Enlightenment E20 Released With Full Wayland Support (enlightenment.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Enlightenment DR 0.20 has been released. The most significant change is full Wayland support where E20 can act as its own Wayland compositor and the whole shebang. Enlightenment 0.20 also has better FreeBSD support, introduces Geolocation support, new screen management, and other changes.

Comments

pics

[MagicM]

This thread is worthless without screenshots that include some HR Giger walpaper.

w007

[vel-ex-tech]

I'll have to emerge Weston and compile this when I get home. Hopefully it'll compile without systemd as easily as E19 did. Bonus if there's already an ebuild available.

Cue endless bellyaching "oh noes, they'll take my X11 network transparency over my dead body!" comments and "damned kids don't know what they're doing," never mind Wayland exists because the damned kids maintaining Xorg got tired of the cruft.

Can anybody help me understand why rdesktop or similar schlepping bitmaps (I'm pretty sure it can do single window instead of whole desktop, which would work nicely with Wayland) or a GTK/QT specific network protocol is unacceptable and why we need to schlep bitmaps over X11 instead? What is the specific use-case that's impossible without X11 (hopefully the specific program that actually uses the X11 font capabilities and not cairo/freetype and X11 drawing primitives and not GTK/QT)?

Re:w007

[Junta]

X11 primitives are admittedly suboptimal for state of the art, but the concern is that recent state of the art remote desktop implementations have been a bit negligent of the 'seamless' facet.

For example, using X11 remoting, little things like notification area and such 'just happen'. Frequently other strategies say 'remote desktop' and dust their hands of making it seamlessly sit in the local display.

Now X11 itself does not do this fully (audio notably is not in scope) or best (X11 primitives aren't interesting, puts client at risk of crash if network issue...). A better approach is to hook things like NETWM as a window manager and the graphics via compositor (a la xpra). Such a strategy wouldn't care one bit about X11. Once upon a time the argument would have been that the facet of having the communication path be abstracted to be network or other paths was important, but compositing created a convenient interception point to make the concern theoretically moot).

The issue is what is popularized. VNC, RDP, and vanilla X11 are the well known examples. Xpra does it right, but no one has heard of Xpra. Even though Xpra's approach would be fully Wayland compatible, it has 'X' in the name and as-yet hasn't bothered with Wayland compatibility, so the knowledge the approach would be portable is not out there. RDP I believe is more capable, but most commonly people experience RDP to a desktop or a 'normal' server, and as such the seamless case isn't presented. So X11 is the *only* thing that people know as ubiquitous and seamless and as such are understandably skeptical about alternatives.

So what needs to be done is for someone to port Xpra or implement something similar and to popularize it. Right now those who understand the technology know how it *could* be done even better than normal X11, but there's a shortage of actual implementation catering to those concerns. There's a lot of 'well, just use freerdp' or 'real applications should be web enabled anyway for remote use', and not enough 'here's a concrete and authoritative seamless remote strategy that fits in with the strategy'.

Re:w007

[NotInHere]

Can anybody help me understand why [...] a GTK/QT specific network protocol is unacceptable [...]?

Because there are people who write backends to wayland without using a toolkit like GTK, QT etc? Like the servo people?

https://github.com/servo/servo...

So yes, such a protocol would be unacceptable, at least if there is no bitmap fallback for applications that use wayland without a toolkit, or for unsupported toolkits.

Generally I do agree that wayland should come, but tbh, enabling it in fedora? No, they should wait a year or two, until wayland is ready for actual distro use.

Re:w007

[vel-ex-tech]

Thanks, this helped. Please mod up.

I've been looking for something like Xpra for quite a while, mostly for torrenting. I used to use Deluge, but if I needed to restart X for whatever reason, it was a minor irritation to fire Deluge back up and wait for it to come back up to speed. I switched to rtorrent instead.

Well, come to think about it, this is even more of a problem for bit/doge/primecoin clients, but I lost interest before learning how to set up a wallet daemon.

Re: Great

[Lendrick]

Even non-programmers can not use something without bitching about the fact that it exists.

Re:Great

[unixisc]

Can't the systemd guys just integrate /etc/hosts into systemd?

Re:Middle click copy-paste missing

[DrXym]

It's not considered an afterthought. It's considered a separate problem altogether that can be solved in numerous ways.