Tk Source Code

To remain first-class citizen under Linux and alikes, support for Wayland is substantial. While XWayland can serve for some time, it shows Tcl/Tk in a bad light. Ignoring Wayland is not (hopefully) a final solution anyway.

The most recent undroidwishen with Wayland support are

  http://www.ch-werner.de/LUCK/undroidwish-wayland-linux64
  http://www.ch-werner.de/LUCK/undroidwish-wayland-raspi
  http://www.ch-werner.de/LUCK/undroidwish-termux-aarch64

where the first is for x86_64 glibc Linux, the second for
32 bit ARM (e.g. Raspberry), and the latter for termux
on 64 bit ARM Android phones, tablets, and settop boxen.
The ARM binaries are rather untested.

Be aware, that the undroidwish approach simulates an X server
as a single Wayland window. Within that single window there's
one wish/tcl process which can have one ore more Tk applications
by using child interps or threads.

The single Wayland window comes without decorations on a Gnome
desktop (the unholy CSD (client side decorations) story) so is
best served in fullscreen mode (-sdlfullscreen on the command line).

Perhaps someone may test Wayland in Undroidwish:

https://www.androwish.org/index.html/wiki?name=undroidwish

Take care, Harald

> Really? What about xterm and friends? What about not so popular other toolkits?

Sorry, no offence... I was just talking about my system (qt, gtk3+ and soon Java).

> BTW and finally, what's bad to have Tk playing sound with XWayland?

AFAIK there are things X Server / XWayland just can't handle well. For example I think there are problems if you have a multi monitor setup with different resolutions an/or non-integer scales set. Applications using XWayland will look blurry (IntelliJ on XWayland has this problem but is fixed with its pure Wayland implementation).


> Is X Wayland deprecated?  If not, it remains a viable option for Tk, as I’m sure it does for other toolkits as well.

It's not deprecated, AFAIK it's meant as interim solution to be used until toolkits/applications migrated to Wayland.

Look, I just wanted to check what your thoughts/plans is about Wayland support, because as far as I can seen all Linux distributions are transitioning over and X server development dead more or less. XWayland will work for now, but like said there might be problems coming up in modern setups that you can't workaround with XWayland.

Also from "marketing" perspective - maybe not now but in 5 years - people might be inclined to not use tk in future because it's not running in pure Wayland (it might look like the toolkit is not maintained well).

Xwayland is an X server for running X clients under Wayland.

I am not sure what X wayland is.  This is what I do know:

I have a couple of Ubuntu 24.04 systems.  They use wayland by default.  In
PyOpenGL you can run OpenGL.setPlatform('x11') and have your openGL rendering
done with X11, not wayland.  (And this is a good thing because it doesn't
work correctly in wayland.)  I don't see any deprecation warnings when I do
that.

The last time Tk made a change of this magnitude was when Apple sponsored a migration from its Carbon to Cocoa.  They hired Daniel Steffen, the core Mac maintainer, and it took him nine months of full-time work to produce an alpha-level implementation. It took the community another five years or so to refine this into a reasonably stable version. 

Migrating from X to Wayland is likely an equally ambitious project. I don’t see it happening without corporate sponsors. 

Is X Wayland deprecated?  If not, it remains a viable option for Tk, as I’m sure it does for other toolkits as well.

> Only tk based applications still require XWayland.

Really? What about xterm and friends? What about not so popular other toolkits?
Although undroidwish talks Wayland since more than five years it had no pressure
from the community. And there might be many roadblocks ahead. Had the CSD debate
settled yet? Personally I lost interest some years ago, honestly.

BTW and finally, what's bad to have Tk playing sound with XWayland?

Is Wayland support going forward?
It seems Wayland is becoming the default for more and more Linux distributions. Personally I run KDE Plasma under Wayland and it works great. Basically everything runs natively in Wayland now for me: Electron applications, qt based application, gtk3+ applications, Firefox, Chromium - there is even Work undergoing to make Java run under Wayland nativily, I can already run JetBrains IntelliJ (which is Java based) on pure Wayland (still in preview though).
Only tk based applications still require XWayland.

May be to try to put it into GSoC? It was suggested years ago, though apparently did not go there. I guess that Python people could possibly help with it, since Tk is used as a default GUI toolkit for Python.

I apologize for just b*tching about it, since not having time for actually dealing with it.

Right, I have closed the duplicate dticket [3bb6525aaf].

I'm not aware of any work toward Wayland support at the moment, although I had discussions with chw some months ago. As far as I know there is no work in this area.

After I had put it first into Tcl tickets, I missed that it was reposted to Tcl tickets:
https://core.tcl.tk/tk/tktview/3bb6525aaf90f3ac85e6

Thus it is twice here now. I guess that one of these tickets can be closed.

BTW Is there something under work for Wayland support?