Re: [dev] Wayland vs X11

From: FRIGN <dev_AT_frign.de>
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2016 20:41:57 +0200

On Tue, 2 Aug 2016 20:33:39 +0200
Silvan Jegen <s.jegen_AT_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.

> 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].

> 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!

Cheers

FRIGN

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux-WCpNvRFM

-- 
FRIGN <dev_AT_frign.de>
Received on Tue Aug 02 2016 - 20:41:57 CEST

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