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The problem is that wlroots is one of several libraries with this goal. Say I wanted to roll up my sleeves and implement NVIDIA's proprietary interface myself.
by csande17 7y ago
The problem is that wlroots is one of several libraries with this goal.
Say I wanted to roll up my sleeves and implement NVIDIA's proprietary interface myself. (Or say in a few years we come up with some new, even better way to allocate buffers or whatever.) On X, I can write a compositor that uses that interface, and it'll work with basically every window manager written since the early 90's.
On Wayland, I could patch wlroots, but then I'll only be able to use window managers based on wlroots. If I want to use a different window manager, I'll need to patch a different library. And depending on how stable wlroots's interface is, I might need to maintain patches for old versions of it depending on how maintained my preferred window managers are.
The Wayland situation is probably fine if you only ever want to use the latest version of the most popular two or three desktop environments. But speaking personally, if I wanted to do that, I'd just run macOS.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago>The problem is that wlroots is one of several libraries with this goal. The only successful one, to be clear. You would be unwise to base your compositor on any of the others (libweston, wlc, swc, etc). wlroots is suitable for basically any use-case.
- calcifer 7y ago> wlroots is suitable for basically any use-case Except the single largest GPU vendor, yes.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y agoA downstream compositor which wishes to implement Nvidia support could do so and integrate it with wlroots. However, there are more reasons than political not to "support" Nvidia. Their alternative has genuine technical problems that would render large parts of wlroots broken.
- calcifer 7y ago> Their alternative has genuine technical problems that would render large parts of wlroots broken. If this is indeed true (and I have no reason to doubt you) then I wish you and the rest of the Sway folks would focus on those issues, instead of the political arguments because from the outside it all looks very petty when you write stuff like "Nvidia doesn't support Sway". Nvidia doesn't even know about you.
- ddevault 7y agoI've personally spoken at length with Nvidia graphics driver developers. They know who we are and they know the technical problems. If you have no reason to doubt me, then perhaps you shouldn't.
- calcifer 7y agoAs I said, I've never doubted your technical arguments. I'm just urging you to keep the petty stuff in check.
- csande17 7y agoAre the technical problems documented anywhere where non-NVIDIA-driver-developers can learn about them? Most of the discussion I've read online argues that to support NVIDIA's solution, everyone would need to add if(nvidia) checks to their code and maintain them forever. But this argument only really holds in Wayland's bizarro-world where all programs that arrange windows must also bake in code that interfaces directly with hardware to draw them on the screen. Absent any other technical problems, it's hard not to conclude that this is just an attempt to use politics to cover up one of Wayland's poor design choices.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y agohttps://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bdip8a/nvidias_patches_merged_into_kwin_does_that/el0yu5n/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bdip8a/nvidias_patch...
- 7y ago
- boudin 7y agoI'm quite sure there's much more Intel igpus in the wild than nvidias gpus