[pas]

So X was horrible, because it is very old and blablabla, and Wayland the protocol got finalized without an actual implementation that people use in good old design by committee fashion (no?), and for some reason now everybody writes compositors instead of writing one for Linux in general... I don't really understand why, can someone explain? (I mean, I know about how Mir seemed to be regular Canonical NIH symptom, but why are they continuing with it?)

[erikpukinskis]

> So X was horrible

Was it?

I feel like someday someone is going to say something like "Man our VR world syncing protocol is really heavy, and we end up needing AGI-level LOD prediction to do it well, but compressing 360 degree light fields is wasteful and leads to latency artifacts... what if there was a protocol that allowed realities to render display-space fields directly to remote devices, but do the final compositing on the client?" and then someone will discover the X protocol, re-implement it with 3D SDFs instead of 2D rectangles, and all of the sudden X will be the new hot thing.

[pas]

Sure, then let's do that.

I mean X as a client server visual/graphical terminal solution is pretty amazing.

But then it took more than a decade to get to the point where it seems that DRI extension is just not going to cut it.

And all the other built-in un-security has to go too.

[simion314]

Canonical will use Mir on other platforms, I am thinking like the screens that show advertising in Malls or touchscreens that display info and you can interact. from what I read Canonical does not intend to change GNOME too much , only fix the major complains, if they wanted a better system from the code molecularity point of view they had the chance 2 times to use KDE as a base.

[pas]

> Malls or touchscreens that display info and you can interact.

Why would that require anything new? I mean, Canonical is in the server OS business mostly, right?

[simion314]

If you have a terminal that needs to run just 1 app then why use Gnome or other DE? you would need to run a minimal display server and start that only application.

[jononor]

Use the Weston full-screen shell. No need to invent a new Wayland compositor for that, and certainly no reason to have multi-display-system abstraction like Mir seems to have.

[simion314]

You would still have to fork it though if you need to add missing things, like how now Gnome and KDE implement in different ways how to grab screenshots. The fact that smaller DEs are creating their own libraries and not use Weston indicate to me that Weston is just a playground for Wayland where they test their ideas and experiment and it is not designed to be used or extended, I may be wrong though, there are some blog posts from the authors of Sway and others that work on adding Wayland support to different DEs. Why do you think Sway, Gnome, KDE and others can implement what they want but Canonical or volunteers can implement wayland on top of Mir but have to use Weston or Mutter ? Do you think everyone should Weston or Mutter?

[pas]

We run a kiosk thing, use i3 without a status bar, directly launch the program from the xinitrc (or whatever script, which launches i3 in the background, sleeps 1 second, then launches the kiosk thing), and all this via startx.

If the script exits, X exits, systemd restarts it. Works pretty well.

[wmf]

No, Weston is pretty much the reference compositor for Wayland.

[pas]

I tried it. It .. does nothing. Maybe there are/were reference implementations for the protocol extensions too?

[floatboth]

What do you mean by "nothing"? Weston includes a usable desktop shell by default. Without virtual desktops, but with a panel.

[pas]

Case in point, there was no exit. I had to switch linux terminals and kill the process, because even though I was able to launch the terminal (let's say xterm), but I had no idea how to stop the weston session.

[floatboth]

Looks like it's Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. I personally never use exit features though, I always switch to the terminal I launched the session from and press Ctrl-C.