On Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 1:08 PM, Silvan Jegen <s.je...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Aug 02, 2016 at 08:41:57PM +0200, FRIGN wrote: > > On Tue, 2 Aug 2016 20:33:39 +0200 > > Silvan Jegen <s.je...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Hey Silvan, > > > > > One can argue that having a simple protocol *is* the suckless part of > > > Wayland (dont forget Xprint[0] :P). The Wayland protocol also does not > > > allow for communication between clients directly[1] but only through > > > the Wayland compositor. > > > > yeah, but omitting the rest is not suckless, it just turns everything > > into a big mess. You might say anything about X.org, but at least you > > can more or less rely on a set of features available to you, even if > > they are "default" XFree86 extensions.
You are comparing a specific implementation of X11 (Xorg) with a protocol (wayland). If you chose to implement your own suckless X11 server, you'd still have all the problems you are describing (rendering, buffer management, input handling, joysticks, etc), and probably a lot more because of legacy X11 baggage. > > > I see two main issues that stem from switching to Wayland. > > > 1. With Wayland there will be no non-compositing desktop. > > > > I don't see this aspect too critically. See how Wayland performs vs. > > X in limited environments[0]. > > I always assumed that having a compositing window manager has negative > performance impact but at least according to > > https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/05/compositing-and-lightweight-desktops/ Xorg is a compositor too... At the end of the day, *something* has to combine all your windows into a single frame to display them on your monitor. I didn't read the article, but presumably the slowness is due to Xcomposite redirecting to some compositing windowing manager. If the display server does the compositing (as in normal Xorg, or a typical wayland server), there is no such problem. > > > 2. Since rendering is done client-side and there is no Xlib, it may be > > > harder to get pixel on your screen if you don't want to use one of > > > the big GUI libraries like Qt or GTK2/3/++/whatev. > > > > Yeah, very good point. Also, clients cannot rely on compositor > > features, because each compositor can do things differently. There > > really is no simple way to write software and making it deliberately > > hard almost makes you believe its a GTK/Qt conspiracy of some sort. > > > > As a non-expert in this space I am not sure the Wayland future is > > > looking that bleak though. > > > Velox[2] does not look bloated to me and wayland-enabled st[3] is only > > > barely larger than the current X11 version's git tip (though the > > > wayland version depends on wld[4]). > > > > How can you compare the two? You need a third-party library (wld) to > > get shit done. Just wait down the line how much of a fucking mess we > > are going to have! With X11 and Xlib, you need an X server that implements every drawing routine you might want to call. But maybe you are arguing for server-side rendering over the display server connection. I think it's simpler to just have the client do the rendering, which it can do however it pleases. -- Michael Forney <mfor...@mforney.org>