cage VS buildroot

You... might be able to, kind of, depending on your goal... So the thing is, if all you need is a single screen (or at least, I've not run this multi-monitor) and you're just working around drivers that don't support Xorg, you can just run cage ( https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage ), run xwayland on that, and run your real GUI on that. Of course, then you're skipping all the advantages of wayland except hardware/driver compatibility.

For "real" wayland, sibling comments are correct that you'd need a wayland compositor that reimplemented awesome.

> As a developer, I needed to port a custom Linux system to hardware that only has Wayland drivers and it was a giant pain. Wayland offers no advantage at all for that system but it broke a lot of functionality that relied on X in terms of window placement, etc.

FWIW, I've had decent luck running cage ( https://www.hjdskes.nl/projects/cage/ ), then on that xwayland, and then just ignoring wayland and running X clients. The result does still have some slight quirks, but it mostly works fine.

That did help me find https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage/wiki initially I'm here there's other going down that path. Thanks

I thought this was going to be some development news with Wayland compositing going further: https://emacsconf.org/2022/talks/wayland/. Maybe it's because 29.1 was on my mind with the full Wayland client support being released.

If you want to just run one application in a modern way (yes, I'm assuming you agree that Wayland is desirable), then check out https://www.hjdskes.nl/projects/cage/.

You can run Wayland inside Xorg via cage[1] so you don't need to use a Wayland compositor.

[1]: https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage

Just ran into cage, seems useful.

It's kiosk mode. Sometimes related to POS. You can use https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage (Wayland) for example.

Maybe starting with reimplementing something like this: https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage would be the easiest?

I did it few times. It's so much easier nowadays with https://buildroot.org/

If you dig through the rootfs of the K1 it becomes clear that Creality is using buildroot so we should be able to do that ourselves - at least some of us.

An embedded system like Roku doesn't need to "run everything", it just needs to run their "platform", which is probably quite small. It's pretty trivial to assemble your own OS from "off-the-shelf" components. You can use something like buildroot to spin up a new OS in half a day, using only the components you want. You can also use "smaller" components that have far fewer features, meaning less bugs and less updates.

https://github.com/buildroot/buildroot

> I do this for every Windows installation that is used for similar purposes, like embedded machines that has to run a single application, virtual machines, etc.

Have you tried running Linux for these use cases? This sort of thing is an area Linux excels, in my experience.

When you run Windows, you're in for the whole kit and caboodle. Most of the components are proprietary, closed-source black boxes. You can only poke and prod and test and hope things don't break in unexpected ways.

Conversely, Linux can be easy stripped down to a bare bones kernel and a single statically-linked binary. I can run a useful application on top of Linux with the whole system weighing in smaller than bootmgfw.efi.

Something more complex, but still custom, is easily crafted with Buildroot.

https://buildroot.org/

Have a look at the commit history of Linux or buildroot for nice readable commit histories.

Gentoo could teach you more about what is involved in dependency handling and actual ‘construction’ of a Linux system. But Linux From Scratch is a much better teaching tool for learning this, and even things like Buildroot are arguably better than Gentoo for this because they generally force you to care about a lot of the stuff that Gentoo hides away to make the system nicer to use.