[HN Gopher] Xorg-Server 21.1.0 ___________________________________________________________________ Xorg-Server 21.1.0 Author : Liskni_si Score : 132 points Date : 2021-10-27 17:29 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (lists.x.org) (TXT) w3m dump (lists.x.org) | jancsika wrote: | I found a neat tool recently called x2x. It lets me forward | keyboard/mouse movement from my laptop to my rpi-connected tv | over ssh. So my laptop ends up doubling as a very fancy remote | control. :) | | E.g., I just mouse over to the right on my screen so I can move | the mouse on my tv and then type in a search string to bring up a | video to watch in the browser on the tv. | | 1. Can this be done with Wayland currently? (Currently = works in | some lts version of a popular distro like Debian or Ubuntu). | | 2. Glad to see people still working on fixing bugs and making | improvements in Xorg-Server! | Liskni_si wrote: | Coincidentally, xmonad 0.17.0 was released today as well: | https://xmonad.org/news/2021/10/27/xmonad-0-17-0.html :-) | nextos wrote: | Yes, I've been using XMonad (and StumpWM) for many years and | they are tightly coupled to Xorg. | | Moving to Wayland implies a complete rewrite of both is | necessary. | dyingkneepad wrote: | It's so nice to see this! | | As someone who is still not using Wayland by default (I tried, | but it regresses my setup), I am thankful there are still people | involved on this. Good job, guys, you are appreciated. It's not | just because Wayland looks sexier [0] that your work on the thing | most people actually use is appreciated. | | [0]: considering Wayland is more than a decade old by now and is | still a huge mess, I guess I'll keep trusting old lady Xorg's | experience to handle my workflow. | woodruffw wrote: | > The meson support is now fully mature. While autotools support | will still be kept for this release series, it will be dropped | afterwards. | | autotools delenda est. | sprash wrote: | Rather bad news. Meson introduces a rat-tail of build | dependencies. | doppioandante wrote: | You may be interested in muon: | https://git.sr.ht/~lattis/muon/ | cozzyd wrote: | Terrible name. A muon is a lepton, not a meson. | | If it were a lighter replacement of electron, muon would be | an appropriate (if counterintuitive) name. | | There are so many mesons (pion, kaon, \eta, \rho, J/\psi, | D, B, \omega,\upsilon), why not pick one of those? | woodruffw wrote: | > Meson introduces a rat-tail of build dependencies. | | From the Ubuntu repos, it looks like the top-level | dependencies are Ninja and Python 3[1]. That doesn't seem | particularly bad to me? | | [1]: https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/meson | eddieh wrote: | Had to deal with this recently, Homebrew on macOS though. | Meson build failed. Had to manually install Mako with pip, | which also installed MarkupSafe. Then bitched that Homebrew | (or Linuxbrew) will break in the future for some reason. So | next time I build X, I can look forward to that. :/ | wott wrote: | Each time something requires Meson, you can also bet it | requires a different version than the one you have | installed... :-/ | woodruffw wrote: | My understanding (which could be very wrong) is that | Meson on its own has no external dependencies like Mako, | but that (by virtue of being Python) anybody can write a | terrible build that introduces additional dependencies. | Is that correct? | | If so, that's unfortunate, but it isn't _that_ different | from what happens in autotools land -- I 've had plenty | of builds fail because the configure step fails to check | for `$tool` and then expects it to be present at build- | time. | eddieh wrote: | I believe that's correct. | bonzini wrote: | Two: Python and ninja/samurai (samurai doesn't have any | dependency other than a C compiler). Almost any program the | size of Xorg will likely already depend on Python anyway. | wott wrote: | > Almost any program the size of Xorg will likely already | depend on Python anyway. | | Last time I built X by hand, there was one... one single X | element the building of which depended on Python amongst | the many, many components of X: XCB. So I had to install | Python just for that one module; let me tell you I wasn't | happy at all with such choice. Icing on the cake, the | Python scripts were not compatible with Python 3, and also | mixed spaces and tabs for indentation, so I had to write | patches to get the stuff to compile. | pantalaimon wrote: | Won't that annoy most distributions as they now have to update | their package build script for X.org? | woodruffw wrote: | The life of a package distributor is one of constant build | changes. Among them, the switch from autotools to meson is | probably not an especially disruptive one. For the ecosystems | I've helped maintain, it certainly wouldn't be. | wahern wrote: | Packaging frameworks like Debian and RPM coevolved with | autotools, especially when it comes to things like cross- | compilation, standard build flags, etc. Anything that moves | _away_ from autotools is, AFAIU, generally considered a | PITA for maintainers of the big distributions. Modern build | tools optimize for the problems of massive corporate | centralized repositories and build pipelines, which often | bundle dependencies and otherwise approach most problems | from an entirely different angle. Nuances related to | portability, cross-compilation, filesystem hierarchies, | dynamic library versioning, etc, are typically | afterthoughts if they 're considered at all. | | OTOH, while it's a PITA it's certainly one to which package | maintainers are accustomed. autotools began to lose | mindshare among younger programmers and with younger | projects many years ago. | sjcoles wrote: | Modern rpm spec has built in macros for meson making it | less of an issue. | wahern wrote: | IME as someone who has done _alot_ of portability work, | both for my own projects and others, and including | writing more than my fair share of Debian and RPM builds | (but not as an official package maintainer for a distro), | boilerplate stuff is rarely the issue. It 's all the | random, niche problems that invariably crop up at least | once or twice with every project, even smaller ones. | Every build is broken somehow. Given that basic reality, | what matters is how often you can route around brokenness | without patching the upstream build, and when you must | patch how easy it will be to implement and maintain those | patches. | eddieh wrote: | Building X was already complex and annoying. While I hate | autotools, I didn't find Meson to be particularly better. If | anything this is a lateral change. Instead of m4, shell, and | makefiles, Meson has python, some python packages (managed | with pip), and ninja. I guess Meson is faster, but I'm not | convinced that justifies changing the build system especially | since the speed up isn't too significant. | p12tic wrote: | My own experience working on X server, clean ccache-based | rebuild is a couple minutes faster on meson compared to | autotools. These minutes add up quickly, switching my | workflow to meson paid for itself the same day. | bonzini wrote: | Meson doesn't depend on anything other than the Python | standard library. | eddieh wrote: | Okay, but builds can require additional python modules. | Mesa requires Mako and won't build without it. | chousuke wrote: | If you're packaging RPMs, what you need is approximately to | change a few %configure macros to the corresponding %meson | macros. Though X.org is large enough that there will probably | be some weirdness. | | If your software is distributed as a source tarball, the | build system follows established conventions like honouring | $DESTDIR and doesn't do anything weird like download extra | stuff from the internet, creating packages is super easy, at | least with RPM. | | Most of the time you just write out a bit of metadata, list | your dependencies, use standard macros for your build system | to do the actual building and then list the files that you | want to use from the build (potentially putting them in | subpackages), and that's it. RPM even supports specifying | dependencies like pkgconfig(library) or perl(Thing) so that | the actual package name that provides it does not matter. | | I haven't done Debian packaging in ages so I don't know how | it compares. | p12tic wrote: | On Debian it's the same. I use Debian packages as the means | to ship code to test devices and the most time consuming | thing when converting X server from autotools to meson was | the default configure flags (meson and autotools use | different formats). | bradfitz wrote: | While researching what Meson was after reading this, I was | amused at this FAQ entry on their site: | | https://mesonbuild.com/howtox.html --- "How do I do X in | Meson?" | | :) | p12tic wrote: | Hi, I'm the release manager responsible for this X release seeing | the light. | | This release would not have happened if an effort to improve | touchpad support in Linux was not funded for the past year and | half. X server 21.1 makes touchpad gesture functionality support | universal so it's much easier to offer consistent user experience | for everyone and downstream developers are less reluctant to | accept contributions. | | Thanks a lot to all the sponsors: | https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear | | By the way, I wonder if there is demand for long-term maintenance | of X server specifically. If you think you could contribute, | maybe write here and if there's enough interest maybe it's | possible to crowd fund something. | eddieh wrote: | Hi, I was recently trying to make some improvements to the | build for XQuartz, which in turn was so I could make some | changes to XQuartz and fix some issues with recent macOS | changes too. | | While I made some progress, it took much longer than I | anticipated. I wonder if there's demand enough for X server on | macOS to justify this work? Additionally, I'd have to find some | funds to support my work as well, if I were to continue. | ace2358 wrote: | Yes there is! XQuartz is so important to keep going as there | are a few beautiful tools that run on it that would be sad to | see go. | znpy wrote: | > By the way, I wonder if there is demand for long-term | maintenance of X server specifically. | | Hello and thank you for your work! | | I'd love to see Xorg maintained at least. | | It seems to me there still is dust to settle around wayland and | xorg os getting little to no development. | | Honestly, I'd just like xorg to keep working until the rest of | the ecosystem has native wayland support. | | Taking myself as an example: i just like xfce. Xfce is not on | wayland yet. I don't care how buggy xorg is or how better | wayland is, I won't switch if I can't run xfce. | GekkePrutser wrote: | Thanks for your efforts! | | In my view there's absolutely space for Xorg in the future. Not | every OS can run Wayland well and Wayland lacks some X features | like network transparency. | | I kinda hope it'll be backed by an organisation that's really | keen on taking it forward. Augmenting the security model for | example. And going back to some client rendering enabling | features like anti-aliasing. I really think there's a lack of a | viable remote display tool in Linux, where Windows has RDP. | Block pushers are just too slow. VDI usecases are picking up | again heavily, as do other security based techniques which | could benefit, like remote browser isolation. Filling up my | desktop with Windows running on a bunch of other computers is | just so powerful. | | So in other words I'd love to see an X12 that really moves | towards the future. As I understand it, it's currently with | RedHat which only sees future in Wayland and X is just on life | support. I regret that because I see a lot of concepts in it | that are still very valid and that have been lost in current | alternatives. | Klasiaster wrote: | For Wayland there is waypipe for single-window forwarding | over SSH, and there is wayvnc for wlroots-based compositors | (Phosh, sway) which can run in headless mode with llvmpipe | rendering, and weston has an RDP backend (but I recommend | wlroots with wayvnc over weston). | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | > I really think there's a lack of a viable remote display | tool in Linux, where Windows has RDP. Block pushers are just | too slow. VDI usecases are picking up again heavily, as do | other security based techniques which could benefit, like | remote browser isolation. Filling up my desktop with Windows | running on a bunch of other computers is just so powerful. | | I think it's just a tooling problem; Apache Guacamole or Xpra | can trivially stick windows in a browser window, VNC is... | okay, not amazing, but passable, and even RDP can be made to | work well on Linux, it's just that setting up any of those is | a horrible pain on Linux (in my experience at least). | diegocg wrote: | X is a dead end. If you want an evolution of X with network | transparency, Arcan seem to be the most likely alternative | https://arcan-fe.com/2020/10/28/a12-advancing-network- | transp... | emidln wrote: | I successfully use X11 and its network and OS transparency | daily. Macbooks don't have 2TB of RAM or schedule 256 | threads at the same time. | markstos wrote: | Which OSes can't run Wayland well? | ch_123 wrote: | The last I checked, the BSDs and most other Unix-likes (and | genuine Unix(tm) variants) don't support Wayland. In fact, | Wayland is pretty much Linux-only in practice. | amarshall wrote: | Wayland is viable on FreeBSD, at least. It is very much | not "Linux-only". | ch_123 wrote: | From the FreeBSD wiki: | | https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland | | > While Wayland isn't ready for general use. | | I can't readily find anything to indicate that this claim | is out of date. I am aware that Wayland has been ported, | but I have not heard of it being widely used, or being | "production ready" as per se. | amarshall wrote: | FreeBSD wiki is a bit notorious for being out-of-date, | and that particular page is marked "CategoryStale". | Anyway, first result on DuckDuckGo is someone using | Wayland on FreeBSD successfully [1]. | | [1]: https://euroquis.nl/freebsd/2021/03/16/wayland.html | rbanffy wrote: | > Wayland lacks some X features like network transparency. | | This, IMHO, is the most tragic loss in functionality desktop | systems suffered. | | It's hard to justify being unable to do something we've done | since the mid 90's. The fact I could sit in front of a | computer while running GUI software from different machines | with different OSs as if they were local and that, now, the | best I can hope for is what VNC gave me in the early 2000's | is nothing short of depressing. | guenthert wrote: | I can relate as I'm one of the few people I personally know | who has used that feature in the last twenty years. In the | last ten years or so however, I used some variation of NX | in any case, whenever I needed a remote X application, as | then I typically need to preserve the session as well. I | think the last time I used plain X11 protocol across the | network was when I still had Sun Rays (between the Sun Ray | server and the application's host). | mrweasel wrote: | So if the touchpad funding had failed there would have been no | more Xorg release? | p12tic wrote: | At least I would not have been driving this release. | | Maybe someone else would have stepped up, it's hard to say. | However there was no release manager for the last several | years, so the likelihood of this outcome would have been | small. | mrweasel wrote: | That seems to be very much in line with previous statements | from Redhat and others that X is almost abandoned. | wott wrote: | The statements that _they_ took the keys and then | abandoned it. | dralley wrote: | You would be hard pressed to find _any_ current-or-former | Xorg developer who actually _wants_ to work on Xorg | anymore, regardless of their employer. The intersection | between long-time core Xorg maintainers and people-who- | started-the-Wayland project is nearly 100%. | | The fact that Red Hat doesn't see much future in Xorg | reflects this, rather than the other way around. | | The other historically important corporate sponsor of | Xorg development is Intel, and they seem to have reached | the same conclusion. | | (I work for Red Hat, but not on anything graphics | related) | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | > By the way, I wonder if there is demand for long-term | maintenance of X server specifically. If you think you could | contribute, maybe write here and if there's enough interest | maybe it's possible to crowd fund something. | | Are we talking money, time, tooling, etc.? I'm rather attached | to Xorg and would like it to keep going; what would be the most | helpful? | zbuf wrote: | > By the way, I wonder if there is demand for long-term | maintenance of X server specifically. | | Certainly interested in that, though you're not clear whether | it's time, money or community you're asking for. | | Whatever happens, at some point momentum would have to gather | outside of RedHat. | | Still very happy with X here, and mainly running X applications | across network rather than Qt/GTK toolkits and desktop | environments. | p12tic wrote: | > though you're not clear whether it's time, money or | community you're asking for | | All of these, but perhaps the most important would be money | as it's the only thing that clearly indicates the level of | community support. Once there's funding it's much easier to | prioritize the work. | jmclnx wrote: | As a BSD user, glad to see the release, but I am concerned about | the future of X since Wayland has plenty of Linuxisms in it, | making it very hard to port. | | https://www.sizeofvoid.org/posts/2021-09-26-openbsd-wayland-... | | https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20210124113220 | jbverschoor wrote: | Can we get an html implementation of X, in such a way that it | doesn't require framebuffers, but just uses the the windowing and | text primitives? | cpach wrote: | Not sure but maybe this is similar to what you're | describing...? https://guacamole.apache.org/ | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | You'd have to pair with xvnc or | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xvfb + x11vnc or so, but yeah | pantalaimon wrote: | After a quick search I found | | https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra-html5 | | and | | https://github.com/GothAck/javascript-x-server | marcodiego wrote: | Xorg/Xfree86 served us very well for decades. Will still continue | to do so as XWayland. It feels like saying goodbye to a good | employer that is retiring but will be replaced by someone more | adequate for the job. | | Thank you all, devs! | sprash wrote: | So far there is no viable replacement around that is "more | adequate for the job" (Wayland is fundamentally flawed at the | concept level). So Xorg will stick around much longer probably | decades. | pengaru wrote: | > (Wayland is fundamentally flawed at the concept level) | | That's a mighty big hand you're waving. | hsbauauvhabzb wrote: | As a consumer/power user with a fairly bespoke window manager | I'm worried that the minimalist approach to wayland will | fragment functionality depending on compostor / DE. | | Wanna use Firefox? gotta use gnome compostor for that! | Chromium only works on KDE compostor, etc. | | Is this a misguided fear, or do you anticipate it moving that | way? | wing-_-nuts wrote: | >Wayland is fundamentally flawed at the concept level | | Expand? | sprash wrote: | The biggest problem of Wayland is that it has the wrong | philosophy ("Every frame is perfect") and the wrong | abstractions ("Everything in the universe is an array with | RGBA values"). If your foundations are flawed like that you | are doomed from the start. What remains is a very expensive | and cumbersome way of blitting bitmaps. | bitwize wrote: | People with decades of experience, each, in the Linux and | Unix graphics stack, have determined that the most | efficient thing to provide, from a display server | perspective, is a way of blitting bitmaps (specifically, | of compositing bitmaps representing viewports into a | final screen image) and that, if there is rendering to be | done, it should be done client side. This is the | consensus of those with domain knowledge, and it is what | is supported by the broader community (toolkits, DEs, | etc.). It's also how the major toolkits have been doing | things anyway, irrespective of how X11 actually works: | draw everything client side and send it to the X server | for display. So, your X server is really effectively | nothing more than a shitty Wayland compositor. | | And people wonder why Linux lags behind Windows and macOS | in terms of desktop smoothness and quality. | | When all is said and done, you may as well remove the | legacy cruft (drawing and filling primitives, the fucking | X font architecture, etc.), delegate remote display to a | protocol that is better designed to support it such as | RDP or PipeWire that only gets loaded when necessary | (which it's not for 90% of users in 90% of use cases), | and streamline the display server itself to just that | which modern clients actually need, and that's Wayland. | Wayland just brings Linux, barely, up to the state of the | art set by Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android -- which have | prioritized perfect frames and smooth compositing and | presentation since forever ago. | alerighi wrote: | Sure, it has better performance if there is not a | networking protocol in the middle. | | What I like about X, that is missing in Wayland, is that | you no longer can run the X server on a machine and | connect to clients (application) on another. | | And if you think about it... this day with the cloud it | could have been the killer feature! Nowadays is normal to | have programs that run in VM in the cloud with a sort of | remote desktop client. X11 would have been more | performant even with not so fast network connection, | because you have the rendering done in your local PC and | only commands that pass on the network. | | And if you think about it for a moment, isn't how web | browsers work? Where you have the server that sends some | HTML to the browser (nowadays JS and other stuff) and the | browser doing the job of rendering? If you compare the X | server to a web browser and the X client to a web site, | isn't very similar? And this is the model that is winning | nowadays. | | Meanwhile we think about a new graphical server that | cannot be used on a network, in a period where we are | returning in the era of mainframes, when X was created | (granted, nowadays is not a big PC in a room but a | multitude of VM in the cloud). | | The problem is not X, the problem is that X was never | used at is full potential because we are so used to the | (to me not optimal) model that Microsoft/Apple proposed | to us. | | You could have had monitors with an integrated X server, | like in the past you had serial terminals, without fans, | cables, and stuff on your desk, just a small ARM | processor with a GPU to render things on screen. And a | single network cable going to a computer that you had | anywhere else in the house/company, or in the cloud. | | No need for HDMI or other display interfaces, just run a | network cable to each monitor, plug keyboard and mouse on | the monitor, you are done. The GPU is in the monitor, | doesn't it make more sense? How much money that could | have saved to a company? It would have been more | efficient than thin clients that connect to an RDP | Windows machine that has to have a GPU just to render the | remote session? Large installations like displays used | for public information? Why use a full screen web | browser, it's overkill, when you could have simply | launched a X server on the particular display, then | launched an application on a server and connected to the | IP of that particular monitor to display everything you | wanted? | | The architecture of X was modern 40 years ago when it was | invented. It in some ways predicted the future, and now | that we are discarding it for something that tries to | imitate Windows/macOS (badly, because these operating | systems just works well, Wayland doesn't). Is it worthed? | bitwize wrote: | The people who write and maintain X decided that life is | too short to write or maintain X. Wayland is their way | forward. | | Web browsers (and Electron) are replacements for NeWS, | not X really. That's part of the reason why Electron | won't go away, the architecture advantages are too great: | have the server push running code to the local display to | take advantage of local acceleration. NeWS was awesome in | its day, and it kind of lives on in the form of browsers | and Electron. | rbanffy wrote: | And none of the original NeWS developers miss writing | apps in PostScript. | rbanffy wrote: | > this day with the cloud it could have been the killer | feature! | | My impression is that latencies kill X performance. | Having a server under my desk is one thing, but running | even something like xedit halfway across a world is | painful. It may be possible to update these tools to be | less synchronous, but I'm not sure this is a great use | case, certainly not for new applications. | | > No need for HDMI or other display interfaces, just run | a network cable to each monitor, plug keyboard and mouse | on the monitor, you are done. | | This would be great. Every monitor has at least a frame | buffer and there is no need to push every pixel to the | monitor 60 times a second. Worst case scenario is you | have a sporting event where you need to push every pixel | to the screen 60 or more times per second, but, most of | the time, there's no such need. | margalabargala wrote: | Presumably the designers of Wayland do not think that | this philosophy and those abstractions are so | fundamentally flawed. | | Could you explain why these concepts are so flawed, for | those of us to whom it is not immediately obvious? | sprash wrote: | For some applications you want "every frame is recent" | and can tolerate some glitches as trade off for not | having perfect frames. Also displays have different pitch | values, subpixel arrangements, color spaces, etc. A line | from A to B might look completely different on different | monitors. By offering only RGB arrays as abstraction | Wayland pushes the the need for care of those differences | down to clients which is a mistake. | | Additionally a Desktop system in general is much more | than a bunch of bitmaps blittet together. Applications | need to interact and such functionality has to be tightly | integrated into the compositor with standardized | protocols otherwise it will be impossible to have such | functionality. Taking screenshots, drawing to the root | window or knowing about coordinates of windows from other | programs are some examples. | kaba0 wrote: | > For some applications you want "every frame is recent" | and can tolerate some glitches as trade off for not | having perfect frames | | Oh and what gives, wayland just has an extension for this | use case! | | HDR is work in progress, there is nothing unchangeable in | Wayland that would disallow different buffer types. | im3w1l wrote: | It tried to come up with issues (out of gamut colors? | other optical properties than opacity - turn a portion of | the screen into a mirror? not correctly modelling color | filter arrays?). Best I could come up with was that it's | not VR-ready. Which might be an issue in 15+ years. | kaba0 wrote: | How would Wayland be fundamentally flawed? | sprash wrote: | Wayland makes the wrong abstractions and does not offer | vital functionality usually needed on a Desktop system. As | a result every Toolkit/Compositor has to implement that | additional functionality itself and most of the time it is | incompatible to the competitor for no apparent reason. | | As an exercise I recommend to write a native universal | applicable Wayland application that takes screenshots. | xxpor wrote: | Why are objections like this not solved with things like | wlroots? | folmar wrote: | wlroots are not used by the two main desktops, so to get | basic features like screenshots you need to support 3 | different ways already. | boudin wrote: | You're mistaken, that's not the role of wayland. If | you're looking into an universal way to takr screenshots, | screesncast, etc..., you're looking for xdg-desktop- | portal. There'is implementations for wlroots, gnome, qt, | and others. | wing-_-nuts wrote: | >You're mistaken, that's not the role of wayland. | | A side note, but I _really_ hate this ideology of 'x | does one thing' outside of command line tools. This is a | display server we're talking about. It should be able to | enable normal desktop usage. Maybe not everything but | core features like brightness control, screen sharing, | screenshots, etc. Otherwise every wm that comes along is | going to have to reinvent the wheel. There are tons of | really great window managers out there, where the authors | have looked at all the work it will take to get running | on wayland, and have simply thrown their hands up in | frustration. | | It seems to me the only people that really benefit from | the switch to wayland are the wayland devs themselves. | kaba0 wrote: | Wlroots is an implementation of wayland protocols -- if | gnome and plasma implement the same protocol according to | specification, you only have to write code to that | protocol, once. | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | Right, but that protocol isn't in wayland proper and | isn't standardized, so GNOME and KDE and wlroots all have | different takes. | dralley wrote: | Right, but the point is that the protocol doesn't _need_ | to be in Wayland proper, so long as it 's standardized | _somewhere_. And it is. | | https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/portal- | docs.htm... | craftinator wrote: | > As an exercise I recommend to write a native universal | applicable Wayland application that takes screenshots. | | As someone who tried to do this... Ouch. Things like this | are why X will still be around in 15 years. | markstos wrote: | Wayland as a `screencopy` protocol and the `wlroots` | library packages it for other compositors to use. | | Is the issue that compositors don't implement the | `screencopy` protocol themselves or use the | implementation provided by wlroots? | | Ref: https://wayland.app/protocols/wlr-screencopy- | unstable-v1 | folmar wrote: | Not really - to quote the page you reference: | | > "Warning! The protocol described in this file is | experimental and backward incompatible changes may be | made. | | and the compositors were there way before 2018, so it's a | bit too much to expect them to jump on the protocol. | tosihakkeri wrote: | Based on what you just wrote, it sounds to me that you | might be assuming the wrong abstraction yourself. | kaba0 wrote: | Wayland as a display protocol (correctly) started out | with a tiny core, which can display the content of a | window, and manage available extensions by version. | | This has grown out to be a really great abstraction, | where later multiple implementations can decide on new | protocols/extensions to support. And they have already | done plenty of such extensions, and they are compatible | with each other. Remember, these are protocols. There is | no need to implement them yourself, they can be made into | a library, like wlroots, and you can build your | compositor on that base, without any repetition. Also, | multiple implementations only mean that there won't be | implementation-specific quirks. | | As for screenshots specifically, while the base use case | is trivial enough, recording screens are most definitely | not (it needs proper synchronization). Pipewire is the | project that can solve the issue perfectly, and it is | indeed working correctly for like a year already, with | screen share even in proprietary apps like teams. | enriquto wrote: | > As for screenshots specifically, while the base use | case is trivial enough, recording screens are most | definitely not (it needs proper synchronization). | Pipewire is the project that can solve the issue | | If I understand the OP correctly, this sort of philosophy | is deeply troubling to some people. For simplicity- | oriented folks, trivial things should be trivial, as a | matter of principle. If some trivial thing becomes | slightly less convenient so that complex stuff may be | possible, this is an unacceptable compromise; or at least | a very worrying one. When taking static screenshots | requires an entire "project" that is "just ready this | year" , the threshold of unacceptability is long | surpassed. | | I get that wayland folks do not share this worldview and | they want to do the right thing, even at the expense of | sacrifying things that were previously easy. But, to | other people, this rubs them in a _very_ wrong way. | kaba0 wrote: | wlroots does implement a very simple screenshot protocol, | the reason I didn't mention it was that it is not cross- | wayland-implementation. But there is nothing inherent in | wayland that would prevent this functionality -- they | just try to find a good abstraction they all can stick to | (as these APIs will likely be used for a long time), and | gnome and plasma people have a different view on that. | | (Also, if we have a complex program that does all the | things we need and a simple program+the complex one, we | will have more complexity in the latter case so the | previous one may be preferred) | bitwize wrote: | I'm sure the architects of Xorg have a much better idea | of which abstraction to use and why it's superior to | Wayland. | | Oh wait, the architects of Xorg _designed_ Wayland! | | X11 is a dead end. Its authors have deprecated it and | offered an upgrade path: Wayland. Time to make like Elsa | and let it go. | bitwize wrote: | > As a result every Toolkit/Compositor has to implement | that additional functionality itself and most of the time | it is incompatible to the competitor for no apparent | reason. | | Or, compositors can use these wonderful things we have | called dynamic libraries, and simply link against | implementations of that desktop functionality, such as | wlroots -- which implementations, by the way, will be far | less crufty and ad hoc than the equivalent X11 solution! | | Much of the reason why X is the way it is is because back | in the day, Unix lacked dynamic libraries in general, so | in order to share an implementation of, say, graphics | primitives, the best way was to write a server that | implemented them and have clients communicate with that | server. Now that we have dynamic libraries, we can share | a single implementation of graphics rendering across | multiple programs, _and_ still have all the speed | advantages of doing all the rendering client side! | pantalaimon wrote: | I think it will take several years before smaller desktop | projects like Mate will move to Wayland, until then I'm happy | to use X.org | | There is nothing Wayland puts on the table that makes me | compelled to go out of my way to use it. | jgb1984 wrote: | Wayland solves problems that I don't have, while introducing | new ones (my Nvidia GPU isn't well supported, remote X doesn't | exist and none of the wm's I love support it, like openbox). So | I'll stay on Xorg for as long as I can. | hsbauauvhabzb wrote: | Are you able to elaborate on the GPU issues you've had? Im in | the same position w/ an nvidia flu but I've never tried | wayland | jatone wrote: | lack of support for nvidia is entire nvidia's own fault. | basically they decided to go there own way on buffer | management for userspace and the development community | rejected them at large. | | it'll be fixed in about 1 year, nvidia finally got on board | and built the APIs they needed to build. iirc KDE forced | one of the nvidia devs to implement and then fix all the | problems with nvidia on KDE wayland. basically the dev went | back to nvidia and was like 'just implement the GDM apis' ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-27 23:01 UTC)