Xorg development effort slowing in favour of Wayland
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Wayland is easier to write for than X.ORg, but it does need a lot of documentation effort to make that clear. Also, Wayland is still improving, which means changing. For compositor development that is mostly not an issue, but once in a while....
I was doing some testing and wanted to fire up fluxbox today, and I thoughtlessly did that the same way I would back when I was using XFree86: fire up Xnest and run a new X session within my current one. Only after testing did I realize I had started and ended in WAYLAND! I had run an X session under a Wayland session and it all just worked! I mean HOLY COW!
IF I was worried at all before, I am not now. The desktop guys got this, and are getting it right!
I was doing some testing and wanted to fire up fluxbox today, and I thoughtlessly did that the same way I would back when I was using XFree86: fire up Xnest and run a new X session within my current one. Only after testing did I realize I had started and ended in WAYLAND! I had run an X session under a Wayland session and it all just worked! I mean HOLY COW!
IF I was worried at all before, I am not now. The desktop guys got this, and are getting it right!
I did similar with mate, and it all worked. XFCE is on 4.18 right now. They're going to Wayland on 4.20, but will retain compatibility (after some discussion).
Is changing over as simple as changing the /usr/bin/X symlink to wayland?
I did similar with mate, and it all worked. XFCE is on 4.18 right now. They're going to Wayland on 4.20, but will retain compatibility (after some discussion).
Is changing over as simple as changing the /usr/bin/X symlink to wayland?
I am not using SLACK or anything slackware like for my testing.
Running Manjaro Plasma I use a logon manager that has room for me to enter my name and password, and a radio button that selects the desktop (I started with Plasma and added Fluxbox). When I installed all of the Wayland packages it changed the prompts to PLASMA (X.ORG), FLUXBOX (X.ORG), PLASMA (WAYLAND) allowing me to select the one I want at login.
I specifically wanted something that allowed that choice because I did not TRUST Wayland. I was right, it was several updates later before it got so solid I could use it for my daily work,
What we need is someone running slackware daily who has converted to Wayland or can select Wayland or X.Org at login so they can tell you how to get there.
Note: Manjaro runs, like ARCH, pretty cutting edge versions of things. Slackware is more conservative. Better if we find someone who is running VERY recent versions so their experience is predictive in setting your expectations.
Hmmm. Then do you have an extra platform where you can do an new install for testing and playing?
I have one I could lend you, if we lived close enough together. Alas, we live FAR apart!
I have a laptop which I retired. It's running Slackware-Current from the end of last year. I also have disk slices with Devuan and the Windows I was burdened with in buying this pc. I figured someone might want it someday. I have some techno-phobic friends & acquaintances.
All window managers seem to be readying themselves for wayland. Mate, for instance can handle wayland with everything except Mate-desktop. Slackware has wayland in KDE - everything else uses Xorg. They offer KDE & XFCE. XFCE will be wayland compatible soon, but I'm sure they won't drop Xorg.
I have a laptop which I retired. It's running Slackware-Current from the end of last year. I also have disk slices with Devuan and the Windows I was burdened with in buying this pc. I figured someone might want it someday. I have some techno-phobic friends & acquaintances.
All window managers seem to be readying themselves for wayland. Mate, for instance can handle wayland with everything except Mate-desktop. Slackware has wayland in KDE - everything else uses Xorg. They offer KDE & XFCE. XFCE will be wayland compatible soon, but I'm sure they won't drop Xorg.
Wayland (latest code) deals with NVIDIA better. IT also solves the issue of the compositor corrupting the display, sometimes freezing X.org or making it unusable until a refresh. Coding for Wayland is far easier to do correctly than coding for X.Org. If those things are not important for you then there is no reason to jump on Wayland if your preferred desktop is not ready.
I would expect that it will not take the XFCE very long to do the conversion, those are nice guys and they have good help. It is perfectly reasonable to wait for that.
If you have an extra drive you can swap into that spare laptop and load with Slackware, Wayland (WITH XWayland mind), and Plasma I think you will find it interesting. If not, there is no rush unless you love to experiment (as I do). They will both be around when your favorite desktop is ready.
Thanks. I'll go to Wayland when it's easy. Maybe a year's time? I did have one Nvidia card in a 32bit box, and rebuilding the drivers every time I changed kernel was a real PITA. I didn't like the fact that they had no respect for Open Source at all. It would cost them very little to throw the guys doing nouveau a few commits, or a few headers. Instead, they treated them like enemies or competitors.
For the laptop, I foolishly accepted an Intel HD4000 IGPU, but got a 17.3" screen, which was important at the time. Doing the sums, it was 5W of GPU . AMD was at their nadir(2012), with uncompetitive and overpriced CPUS and still sucky GPUs on massive fabrication - 40nm or something. I was reluctantly driven to Intel. Now I'm on AMD all round again. So Nvidia doesn't worry me.
All window managers seem to be readying themselves for wayland.
You seem to be missing a qualifier before window managers, e.g mainstream or actively maintained. Window managers with no apparent movement towards wayland: stumpwm, twm, fvwm and I suppose a great many others.
Perhaps of help to people porting (rewriting really, right?) their own wm efforts is this online book by Drew DeVault, author of sway: https://wayland-book.com/
I also discovered (maybe others all know this) that libegl can be best thought of as an opengl library that doesn't require Xorg. I don't know why I puzzled so over what this dependency is but it seemed not so mysterious to me reading it put this way here: https://github.com/malcolmstill/cl-egl
So how does it work? The compositor (and clients?) call opengl routines to render raster buffers that it combines and sends down to the DRI kernel drivers?
Once I'm done re-reading Oliver Jones's Introduction to the X Window System and have tweaked my twm fork in more satisfying ways I'll have to start reading Drew's wayland book. Maybe he'll have finished it by then and maybe wayland will be closer to ready.
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