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  • KiCad and Wayland

    From rbowman@21:1/5 to All on Mon Jun 16 19:25:38 2025
    https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/

    It's a good summary of the problems going from X11 to Wayland. For those
    not familiar with it KiCad is very popular for creating schematics and pc
    board layouts. With the number of companies offering board fabrication at relatively low prices it's a long way from the old days of laying out
    boards with tape and etching them yourself.

    KiCad uses wxWidgets, where the 'x' means X11 and is cross-platform. It
    would be ironical if Windows becomes a better OS than Fedora or Ubuntu for electronics design.

    For a while QGIS had a banner alerting users that dialogs might not
    function correctly on Wayland but they seem to have overcome the problem. Because of its nature KiCad may face greater difficulty.

    fwiw, I haven't tried but I doubt our legacy software would do well with Wayland. Like KiCad it uses window control and IPC features that Wayland specifically removed.

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  • From John McCue@21:1/5 to rbowman on Tue Jun 17 01:50:39 2025
    rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
    https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/

    <snip>

    KiCad uses wxWidgets, where the 'x' means X11 and is cross-platform. It
    would be ironical if Windows becomes a better OS than Fedora or Ubuntu for electronics design.

    Interesting, IIRC BOINC Manager on Linux also uses wxWidgets,
    so I guess people needing that could be out if luck.

    For a while QGIS had a banner alerting users that dialogs might not
    function correctly on Wayland but they seem to have overcome the problem. Because of its nature KiCad may face greater difficulty.

    fwiw, I haven't tried but I doubt our legacy software would do well with Wayland. Like KiCad it uses window control and IPC features that Wayland specifically removed.

    Yes, looks that way to me too :(

    --
    [t]csh(1) - "An elegant shell, for a more... civilized age."
    - Paraphrasing Star Wars

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  • From Rich@21:1/5 to rbowman on Tue Jun 17 04:02:05 2025
    rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
    https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/

    It's a good summary of the problems going from X11 to Wayland. For those

    I wonder what kind of dismissals our local wayland cheerleeder will
    offer in retort to KiCad's issues?

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  • From rbowman@21:1/5 to John McCue on Tue Jun 17 04:46:18 2025
    On Tue, 17 Jun 2025 01:50:39 -0000 (UTC), John McCue wrote:

    rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
    https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/

    <snip>

    KiCad uses wxWidgets, where the 'x' means X11 and is cross-platform. It
    would be ironical if Windows becomes a better OS than Fedora or Ubuntu
    for electronics design.

    Interesting, IIRC BOINC Manager on Linux also uses wxWidgets,
    so I guess people needing that could be out if luck.

    Possibly. wxWidgets on Linux is actually wxGTK, but then you get into Gtk
    X or Gtk Wayland. (or Gtk Win32 for that matter). I'd assume many apps
    that use wxWidgets will work fine. Those, like KiCad, that were using the
    lower level functions will have a problem.

    Our legacy GUIs used Motif but looking at the code there are dips down
    into Xt and Xlib to get the job done. For example, the base GUI of one app presents a summary of incidents but each user can configure how many
    individual incident entry screens they want, where they want them, and the sizes, and that data is saved per user. That's exactly the 'inside'
    knowledge of the server than Wayland is designed to prevent.

    It's going to be messy.

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  • From candycanearter07@21:1/5 to John McCue on Wed Jun 18 05:30:07 2025
    John McCue <jmclnx@gmail.com.invalid> wrote at 01:50 this Tuesday (GMT):
    rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
    https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/

    <snip>

    KiCad uses wxWidgets, where the 'x' means X11 and is cross-platform. It
    would be ironical if Windows becomes a better OS than Fedora or Ubuntu for >> electronics design.

    Interesting, IIRC BOINC Manager on Linux also uses wxWidgets,
    so I guess people needing that could be out if luck.

    And there goes any chance I'm migrating to Wayland.

    For a while QGIS had a banner alerting users that dialogs might not
    function correctly on Wayland but they seem to have overcome the problem.
    Because of its nature KiCad may face greater difficulty.

    fwiw, I haven't tried but I doubt our legacy software would do well with
    Wayland. Like KiCad it uses window control and IPC features that Wayland
    specifically removed.

    Yes, looks that way to me too :(


    Which sucks, since SOME COMPANIES are really pushing Wayland. I'm going
    to hold out on X11 for as long as I can.
    --
    user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom

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  • From =?UTF-8?Q?St=C3=A9phane?= CARPENTIE@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jul 5 09:18:34 2025
    Le 17-06-2025, John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> a écrit :
    On 17 Jun 2025 04:46:18 GMT
    rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

    For example, the base GUI of one app presents a summary of incidents
    but each user can configure how many individual incident entry
    screens they want, where they want them, and the sizes, and that data
    is saved per user. That's exactly the 'inside' knowledge of the
    server than Wayland is designed to prevent.

    Screen layout and window placement is "inside knowledge" in a GUI environment?

    Of course.

    What a demented philosophy.

    It's the best philosophy: to keep things simple. I have configured my
    GUI to display my apps where I want. I don't want to configure each app
    to mess with that. My GUI grant some part of a screen to an app and that
    app doesn't need to know what's outside of it.

    Some well define exceptions exist, like screenshot, which need to be
    addresses separately. And from what I understand from the website of
    KiCad, its issues came only from a poor design.

    --
    Si vous avez du temps à perdre :
    https://scarpet42.gitlab.io

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  • From Lawrence D'Oliveiro@21:1/5 to John Ames on Mon Jul 7 21:57:46 2025
    On Mon, 7 Jul 2025 09:03:07 -0700, John Ames wrote:

    ... different windows arranging themselves in a saved configuration is
    an *extremely* well-known design pattern for GUI applications ...

    All the apps I use on a regular basis have their own mechanisms for implementing custom layouts within each document window, where they need
    it. E.g. Inkscape and GIMP have those dockable tabs, LibreOffice has its Sidebar etc. Blender, on the other hand, goes all the way in implementing
    its own tiling window manager, so the user can define custom “workspaces” and switch quickly between them as part of the content-creation workflow.

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