XWayland-Run 0.0.3 Adds Support For KDE's KWin

[phoronix]

Phoronix: XWayland-Run 0.0.3 Adds Support For KDE's KWin

Since last year Red Hat engineers have been developing xwayland-run and wlheadless-run for spawning X11 clients within its own dedicated XWayland rootful instance and for running a Wayland client on a set of supported Wayland headless compositors, respectively. The intent is on improving the Wayland headless experience as well as being able to get classic X11 sessions up and running via rootful XWayland. Out today is the XWayland-Run v0.0.3 release...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Run-0.0.3

[endrebjorsvik]

I have a suspicion that RH is doing all this rootful XWayland stuff to ensure support for a whole lot of EDA software ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electr...ign_automation ) which might be hard to port to Wayland. A whole lot of these tools are ancient tools (90's UNIX stuff) with horrendous GUI, outdated toolkits, and insane licensing cost. RHEL is very often a preferred platform for these tools, because RHEL has very long support. The vendors I know are in the process of phasing in RHEL8 at the moment, just in time for EoL of RHEL7.

[Quackdoc]

Lately i've been playing around using cosmic-comp + lxqt/openbox using xwayland-run, it's a fun toy, and I think it could be a good path forward for those who hate xserver. Just make sure to run "env WAYLAND_DISPLAY= startlxqt" to unset wayland or else some of your apps will start on the host compositor

[Danny3]

Great job!
Kwin and Plasma are great and in the future will be more and more popular with all the future it has accumulated and will continue to accumulate.
Honestly, besides Vulkan support, I don't even know what's still missing, now that it has color management and HDR support too.

[milo_hoffman]

Once we all move to Wayland, this will provide a nice way to have fun and bring up an old X11 desktop environment for fun and memories.

[Quackdoc]

Once we all move to Wayland, this will provide a nice way to have fun and bring up an old X11 desktop environment for fun and memories.

I have a feeling it will be necessary for some folk still, but if xwayland can replace xserver, thats good enough too

[MrCooper]

I have a suspicion that RH is doing all this rootful XWayland stuff to ensure support for a whole lot of EDA software ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electr...ign_automation ) which might be hard to port to Wayland.

Rootful Xwayland is neither necessary nor very useful for running individual applications. Rootless Xwayland is fine for that.

The main use case for rootful Xwayland is running a nested X session. Some of the recent improvements have been in the direction of allowing to use Xwayland on top of a lightweight Wayland compositor as a replacement for Xorg.

I have a feeling it will be necessary for some folk still, but if xwayland can replace xserver, thats good enough too

Xwayland is part of the xserver tree, just like Xorg. Presumably you mean the latter.

[endrebjorsvik]

Rootful Xwayland is neither necessary nor very useful for running individual applications. Rootless Xwayland is fine for that.

It is not uncommon that these EDA programs consists of multiple unrelated processes, with a plethora of different windows. And these processes sometimes communicate heavily with each other. For instance the waveform viewer is automatically updated by the result browser. Or you can pick a signal in the schematic from the result browser. Or multiple layout editors showing the same cursor in multiple windows showing the same layout. Or an error browser highlighting errors in the layout viewer.
I have a suspicion that these kind of connected windows might rely on some X11 mechanisms. But I could be wrong.

[Quackdoc]

Xwayland is part of the xserver tree, just like Xorg. Presumably you mean the latter.

I meant specifically and only for replacing running x11 desktop environments as a standalone thing.

[anda_skoa]

I have a suspicion that these kind of connected windows might rely on some X11 mechanisms. But I could be wrong.

Not impossible but I have worked on similar multi-process systems in other industries and they always communicated on a level below the UI.

Most because they also had Windows versions, even they were only used for sales people demoing the software to potential customers.
Some because they supported running on multiple machines.