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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I think “speed up Wayland development” isn’t quite right, tho it will probably feel that way to end user. It’s about getting experimental protocols into the hands of users in a formalized manner while the stable protocol is still being forged. This already exists in certain forms e.g. HDR support being added before the protocol is finalized, but having a more formalized system is probably pretty helpful for interoperability, e.g. apps having to work with different DE’s.

    My biggest is concern is whether there’s a possibility this will actually slow down Wayland development by pulling attention away from the stable Wayland protocols in favor of Frog Protocols. But hopefully the quicker real world usage of the new protocols will bring more benefits than the potential downside.




  • The compositors are the ones doing a lot of the protocol development. They want to have WIP versions so they can see what issues crop up, they’ve been making versions all doing. Now, I agree that it is slowing things down, but it’s more of just an additional thing that needs to get done, not so much a chicken and egg problem.



  • Also XWayland has many limitations as X11 does.

    If an app has only ever supported X11, then it probably doesn’t care about those limitations (the apps that do care probably already have a Wayland version). And if an app doesn’t care about the extra stuff Wayland has to offer, then there’s not really a reason to add the extra support burden of Wayland. As long as they work fine in XWayland, I think a lot of apps won’t switch over until X11 support starts dropping from their toolkit, and they’ll just go straight to Wayland-only.




  • No shame in having to switch back after giving it a try and running into a lot of issues. Having to reboot a lot is definitely unusual, there’s probably something wrong with your setup, but who knows where the issue is or how long it would take you to fix. Hopefully you can give it another try in a few years and those issues have been resolved.






  • The issue is one of licensing, not technology. There’s all kinds of patents in the space, and using free codecs could still infringe them. DirectX doesn’t have the same patent protection. I believe in theory you could make a fully open source Linux native version of DirectX.

    For more info from someone who knows more than me, see here.



  • If GE received a Cease and Desist, that would be frustrating, but linux gaming would go on. If Proton got a Cease and Desist, that could be catastrophic to linux gaming. Valve could even theoretically get banned from working on linux gaming (like the Yuzu devs got banned from working on emulation). It’s just not worth the risk for compatibility/performance for a smaller proportion of games.