Linux

48328 readers

69 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

252

KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

181 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of "Wayland breaking everything" isn't really accurate.

"In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!"

Nate's Original Blog Post

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

OR:

Nvidia will feel enough pressure (likely from the ML / HPC space?) to provide open kernelspace support that they'll actually make that happen.

Which... Has already happened.

Nvidia took a lot of the kernelspace logic that used to be in their proprietary driver, re-architected their GPUs to move that logic into a firmware blob (GSP).

And last year they released a completely Free driver that intefaces with GSP.

This allowed Nouveau developers to finally access critical features like power management (which were basically behind a wall of DRM, as Nvidia used legal and technical measures to lock Nouveau out of their firmware).

Now Nouveau has a new shader compiler, Vulcan support is growing rapidly, and people like me will soon prefer the Mesa stack for Nvidia over Nvidia's own drivers.

And you can bet that Nouveau will work great with all of the Wayland compositors.

This is really the exact wrong point in history to be making the argument you're trying to make 🤣.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Wow you got that backwards. They don't do any of that for the sake of Nouveau or Vulkan or Wayland or whatever. They don't care what people use their open scraps for.

They open up the minimum they can get away with because it's ultimately meaningless — their proprietary stuff is still hidden away and it's not like you can use the parts they open with anything else.

This, btw, applies to AMD and Intel too. The only choice you get with proprietary hardware that you have to use (like GPUs) is whose dick you want to suck. They're not your friend and they won't let community pressure then into decisions.