[RndTbl] sawfish on wayland

[Trevor Cordes]

I thought this might interest some MUUGers.  This is mostly about
Wayland in general, though my query was regarding "porting" sawfish (my
favorite wm for 10+ years) to wayland (the replacement for X we're all
soon going to have foisted upon us).  The pasted posts below come from
the sawfish mailing list, mostly from actual sawfish devs, and other
interested parties.

I wouldn't mind hearing a MUUG discussion about wayland, if people want
to chime in.  With wayland, it definitely won't be "business as usual".

I have a question: is wayland just a linux thing, and if so, that means
the BSDs will stick with X?  I sure hope so, as that would mean X will
stick around, even on Linux.  Also, I now welcome mir (wayland
competitor from Ubuntu), as keeping things fragmented on the
replacement side will also keep people (who don't want wayland for any
particular reason) in X.

Weird... I can't seem to find any Linus comment on wayland anywhere.
He wasn't silent about systemd, why wayland?


============

From: Trevor Cordes <sawfish at tecnopolis.ca>
To: sawfish at lists.tuxfamily.org
Subject: wayland support?

Maybe this has been asked already, but I can't find it on google
anywhere...

Is work being done on making a "sawfish for wayland"?  Since wayland
doesn't access wm's like X does, it looks like "wm-like" things have to
be rewritten and merged somehow into wayland.

It sounds like enlightenment is already working in wayland, so I
suppose it is possible.

Please tell me we'll have sawfish for wayland?  With the amount of
customization I've done in sawfish during the last decade my
productivity will go into the dumps if I have to throw it all away,
especially if the replacements (enlightenment) can reproduce the same
customizations.

It looks like with Fedora 25 defaulting to wayland that in about 7-8
months when F24 goes EOL I'll be forced into wayland whether I like it
or not.  Even if (?) F25 allows you to switch to X (not X in wayland,
but pure X-only), all the desktop apps will start to be developed and
maintained with wayland in mind.  That means even if I can stick with
X for a couple of Fedora revs, the X versions of things will get
buggier and no one on bz will care.  Kind of like the 32-bit kernel
today.

If anyone has some insights into these things, I'd love to hear them!
Anything to keep my hopes up.  -- Signed: a happy X user that sees
absolutely no value-add for wayland in his happy 2D-only sawfish life.


==================


From: Jan Kasprzak <kas at fi.muni.cz>
To: sawfish at lists.tuxfamily.org
Subject: Re: [Sawfish] wayland support?

	Hello,

Trevor Cordes wrote:
: Is work being done on making a "sawfish for wayland"?  Since wayland
: doesn't access wm's like X does, it looks like "wm-like" things have
to : be rewritten and merged somehow into wayland.
: 
: It sounds like enlightenment is already working in wayland, so I
: suppose it is possible.

	This is a question I wanted to ask for some time as well.
GTK supports Wayland, but I am not sure about how WMs are supposed
to work in Wayland.

: It looks like with Fedora 25 defaulting to wayland that in about 7-8
: months when F24 goes EOL I'll be forced into wayland whether I like it
: or not.

	Speaking as a Fedora 25 user: there is no problem with Sawfish
(+XFCE, in my case) on Fedora 25. It apparently uses Wayland only for
GNOME-only setups. My lightdm starts the X server and XFCE session just
	fine, as it did in previous releases. My F25 systems run Xorg
	just fine (including a dual-seat workstation at home).

:  Even if (?) F25 allows you to switch to X (not X in wayland,
: but pure X-only), all the desktop apps will start to be developed and
: maintained with wayland in mind.  That means even if I can stick with
: X for a couple of Fedora revs, the X versions of things will get
: buggier and no one on bz will care.  Kind of like the 32-bit kernel
: today.

	I guess the biggest push would not be from desktops being
	developed for Wayland, but from drivers for newer hardware
	being developed for Wayland. It is not a problem yet, but I
	think it will be.

: If anyone has some insights into these things, I'd love to hear them!
: Anything to keep my hopes up.  -- Signed: a happy X user that sees
: absolutely no value-add for wayland in his happy 2D-only sawfish life.

	+1.

-Yenya


=============


From: "Robert 'Bobby' Zenz" <Robert.Zenz at bonsaimind.org>
To: sawfish at lists.tuxfamily.org
Subject: Re: [Sawfish] wayland support?

The "problem" with Wayland is that it is just a protocol. So there is
no such thing anymore as a window manager on Wayland, there are just
different compositors which do *everything*, from providing drawing
capabilities to handling input, configuration and windows. There are
efforts to extract most of these into libraries, though, but with other
downsides, for example libinput has a lot of hardcoded assumptions.

I don't know if something like the Wayland-X bridge can be used, getting
Sawfish "natively" on Wayland would require to write a complete
compositor for Wayland, which for sure is neither trivial nor easy.

Also I'd like to take the opportunity to remind everyone that X is
going *nowhere* within the next two to three decades at least. I
mean, it could happen that some people like Gnome drop support for it
within the next years, but I hope that's not going to happen because
that would be pretty fatal to the Linux application ecosystem as a
whole (a friendly reminder that Mir *is* a thing, and currently there
is only a Mir-X bridge). So I hope nobody is that stupid.

My personal opinion on Wayland is quite bleak, actually. It feels like
it is tailored towards a mobile environment in which no application is
trustable, similar to the sandbox and all-in-one package movements
which seem to endorse a "download some completely random application
from the interwebs and don't worry when running it" mentality. Which is
in extreme contrast to what has been pushed in the last decades, "you
can trust any application you run as long as it is coming from the
official repository". That means that a Wayland compositor must bring
all the functionality which are currently provided by different tools,
because nothing is allowed to temper with the compositor or other
windows.

Having a nice compositor would be cool, but Wayland comes, in my
opinion, with a pretty hefty price tag.


===========


From: Christopher Roy Bratusek <nano at jpberlin.de>
To: sawfish at lists.tuxfamily.org
Subject: Re: [Sawfish] wayland support?

Hi folks,

to put it plainly: there are no such plans. As Robby Zenz already said X
isn't going anywhere, soon. Also we do not have enough man power or free
time.


============


Lastly, from "Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2017 edition":

Wayland:

    !! Wayland works through rasterization of pixels which brings about
    two very bad critical problems which will never be solved:

    Firstly, forget about performance/bandwidth efficient RDP protocol
    (it's already implemented but it works by sending the updates of
    large chunks of the screen, i.e. a lot like old highly inefficient
    VNC), forget about OpenGL pass through, forget about raw compressed
    video passthrough. In case you're interested all these features
    work in Microsoft's RDP.

    Secondly, forget about proper output rotation/scaling/ratio change.

    !! Applications (GUI toolkits) must implement their own fonts
    antialiasing - there's no API for setting system wide fonts
    rendering. What??! Most sane and advanced windowing systems work
    exactly this way - Windows, Android, Mac OS X. In Wayland all
    clients (read applications) are totally independent.

    !! Applications (GUI toolkits) must implement their own DPI scaling.
    The above issues are actually the result of not having one unified
    graphical toolkit/API (and Wayland developers will not implement
    it). Alas, no one is currently working towards making existing
    toolkits share one common configuration for setting fonts
    antialiasing, DPI scaling and windows shadowing. At least in theory
    these issues can be easily solved, in practice we already have
    three independent toolkits for Wayland (GTK3/Qt5/Enlightenment).