Notices by Ivan Molodetskikh (yalter@mastodon.online)

Dear god how many layers of YAML is Ubuntu on, why is subiquity YAML generating cloud-init YAML generating netplan YAML generating sd-nd/NM. How Do I Escape

Interactive window moving, laptop lid and tablet mode switch binds, mouse and touchpad scroll speed setting in today's niri v0.1.10 release!

https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.10

Also, niri-ipc is now on crates.io, but keep in mind that it will not be Rust-semver-stable: https://crates.io/crates/niri-ipc

#wayland #smithay #rust #niri

By the way! I'll be giving a talk at RustCon in Moscow on December, 6! :ablobcatwave:

https://rustcon.ru/

Wherein I will briefly describe what a Wayland compositor is, and then show several testing and profiling workflows that I've been using to keep niri stable, robust and performant.

(The invitation to submit a talk was completely unexpected, guess niri found its way into the right eyes. 😅)

There will be a recording, though in Russian.

#rust #niri

somehow this touch moving under stationary pointer works better than i expected

(yes trying to do a precise left click with an elbow was difficult)

Suddenly, @drakulix showcasing the Cosmic session running on, among other compositors, niri! On the big screen at the Ubuntu Summit 😄

https://github.com/Drakulix/cosmic-ext-extra-sessions

#niri

Added a bit of rubberbanding before the window is "dragged out" of the layout. Should help avoid unintended layout changes.

Along with a few more fixes I did, I think interactive move should be good to merge? It's not 100% perfect and jank free, but I'm fairly sure I got all the important things done. Will give it some more testing.

#niri

Made interactive move work on touch (and resize too while I was at it), didn't need that many changes actually

#niri

Over the past 2 weeks I've been slowly but surely working on the interactive move niri PR [1] by @pajn. It's already got me to fix quite a bit of tech debt in the layout code, which is cool.

The PR is still rough around the edges, but mostly works, and I switched to running the branch on my own systems to give it thorough testing.

(also no, this is not the Floating Layer yet, though it's a good step towards that)

Attaching a video of what it looks like rn

[1]: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/pull/547

#niri

A month has passed and a number of important additions have landed in niri, so here's a second alpha release: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0-alpha.2

Highlights include relative-pointer and pointer-constraints which let Xwayland masterfully handle 3D games mouse look, and popup unconstraining which prevents popups from opening off-screen. I actually made popups place within their window with some padding, which looks quite nice.

#rust #wayland

The development pace had slowed down a little, so I've tagged an alpha release for niri: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0-alpha.1

Also made a COPR for the occasion, if you're on Fedora: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/yalter/niri/

Tagged niri v0.1.0-alpha.3 with multi-GPU support, borders and other improvements! Multi-GPU was one of the bigger things I wanted to get done before going out of alpha so I guess I'm slowly getting there.

https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0-alpha.3

Aaahhhhhh another difficult refactor down and niri now does multi-GPU! By which I mean that monitors plugged into secondary GPUs will now light up and work. All the screenshot UI and screencast portal stuff also works just fine. Wouldn't be able to do this as quickly without Smithay's MultiRenderer support and lots of help from @drakulix 😄

I went for the easier strat of always rendering on the primary GPU, but you can also pick render GPU dynamically, which apparently cosmic-comp does, cool!

I added text rendering to niri using pangocairo, which turned out to be surprisingly simple. It basically "just worked". This unlocks a lot of features, beginning with a hotkey overlay, which should help people get started (suggested by @ju).

I've tagged niri 0.1.0-beta.1 which includes the overlay along with many more improvements: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0-beta.1

I'm now happy enough with the feature set so in a week I'll release 0.1.0. Time to finally catch up on other projects I've been neglecting.

Turns out that if you implement xdg-decoration in your compositor but tell clients that you want CSD, then SDL2 + libdecor clients will break due to a bug. The bug is already fixed, but the fix hasn't made it to any SDL2 release yet, let alone all the runtimes and vendored copies.

Hiding xdg-decoration from clients it is then

#wayland #sdl

I'm pretty excited to finally be able to "release" niri soon but god I'm glad I set aside a beta week for bugfixes. We already stumbled upon and fixed several issues

visual tests are such a lifesaver, so glad I stole that idea from osu!lazer

Before adding more animations into niri, I'm making a "visual tests" application. It shows a set of hardcoded scenarios which I can quickly go through and visually check that everything looks right.

It uses solid color rectangles as "windows", but otherwise this is the real niri layout code and real niri + Smithay rendering code, drawing to a GTK GL area.

For example, on the last test you can see that my offscreen code currently clips CSD shadows (during the open animation).

Well, I'm happy to release the first stable version of niri, my scrollable-tiling compositor: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0

Very satisfied with the current state, even though there's plenty left to do. Took a lot of time and work but I've certainly learned a lot, and I'm glad to have contributed a bit to Smithay too!

#wayland #rust #smithay

A few latency tests before release confirm that niri's still doing good (at least on idle; I don't have any repaint scheduling yet but on idle it doesn't matter). The compositors are pretty much within the noise threshold from each other. Except some sway fullscreen bug and Shell losing one frame somewhere.

Just implemented something I've had in mind for a while: compositor-side blocking out of windows from screencasts! The compositor is the perfect place to do this since it can replace the window contents in the render tree, which will work fine with any kind of overlapping, transparency, etc. AND it will work with anything that records the screen through the portal, be it OBS or video meeting, or whatever.