Is Mir the one they built for PureOS? I would imagine since they can garuntee the type of video cards being used in their products they aren’t really hampered by NVIDIA (although I think NVIDIA is just a scapegoat for DE devs), and so it would make sense that Purism would be able to embrace all that moves Linux forward as a whole.
Sorry I didn’t get your question.
PureOS uses gnome-shell and phosh, both are Wayland compositors, one is based on mutter another on wlroots.
Mir was concieved by canonical as an alternative to both wayland and X11, although after major setback from community they re-purposed it to be just another wayland compositor.
A good example is phosh working on both L5 (vivante) and pine (mali) using mesa.
Hey ruff. I probably have the terminology mixed up. I’m not using PureOS currently and didn’t think to check then, but I was not sure if it was using Wayland or X11 still.
I’m curious because the brunt of the linux community seems committed to pushing Wayland forward and Xorg out, but I was curious how Purism felt being the die hard FOSS advocates they are. (Read those sorts usually have strong opinions on the matter.)
Purism wants to get rid of Xorg ASAP. It’s one of the key motivations behind phoc/phosh, being Wayland only and not carry the cruft of the eighties onto the L5.
Wayland is also said to be better for security. You cannot even make a screen shot. You have to ask the compositor to give you one.
It isn’t an ideological question. The X.org dev team basically decided that it was better to restart from scratch with Wayland rather than keep extending X.org’s code to create X12. X11 is basically in maintenance mode and has no future. This article and this one explain why X.org decided to develop Wayland.
Wayland has major performance and security benefits over X11. I got 35% better OpenGL benchmarks in my i5 laptop just from switching GNOME from X11 to Wayland. It is a long and painful transition, but necessary if Linux wants to be able to compete with Windows, OS X, Android and iOS in terms of graphics and gaming.
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This is precisely how I understood it. Wayland also greatly simplifies the graphics stack, and puts most of the responsibility on the application (as it should be IMHO).
Screenshots are one lament I hear over and over again, but this hasn’t been a problem for me using the screenshot application provided by Gnome.
People say Nvidia has been a turd with how they’ve made a competing standard, but this isn’t really the case. It was never Wayland’s responsibility to create this standard. Wayland doesn’t care if you are using EGL or GBM. That is something for others to figure out and has nothing to do with Wayland.
Within a VM, Wayland is wonky. This just has to do with Workstation I’d imagine. But on the Librem 13, Wayland has been SUPER stable and fast. I’m very pleased with it. Glad to Purism is working with the future and not the past.
Thanks Amos for the link to the article!
Edit: Turns out, everyone thought this had to do with 3d acceleration in the VM settings provided by Workstation, but I think it is actually the drag and drop functionality that workstation offers between host and guest.
PureOS has defaulted to using Wayland for a number of years. For instance check out this thread from almost three years ago where we talk about how to deal with a monitor that doesn’t pass along precise EDID to the kernel, which wayland depends on to know of valid modes it can use. Overriding it requires going back to X11:
Hmm, that is interesting. I’ve always noticed much better VM performance through PureOS. I always attributed it to just not having as much junk in the build. But it makes total sense that it was Wayland the whole time.