I've not personally had wayland enabled (have it for build deps only), so I'm not sure exactly what this means. That you won't have to go through some XWayland layer? That's why I've been avoiding it.

I'm dreading wayland, because I don't like compositors and I still use old school X11 window managers.

Quoting: GroganI've not personally had wayland enabled (have it for build deps only), so I'm not sure exactly what this means. That you won't have to go through some XWayland layer? That's why I've been avoiding it.

I'm dreading wayland, because I don't like compositors and I still use old school X11 window managers.

Eventually, yes. Once all pieces are in place, Wine will work directly with Wayland so you won't need XWayland for it anymore.

I don't see any issue with compositors. It's the more advanced way to render things for a DE than previous approaches.

Last edited by Shmerl on 12 November 2023 at 12:02 am UTC

That's good to hear, it's that "XWayland" thing that I don't like hearing about the most.

For gaming, that stuff will need to be able to be pushed out of the way (like the X server with DRI). Pretty hard to disable the compositor when your display is the compositor. That's why I don't like them, and also, it's needless complexity. The way things are right now, with compositing window managers I mean.

I tried to like using Plasma for a while, had to disable the compositor for gaming as at the very least, it was detrimental to performance. Also I found kwin crashed sometimes (seamlessly, reloading itself, reconnecting everything again so you'd hardly notice lol) with the compositor enabled.

I can't imagine my windowing operations being "faster". They already snap to attention faster than the eye can perceive, without any blub blub animation or sync delays.

We'll have to see what happens later, but initially I won't be changing without a lot of kicking and screaming :-)

Last edited by Grogan on 12 November 2023 at 7:38 pm UTC

Wayland addresses such kind of use case with direct scanout. Basically, there is no issue with the need to "push out of the way".

See also: https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2021/12/14/about-gaming-on-wayland.html

Last edited by Shmerl on 12 November 2023 at 7:42 pm UTC

Part of it is me resistant to change. I've been doing things the way I've been doing them for near 25 years. It's hard to get me to try a new brand of coffee, never mind display systems lol

Thanks for that link, it helps. By the time I'm forced to use it, my concerns shouldn't be a problem.

One more problem I have with this approach. What happens when there's a GPU/Display that's not capable of this? With the way things are now, you could use vesafb if nothing else and still have a usable X session.

Not sure what kind of GPU won't be capable of this though. A random guess, but I'd assume any GPU that's capable of Vulkan support should be fine (and you want that if you want gaming either way).

And I think their future plan it to use Vulkan for KWin needs too: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/issues/169

Last edited by Shmerl on 12 November 2023 at 8:37 pm UTC

Oh yeah, I'm talking about old stuff, not gaming hardware.

Though I do have a card incapable of Vulkan in the closet, HD4850 (radeon, not supported by amdgpu) and I had to use it for a few days when my previous video card died. I also have another box I still use that has one of those HD4850 cards in it. I don't play games on it though.

I'm resisting a new build, procrastinating. I mean it when I say I don't like new things. I've got to get ordering parts before the next fad ("AI") drives up prices again.

Last edited by Grogan on 12 November 2023 at 8:45 pm UTC

Supporting very antique GPUs isn't really a good time investment for these developers, but someone was still working on Vulkan support for some pre-Polaris GPUs if I remember correctly. Search for "AMD Terakan".

I'd see it as a fun curiosity, not something developers should rely on though.

Last edited by Shmerl on 12 November 2023 at 8:43 pm UTC