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Enlightenment E19 To Have Full Wayland Support
An anonymous reader writes "Full Wayland support has been added to Enlightenment 0.19. Building upon earlier Wayland support, Enlightenment can now act as its own Wayland compositor by communicating directly with the kernel's DRM drivers instead of having to rely upon Weston. The Wayland support is still considered experimental but it's now the first Linux desktop with full Wayland support."
Quick README on building and using it.
Oh great, another acronym overload. The first thing I thought of was Digital Restrictions Management drivers, which was plausible because stuff that plays the crap that comes from Hollywood usually wants to be paranoid about DRM. Do we really have to overload this acronym with something related to screen display?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The main wayland API docs are pretty meh and any others I can find are also not great. Does anyone know of a site gives proper C/C++ examples akin to the venerable Xlib Programming Manual?
Hawaii was the first, I think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
There is also a Wayland distro called Rebecca Black OS. Although when I tested it last time, it was super glitchy and crashed all the time. It has been recently updated so it might be worth another shot.
Anyway, great to see the Wayland stuff rolling in.
enjoy your lols. e17 -> e18 took 12 months. it's been about 4 months since e18.
--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
I'm sticking with E17.
Think you're confusing the acronym.. DRM in this context is Direct Rendering Manager.
I have absolutely no idea what the summary is talking about, but I did recognize the word "Linux" at least. And "DRM", but apparently it's not that DRM.
Better known as 318230.
The X11 remote support is used by a relatively small amount of people. Getting a fast and smooth local desktop is much more important.
I have no, zero, nada idea what's being discussed here. Am I the only un-enlightened person on /. and it has been the latest craze and buzz and just I'm so far out of the loop that I have never ever heard of it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I do not understand why open source projects are so eager to stay on 0.x version numbers even when the software is perfectly usable and polished. It just unnecessarily gives them an image of an unfinished or beta quality software. E17 could as well be 17.0 instead of 0.17, and for a while E19 could be "19.0 beta".
Enlightment is one of those things which always seems great from an distance but somehow I never get around to really using. I've been playing with terminology recently and it seems pretty good (shiny effects are even smooth on my venerable eee 900).
But lots of people Ive spoken to share the same sentiment. Does anone here use it and is it any good in practice? Ultimately I'm not very sold by merely shiny things. Terminology does at least seem to be really functional.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It allows more direct access to application framebuffers, prevents tearing and, allows booting to a graphics mode early on and from there a smooth transition to desktop. As a downside, it does not allow applications to be displayed on a remote desktop and for example VNC has to be used instead.
12 years, in fact. But E18 was only 1 year. I doubt they are eager to do another ground-up project like E17 any time soon, so E19 may well be ready in a reasonable time like E18 was.
This isn't necessarily true. It simply does not provide a method for remoting of applications. However, given Wayland's nature it's likely that any remote Wayland solution will be more efficient than VNC and even X forwarding, rather than less.
I haven't heard of any remote Wayland solution coming.
What's always fun is when they get to 0.99 then have to go to 0.100 or 0.991. It's the exact opposite of the way Chrome and Firefox version numbers work by incrementing the major version number multiple times a year. (IMHO, FF should have gone with YY.0 to YY.3 using the current year and quarter, and the version number was about right when they started doing that.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Yes, the example is called Weston.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
As a downside, it does not allow applications to be displayed on a remote desktop and for example VNC has to be used instead.
The use of a vaguely VNC-like protocol optimized for forwarding compressed video over a network rather than the X11 protocol optimized for primitive drawing operations very few applications actually use is not a downside. If you prefer, think of it as X11 as it's actually used by modern applications (a series of pixmaps), but with compression and fewer latency-sensitive round-trips. Or even better, like xpra with fewer rough edges.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Remote Desktop Backend Merged into Wayland
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Agreed, YY.M would work great for Chrome and Firefox, as they both are mostly about incrementally improving the browser.
I'm dying to find out whether Wayland is faster and smoother than X. Anyone have any evidence?
ayottesoftware.com
Oh right. So if I wanted a decent reference guide for the unix system APIs you'd tell me to go and read the linux source code instead of getting hold of a copy of Stevens?
@rsehole.
Interesting. Then the people complaining about Wayland missing remote support should actually be fine? RDP seems to be able to forward windows of individual applications.
I realize this is a specialized subject and that the people who are really interested in this already know what is being discussed. However, I feel your audience would be much wider if you added a short paragraph on what Enlightenment is, what Wayland is and why what you are discussing is a big deal. I'm not being sarcastic, the title is intriguing, but I don't have the time to dig through all the available resources to really understand what is being discussed. Just a suggestion.
these days, like most high end users we are fleeing gnome/unity/kde (tho kde is still my choice for non-lightweight) to use e17 or xfce or lxde etc
i do admit that e17 hits many sweet notes of art :)
WTF... look away for a few months and it skips two wole versions after having sat on 0.16 for years...
Anyway, the enlightenment website itself only mentions Enlightenment 0.17... so where the heck is this 0.19?
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
No it will not take a decade to see E19 final. Once the project started back up again, they went from E16 to E17 in one year. E18 was quickly on it's heels and now a functional beta of E19 is already out. I am on their mailing list and follow the project closely. They are developing at warp speed. To all the people who install a recent version of E, play with it for a few hours, declare it crap and purge it from their systems: you have no idea what you are missing. If Enlightenment has a problem, it is that to use it to it's full potential - which is vast - one must endure one of the, if not the, steepest learning curves of any DE out there. Once mastered, there is no GUI\DE more powerful and flexible. I am currently running Bodhi 4.2 with E 17.4 and out 16 years of using Linux and every other DE\WM that has come along over that duration, this is the greatest setup I have ever had. I have one display setup with four workspaces, each setup in it's own tiling configuration and my other display setup in a more traditional, but heavily customized way. The window tiling abilities in E are no joke and one of the primary reasons I use it. Being able to use it both ways, one on each monitor is more than I could ever ask for. Now, if all E could do right after an install was limited to what you are presented with, then yes, it would be silly. But it is up to the user, perhaps with a little Googling, forum searching, and getting the mailing list to make it do whatever your hearts content. Because of this, Enlightenment is not for everyone: power users only need apply. I keep going, but i will stop here before I get too carried away. My only gripe is the current lack of documentation for Elementary, which makes writing software for it difficult since you can only learning by studying source code, but standard tutorials are on the way.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Finally Wayland will start to approach what the fanboys said it was already doing two years ago!
Jabs at the very weird fanboys aside, I wish the developers the best of luck (even the one that likes to make fun of Enlightenment) and hope it goes well. We need a range of options and not "one true desktop" like some of the fanboys want.
Wayland is a protocol for client apps to talk with a compositor. The compositor can offer remoting if it wants to and indeed Weston does.
It's a way for client applications to connect to a display, receive input events, and render into surfaces without using X11. The surfaces are rendered via a compositor which could push the result out to the screen or remotely. It's less complex, context switching and data duplication than X11 so it should be more efficient and yield a better desktop experience.
He's not telling you to read the linux source code, he's telling you to read the "Reference" compositor. i.e. it is meant to be the example code.
Weston has support for RDP. i.e. you establish a remote session to it via a RDP client and you see your apps. RDP has a seamless mode though I don't know if the compositor supports that although it could in theory.
One thing I've never understood. I understand the utility of KDE and GNOME (at least GNOME 2). If one wants something like the old NEXTSTEP, there are GNUSTEP DEs like Etoille or Window Managers, like WindowMaker. I can understand people using those. I can even understand people disgusted w/ recent trends w/ GNOME 3 or Unity going for XFCE, Cinnamon,, LXDE/Razor-qt.
What I'm not getting - what does Enlightenment offer that the others don't do better?
No, the people complaining about Wayland missing remote support know about this.
They're complaining because Wayland doesn't have the correct type of remote support. They'd much prefer it if their display server was responsible for drawing every widget (of every toolkit (used by every app)) primative-by-primative, instruction-by-instruction.
You know, because they're retarded.
I've used it since 1997 or 98 and still have e16 with the same theme I've been using since 1999 on a new work pc. I've put a variety of things on other machines but keep coming back to e16/17 and fluxbox. There are many things better about e17, which I have at home, but I've got too comfortable with different coloured window borders meaning different things and haven't found or put together a e17 theme like the "ganymede" theme I'm used to.
The window snapshot thing is nice but even win7 has that now so it's bound to be in a few other X window managers.
Most people only ever use X11 as a client and server on the same machine. You're living inside a bubble to think otherwise.
This again? If your quote is taken from Mr Stone you'd best be informed that things such as openoffice/libreoffice does not fit into the class of "modern applications". It means the gnome3 cutting edge and not earlier gtk, qt and all the rest.
For phones and tablets yes - hence Mr Stone's involvement in Wayland, for other stuff such as science and engineering workstations remote display support is still the killer app. Supporting "that app from 1996" that Mr Stone makes so much fun of is often the entire reason for the choice of windowing system.
So while it's a "relatively small amount of people" it's probably the majority of people using linux desktops in an office environment. That's far too important a niche to abandon IMHO.
What I'm not getting - what does Enlightenment offer that the others don't do better?
Cool window decorations!
There are some nice and clean themes for KDE/GNOME, but the theming system in both seems a bit lacking in flexibility. All the themes look kind of the same but with different colors.
Back in 1999 Linux desktops were horrible mismashes of different widgets and applications that didn't fit together, but the window title bars had beautiful pixel art vines running on them and stuff like that. That was fun, I miss those parts.
reference code != reference documentation
That was fun,
turning a super-stodgy old HP-VUE desktop into wild ornate Giger nightmare with rust holes in the window frames. Too bad it was so unstable. What was that, 15 years ago, and it's now on 0.19? Good times in the server room. Wish I had a mod point for you today.
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
E does what I tell it to do and gets the heck out of the way otherwise. That's something that Gnome and, to a lesser extent, KDE seem to have a real problem with. As far as XFCE, LXDE et al, dunno. I've used Enlightenment off and on for rather a long time, and haven't found it necessary to spend much time with the other lightweight desktop options.
The code IS the documentation.
Especially if it is in C++, the most readable and unobfuscatable language in history....
I assume you have usage statistics proving your assertion. Otherwise you are just considering your own usage and think it represents everyone.
Quite a lot of people have asked that question on both sides of this debate. It would be nice if some professional organization with broad reach would just put up a fucking survey so we could find out already. Actually, I would hope we'd get a variety of surveys; an Ubuntu survey, some sort of survey of Unix professionals, etc. Then we could come up with some good idea of how many people actually remote X applications. In order for the results to be particularly useful, we need to know how many people run individual apps and how many run full desktops, although I do personally suspect that there's a fair amount of individual-app remoting going on — I would guess that there's been something of a resurgence of it since ssh became popular.
The average user at their desktop will never remote an app. They were much more likely to do so before the death of the UNIX(tm) workstation, but that day has come and now we have PCs everywhere. They might well run Linux or some other Unixlike or hell even some kind of UNIX(tm) but they're still going to be a PC, and they're going to have vast resources of processor and memory for very little money because nobody is having to pay the tax on extra-special, precious, overpriced architectures any more. It's still an option, IBM is happy to take your money for example, but it's not really necessary. The user can run the app on their own system on a PC that costs a nickel. Well, compared to buying an Ultra 5 back in the day — which was made mostly out of a bunch of chips which were used in PCs and Macs, and a very expensive processor that was quickly left behind by PCs thereafter.
So, other than a handful of diehard nerds, and some systems administrators, who's actually remoting X?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, it seems that half of the people reading this article crawled out from under a rock in the last couple weeks.
Well, it *is* spring in the northern hemisphere, that might have something to do with it.
:-P
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
no it's not. no it isn't
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
Well the big thing it offers in 2014 is the GUI API (EFL) used by Tizen. Tizen depending on how things play with Google may or may not be core to Samsung's strategy going forward. The real advantage of E is on hardware well below what's normative even for netbooks around 128 MB RAM.
yeah. the name is juvenile. just like windows. i mean - how will i find that on altavista? and macintosh. i mean it'll just hide among all the apple varieties of the same name. or what about android? all i'll find is robot porn instead. oh and a galaxy note... note.. gee - i won't find anything outside of a bunch of pictures of paper. or a galaxy gear.. i'll just find cogs all over.
you really know nothing about naming. names evoke ideas and concepts in someones head. a name is inspirational to most. the easier it is to remember (eg is a word they already know) the more easily they attach to it. if they have to remember "xfwm" or "ctwm" ... they will have a far harder time remembering it. "someone told me about this awesome window manager last weekend called f something... bunch of nonsensical letters" but if it's enlightenment.. they remember as the word itself is a unit of knowledge where fvwm is 4 units of knowledge. the word enlightenment will likely be associated with a concept or images, but twm will not.
seemingly a vast swathe of professionals in marketing agree on naming this way in the past, and still do. just SOME examples above.
but who am i kidding. this is slashdot. actual facts cited are irrelevant. trolling with an exaggerated personal opinion is the order of the day.
--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
In which case you are incorrect and taking the quote you are depending on out of context. When Mr Stone was referring to modern applications he meant specific ones written recently with specific new toolkits and not even other ones being written now using older toolkits.
"So, other than a handful of diehard nerds, and some systems administrators, who's actually remoting X?"
You answered the question yourself.. a handful of diehard nerds, and some systems administrators.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
"E does what I tell it to do and gets the heck out of the way otherwise."
can you explain what that statement means exactly? I see this written all over the place as a virtue for almost all desktop environments and i don't have a clue what it really means.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Jolla Sailfish might beccome a big player too
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I don't want to write a damn compositor - I want to learn the user API FFS!
Possibly. I'm just not sure they have the money / resources. There are likely going to be lots of interesting niches in handsets I hope Jolla finds one or two and thrives. I'd love to see Sailfish keep being designed.
For lurkers: Sailfish is Qt based though so it doesn't use EFL. The tie was to Tizen not to the Enlightenment comments.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I was quoting someone. I was not, therefore no quote was taken out of context.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
In which case where do you get this idea from? Gut feeling?
I'm glad you posted this, but note that the tittle of the article is wrong: the RDP backend was merged into the *Weston* compositor not into the Wayland protocol.
Which means that if you're using E19's own Wayland compositor then of course you **don't** have access to this this RDP backend, unless there is a way to stack compositors?
The same place anyone else would get it from, if they bothered to look: research on how modern graphics pipelines work, how modern toolkits work, and the design of the X11 protocol. With a few exceptions (mainly text via the new XRender glyph extensions, excellent for terminal emulators but not much else) the X11 protocol encodes pixel-oriented drawing primitives which are no longer directly supported by current graphics cards, or even efficient to emulate (e.g. pixel-accurate aliased ellipses, stipple patterns) and which can't be efficiently mixed with direct rendering on the client side via OpenGL and DRM. Standard rendering these days—using GTK+ 2.8+, Qt 4+, or a custom toolkit based on Cairo or OpenGL—consists of drawing into a buffer with OpenGL or into a pixmap with the CPU, and then handing that buffer or pixmap to the X server just so that it can hand it over to the compositor. That works okay locally due to shared memory, despite the extra overhead of having the X server in the middle, but it's hardly "network transparent", especially given that the protocol doesn't provide for any means of compressing pixmaps.
It's simply more efficient to let the client do all the drawing with local graphics resources and push the resulting surface to a remote compositor, particularly if you can take advantage of hardware-accelerated video codecs. That's how the application is designed to work anyway, but with X11 it only works well if the application is local. Otherwise you have to use some sort of fallback in place of direct rendering (perhaps XRender, but more likely software raster), doubling the development and testing effort, and the resulting solution requires more bandwidth and lower latency than a properly designed remote video protocol.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Please try to understand what you've written and then try relating it back to my post above. Sadly there don't seem the be many "modern applications" in use by that definition so you are describing the minority of situations.
That's an opinion of what is possible - it's a goal and not a description of something that has been implemented and shown to save time.
Just because using a strawman like the latest piece of crap gedit is slow to start does not mean X is a failure.
For starters: Enlightenment_remote
The "something bad...." seldom has prevented E from restarting on the occasional hangup.
But having e remote to control the DM/WM is really useful
And moreso in its 1st encarnation than the last
resist propaganda