Just porting to a toolkit that "supports" Wayland won't be much help to window managers. A WM has to implement the wayland server side (compositor) while applications are clients. The toolkits abstract away the X/wayland client API calls (E.G. Qt platform plugins) so you simply create your widgets, setup your (toolkit native) callbacks and are done. But as soon as you call X-specific functions in your applications things will get harder. Qt now also implements a wayland-compostior which HELPS creating a wayland server. But still you need to do quite some work. Porting to gtk3 (xfce... ) will have a similar impact: It won't allow XFCE to automatically run on X and Wayland. Probably it makes some things easier but in the end there is not so much the toolkit can abstract away in terms of creating a compositor/server/WM.
Personally I tried to get running Plasma on wayland several times and while I finally got it started there were so many crashes (e.g. some applications esp. those having to run on XWayland, but also systemsettings) and issues with managing windows that I gave up on it for the moment. Gnome might be a different thing as they go wayland exclusively and have a working implementation for a longer time than kde. I also tried enlightenment with wayland which didn't run more stable than with X :( 2017-07-11 17:25 GMT+02:00 Rich Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org>: > On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 10:51 AM, Ian Zimmerman <i...@very.loosely.org> > wrote: > > On 2017-07-11 09:02, Rich Freeman wrote: > > > >> > I use GNOME with Wayland for some time and I actually didn't notice > >> > that I switched until I tried to get synergy working ( mouse sharing > >> > software, which only works on X ), seems like GDM automatically > >> > chose Wayland since some upgrade. XWayland works pretty seamlessly > >> > as well, so I'll just stay with Wayland for now, but it might be > >> > more annoying to use it with other DEs/WMs. > > > >> > However, I have less screen tearing with fullscreen applications > >> > with Wayland than I had with X ( with radeon + mesa ). > > > >> My sense is that this is probably what people would see. It will > >> probably work fine for any of the major DEs, but you'll find these > >> little cases of tools that aren't ported. One BIG area that will be > >> affected is X11 forwarding. I'm not sure if that works over ssh or > >> not with wayland, but wayland in general doesn't support network > >> sockets. > > > > What about "3rd party" window managers like openbox? From my limited > > understanding of wayland, that functionality just goes out of the window > > (OOPS, sorry); window management becomes a responsibility of the toolkit > > and there is no way to plug in a different one. > > I'm going out on a limb a bit here, but my understanding is not so > much that it is impossible for arbitrary applications to talk to > wayland (that seems silly - it is just an API). Rather, the major > toolkits simply have already done all the hard work so that if you use > one of those toolkits then your application will work. > > I'm sure there is no reason an application that doesn't use qt/gtk/etc > couldn't just make direct calls to wayland. However, it will require > a lot more porting work on the part of upstream, and so it probably > won't happen quickly. > > In the same way an application written to use QT probably can be made > to work on OSX or Windows with very little additional work, because > the toolkits provide a single API across all the platforms. You could > write an application that works on all these platforms without using a > toolkit, but then the developer needs to maintain all the API > abstraction. > > Getting back to openbox/etc, I suspect that you have a couple of extremes > here: > > * Full-fledged DEs like Gnome/KDE. They have a ton of functionality > that would be impacted by Wayland, but they also use toolkits that > have probably already taken care of this. > * Very minimal window managers (think fvwm/twm/etc). They may not use > a toolkit that was ported, but on the other hand their functionality > is minimal and porting might not be so hard. Also, there seems to be > some effort to port more minimal toolkits like motif to wayland. > * In-between environments (think xfce, openstep, etc). They don't > benefit from the toolkit but still have a lot of functionality to > port. I heard that xfce is being ported to gtk for just this reason. > > I suspect that Wayland is going to drive adoption of gtk/qt much more > widely. For the effort of directly porting to Wayland you could just > port to gtk and then get coverage on other platforms as well. > > > > > Or does xwayland help with that? I'll be grateful for an explanation of > > this area, as I'm worried about the future of the X server but I'm also > > married to openbox. > > > > I suspect that xwayland would cover some of this, but I haven't messed > with either. > > -- > Rich > >
