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Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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Can anyone explain why Wayland exists or who cares about it? X has been around forever, it sucks but it works and everything supports it. Alternatives like NeWS came around that were radically better, but were too soon or relied too much on corporate support, so they faded. The GNU project originally intended to write its own thing, but settled for using X. Now there's Wayland though, which seems like a slight improvement over X, but mostly kind of a lateral move.
If you're going to replace X, why not do something a lot better? If not actual NeWS, then something that incorporates some of its ideas. I think Squeak was like that but I don't know much about it.
But Wayland is waaay better than X in basically everything? Performance and security are simply in another league entirely. And these 2 are the most important factors.
The rest of the "features" will be eventually there. In fact, mostly are there already. I've been using Wayland 2 years without issues. The important thing is that now the sofware is solid, the code is clean and the performance is amazing. Growing from there will be so much better than from X11.
You cannot even record single windows without having your DE patching that in for you.
The screen capture protocol was merged a month ago. Support will come soon. wayvnc, grim (and by extension grimshot) already have support for it. No compositors have implemented it afaik, but wlroots is very close to it.
That’s part of my issue I have with Wayland protocols. It was added a month ago. After several years! During research I found discussions ~6 years old, this PR was 2 years old, and superseded a 4 years old other request.
In the meantime some environments implemented that on their own without waiting for the protocol. If I understand correctly: Gnome as well as KDE have implemented it outside the protocol. And Hyprland devs forked wlroots to advance development faster and also add that. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
Since labwc uses wlroots (but is a bit slow with adapting to new versions) it will take quite some time before I can put a checkmark after my last usecase. I am optimistic that it will work. But I accepted that it may take several years to add new functionality and a few months before the functionality arrives in wlroots and at some point after that in labwc.
Yes. Wayland protocols take too long to get merged. Actually, a few days ago some people (mostly Valve guys) got tired of it and took action by proposing changes[1, 2, 3, 4]to the way new protocols are handled. Hopefully it gets better. Also, if your compositor is based on wlroots, then you might get support for the new protocol very soon.