• General

  • X.org/Wayland - The future?!

Flipping some wayland switches in packages to default-on for NetBSD 9, and Linux now that freeze is over and I'm not traveling without a reliable internet connection.

    a month later

    @nia
    I've decided to take this for a spin and installed velox and qt5-qtwayland, the other needed packages were already installed.
    I created ~/velox.conf and the script bellow to make it easier 🙂

    #!/bin/sh
#
# ~/wayland-velox.sh
export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland-egl
export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct

export GDK_BACKEND=wayland
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme 'Shades-of-gray-Harvest'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme 'Orange-Aurora'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface font-name 'Liberation Sans 10'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface monospace-font-name 'Liberation Mono 11'

export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1

mkdir /tmp/pin-runtime
export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/tmp/pin-runtime && swc-launch velox

    Then, just to be sure, I've changed wscons to us and rebooted.

    $ ./wayland-velox.sh launches the WM just fine and I can switch between workspaces.
    Although, launching firefox68, featherpad or qterminal all produce core-dumps.
    I was able to launch galculator and gnumeric from dmenu-wld but, then the display server crashed and I was back at console with the message BROKEN PIPE.

    Has the wayland-session been stable for you?

    OK, so, I lost my password for this forum 🙂

    Mozilla applications are known to be broken. You'll notice Firefox instantly crashes during my FOSDEM talk. It needs work(tm). I've been using vimb/luakit/midori/netsurf happily, though.

    Qt5 applications being broken is a regression. I've just fixed it in pkgsrc. Also here: https://github.com/michaelforney/swc/pull/57

    After this I can run qterminal but it doesn't like being closed much. I should fix this. I'd like to use it because it still supports bitmap fonts but sakura doesn't any more.

    I consider stability to be an uh, TODO item.

      nia I'll try again soon, thx!

        Another PKGREVISION bump for swc and qterminal is now happy being closed. I did notice that Qt is picky about the permissions of XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, it wants it to be chmod 7700.

        • pin replied to this.
        • Jay likes this.

          nia I had to set it to 0700 under X11 to keep it happy 😉

            Well, people from Enlightenment project think so

            The project is currently transitioning from X11 to Wayland. We are fully committed to moving to Wayland eventually, as its the future of graphical display layers on Linux.

            We still primarily support Linux for Enlightenment, but there is some effort (based on help and support from users and some developers) to support BSD too.
            https://www.enlightenment.org/

            By the way, pin and nia, are you both girls using BSD systems, if yes then i am in love with you

            • pin replied to this.

              Mounsier 🤔 what does gender have to do with it? We are both human!
              But, ...if you need to know, I'm not a girl.

              We still primarily support Linux for Enlightenment, but there is some effort (based on help and support from users and some developers) to support BSD too.

              Right, duh!? Why does it need --disable-systemd config flag? 🤨
              Is providing this option their way of showing love to non-systemd OSs?

              • Jay likes this.

                @nia 🤣

                Ok, I still had to default to us in wscons.conf but, to be honest I didn't look into it.
                grim, the screenshot tool I've packaged in wip, is not working and right clicking qterminal to adjust settings make it crash but, its sooooo cool 🕶️ to be running wayland natively on NetBSD.
                Thx!

                • Jay likes this.

                nia Non-DRM rendering (dumb framebuffers) - needed for some of the legacy and unaccelerated machines NetBSD supports.

                What would need to be done to fix this?
                One of my concerns with Wayland (although probably not shared by the majority) is if it's going to end up excluding older graphics cards.

                  4 years later

                  Assassink yes, and there's basic support on NetBSD also.

                  FreeBSD is a different story.

                  • Jay likes this.

                    The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant (meaning, likely irrelevant to the topic of switching to Wayland or not).
                    The relevant comment section on HN provides some valuable insight on Wayland/X and their respective pitfalls.

                    That said, personally I'll switch to Wayland when FVWM will (this implies a complete rewrite); and, at the same time, when NetBSD will.

                    Oops, i should have read the dates on those posts, i guess. To everyone i necro-liked: Well, your posts are obviously pretty good even 4 years later. To everyone else: You probably had some good posts too but i stopped liking stuff halfway through when i realized what time period i was in and how much years of catching up were still in front of me 😉

                    On the topic of Wayland i pretty much agree with what @pin wrote 4 years ago. It has been "taking over without taking over" for so long now that it became pretty boring to repeat the same old pros/cons/ideas over and over again. It's quite funny though how of all people Gnome and Redhat guys were/are pushing Wayland. They should have gotten Poettering on board too. Talk about missed "PR" opportunity... 😉

                    a year later
                    pin locked the discussion .