A Call To Move Games Outside Of Linux Desktop Environments, Own Wayland/KMS Setup

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Call To Move Games Outside Of Linux Desktop Environments, Own Wayland/KMS Setup

KDE developer Martin Gräßlin has laid out an idea for shifting games from running within desktop environments to instead their own Wayland server, or taking it even lower to having games interact directly with kernel mode-setting and input received via libinput...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Propose-Games-Outside

[uid313]

What about toggling between windowed mode and fullscreen mode?

Some games can do Ctrl+F or Alt+Enter to toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode.

[Drago]

Basically transforming Linux Desktop to game console. I like! +1

[unixfan2001]

Well. As long as it isn't going to be as messy as Mac OS X' "fullscreen" implementation(s) (where every game just does whatever it damn well pleases. Some of them drawing themselves into seperate spaces), it's probably not too bad of an idea.

Though I'd really love some sort of standards compliance assurance there. A tightly defined protocol that makes sure every fullscreen application/game behaves exactly the same (perhaps a simple check for OpenGL. i. e. "if App X uses OpenGL, move to separate Wayland session).

If one game is running that way, all the others should as well. No weird hacks that lead to a lack of consistency please.

[schmidtbag]

Aside from switching tasks or toggling fullscreen, there's also the problem of custom inputs from programs like qjoypad or antimicro. Maybe these would still work fine; I'm not sure. But these programs are handy when you've got a game with less-than-desirable controls.

Other than those few things, this sounds like a great idea. I definitely think no matter what it should be off by default.

[nctd]

How does this compare to the SteamOS system?

[Djhg2000]

Alt+Tab is already broken in many of the games I've tried with Gnome. Moving them to VTs might be favorable as you rarely have many games running anyway (making multitasking irrelevant), they want the full screen (making window management irrelevant) and want high performance (making fancy desktop features irrelevant).

[giucam]

Alt+Tab is already broken in many of the games I've tried with Gnome. Moving them to VTs might be favorable as you rarely have many games running anyway (making multitasking irrelevant), they want the full screen (making window management irrelevant) and want high performance (making fancy desktop features irrelevant).

Fullscreen doesn't mean that window management is irrelevant, at all. I still want notifications on my fullscreen windows, i want my key bindings for volume and screen brightness to keep working as i defined them in the compositor, i want to be able to minimize the window or to change the virtual desktop, i want to show the game on one screen and, say, my irc client on another one. You could make up many more examples, i think this suggestion would fit only for very restricted use cases.

[unixfan2001]

How does this compare to the SteamOS system?

SteamOS is still X11 based. It doesn't do anything special. AFAIK, its compositor doesn't even unredirect.

[justmy2cents]

How does this compare to the SteamOS system?

probably not much. i doubt getting games to interact with all low layers directly is a good idea at all. you really want something like steam BPM to create and control that game session, not to mention it could allow easy switch between your desktop and games. not only you get handling of volume, multimedia keys and so on, you'd also get game launcher.

but, mainly letting game connect directly to lower layers is bad idea because i can imagine all sorts of nightmare scenarios game developers will use in their lack of knowing how.

otherwise, idea of game session is something i already preached few times, so i don't think it as bad. just this way is a bit too hardcore