Why YOU should write a Wayland compositor - Victoria Brekenfeld - HiP22 Berlin

“ Ever wondered why the Linux Desktop shifts to the Wayland protocol? What exactly makes it "better", how do its internals exactly work and how YOU could utilize it? I'll give you a quick rundown! ”
Talk saved from unreleased relive cuts of Hacking in Parallel Berlin 2022.
Copyrights belong to HiP and individuals, released under permission.
Timestamps
~TBD~
Victoria Brekenfeld:
“Hi! My name is Victoria and I have worked on a Wayland compositor library called "smithay" for the past 5 years.
Right now I am working for system76 on their new desktop environment, I am member of wayland-protocols and have been contributing to the wider ecosystem. So if you even wanted to learn about the wayland ecosystem and linux desktops, I can and will try to do my best to explain. Even better, I want to give you a reason to use this technology for your projects!
The Talk is roughly divided into two parts: First off the background, to get everybody on the same page - What exactly is wayland? - How is it different from X11 in the most important ways? - Technical details! Or how a modern linux desktop is build! - We'll be talking about the "Direct Rendering Manager", "EGL", "libinput", "Client-side-decorations?", "nvidia?!", "WSL?!?" You name it! - THE Showcase! Hopefully you'll understand a lot about the stack now, but you have no idea what to use it for or feel like nothing of it is relevant for you work? Don't be deceived, people use wayland in embedded and automotive applications, for automated testing and continuous integration, for virtualization, XR Applications, Game streaming, Remote Computing, ...!
Let me show you, what weird things did people build with it and let's unlock more of its potential together!”

[@izairdgh]

I'm hopeful for a bright future with wayland amazing presentation Victoria

[@emanuelescarsella3124]

Thank you for sharing, interesting speach

[@beryesa]

Your thanks belong to Victoria, for giving this interesting speech.

[@emanuelescarsella3124]

@@beryesa sure, and also thanks for making Smithay, I'm using that library on a side project on my free time, and it seems really well-made👍

[@merthyr1831]

Great talk Victoria! Mad respect to you and the Sys76 folks for the work you're taking on with COSMIC DE and everything else Wayland. Honestly, looking at the way you've described the Wayland approach to protocols has helped me to properly understand Wayland has chosen to approach this system instead of simply rewriting X11 using similar principles. Thanks!

[@julesoscar8921]

This was so interesting thank you. And please, talk 3 hours about this, i will listening

[@paulojose7568]

Good talk

[@DavidLange1492]

We probably need a book with clear examples to help with Wayland development. I barely can do X coding, and have no idea about Wayland development. Is there a clear path to remove X completely yet?

[@szaszm_]

Until we get that, your best bet is probably to see how other compositors solve certain problems. It's all open source, and if you can write code, you can probably also read code.

[@damianateiro]

​@@szaszm_Although you are right, one cannot replace something as functional as x11, with its documentation and tools, and change it for something that does not have tools or documentation made by the same developers, and time is no excuse, they had more than 10 years to do it and they have the resources of Red Hat

[@DanteMishima]

I still don't know what Wayland is

[@beryesa]

​@@DanteMishima You should check out kzbin.info/www/bejne/mYLSgniVfal6bsk

[@MrChelovek68]

@@damianateiro ibm and other organizations. But I wonder where people come from who believe that some left-wing office, whose interest lies solely in money, will do something for some no-names?

[@dengan699]

wayland is coming anytime now! lol EDIT: but yes, very interesting talk

[@MrChelovek68]

not,it's not

[@SlinkyD]

3:50 Boy did y'all miss. Somebody might fix X before Wayland roll out default features.

[@DavidLange1492]

I doubt X can be fixed, unless you mean "fixed" like the mob does.

[@SlinkyD]

@@DavidLange1492 No. Functional as expected fixed. Wayland a glorious blaze of something. Works for them tho.

[@flarebear5346]

When did you last use wayland btw?​@@SlinkyD

[@SlinkyD]

@@flarebear5346 Right now.

[@merthyr1831]

The reason X is dying in favour of Wayland because quite literally every single Xorg developer almost exclusively works on Wayland nowadays. I'd be surprised if X releases a new major version between now and 2030, which is when Xorg will be officially be EoL under RHEL's LTS releases.

[@Atius]

berysa

[@happygofishing]

Systemd 💀

[@bravefastrabbit770]

Great presentation Victor!

[@kylehennkens9578]

?

[@Archbtw_]

@@kylehennkens9578 bravefastrabbit770 is just being an asshole for no reason.

[@xenonmob]

victoria???

[@beryesa]

I cropped the relive streams and asked to share, as stated in the description. Hope you find it valuable!

[@Megalomaniakaal]

xenonmob???

[@kylehennkens9578]

​@@bravefastrabbit770Who are you talking to?

[@paulojose7568]

@@beryesa Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?

[@beryesa]

@@paulojose7568 who even are you

[@erik_james]

As a very conservative and offensive person I wanna say: That kinds of people pisses me off and I definitely wouldn't follow their desired pronounces and another sh$t they want me to follow. If I feel that's a dude I'm gonna call him a dude. BUT: Despite of that woke political BS, in the end of the day this person made a huge contribution to the linux community and I'm not gonna ignore this fact. So I wanna say: "Thank you very much, Victoria. Thank for your work and for spreading this valuable information to us so we can get a more clear understanding about wayland. The world definitely needs more people like you to push Linux forward. I hope you'll meet less amount of people like me in your life."

[@user-vm9mu5ul1h]

Short answer: No, you shouldn't. Yet another broken, bloated replacement for something that has been working pretty well before.

[@PeakKissShot]

probonopd alt account lookin ahh

[@beryesa]

“Working pretty well” - Definitely not for X developers themselves :)

[@CristianMolina]

Before... Long before. Using X since late 90s,when my old Trident 8900 ISA card started being supported. X was good enough but never was great.

[@MrChelovek68]

@@beryesa You know what's the funniest part? For some reason, people who work with a language that is foreign to the platform coped with hardware acceleration of rendering. And everything works perfectly. Yes, yes, C#. But the cool developers working with native C/C++ couldn't cope. How is it so funny?

[@MrChelovek68]

This is the most sensible comment so far

[@MrChelovek68]

Wayland it's a crap in current point.

[@beryesa]

Would you rather maintain Xorg then? Well, you're free to step up :)

[@MrChelovek68]

@@beryesa It's so great to talk nonsense. If I need to, yes, I will support X. But, it doesn't even occur to your super-intelligent head that the 10-year protocol is not only raw, it's full of bugs? Why not clone the Surface Flinger from Android in such a case and modify it to the desired requirements? It was a well-developed technology, but for some reason it was necessary to try to crutch "our own". And now the bottom line is that just like with a single browser, a single browser can write it, but it will take a lot of time. As a result, this garbage is done by KDE, GNOME and others, who could not figure out how to display data on the screen. which is very funny. Oh yes, there was only one XORG, the rest was written on top and it was perfect in terms of structure. It didn't require anything, everything that needed to be implemented was implemented on top of the server. and here, in order to make a window manager, everyone is now obliged to write their own window server. I can't imagine a greater stupidity. And yes, the X11 is outdated and needs to be redesigned. But Wayland is never a replacement because-crooked ugliness

[@MrChelovek68]

@@beryesa where is my comments?

[@beryesa]

@@MrChelovek68wdym

[@MrChelovek68]

@@beryesa I left another comment about the fragmentation and idiocy of the "all in one place" architecture of Wayland implementations. and one detail that complicates the development of your own server-based environments.

[@hasanpasha01]

Why is the dude have a female name!