Wayland

[CardealRusso]

Hello.

I've tried to use wayland several times on TinyCore and each time I failed. But whenever I see something related to Wayland on the internet I try again.
I know there are other related topics, but I personally believe that these are outdated. Maybe some administrator can teach us in a practical and concise way how to test wayland? And is there a less bloatware way to make it work?

What motivates me is the fact that several distributions are collectively abandoning Xorg. Xorg itself abandoned itself... And I worry about possibly being stuck with something that may contain vulnerabilities.

Relevant links:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-MR-Drop-X11-Session
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f34/release-notes/desktop/Desktop/#_kde_plasma_now_defaults_to_wayland
https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/wayland

[hiro]

i use tc specifically in order to avoid bloat like those common desktop environments that you're mentioning.
for a long time i used just Xvesa, no acceleration.
xorg is sadly very huge. but as long as wayland is so strongly integrated with all this freedesktop&dbus&systemd&pulseaudio stuff, i'm not overly motivated to play with it.
why don't you wait until X is actually abandoned? why maintain both things in parallel, for double the work?
i already maintain ipv4 and ipv6 here at my home... that's enough "transitions" at one time.

[CardealRusso]

why don't you wait until X is actually abandoned? why maintain both things in parallel, for double the work?

It seems like something interesting to have functional in tiny core since in theory it is much lighter and faster than xorg, but the dependencies, as you say, are painful.

[Juanito]

The weston wayland reference window manager works on CorePure64, piCore and piCore64 - see the weston info file.

There’s also the sway wm and, for full on bloat, gnome-session in CorePure64.

For me wayland is notably faster than x on piCore.

For interests sake I compiled fltk-1.4 with the wayland backend and recompiled various extensions wayland only to get a TinyCorePure64 equivalent at about 150% of the size of the x version, but with 3d acceleration.

[CardealRusso]

For me wayland is notably faster than x on piCore.

I saw a comment on reddit stating something similar, but I didn't mention it because it seemed absurd.

Because of this efficiency, Wayland is faster (on RPI 4: 400 fps instead of 100) and consumes less resources.

Is it really 4x faster?

In this sense, yes, old computers with extremely limited resources may not benefit from wayland on tinycore, but small components like the raspberry pi (which, by the way, is what moves the tinycore forum the most, I even feel alone in the corepure64 session) They would definitely benefit a lot.

[Juanito]

Have you tried weston on CorePure64?

[CardealRusso]

Have you tried weston on CorePure64?

I've tried everything and every time I failed there were errors suggesting that it was a problem with Nvidia's proprietary drivers. But I will try again today.

[Juanito]

Ah - nvidia, that complicates things - perhaps it’s a question of loading the correct nvidia kernel module..

[GNUser]

The buzz around Wayland makes me nervous. Xorg does everything I need, plus my favorite WM (fluxbox) and many of my must-have apps are Xorg-only at this point. If Xorg were to disappear tomorrow, I'd be in a world of pain. But I do realize that someday I may have to switch. I just hope that day isn't soon

It is some solace that as long as there is TCL, there is a way to run Wayland with as little freedesktop/systemd/other-ballast as possible.

I do have two questions for the TCL developers, if you'd be so kind:

1. If Xorg were to soon be officially abandoned by its developers (maybe it is already), but majority of applications can still run on it, what would be TCL's plans regarding Xorg? Keep using last release? Switch to TinyX or something similar? Too soon to tell?

2. I was surprised to see that weston depends on wayland-protocols as well as on Xorg-7.7-3d. If weston is a Wayland compositor and Wayland is meant to replace Xorg, why does weston depend on Xorg? Forgive me if this is a stupid question with an obvious answer.

[CardealRusso]

If weston is a Wayland compositor and Wayland is meant to replace Xorg, why does weston depend on Xorg? Forgive me if this is a stupid question with an obvious answer

I endorse the question.

And it is also curious that xwayland does not have xorg as a dependency.

[CNK]

The buzz around Wayland makes me nervous. Xorg does everything I need, plus my favorite WM (fluxbox) and many of my must-have apps are Xorg-only at this point. If Xorg were to disappear tomorrow, I'd be in a world of pain. But I do realize that someday I may have to switch. I just hope that day isn't soon

I looked into it and it seems fairly trivial to make a wrapper for a Wayland-only application to display in X. As far as I'm concerned that's all I need to know to be sure I can stick with X for as long as I want unless Linux gets completely redesigned from underneath it (which would be a much bigger disaster). I expect someone else will develop the wrapper before I need it too, although it looks like something I could do.

1. If Xorg were to soon be officially abandoned by its developers (maybe it is already)

It isn't abandoned, a new libX11 version was released this month. What can be confusing is that they stopped doing the old combined packages of all the separate libraries and programs and now release individual parts separately instead. It's also no longer a Freedesktop.org / Red Hat project which means fewer paid programmers are working on it. I always seem to get fed up with Freedesktop.org projects, I've even given up on Modem Manager now and had more success directly configuring pppd, so I'm tempted to consider this a good thing.

Here's the current release manager, trying to raise money for himself.

[curaga]

1. If Xorg were to soon be officially abandoned by its developers (maybe it is already), but majority of applications can still run on it, what would be TCL's plans regarding Xorg? Keep using last release? Switch to TinyX or something similar? Too soon to tell?

We'd ship the last release as long as it works.

TinyX we already control, and runs most 2d apps anyway.

[Juanito]

I was surprised to see that weston depends on wayland-protocols as well as on Xorg-7.7-3d. If weston is a Wayland compositor and Wayland is meant to replace Xorg, why does weston depend on Xorg? Forgive me if this is a stupid question with an obvious answer.

It depends on whether mesa is compiled against x, wayland or both. Since we want the choice of using x and wayland, mesa is compiled against both (except x86 where it’s only compiled against x).

As mentioned above, using fltk-1.4, it’s possible to make a wayland only version of TinyCorePure64.

[GNUser]

Thank you, curaga and Juanito. Good to know.

Also, thank you so much for TCL. It is a gem and I'm glad it is in good hands

[gadget42]

YES! Huge KUDOS & Thanks to curaga, Juanito, and Rich who are definitely priceless!