Expose more Wayland features?
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Hello!
I'm currently working towards porting the recently-released SDL3 to Ubuntu Touch.
Most of the essential stuff like creating a window already works, but some OS-specific features like the HDPI scaling factor are available only to Qt-based program (through
GRID_SIZE_PX).Wayland has mechanisms to communicate that information to apps, which SDL use, but Lomiri doesn't seem to expose them, so they don't work on Ubuntu Touch. Would it be feasible and reasonable to implement them?
Some of the features I'm thinking about:
- HDPI scaling
- Clipboard
- Dark theme
- Cameras
- ...
I'm willing to provide help to implement those features! However, I would need confirmation that this is desirable, and I would need the help of people who are familiar with Lomiri's internals to point me in the right direction.
Thanks!
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Let's wait for someone with a deeper understanding on this but just a quick note that better Wayland support and capabilities may come with the move to recent/latest Mir versions which is 2.x. Currently UT still uses Mir 1.x so Wayland support is quite limited. Good news is that there's progress on this regard but I'm not sure how soon it will be released though but definitely after the 24.04 Noble release.
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As kugiigi says, Ubuntu Touch is using an obsolete version of Mir (1.8) with dated Wayland support. Also, most of the Wayland support in Lomiri comes from Mir (the rest comes from Mir's support for "custom" Wayland extensions).
The consequence of that is that there's no much prospect of improving the Wayland support in Ubuntu Touch without first updating it to use the current version of Mir.
The good news is that is work currently going on to get Lomiri working with the current version (2.20) of Mir. As of today this works on the machines of the developers involved and is close to landing in both the Debian and Fedora archives.
However, it will still take significant time to get the rest of Ubuntu Touch migrated over to this newer stack. That is probably the task that can most benefit from help at present.
After all that is completed, it should be possible for Ubuntu Touch to track the current version of Mir, and Wayland support will follow Mir. It is also possible to contribute to Mir's Wayland support, but that won't help Ubuntu Touch at present.
