[Rd] Wayland Display Support in R Plot

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 29/10/2023 4:20 p.m., Simon Urbanek wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 30/10/2023, at 8:38 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd using 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 | edd using debian.org
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel