Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

phoronix.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 714 posts

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#351

Post by ddevault »

gpm wrote: post #313
jhasse wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland isn't a code base but a protocol.

Wayland is both a code base and a protocol unless you are being unreasonably technical about terminology (distinguishing between wayland and libwayland) to the point where you are deceiving casual readers. It is for all practical intents not possible to implement a useful wayland compositor without relying on libwayland, because mesa links to libwayland and expects to be passed pointers to data structures defined in…

Another obsolete "fact" about Wayland which hasn't been true since 2015. Which is all the anti-Wayland propegandists seem to be able to come up with.

This was addressed by the linux-dmabuf protocol extension (which also works on *BSD, despite the name). The mesa route has been deprecated for years.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#352

Post by tbr1 »

corty wrote: post #79
QuesnayJr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is Wayland's architecture broken? Is there a critique floating around I could look at?

The design overview slides are their own critique: Wayland does almost nothing besides render buffer handling. Input? Applications job. Window decorations? Compositors job. Application talking to the Compositor? Somebody elses job. Clipboard? Maybe compositor or toolkit. Screenshots and remoting? Somebody elses job, but only after Wayland has bored the appropriate holes in its security model. This all leads to a ton…

This comment is mostly correct (as a daily Wayland user), with a few exceptions.

> Wayland does almost nothing besides render buffer handling. Input? Applications job.

Applications don't do more work to handle input on Wayland as opposed to e.g. X11. It's still event-based, and the compositor feeds input events to applications that can process them as normal. Keyboard, mouse and touch input are part of the core Wayland protocol, and tablet input is part of an extension that all major compositors fully support.

> Window decorations? Compositors job.

Kind of, it's the job of the application (client-side decorations) or compositor (server-side decorations). The compositor can choose which to use. CSDs give more custom look-and-feels to applications that have them (think Firefox or Chrome); SSDs provide consistent looks across all apps. GNOME only supports CSDs, but is an exception in that regard.

> Clipboard? Maybe compositor or toolkit.

Both: https://emersion.fr/blog/2020/wayland-clipboard-drag-and-dro...

Clipboards are (implementation-complexity-wise) scary in X11 as well.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#353

Post by michaelmrose »

ddevault wrote: post #331
michaelmrose wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of Wayland users are on Gnome? It seems likely to me that Gnome is likely to be 90-99% of peoples experience with Wayland.

So what? What percentage of Wayland desktops are on Linux? Do comments on Wayland generalize to comments on Linux? What percentage of Linux installations are on x86_64? Do comments about Linux generalize to x86_64? No, obviously they don't. So, knock it off.

If the majority of new users are exposed to linux via wayland and exposed to wayland via gnome and the gnome experience sucks people will perceive that linux wayland and gnome suck regardless of who is at fault.

Have anyone ever bought a car or piece of electronics that was bad because of a particular component and though wow really sucks instead of sucks?

Desktop linux may be a niche but window managers are a niche among niches. Interesting window managers implemented via Wayland are a niche in a niche in a niche.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#354

Post by nullc »

heeen2 wrote: post #348
nullc wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the buffer handling is great, ... so long as you don't care about latency and don't mind a $3000 top of the line 64 core desktop feeling slightly slower than a machine from 20 years ago. :(

Wayland has shipped on plenty of embedded devices with anemic arm socs as early as 2014

As I understand it the extra latency is relatively hardware independent, and caused by extra whole frames of delay from additional compositing layers. I expect an anaemic SOC to be slow, it's less fun when extremely high end machines are also slow.

Every time I pull a old system out of mothball and start it up I'm disappointed at how much less responsive the feel is of modern systems sitting right next to them.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#355

Post by pengaru »

swiley wrote: post #67

Sure X.org is abandonware but there are serious problems Wayland still hasn't solved that X has. 1) Wayland is really slow. I don't know if it's the compositing or what but it's unusable on lighter hardware that X ran fine on. 2) Widget toolkits handling window decoration is awful. Before the large number of toolkits just meant some controls were a little different but now basic behavior changes based on how programm…

> 1) Wayland is really slow. I don't know if it's the compositing or what but it's unusable on lighter hardware that X ran fine on.

Presumably your compositor is using llvmpipe software rendering if it's so slow.

Unaccelerated Xorg using something like the vesa driver is slow too.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#356

Post by ddevault »

jancsika wrote: post #344
ddevault wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, all of these facts are conveniently converted into opinions once shown to be wrong.

On the small point wrt "stuff not working" for a user: There is a future blog that will point out all the "support myths" about Wayland. E.g., how, contrary to popular misconception, obs and other standard Gnu/Linux applications do work out of the box with Wayland at the time of this future blog's writing. I imagine the impossibility of writing that blog today is the reason Ubuntu 20.04 ships with x11 as a default.

>obs and other standard Gnu/Linux applications

1. obs is not a standard GNU/Linux application

2. It supports Wayland via a plugin which is available in several Linux package repositories

Please: stop levying false criticisms based on facts you don't actually know. Please stop.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#357

Post by michaelmrose »

Arnavion wrote: post #301
linuxdaemon wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am forced to use ms teams for work. Every time I attempted to share my desktop, teams would crash. I thought it was just because teams sucks. As it turns out, it seems to be that running under wayland was actually causing it. Everything works fine under x.org. After I was running with x.org for a couple days, I realized there are quite a few little oddities that I just lived with and didn't realize it was because w…

Yes, Teams uses a function that is unsupported by Xwayland (XGetImage, if I remember the backtrace correctly), so it crashes. I worked around it with a rather convoluted setup that involves running Xephyr under Xwayland, then running Teams under Xephyr (via setting `DISPLAY`), and running vncviewer under Xephyr connected to a VNC server (wayvnc) sharing my screen on the parent wayland instance. Then I tell Teams to s…

I salute your creativity and tenacity but what the actual fuck the need for a rube goldberg setup in order to make an application work is ... unfortunate. If I did such a thing I would take one last look to take pride in my work before deleting the whole affair and installing an OS that isn't broken.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#358

Post by a1369209993 »

adwn wrote: post #187
goatinaboat wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is really slow. I don't know if it's the compositing or what but it's unusable on lighter hardware that X ran fine on. This is crazy when you think about it. I remember running an X server, Hummingbird I think it was called, on 386 and 486 machines connecting to Suns and it was fine , this was a perfectly acceptable way to work. Couple of xterms, an Emacs, xbiff for email, maybe some xeyes just for fun. Devel…

For what it's worth, whenever I tunneled X over a non-local SSH connection, it was slow as molasses. That's because almost all contemporary GUI applications render to a bitmap anyway. Those that actually use the outdated X vector graphics operations look like utter garbage compared to anything post-1995. Frankly, I'd rather my applications are at least somewhat aesthetically pleasing.

> whenever I tunneled X over a non-local SSH connection, it was slow as molasses

And? Last time I checked, tunneling Wayland over a non-local SSH connection was slow as glass. Which is to say it didn't work at all.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#359

Post by symlinkk »

p_l wrote: post #76
kochthesecond wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say the story on server side decorations is nasty and disappointing from the GNOME devs.

It's evolution of the stance that started in early GNOME 2.x time, and crystallised with GNOME 3. Similar to how GNOME 3.8 was used to push systemd one everyone, similar to how they tried to push their own idea about input methods on everyone (since I don't use IBus, I don't know if they finally succeeded - fortunately UIM and XIM still work). "We know better" could be their motto.

And yet, they have built the most popular desktop environment for Linux. To me, GNOME (on Fedora) feels more polished and visually consistent than Windows 10, which is impressive considering the massive imbalance of resources between those two projects. Would that have been possible if they listened to the zealots online who complain if they don’t support every possible configuration under the sun? I don’t think so.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#360

Post by ddevault »

michaelmrose wrote: post #353
ddevault wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? What percentage of Wayland desktops are on Linux? Do comments on Wayland generalize to comments on Linux? What percentage of Linux installations are on x86_64? Do comments about Linux generalize to x86_64? No, obviously they don't. So, knock it off.

If the majority of new users are exposed to linux via wayland and exposed to wayland via gnome and the gnome experience sucks people will perceive that linux wayland and gnome suck regardless of who is at fault. Have anyone ever bought a car or piece of electronics that was bad because of a particular component and though wow really sucks instead of sucks? Desktop linux may be a niche but window managers are a niche…

GNOME sucks. This sucks for users. GNOME is popular, so it sucks for a lot of users.

That is not a statement about Wayland, so fucking knock it off. If you really want to fix this problem for this large number of users, you ought to make it about GNOME, to pressure them into fixing it and make more people aware of the problem. Making it about Wayland is (1) wrong and (2) makes it worse for the people actually doing something about it.

Post reply on HN