I started the video thinking "huh, that's neat I guess" and then I was more and more impressed as the video went on. This would be pretty revolutionary in how it could change your workflow. It's the kind of feature that would get me to switch from Gnome to KDE if it was only supported fully in the latter.
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Very similar experience. He did a good job of building to the "Ok but why does this matter" aspect of it all
It's not just about crashes. You can switch compositor without logging out or save save the full state of an app to disk to 'sleep' the app if you are short of memory. I'm sure people will think of other possibilities too.
I'm a big fan of high availability software rollouts. It would be interesting to see this do a live update where you spin up the new compositor, run some test on it, if it passes hand off, if that succeds kill the old one. Minimal disruption for the end user.
Kind of neat for desktop users, but for kiosks or other always running GUIs its super cool to me
Valve should get on this for gamescope, imagine Steam Deck doing a system update without closing your game.
The Steam Deck is immutable aka image based and I am not sure if Steam isn't part of that image too or what effects that would have but it definitely would be a cool feature!
For SteamOS this would manifest as seamless transitions between gamescope and desktop mode, which atm needs you to log out of one session to log into the other.
Exactly a great use case!
Hell, the current Plasma and its compositor are far more stable in Wayland than Gnome. It amazes me that Wayland can actually be usable when using a desktop that is stable.
Gnome is pretty stable for me, unless extensions are involved, because then it's unusably buggy.
The problem is that Gnome vanilla is too vanilla, even compared to MacOS. Extensions are an absolute must for Gnome to be a functional DE. But as you said, once extensions are involved, it becomes buggy.
It is almost impossible to have an usable gnome without extensions, at least for most of us.
I've been maining Wayland ever since the big push for fixes in kwin-wayland (what is that, like 6 or 8 months ago now?)
It's been a little bumpy but no major complaints, and very solid otherwise. I can still play VR games, even!
With all the Linux on mobile work, one thing I was wondering about is how Android (and iOS too, I think) can just stop apps running in the background if it thinks they won't be opened any time soon, to save energy, and how apps must therefore be programmed to be able to handle that gracefully. There has been a lot of focus on making apps adapt to the screen size, but not so much on making them save energy like that - I wonder if this work could enable that in one go for whole classes of apps?
This doesn't seem so insignificant anymore.
It's a nice feature in theory. In practice, the sort of crash this guards against happens to me no more than once a year. Often more rarely. And I'm including all my machines in this anecdata - my personal desktop, laptop, corporate workstation, with Intel and NVIDIA GPUs in the mix. 😄
I believe it's possible to turn this into a very robust hibernation feature.
In the video he provides additional use cases outside of crashes. If I'm understanding it correctly, one is the ability to seamlessly transition across and/or run multiple DE's in real-time, and the second is reimagining app loading by being able to restore apps from the disk as if they never left RAM. Someone please correct me if I misinterpreted this
In addition this feature makes debugging and developing KWin much easier because you can just restart the compositor without interrupting your workflow.
Well, that's probably because you're running XOrg.
Badum-bum-tish I'll be here all night.
Hahaha. You know what, I thought that'd be the case but I've been on Wayland on my Framework since Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and I'm baffled at the stability of the stack. I thought it'd be a shit show, and it wasn't. I guess a decade of development didn't go in vain. 😄
This would be an incredible QoL improvement for gaming, at least until all compositors reach feature parity. Imagine using your preferred compositor for everyday tasks, quick-switching to another one that supports VRR and/or HDR while gaming, and then back again, all without logging out and logging in again.
There was also a talk at GUADEC that discussed this exact feature but even more fleshed out, I believe for GNOME. It was reminiscent of iOS or Android’s sleep and resume capabilities for apps.