this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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This looks awesome.
Looks like it could be a very good alternative to mutter and kwin.
Questions:
Thank you :)
Yes, I believe I could create a renderer using Vulkan without much difficulty. Initially, I chose GLES2 for compatibility reasons.
Yes, only the decorations with macOS style.
Well, that's a compositor (which uses COMO) and Louvre is a library, so sure, I could collaborate with COMO.
Cuarzo Software is just a name I use to release my open source projects, it’s not a real company. Everyone is welcome to suggest ideas or contribute to the development of these projects, and I genuinely appreciate that.
If time allows me, of course.
Absolutely, you're free to build a compositor however you like, whether it's in 2D, 3D, or any other style. Essentially, it's akin to creating a game, with window applications acting as textures.
Those are compositors and Louvre is just a library, so I don't know how to compare them. As you noticed, the compositor in the video is just one of the examples I made with Louvre.
If we are talking ideas, I would propose the following:
I know dropping xwayland and opengl is unpopular, but this is where things are going. It's on the gnome Todo sometime because as far as I read, there is development for mutter to be built totally without xorg support. Plus they recently switched gtk4 to use New vulkan rendered by default.
Another question came to my mind: how is video processing handled? There were some changes in Mutter and/or gtk4 so it would be efficient, any chance for louvre to have it?. E.g. https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-46-Beta-Released
I agree, all the apps I use run natively on Wayland, but I think there will always be some legacy X11 apps that won't get ported. So, I think I'll implement it, but it is definitely not a priority.
I think I can just add support for Vulkan. There is no need to get rid of GLES as it increases the range of supported devices.
I know that Linux Mint already has support for Wayland. I am not sure which library or base compositor they are using, but I am always willing to support anyone using Louvre. Right now, I want to focus on developing my own compositor, which I'll name Crystals.
That's an important feature, which I'll add at some point.
Looks very interesting! I wonder how it works, so I definitely will check it out.
Why?
Currently, the only type of buffers that are directly scanned out are cursors. I want to add an API to allow the use of other types of buffers soon. It is a bit complicated because overlay planes are very hardware-dependent and limited, and they support a few specific formats/modifiers. So, you also need to negotiate that with the client and so on.
While I understand the need for legacy, I also think at some point legacy should be left alone. If it is really needed for some old app to run, VM should do fine. I don't think missing xorg is ever going to be an issue in 2025+ (well, Electron apps maybe). Yet added and not used features (or seldom used features) is offset with future maintenance burden and/or security issues for no good reason.
This also applies to OpenGL comment. Every code path introduces a maintenance burden. While support of more devices is good, supported devices are super old in this case and the question is - is it worth it? Vulkan drivers should either way be in a better state.
Is super cool, there is a presentation in one of the conferences about it. Architecture is explained somewhere in the docs. Anyway, if you do implement it - this would be a good alternative to https://guacamole.apache.org
Who knows, maybe it would be a money opportunity.
It's not Microsoft, but actually an open source community running open source forge. Also, it's way faster to use in browser.
Regarding Xwayland, I think so, but with respect to OpenGL + Vulkan, I don't see it as that complicated. It's a matter of configuring contexts and updating Louvre's higher level APIs for buffer allocation and rendering.
Oh, so it basically displays a remote window manager in the browser? For a moment, I thought it was running the compositor directly inside the browser with extensions or something like that, hahaha.
I see. Well, to be honest, I am quite comfortable with GitHub and its features like actions, discussions, etc., and I don't really care if Microsoft owns it as long as it's free. But thanks for the suggestion.
I saw it basically months ago, so don't remember 100%. To not say the wrong thing, you can read about the architecture here: https://greenfield.app/pages/design/
Also, here is a video. The dev demonstrated it's fast enough for gaming https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3219-greenfield-wayland-in-the-browser-an-update/
In simple usage OpenGL can perform identical to Vulkan. A compositor with little complex rendering won’t change.