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Gräßlin: Client Side Window Decorations and Wayland

Gräßlin: Client Side Window Decorations and Wayland

Posted Feb 14, 2013 4:00 UTC (Thu) by Serge (guest, #84957)
In reply to: Gräßlin: Client Side Window Decorations and Wayland by Jandar
Parent article: Gräßlin: Client Side Window Decorations and Wayland

> Now I look forward to a distribution having KDE on Wayland.

I guess it's not possible. You may get Wayland in KDE, i.e. KWin from KDE running in X.Org and supporting native Wayland applications. But it's really hard to run KDE on Wayland without X.Org.

Wayland protocol requires compositor to be a bloat monster. To have Wayland-KDE without X.Org you need KWin + Plasma + KScreensaver integrated into a single compositing application.

Are you sure you want that? ;)


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Gräßlin: Client Side Window Decorations and Wayland

Posted Feb 14, 2013 9:34 UTC (Thu) by mgraesslin (subscriber, #78959) [Link]

> Are you sure you want that? ;)
No and that's why we won't do it. KScreenSaver is already dead in 4.10 (kept alive as a zombie for those who really need fancy animations from the 90). Plasma and KWin won't be merged and even in a Wayland world they don't need to be merged.

Sure more things will go into KWin, but that's not a particular new thing. It happened over the last few years more and more that we moved things into the compositor.

Gräßlin: Client Side Window Decorations and Wayland

Posted Feb 14, 2013 10:56 UTC (Thu) by Serge (guest, #84957) [Link]

> KScreenSaver is already dead in 4.10 (kept alive as a zombie for those who really need fancy animations from the 90).

Different people, different tastes. On a private notebook screensavers may be useless. But I've often seen password-protected screensavers in offices.

BTW, have you seen rss-glx or Electric Sheep?

> Plasma and KWin won't be merged and even in a Wayland world they don't need to be merged.

In a Wayland world how can you implement taskbar, systray etc. without either merging plasma into compositor or extending Wayland protocol with the missing parts of X11?

Gräßlin: Client Side Window Decorations and Wayland

Posted Feb 14, 2013 12:06 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

IIRC taskbar, systray &c are NOT part of the X11 protocol, but extensions to it...

Gräßlin: Client Side Window Decorations and Wayland

Posted Feb 14, 2013 13:07 UTC (Thu) by mgraesslin (subscriber, #78959) [Link]

>> KScreenSaver is already dead in 4.10 (kept alive as a zombie for those who really need fancy animations from the 90).

>Different people, different tastes. On a private notebook screensavers may be useless. But I've often seen password-protected screensavers in offices.
It's still possible to lock the screen, just KScreenSaver is not used for that any more.

>> Plasma and KWin won't be merged and even in a Wayland world they don't need to be merged.

>In a Wayland world how can you implement taskbar, systray etc. without either merging plasma into compositor or extending Wayland protocol with the missing parts of X11?
Systray is already D-Bus only (modulo legacy X11embedd and we won't have a wembedd) and for tasks I don't see a problem with having a private protocol between plasma and KWin if that doesn't get standardized. It's not like KWin and Plasma talk quite a lot already with custom protocols in the X11 world.

Gräßlin: Client Side Window Decorations and Wayland

Posted Feb 14, 2013 15:51 UTC (Thu) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]

>Different people, different tastes. On a private notebook screensavers may be useless.
> But I've often seen password-protected screensavers in offices.

Personally, I have very little trust in the ability of X11 environments to securely lock a session. I remember for many years how windows would pop /over/ the screen saver. Or the screen saver crashing, defeating the security it "provided". Or the screen saver taking 30+ seconds to pop up after resume (why is it so slow to start???). Not to mention, under many circumstances the screen saver will never start (one of the Wayland videos from Linux.conf.au actually mentioned this).

Work has been done to improve the situation (I believe an extension was developed to try to solve the first one), but I still find the whole screensaver-as-locking-mechanism to be a poor fit. I'd rather see Linux adopt something akin to what OSX and Windows have been doing for somewhere around a decade, where the lock screen is its own secure context, instead of just a window painted above all the others. I believe the Wayland developers have even spoken about doing something along these lines in the past.

Gräßlin: Client Side Window Decorations and Wayland

Posted Feb 14, 2013 16:55 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Heck, I remember a bug in Compiz when you could just drag screensaver away using the alt-drag feature.

Gräßlin: Client Side Window Decorations and Wayland

Posted Feb 15, 2013 10:26 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

A bug I've noticed with GNOME3 (GNOME-shell) is that the screensaver locking often hasn't taken effect when the machine suspends. So when the machine resumes, you are shown the desktop that was there before, and *then* (sometimes after seconds) it switches to the lock screen. This could be a problem if there was sensitive content on the desktop prior to suspending.

I guess the GNOME3 screen saver isn't synchronised with the suspend process, such that it ensures the screen locking code has run before suspend occurs.

I don't remember either way whether or not this occurred before GNOME3. Maybe it's a long-standing bug, maybe not. If a long-standing Linux suspend / screensaver bug, then I suspect it's more noticeable with GNOME3 because of some slowness somewhere or races that become more apparent with the heavier-weight nature of GNOME shell (RAM wise particularly) - resume takes a lot longer with GNOME shell.

On my multi-monitor, work desktop, I've noticed with GNOME3/Cinnamon the screensaver can sometimes kick in but still leave 1 desktop monitor setup visible - though you can't interact with it. You have to type the password blind to get in. Fun...

Gräßlin: Client Side Window Decorations and Wayland

Posted Feb 15, 2013 10:28 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

It happened before GNOME3, too - it just was less annoying back then.

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