A trip report from XDC 2018 in A Coruña, Spain, written by the lead developer of Sway and wlroots. The author attended with four other major wlroots contributors from Collabora, IGEL, and Purism. Key takeaways include learning about VKMS (virtual kernel mode setting) for testing DRM code, insights into Intel GPU architecture and Mesa testing infrastructure, and candid conversations with AMD, Intel, and Nvidia driver developers. The author notes disappointment that Nvidia still shows little meaningful open source involvement despite receptive engineers, and that Wayland protocol standardization discussions were limited due to key attendees being absent. The conference resulted in new contributors joining the sway/wlroots projects and vice versa.
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