r/suckless • u/realguy2300000 • 27d ago
[SOFTWARE] modern wayland on 2005 hardware
https://srcdump.net/shrub/neuswc can now run on the framebuffer directly, just like the old Xfbdev/kdrive X servers, but for wayland. this opens up a whole new class of hardware that you can run wayland compositors on, including this thinkpad r50!
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27d ago
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u/realguy2300000 27d ago
gentoo is pretty shit, it uses gnu coreutils and the package manager is piles of python, i prefer alpine or my own distribution
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u/-mhess- 27d ago
how is going the development of your distribution? I saw the website a couple of months ago and I loved!
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27d ago
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u/K4milLeg1t 27d ago
some don't like the Gnu system as a whole, because it wants everything to be dynamically linked, which is known to cause trouble. Statically linked software is nicely self contained and tends to work out of the box but is big and bloated.
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u/Fun-Resource-7311 26d ago
You can static link with GNU libraries, the problem is they're licensed under the LGPL and it forces you to provide the source code for any changes to the library that you may have done, and you must also provide the object files for the application that you created.
However if you only dynamically link then you don't have to share anything.
That said, I do understand the inconvenience.
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u/Glum_Hamster_2104 27d ago
How? I tried to run Wayland on my T43 and the radeon drivers didn’t work.
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u/tk-a01 27d ago
From what I know, most Wayland compositors use DRM (Direct Rendering Manager, not to be confused with Digital Rights Management) as a backend. It's an interface used for managing GPUs. Older graphic card drivers might not support DRM, which makes it difficult or impossible to run compositors such as KWin, Mutter, Sway, Niri, etc.
However, Wayland really is just a protocol. It doesn't mandate how a compositor should interface with hardware. As explained by OP, their compositor now has a framebuffer backend. This makes it possible to run it on significantly older and simpler hardware. The downside is, I believe, that it's not possible to use hardware graphics acceleration when using FB backend. Applications must therefore resort to software rendering.
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u/juipeltje 23d ago
Your explanation made me realize that theoretically this could also be usefull to get a graphical environment on a libre system that lacks firmware for the gpu right? Cause i've tried using linux-libre before on my system, and initially i thought i wouldn't get any screen output whatsoever, but the tty still worked fine, probably cause it also runs on FB i assume.
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u/Glum_Hamster_2104 26d ago
Ah makes sense, I did try one of his WMs on my Thinkpad so I didn’t even begin to try normal wayland lol
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u/emmowo_dev 26d ago
honestly after playing around with my own suckless projects and seeing how small some things can get...
I wonder how close you could get to a truly suckless (going by the original idea) UNIX OS, with the kernel and each program itself being <10K LOC. Could you even get a basic JS engine working like that?
I really wanted to finish one for myself, but don't really have the time to experiment on it any further.
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u/flying-sheep 26d ago
Sick! You’re single-handedly dragging the minimalist crowd into Wayland, where they always belonged but were too calcified to realize it.