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?
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From: Trevor Cordes sawfish@tecnopolis.ca To: sawfish@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.
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From: Jan Kasprzak kas@fi.muni.cz To: sawfish@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
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From: "Robert 'Bobby' Zenz" Robert.Zenz@bonsaimind.org To: sawfish@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.
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From: Christopher Roy Bratusek nano@jpberlin.de To: sawfish@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.
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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).