Re: [9front] Thoughts on Wayland?

[Willow Liquorice <willow@howhill.com>]

I see your point. Re: the extensions. I was poking around on 
wayland.app/protocols, but I didn't scroll down far enough to see the 
mountain of extensions labelled "wlr", "KDE", "Weston", and "External". 
Jesus Christ…

I must agree: *Plan 9 is no place for a Wayland compositor.*

Still, it might be a place for a remote Wayland client, Arch Wiki 
summarises the state of the art:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland#Remote_display

They all use different solutions of course. I suppose the Plan 9 
solution would be a file server on the compositor machine.

I find it funny that most of my interactions with this list have boiled 
down to "_ can't be that hard, right?", followed by "oh fuck, _ is that 
hard!" within the space of 24 hours.

I really should try and get 9front running on something instead of being 
a theoretical hacker. Have the Raspberry Pi images been tested on the Pi 
Zero?

	- Willow

P.S. I wasn't expecting this to blow up as much as it did. This has been 
a really informative thread, and the talk about GPUs on Plan 9 has been 
fascinating.

On 04/08/2024 22:31, ori@eigenstate.org wrote:
> Quoth Willow Liquorice <willow@howhill.com>:
>> Hello again 9front,
>>
>> (Warning: long email is long)
>>
>> I've been leafing through the Wayland protocol, comparing it to rio and
>> /dev/draw. To me, a system that could speak Wayland sounds much more
>> compatible with the wider software ecosystem.
>>
> 
> A system that fully implements the posix APIs would also be more
> compatible with the wider software ecosystem, however it would not
> be more pleasant to program for or interact with; The appeal of
> Plan 9 is that it's simplified things to the essentials, and
> doesn't pull in a bunch of overengineered junk.
> 
> So, as for Wayland specifically: The biggest problem with it is
> that it's not a protocol. It's got a core that's insufficient for
> actual use, and a set of mutually incompatible extensisons that
> forces each user to write programs that explicitly support wlroots,
> gnome, and KDE with separate hacks. To pick on an example, cursor
> warping in drawterm only works in some environments, because others
> fail to support those specific extensisons.
> 
> On top of that, the protocol's model of resources is rather
> overengineered and painful to use.
> 
> More or less, Wayland was misdesigned on different axes than X11;
> it's not clear which one is a worse approach.
> 
> However, Wayland is clearly a worse fit for Plan 9 than devdraw;
> it's designed for the case where not only does the GPU live on the
> same machine as the compositor, it's designed for the case where
> every single piece of software doing drawing lives on the same
> machine as well.
>