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[BryanC]

What are the implications of Wayland on Theater View? Should the new display server make it easier (more feasible) to implement?

[Awesome Donkey]

I'm not sure if MC even supports Wayland yet, probably just X at the moment. Getting it working through XWayland should be possible, no?

[BryanC]

I'm not sure if MC even supports Wayland yet, probably just X at the moment. Getting it working through XWayland should be possible, no?

Oh I'm sure it doesn't support Wayland. I was just wondering if the Theater View development time would be better spent working in Wayland instead of X. Standard view works great in X but I know that since Theater View is DirectX-based there will be substantial issues porting it to X. I wonder if just doing it in Wayland would be considerably easier.

[mwillems]

MC does not work on wayland yet (or didn't as of a few weeks ago), and neither does most nvidia hardware with the proprietary drivers.  Regardless of what the Freedesktop.org/Gnome crowd may think Wayland will not be ready for prime-time in the near term.  Maybe in time for the next Debian Stable.  Maybe.

Don't mistake me, I'm a huge fan of Gnome, but you only have to boot into a Gnome Wayland session on the latest Gnome (3.16) and see how wonky everything is at the moment (especially with non-gnome software).  Unless you have NVidia hardware with the proprietary driver, of course, in which case it doesn't work at all (white screen of death, etc.).  Since 3.16, they've been piloting running GDM with wayland by default, and it generated a huge amount of issues/friction just for the login screen which they have complete control over.

In my view, wayland is somewhere between alpha and beta right now, and it will be years (my guess is more than one less than three) before it becomes a useful replacement for X11.  And most linux desktops don't support wayland robustly ATM, so targeting wayland for development right now would effectively be saying "use gnome or else, and here's hoping you don't want to use a newer nvidia graphics that nouveau doesn't really support yet."

[BryanC]

MC does not work on wayland yet (or didn't as of a few weeks ago), and neither does most nvidia hardware with the proprietary drivers.  Regardless of what the Freedesktop.org/Gnome crowd may think Wayland will not be ready for prime-time in the near term.  Maybe in time for the next Debian Stable.  Maybe.

Don't mistake me, I'm a huge fan of Gnome, but you only have to boot into a Gnome Wayland session on the latest Gnome (3.16) and see how wonky everything is at the moment (especially with non-gnome software).  Unless you have NVidia hardware with the proprietary driver, of course, in which case it doesn't work at all (white screen of death, etc.).  Since 3.16, they've been piloting running GDM with wayland by default, and it generated a huge amount of issues/friction just for the login screen which they have complete control over.

In my view, wayland is somewhere between alpha and beta right now, and it will be years (my guess is more than one less than three) before it becomes a useful replacement for X11.  And most linux desktops don't support wayland robustly ATM, so targeting wayland for development right now would effectively be saying "use gnome or else, and here's hoping you don't want to use a newer nvidia graphics that nouveau doesn't really support yet."

I likely do not understand its limitations completely, but would it not be possible to use Wayland only when theater view is in 'exclusive/full-screen' mode, sort of how GDM is using Wayland now but the rest of the DE is still on X? In other words can theater view use Wayland while standard view, etc uses X? I imagine this has to be possible since the display manager is always running alongside the X server in gnome/GDM.

And I have used Wayland/Westin before...it was probably three years ago and I managed to get it running after a few hours of work just for the hell of it. Then I realized I couldn't actually use any programs outside of a Win 3.1-esque file manager and went back to X.

[Awesome Donkey]

Then there's Canonical and the push for Mir to replace X in Ubuntu. I haven't attempted to see if MC works with XMir, hopefully I can soon.

[mwillems]

I likely do not understand its limitations completely, but would it not be possible to use Wayland only when theater view is in 'exclusive/full-screen' mode, sort of how GDM is using Wayland now but the rest of the DE is still on X? In other words can theater view use Wayland while standard view, etc uses X? I imagine this has to be possible since the display manager is always running alongside the X server in gnome/GDM.

This is onyl sort of true.  Prior to 3.16, GDM went away after login; now GDM hangs around after logging in, but it does that by hogging two different login sessions (basically tty1 and tty2 are both occupied when you login to Gnome from GDM).  This has a lot of problems in terms of performance and memory, as well as having some downstream consequences like breaking bluetooth pairing (which pair to the GDM instance and not the actual gnome shell instance), and hardware acceleration in Virtualbox (I think, I'm still trying to figure it out, but GDM 3.16 definitely broke accel). 

So for MC to do something similar would require logging in as another user; you need a whole new session to take advantage of wayland.  There could be an "MC" user, but it starts to sound like a lot of overhead.

And I have used Wayland/Westin before...it was probably three years ago and I managed to get it running after a few hours of work just for the hell of it. Then I realized I couldn't actually use any programs outside of a Win 3.1-esque file manager and went back to X.

It's better than that, but not that much better 

[BryanC]

hogging two different login sessions (basically tty1 and tty2 are both occupied when you login to Gnome from GDM)

I did not realize this. I usually switch to LightDM and had assumed GDM operated in a similar manner. That's a bummer.