On 2022-03-11 at 06:47, Nate Bargmann wrote: > * On 2022 10 Mar 17:04 -0600, Emanuel Berg wrote: > >> didier gaumet wrote: >> >>>> OK, thanks, I won't switch then I think ... I like feh and use >>>> it a lot. >>> >>> Just to be clear in case there would be a misunderstanding >>> because my sentence was not accurate enough: what I meant is feh >>> (for example) is not directly compatible with Wayland, but can be >>> run in the X11 compatibility layer of Wayland (Xwayland, the >>> nested X server that can be run inside Wayland) >> >> No, I understood, but that sounds like too much emulator ... > > My understanding is that xwayland is an X server that runs under > Wayland and the idea is that it handles X protocols but Wayland > handles the video drivers and screen drawing.
That's a rough match for my own understanding, with the added qualification that apparently there are some features of the X protocol which Wayland doesn't support, and which XWayland therefore may well also not (be able to) support. (Although, while writing this mail, I've seen assertions that the XWayland codebase *is* the X.org codebase, just with the hardware-related parts stripped out and replaced with calls to Wayland - in which case maybe those features would be working after all.) The most important one for my purposes, and therefore the one that I remember, is the ability to have multiple desktop-like things which are actually all just viewports on one much-larger single area. The big advantage of this is that it lets you have a window that's larger than any one single desktop, and switch around between desktops to look at different parts of that window. One of my brothers and I have both made productive use of this feature (for values of "productive" that relate to games and entertainment, anyway), and would not be happy to lose access to it. (Possible FUD alert; I don't have any citations for the next paragraph, although I trust the person from whom I learned of it.) I remember having been informed that people had brought this up with the Wayland developers, and that the upshot of the ensuing conversation was that those developers considered this feature to be an odd historical wart on the X specification, clearly of no value, and not worth supporting or implementing - and because they considered it so, Wayland had been designed in a way that made it difficult or impossible to implement that feature, even with people now requesting it. Another limitation of XWayland as I've heard it described (by the same person on whose statements the previous paragraph is based, as well as in online discussions related to XWeston, below), as compared to a full X server: where you can (and, in fact, usually need to) run a window manager on top of an X server, I'm given to understand that you cannot run a window manager on top of XWayland. Instead, the window manager needs to be implemented as a Wayland compositor, and you then run XWayland inside of that. (I have not actually tried to do this myself, for reasons which I'm about to get into, so I may have some of the details wrong.) That's a showstopper from my perspective, since the window manager I use A: is in long-tail maintenance mode, with very little work done over the past decade (relatively speaking), and will certainly not be rewritten as a Wayland compositor, and B: includes features which are built on top of that multiple-desktops windows-larger-than-the-desktop X feature, and which therefore probably cannot be implemented on top of Wayland. For reference in case anyone is interested, that window manager is Enlightenment DR16, also known as e16. It hasn't been in Debian for quite several releases now, I compile it from the upstream source tree. The solution to this is apparently XWeston[1], but I remember that being reported as having performance problems (though I'm not finding those reports again now) and I don't know how well supported it is even by its developer; it doesn't seem to have been touched since its initial development work in 2015. I keep meaning to try out running e16 inside of XWeston, but to date have not acquired a sufficiently circular tuit. [1] https://github.com/ackalker/Xweston https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=185297 https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2dna8v/xweston_xwayland_with_weston_the_other_way_round/ https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/how-can-i-install-wayland-on-slackware-4175694086/page2.html -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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