On Tuesday 11 Jul 2017 22:27:03 Mart Raudsepp wrote: > Random information dump on the subject. > > Wayland is no program, it is a protocol, that's it. dev-libs/wayland is > essentially a helper library to speak that IPC protocol. > > The window manager has to be the compositor and other things as well > and do the input handling, window drawing, screenshot support, screen > capture support, etc etc. > Random programs can not take screenshots, listen to keys (think global > keys, e.g outside desktop shortcuts/push2talk voip) without some > protocol between the WM and the program. The Xorg programs for that > essentially make use of Xorg design security issues to do stuff like > take screenshots (random program can see your whole desktop screen with > Xorg), listen to input (keyloggers are trivial with Xorg), etc. > There are some standardization efforts going on between the desktop in > various areas of this, to define wayland protocols to more securely > support these things for applications. In some areas things are still > lacking. > > To detect native wayland vs Xwayland or Xorg I like to use xprop. > Running that command and clicking it on a window will give information > about that window IFF it's using Xwayland or your whole session is in > Xorg. > But if you are still using Xorg, then you'll have a /usr/bin/X running. > There is no X running with a wayland WM, just Xwayland at most for > programs that don't support wayland natively. > Xwayland is a rootless X server to run on top of a wayland supporting > compositor. It's conceptually the same like Xquartz or Xming to run X11 > clients in some other environment. > > Wayland strives towards the "every frame is perfect" mantra. It is very > hard for toolkits and other things to draw things halfway on monitor > scan-out, so things like tearing are rather hard to accomplish, albeit > possible still in certain situations. > > With wayland your programs need to do all the drawing themselves, which > actually means often pure software rendering, but thanks to the > smoothness of "every frame is perfect", it'll feel faster on your > common system. You don't have RENDER extension to do some acceleration > like you do in Xorg with many toolkits knowing about X RENDER (cairo in > the gtk+ world). To get hardware acceleration, the toolkit itself needs > to be able to use OpenGL (full or GLES), Vulkan, or similar. GTK+ 4 > will be able to do both. Games typically already use OpenGL or Vulkan > and if they run natively on Wayland, they are still accelerated, often > with some things out of the way compared to Xorg. Programs that don't > run natively and end up using Xwayland are also accelerated via RENDER, > as Xwayland makes use of GLAMOR, which implements RENDER in the > (Xwayland rootless) X server on top of OpenGL. But as said, in practice > things are fast and smooth already as-is, even if software rendering. > > One caveat of Wayland is that if the WM/compositor crashes, your whole > graphical session dies, while with Xorg the WM typically just restarts > and for the session to die, Xorg itself would have to die (and that's > been ironed out over the decades to very rarely do). > > GNOME is indeed one of the leaders in adoption and implementing various > extra features on top of it (even middle-click PRIMARY paste, > seriously). EFL is probably another, and I think plasma is getting > there. And then you have the dedicated wayland compositors like Sway (a > i3-compatible approach). I bet there are something similar openbox-like > out there as well, but openbox itself definitely won't work, as it'd > have to be the compositor and not talk libX11.. > > > HTH, > but probably you should have just googled ;) > > > Mart
Thank you very much for a comprehensive information chapter on Wayland! :-) Clearly I run Xorg: 4418 ? SLsl 0:00 /usr/sbin/lightdm 4427 tty7 Ssl+ 1:00 \_ /usr/bin/X :0 -seat seat0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch xprop does not reveal wayland anywhere either. I copied /usr/share/xsessions/enlightenment.desktop to /usr/share/wayland- sessions/ and tried to select it in LightDM. Unfortunately LightDM returns me back to the login page. I don't know if this is a result of LightDM not being compatible with Wayland and friends, or if I need to install some other package in addition to what has been emerged already. -- Regards, Mick
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
