X and SteamOS

Posted Sep 17, 2014 20:13 UTC (Wed) by jonquark (guest, #45554)
In reply to: X and SteamOS by Plagman
Parent article: X and SteamOS

Thanks. Questions is at 31:30. The speakers take is that Wayland won't give them much as they are so OpenGL focussed and has the potential to break their existing games. (So we're unlikely to see a Wayland-SteamOS in the very near future)

X and SteamOS

Posted Sep 17, 2014 21:04 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (11 responses)

I for one am concerned about their lack of investigation and curiosity about Wayland, it seems to me that the best way to make sure that Wayland doesn't break their games is to spend some small amount of time testing and playing with it in the lab and forwarding bug reports or patches upstream. The worst time to find out about any Wayland problems is after it start shipping by default, especially if there are architectural problems which can be easily fixed now but become difficult to fix later.

If there are things which Wayland can make better and easier for SteamOS, now would be the time to find out and get started.

X and SteamOS

Posted Sep 18, 2014 7:37 UTC (Thu) by deepfire (guest, #26138) [Link]

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of what you said.

It would be very very sad, indeed, if Valve doesn't see that..

X and SteamOS

Posted Sep 18, 2014 8:22 UTC (Thu) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (3 responses)

I am also concerned. If what Linus is saying( that SteamOS will be the one true backwards compatibility story and bring domination to the Linux desktop) is true than it is very bad that SteamOS seems stuck with X.
Could be really bad for Wayland.

X and SteamOS

Posted Sep 18, 2014 10:24 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link] (1 responses)

Our X11 compatibility has to be perfect anyway, so not a lot of difference from the status quo there. Obviously I'd prefer for them to be shipping a native Wayland platform, not least as it would make all the hacks to X11 redundant, but I know that they've thought through the tradeoffs internally and come to a reasoned conclusion, even if it's not the one I'd like.

X and SteamOS

Posted Sep 18, 2014 17:35 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I wonder if it makes any sense for them to build a SteamOS Wayland compositor that includes the X server in the compositor itself, so it's essentially a multi-protocol deal, with the Wayland libraries for hardware enablement but able to run existing X11 games without additional round-trips between processes, maybe do-able because SteamOS doesn't need to run more than one game at a time so doesn't need to run multiple X servers under Wayland.

X and SteamOS

Posted Sep 22, 2014 1:05 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

I've yet to be convinced that Wayland, like systemd, isn't merely more evidence that it is *too* possible to break *nix by trying to turn it into Windows.

X and SteamOS

Posted Sep 19, 2014 2:45 UTC (Fri) by fdrs (subscriber, #85858) [Link]

We must remember that, first of all, they must finish their product and ship. I dont think that now is the time for them to take a look at it yet. Their first steam machines will be X, and that makes sense now. After they ship, then it's time to look at it.

X and SteamOS

Posted Sep 19, 2014 10:32 UTC (Fri) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link] (1 responses)

SteamOS being its own distribution won't be affected by the defaults of others.

Steam on (regular) Linux will be affected, but, it being much more niche, maybe Valve foresees no big pressure when it breaks. If it breaks at all.

X and SteamOS

Posted Sep 19, 2014 13:47 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

yeah, that is nice in theory, but it usually doesn't work out that way in the longer term. If you use something nobody else does, it will start breaking - because nobody notices. Think about Mesa, drivers, input devices perhaps... Once apps start to appear exclusively written on Wayland and never tested on X, things will break.

X and SteamOS

Posted Sep 25, 2014 6:55 UTC (Thu) by Olosta (guest, #98669) [Link] (2 responses)

Keep in mind that "OpenGL focused" actually means: we want proprietary NVIDIA and AMD drivers.

Wayland has nothing to offer here yet, the SteamOS project is already turning into something that is moving slower than expected. It's understandable to not hook with another project that might not be ready soon and risking other delays.

That's sad because Wayland Drivers and Wayland Games is a chicken and eggs problem that could be handled by a Valve/GPU vendor collaboration.

I also think that this SteamOS/Steam on Linux team is actually not very big, I don't know if the actual number is know, but the entire Steam Machine (HW and SW) team was 40 people in late 2013[1]. That does not leave a lot of room for a team of people not directly working on the product.

[1]: http://blogs.seattletimes.com/brierdudley/2013/11/04/a-gl...

X and SteamOS

Posted Sep 25, 2014 17:16 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

So maybe the right answer is to see if an interested party is willing to look at their compositor and X patches which are available (just the Steam client app is not) and see how one would replicate their needs in Wayland. That's a lot of volunteering which may not be palatable, there isn't necessarily an itch being scratched or any benefit to the developer doing the work.

X and SteamOS

Posted Sep 25, 2014 22:28 UTC (Thu) by filipjoelsson (guest, #2622) [Link]

Err, excuse me? No itch being scratcehed? I do believe there is a game or two that a developer might be itching to play. I'm not a Wayland hacker, but that does actually sound like a fun project to tinker with! :-)