This Wayland Change Will Improve Linux Forever

Key Takeaways

while it's certainly very rare if you have a well-made desktop one of the most annoying things to happen on Linux even more annoying than your entire system crashing is your desktop crashing losing all of the windows you have open losing any unsaved work in the blink of an eye now X11 has traditionally had a way to recover from this bringing all your windows back without ever batting an eye but over on the Wayland side if you're wailing compositor crashes everything gets taken down with it everything is gone no questions asked but it doesn't have to be that way what if there was a way to bring everything back as if nothing had ever happened well there isn't in the main projects but it is being worked on this right here is a gtk demo ignore the fact that it's being done on KDE these are all gtk4 windows and in just a second here he will demonstrate or sort of simulate what it would be like to crash the desktop and when that happens everything is going to come back oh no problem at all and this is the same demo being done but this time with a bunch of tutty applications instead and the exact same result is going to occur in just a moment when he causes the crash to happen right here when everything dies it's all going to come back as if nothing happened this work is primarily being done by David Edmondson and back in 2021 he was going around having talks about this calling it a compositor handoff this is an xdc 2021 addressing whale and robustness and the video we were just looking at was from Academy 2021 with the exact same title he is a developer on KDE and one of the plasma maintainers but he's not solely doing this to improve KDE this is intended to improve the general Wayland experience and he is doing this work as a contractor for valve aiming to improve the general robustness of the Linux desktop and Weyland as we move further and further into it the idea is very simple the implementation maybe not so much so this is his words from various different write-ups make clients survive the compositor crashing or being manually restarted improving overall robustness and reducing potential data loss if the compositor crashes clients can try to reconnect to the previously used socket and resend window State and buffers typical toolkits have all of this information at hand already and can take care of it transparently to application code if the compositor does not support the reconnect mechanism if it exit crashes or in the case of a logout where you support a compositor cleanly closes applications will exit as before applications themselves require no changes unless they do low-level Wayland work it has been tested with a wide range of applications from Advanced Ides to video editors to games and that's the most important thing if every single application had to implement this themselves it would never happen it has to be there at the toolkit level so everybody can just go and use it now this way of approaching crashing is a lot more akin to the way your audio server functions so when something like pulse audio or pipeware crashes and then restarts which I've dealt with often enough sometimes it's my fault for writing really bad Lewis scripts sometimes it's a legitimate problem it doesn't just sit around doing nothing in most cases it will reconnect to the application and audio just starts playing fine like it should but those videos that I've showed you are not just supported by work at the GUI framework level there's also work to be done at places like the compositor level this merge request introduces an API for clients to hand off between compositors literally providing the mechanism for Windows to reconnect to the compositor now the way that I understand it which might be a misunderstanding but I don't think it is is it's not necessarily just say you're using KDE you have all of these windows open it crashes you reopen KDE all the windows are back if I understand it correctly you should be able to go between different desktops that support this feature and have all of the windows follow you assuming that either your desktop crashes or like they're doing in the demo forcing the crash to happen now as it currently stands we have this open merger quest for Weyland we have an over merge request over on the QT side this one has a merge conflict we have an open merger Quest over on the gtk side an open merge Quest over on the X Weyland side we have an open merger Quest over on the Mesa side there is a merger already done on sdl and nothing has been done over on lib Decor yet so right now pretty much everything is still open and still open for discussion and whether you know certain projects are going to want to include it really this only ends up mattering if it becomes a standard across everything if your gsdk windows open but not your QT Windows maybe it works great on your gnome for example but then Katie is just you know sitting there doing nothing but the people becomes a serious problem for are those using a window manager like I do I use a mix and match of QT and gtk if some of the windows closed and some didn't I just would never use the feature now according to this developer the changes are relatively non-invasive throughout these libraries so hopefully it goes well and everything gets merged but over on VR the gtk side over on The Gnome toolkit side which was one of these tabs it had sort of the most gnome response you will ever see this is a good faith feature being worked on by a contractor generally trying to improve the Linux desktop and most of the work is being done by this developer and the first response after some technical criticism which is totally fair needs some tests needs to handle implicit grab fine whatever is this here I should point out that I think this is an absolutely stupid idea on a conceptual level and he goes on from there to give a technical explanation as to why he thinks that is the case but I don't know why he ever thought that starting it like this was a good idea this led to a bit of back and forth about whether it's a good idea whether it's not a good idea the developer said I disagree on the technical comment I've elaborated on them below they ultimately I'm not a gtk Dev I've been doing this across a bunch of toolkits so wanted to help with gtk with patterns proved to work well in if you want it great I'm happy to do the work if not that's up to you and eventually after some back and forth the dev did ultimately agree with him but one of the other contributors had this to say no wonder some people have a bad experience contributing to gnome if this kind of response is acceptable on any level I'm just going to close this thread it's not worth anyone's time responding if there are things to address Hidden in there it better to just open new threads for those issues and the guy who started the thread said stupid idea is such a common idiom in the English language that I didn't even consider anyone would consider it not acceptable let alone on any level it should be pretty obvious that if someone submits work to you the first thing you say shouldn't basically be your dumb like that's not a good way to start a conversation started with the criticism and just leave that comment out altogether but as I said earlier this Dev did eventually get on board or at least no longer thinks it's a stupid idea that you should never be considered and from there that's pretty much the end of our story the most recent work that was being done was from about two or three months ago from there pretty much all that's been done is just making sure these commits can still be merged keeping it tracking with the more recent commits but nothing has been merged so far and no extra work from what I've seen has been done on these repos so as it stands it's kind of just up in the air what's really happening with this honestly I would love for this to be merged and make its way over to W or Roots some of these smaller WL roots compositors are a little bit crashy like when one random person makes a compositor is not gonna be as stable as gnome or as stable as KDE and sometimes things can happen usually they get better over time but better over time is not great for a production system where you want to be getting work done so hopefully this gets merged and hopefully this just becomes standard on the Linux desktop let me know your thoughts in the comment section down below do you care about your compositor crashing and bringing your windows back do you even use a computer do you know what a computer is why are you watching this video I would love to know so if you like the video go and like the video If you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here go check out my patreon scrub star and liberape linked down below that's gonna be it for me and I'm out [Music]