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>Like, there is no "system". I had read that "it's a protocol" but I hadn't fully internalized it. I'm honestly a bit surprised anyone has adopted it. It almost
by teleforce 1y ago
>Like, there is no "system". I had read that "it's a protocol" but I hadn't fully internalized it. I'm honestly a bit surprised anyone has adopted it. It almost feels like a scam.
I feel you. I was there before and after Wayland. I was there when they promised you toward the promise land of the year of Linux Desktop and allegedly X11 is the main hurdle.
X11 is a proper system and protocol, and it seems the Wayland folks just ignore this. The two main reasons were given by them at the time were X11 has archaic architecture (reverse client and server concept) and, the X11 code is ancient and a mess. I'm kind of sold on their first idea of Linux need a clean windowing system so we can have something nice like RDP in Windows. But their second points on the codes debt is rather off. It did occur to me at the time it will be much easier to come up with a clean room implementation of X11 system and protocol rather than come up with entire new windowing system, than hope entire people and industries will use them. After all Linux basically is a clean room implementation of Unix.
I think the main problem is that at the time there's no authoritative figure like Linus on the non-kernel Linux part or what I called Linux user environment. At the time there was Miguel de Icaza of Gnome fame but at the time he seems too much involved with another promise land of Windows .Net and Linux people cannot come to term with the idea of we should just use Win32 as other comments have suggested here. It's proven later that .Net is an eventual failure as expected and Miguel reputation suffered because of that. Strangely to be honest I have never read Linus comment on Wayland but why would he? He's laser focus on the kernel and he's happy to admit using Fedora in the middle of the Red Hat Fedora bruhaha.
- ChocolateGod 1y ago> X11 is a proper system and protocol It's really not, it's designed for drawing on remote terminals over a network (it even has a print server), not hardware accelerated devices. Things like HDR, multiple refresh rates, mixed DPI, passive compositing, hardware planes are just harder to do. There was a reason Android didn't use Xorg and instead used SurfaceFlinger (which shares more design with Wayland than Xorg).
- gf000 1y agoWhat I don't understand is why do "GNU Linux" have such an adverse reaction to anything Android? Like why wasn't SurfaceFlinger got adapted for both?
- ChocolateGod 1y ago> Like why wasn't SurfaceFlinger got adapted for both IIRC SurfaceFlinger is tightly tied to Binder which is an Android only kernel IPC, didn't work with the standard Mesa stack and wasn't designed for multiple windows with multiple displays. Wouldn't be surprised though if eventually Android swaps to Wayland as Google wants to merge it with ChromeOS. Since talking to the compositor is abstracted away to the platform APIs, I don't see it as big of a hurdle as X11 to Wayland was.
- gf000 1y agoFair enough. Though I would be happy if merging of work would happen in either direction.
- ahartmetz 1y agoIt doesn't seem like Android devices have much to offer to fill desktop computing functionality gaps in Wayland.
- ChocolateGod 1y agoAdopting SurfaceFlinger on the desktop would certainly be a step backwards, OEMs effectively fork it each time and change it for functionality on their devices. Google sometimes tries to add these features (e.g. split screen, multiple windows etc) into the base code but can take time for OEMs to adopt them on their skins.
- m-p-3 1y agoI'm curious to see what Google did for their Desktop Mode / DeX-like implementation in Android 16.