On 29/10/2023 4:20 p.m., Simon Urbanek wrote:


On 30/10/2023, at 8:38 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <e...@debian.org> wrote:


On 30 October 2023 at 07:54, Paul Murrell wrote:
| I am unaware of any Wayland display support.
|
| One useful way forward would be an R package that provides such a device
| (along the lines of 'Cairo', 'tikzDevice', et al)

As I understand it, it is a protocol, and not a device.


Well, X11 is a protocol, not a device, either.

Wayland is a lot worse, since it doesn't really do much at all - the clients 
are fully responsible for drawing (doesn't even support remote connections).

Given that Wayland is essentially a "dumb" framebuffer, probably the easiest 
way would be to take Cairo and add a libwayland back-end. Cairo is already modular so 
it's relatively straight-forward to add a new back-end to it (I'd probably just copy 
xlib-backend.c and replace X11 calls with libwayland calls since the low-level design is 
the same).

However, that is limited only to devices, so you would still run R code in the 
shell (or other GUI that may or may not by Wayland-based). Given that Wayland 
is so minimal, you'd need some GUI library for anything beyond that - so you 
may was well just run a Wayland-based browser and be done with it saving you 
all the bother (oh, right, that's called RStudio ;)).

One package that may be worth adding Wayland backend to is rgl so you get 
OpenGL on Wayland - I'd simply re-write it to use GLFW so it works across all 
platforms and including Wayland.

I looked into using GLFW a while ago, but it seemed too hard to do without other really major changes to rgl, so that's not going to happen soon (unless someone else does it).

I think the issue was that it was hard to get it to work with the ancient OpenGL 1.2 that rgl uses. I forget whether it was just hard or actually impossible.

I am slowly working towards having rgl use newer OpenGL versions, but I don't expect this to be done for quite a while.

Duncan Murdoch

Cheers,
Simon



Several Linux distributions have long defaulted to it, so we already should
have thousands of users. While 'not X11' it provides a compatibility layer
and should be seamless.

I think I needed to fall back to X11 for a particular applications (likely
OBS) so my session tells me (under Settings -> About -> Windowing System) I
am still running X11. I'll check again once I upgrade from Ubuntu 23.04 to
Ubuntu 23.10

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(protocol) for more.

Dirk

--
dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org

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