is gone).

Ultimately this is exactly what we want. We would like all toolkits and compositors to adopt such a standard. What we're doing is prototyping/proving it first and making it work. Since we can control both ends easily (toolkit and compositor) and they are part of the same project and team, it makes sense. Once we have it solid then proposing it to become a core standard would be the next step. Unfortunately at this moment there are some issues like EGL having wayland connection state internally. Also the new XDG foreign protocol is going to make this a bit nasty.

This isn't just for crash recovery. For us it's 99% about on-the-fly upgrades. When we develop AND eat our own dogfood, you need to try out your new code/feature... in the past in X11 we just restarted the WM. Hit ctrl+alt+end and presto... back to where you were with the new compiled binary. Changes to WM or libraries behind it are now in effect. It makes development beautifully easy and efficient. We want just this for a Wayland world too. It ALSO can be used to deal with crash recovery too...