Wayland support

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skbochs
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Joined: 02/20/2011

I'm curious as to whether Ubuntu's recent decision to switch to Wayland by default will be upheld in Trisquel. Personally, I'm all in favor of moving away from X and its myriad problems soon but not yet. I tend to agree with the statements made by Fedora team members that it'll be the right move eventually, but it's not there yet.

Some thoughts:

Pros:

  • More efficient protocol.
  • LGPL'd server and libraries.
  • Works with free video drivers like nouveau.
  • I actually think it's a plus that Nvidia has decided not to support Wayland, given that their official video drivers are non-free and in violation of the kernel's license.

Cons:

  • Won't be ready for a while.
  • Needs nasty OSX-style nested X server for backwards compatibility.
  • There'd be a lot of pressure not to write Wayland-native apps as long as other distros refused to switch.
Michał Masłowski

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Joined: 05/15/2010

> I'm curious as to whether Ubuntu's recent decision to switch to Wayland
> by default will be upheld in Trisquel. Personally, I'm all in favor of
> moving away from X and its myriad problems soon but not yet. I tend to
> agree with the statements made by Fedora team members that it'll be the
> right move eventually, but it's not there yet.

I don't know about the "myriad problems" with X, most of the problems
which I know apply only to old programs (which won't be fixed by
Wayland), old X server or drivers (which also won't be fixed by Wayland).

X has useful features like support for clients on different machines or
not requiring 2d or 3d hardware acceleration. Will such things work
with Wayland?

> Works with free video drivers like nouveau.

X works with Nouveau, but also with Radeon (which has KMS disabled in
Trisquel since it requires non-free firmware) or drivers without KMS
support.

> Needs nasty OSX-style nested X server for backwards compatibility.
> There'd be a lot of pressure not to write Wayland-native apps as long as
> other distros refused to switch.

There are already good reasons to use GTK+, Qt or something similar, so
no changes in typical properly written applications should be needed.

ruben
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Joined: 09/24/2010

> I'm curious as to whether Ubuntu's recent decision to switch to
> Wayland by default will be upheld in Trisquel.

IIRC it requires 3D acceleration. If that's true we will not switch.
And if it works without it, we will probably pass anyway.

skbochs
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Joined: 02/20/2011

Just looked it up… yeah, it does. That's weird. The Fedora team's using the fact that nouveau already works w/ Wayland as a selling-point. But it's no secret that nouveau's 3D acceleration doesn't work correctly yet — they warn non-developers not to install it.

Fishy.

ruben
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Joined: 09/24/2010

> Just look it up… yeah, it does. That's weird. The Fedora team's using
> the fact that nouveau already works w/ Wayland as a selling-point.
> But it's no secret that nouveau's 3D acceleration doesn't work
> correctly yet — they warn non-developers not to install it.

Nouveau would be an small problem, taking on account that no ATI card
has 3D acceleration with free drivers.

AndrewT

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Joined: 12/28/2009

The experimental library that enables 3D acceleration with the nouveau driver is pretty unstable, but when it was tested with Compiz it performed well and was stable enough for regular use. On the other hand, OpenArena crashes after a couple of minutes. As Ruben said, the problem that prevents us from adopting Wayland is ATI cards.

grvrulz
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Joined: 09/23/2010

Does 3d work with nouveau on Trisquel?? I think it requires a non-free kernel module to work. Or it doesn't??

Ark74

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Joined: 07/15/2009

On Thu, 24 Feb 2011 10:39:46 +0100 (CET), name at domain wrote:
> Does 3d work with nouveau on Trisquel?? I think it requires a non-free
> kernel
> module to work. Or it doesn't??

No it doesn't require a non free module, but requires a experimental
OpenGL/DRI support.

So far only few cards had being tested and documented.
http://www.h-node.com/videocards/catalogue/en/1/1/NVIDIA/undef/works_with_3D/undef/undef

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grvrulz
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Joined: 09/23/2010

Thanks for the info.. actually i've gotta install Trisquel on some of my friends' PCs having Nvidia cards.. It'll be great if it works.. :) i'll check out the link..