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.
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....
You might be right on the first point you made, and you definitely are on the second. Still, by looking at the number of dead projects floating around I seriously doubt that writing a WL compositor is easier than writing a Xorg WM: this about Way Cooler[1]; read what the wlstem developer wrote[2]; wltrunk seems to be dead[3]; waymonad definitely is.
I've spent the last weekend trying to write some code, using the wlhs haskell binding, with absolutely no results.
This is what the main developer writes about the wlhs haskell bindings: "I’m surely tempted to write the relevant C code and include it directly in the low-level bindings, because otherwise it looks like they’re completely unusable."
It doesn't look like, it is. Even though they have been spending more than three months, still the code is unusable, and I doubt it will be in the near future.
Anyway Sunday evening I gave up: I closed all my browsers tabs with all the documentation I could find, closed by emacs buffers and, in despair, I started googling "Why writing a Wayland compositor is so difficult?"
And than an epiphany... I found many references to a project I never heard about before...
Yes, I found Arcan. I immediately installed it (there is even a sbopkg build script) along with durden and... I was blown away...
So Monday I decided to start writing the Haskell bindings to its shared memory interface and in a couple of days I was able to code a client for it. I also started sharing my code...[5]
Arcan comes with a Wayland (and Xwayland) bridge (which is supposed to be crash resilient [6], something really useful judging from my experience of running kwin_wayland in qemu), the API is very well documented and writing code (Lua or C -- and hence Haskell) for it really straightforward.
So, yes, there are alternatives and I do not despair I will be able to code my way into this brave new world. Still I think that decisions on crucial digital infrastructures are political in nature: we are build the space into which we are living an increasing amount of our social experiences. I'm not suggesting that this is done on purpose, but it is a matter of fact that only big organizations will be able to produce usable desktop environments, something we have already seen with web browsers, and this is not going to be without consequences. The whole FOSS stuff was meant as a liberating tool for ordinary people. My impression, instead, is that we are moving towards monopolies of digital assets. Maybe this is inevitable, but the possibility of reading the code you are using -- who reads code apart from some lunatics like me? -- doesn't have anything to do with freedom.
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....
You might be right on the first point you made, and you definitely are on the second. Still, by looking at the number of dead projects floating around I seriously doubt that writing a WL compositor is easier than writing a Xorg WM: this about Way Cooler[1]; read what the wlstem developer wrote[2]; wltrunk seems to be dead[3]; waymonad definitely is.
I've spent the last weekend trying to write some code, using the wlhs haskell binding, with absolutely no results.
This is what the main developer writes about the wlhs haskell bindings: "I’m surely tempted to write the relevant C code and include it directly in the low-level bindings, because otherwise it looks like they’re completely unusable."
It doesn't look like, it is. Even though they have been spending more than three months, still the code is unusable, and I doubt it will be in the near future.
Anyway Sunday evening I gave up: I closed all my browsers tabs with all the documentation I could find, closed by emacs buffers and, in despair, I started googling "Why writing a Wayland compositor is so difficult?"
And than an epiphany... I found many references to a project I never heard about before...
Yes, I found Arcan. I immediately installed it (there is even a sbopkg build script) along with durden and... I was blown away...
So Monday I decided to start writing the Haskell bindings to its shared memory interface and in a couple of days I was able to code a client for it. I also started sharing my code...[5]
Arcan comes with a Wayland (and Xwayland) bridge (which is supposed to be crash resilient [6], something really useful judging from my experience of running kwin_wayland in qemu), the API is very well documented and writing code (Lua or C -- and hence Haskell) for it really straightforward.
So, yes, there are alternatives and I do not despair I will be able to code my way into this brave new world. Still I think that decisions on crucial digital infrastructures are political in nature: we are build the space into which we are living an increasing amount of our social experiences. I'm not suggesting that this is done on purpose, but it is a matter of fact that only big organizations will be able to produce usable desktop environments, something we have already seen with web browsers, and this is not going to be without consequences. The whole FOSS stuff was meant as a liberating tool for ordinary people. My impression, instead, is that we are moving towards monopolies of digital assets. Maybe this is inevitable, but the possibility of reading the code you are using -- who reads code apart from some lunatics like me? -- doesn't have anything to do with freedom.
I heard a lot of similar negative stuff about rust when devs started using that.
But recently enough, google surveys revealed that their rust devs were twice as productive as their C/C++ devs. I'm don't code, but had to do an Assembler program as part of a hardware project. The guys I tried to farm it out to ran away . So I went through the learning curve had a headache for a month, and wrote and tested the thing really in 2 weeks of part-time work. A subsequent test program went together inside an hour. Wayland might be a tough learning curve due to poor docs. Ever read the pppd info page? Or if you really want suffering read the pppd HOWTO.
What I'd also like to know is: what is the relationship (if any) between plasma & wayland?
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. 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.
. So I went through the learning curve had a headache for a month, and wrote and tested the thing really in 2 weeks of part-time work. A subsequent test program went together inside an hour. Wayland might be a tough learning curve due to poor docs. Ever read the pppd info page? 
