Describe the purpose of the group in no more than 4-5 sentences
The graphical desktop on Linux workstations in animation and VFX facilities has relied from the beginning on the Xorg implementation of the X Windows System (X11) protocol. The Wayland effort is a long running effort to replace X11 with a more modern protocol architecture, and new versions of Linux distributions and desktop environments are replacing X11/Xorg with Wayland. The full impact of this transition on high-end content creation applications (commercial, open source and in-house) and workflows used in animation and VFX as well as remote access solutions is not well understood in our industry.
Historically, the industry has relied on moments of open cooperation and collaboration to align on a sustainable path forward for everyone’s benefit, such as the Studio Linux initiative during the migration away from IRIX, the founding of the VFX Reference Platform, and the more recent VFX Linux Recommendation Report to address the end of life of CentOS Linux. This Working Group would provide a forum to convene the community to ensure the long-term viability of Linux as the premier platform for professional VFX and animation artists.
Goals of the working group
- Study aspects of the Wayland transition affecting typical animation / VFX applications
- Integration with input devices such as graphical tablets
- Integration with the window manager, input focus management, key bindings
- Studio and user level desktop customization
- Support for color management and HDR
- Survey the state of remote access solutions and how they interact with Wayland
- Survey the state of GPU acceleration under Wayland
- Identify and convene stakeholders across Linux distro providers, software providers, hardware vendors, and studios.
- Align stakeholders on a set of shared goals, and a roadmap to achieve them
- Prototype a working Linux / Wayland desktop environment with some sample VFX applications
- Help avoid previous drawn out industry transitions (Python 3, CentOS 7), allowing us to adopt new Linux distributions and benefit from new technologies and security improvements
Non-goals of the working group
- We do not aim to help port existing applications (commercial or open source) from X11 to Wayland
- We do not aim to prescribe a common desktop environment for all studios
- This is not meant to become a long term working group: once the deliverables are completed, the work of porting applications will have to be done by commercial vendors, open source projects and studio development teams.
Deliverables
- A forum for parties interested in this topic to meet and discuss (WG meetings and Slack channel). A monthly meeting cadence is likely sufficient.
- Documentation (Wiki, white papers) from the findings of our investigations to help vendors, studios and projects in their transition to Wayland
- A prototype environment (delivered either as a container image, virtual machine, or bare metal installation scripts / configuration instructions) to allow interested parties to experiment and validate our results
Describe the purpose of the group in no more than 4-5 sentences
The graphical desktop on Linux workstations in animation and VFX facilities has relied from the beginning on the Xorg implementation of the X Windows System (X11) protocol. The Wayland effort is a long running effort to replace X11 with a more modern protocol architecture, and new versions of Linux distributions and desktop environments are replacing X11/Xorg with Wayland. The full impact of this transition on high-end content creation applications (commercial, open source and in-house) and workflows used in animation and VFX as well as remote access solutions is not well understood in our industry.
Historically, the industry has relied on moments of open cooperation and collaboration to align on a sustainable path forward for everyone’s benefit, such as the Studio Linux initiative during the migration away from IRIX, the founding of the VFX Reference Platform, and the more recent VFX Linux Recommendation Report to address the end of life of CentOS Linux. This Working Group would provide a forum to convene the community to ensure the long-term viability of Linux as the premier platform for professional VFX and animation artists.
Goals of the working group
Non-goals of the working group
Deliverables