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Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

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Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#251

Post by vetinari »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #227
vetinari wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X11 is the kludge. Xwayland is the symptom. If anything, Xwayland is too nice and too seamless ; it should get Xquartz treatment. The point of blurry scaled windows is, that X11 compositors cannot tell which clients are DPI aware and which are not. If you run Chrome, it can render itself properly for HiDPI; if you run Gimp (the Gtk2 one), it won't, it needs to be scaled, Meanwhile, the compositor is none the wiser, w…

> The point of blurry scaled windows is, that X11 compositors cannot tell which clients are DPI aware and which are not. I Just make a new property, and make those DPI-aware clients set it! You could even make a small utility program that sets it on _other clients_, e.g. "windows created by these binaries get the DPI-aware property set automatically because I know it". This would be trivial to write in X11, but becom…

> Just make a new property,

That's the easy part.

> and make those DPI-aware clients set it!

That's the difficult part. You are welcome to try, though!

> You could even make a small utility program that sets it on _other clients_, e.g. "windows created by these binaries get the DPI-aware property set automatically because I know it".

Yes, another hack to keep on piles on other hack. Why would anyone want nice, clean solution, when a hack does?

> E.g. can Firefox already screen grab from Wayland these days?

Firefox can do screen recording/screen sharing under Wayland these days. Hardware encoding for WebRTC is in the works; that's something they would not be able to efficiently do under X11 at all.

> Will Zoom ever do it?

That's the question for Zoom. If we kick them as Apple does, they will. If we lay down and keep piling hacks on top of other hacks, they won't see the point.

> And work with any Wayland display server other than Gnome's?

That's a question you have to ask the authors of any Wayland display server other than Gnome's.

> It is a mess, and has been so for a decade already. And that is why we get this article.

It is a mess, because some people are too hung up on their current ball of mud and cannot see further than their personal desktop. Then they write articles like this and try to drag down others to the level of their ball of mud.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#253

Post by eitland »

michaelmrose wrote: post #184
eitland wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TreeStyleTabs absolutely work but is crippled compared to what it used to be. In fact I asked yesterday and it was an interesting experience: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447#c170

You can get rid of the top tab bar is your user css file other than that it seems kind of identical in functionally to me save for the keybinding gui for it being in a different screen under extension bindings if I recall correctly

Yep. Only Mozilla makes it harder year by year. Here's from January last year, another hoop to jump through: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/issues/2450

For all the talk about UX, why cannot someone be bothered to sit down and talk to the actual people who use the product and ask what the ux problems are?

At this point is there anyone left using Firefox except stubborn power users like me?

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#254

Post by cycomanic »

edent wrote: post #44
axlee wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you manage to get screensharing working with Slack on Wayland? Did you manage to setup more than 1 monitor to run on various (an sometimes very different) dpi settings?

I don't use Slack for that, but it works on Zoom, Teams, and Meet. So I suspect it works. I have set up fractional scaling of different fractions on all three of my screens. No issues on Wayland.

One of the things I noticed with fractional scaling on my 4K monitor that video playback occasionally looks choppy, which is slightly annoying because I don't want integer scaling because my other monitor is a factor of about 1.4 off.

That never worked under X11 either so not a problem with wayland, just it would be nice to find a solution.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#255

Post by elric »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #108
elric wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] reducing technical debt, improving security practices, etc Reducing technical debt by rewriting everything from scratch (almost?) never works. It's the baby and the bathwater. It's the sort of thing that seems attractive to junior developers, but more seasoned folks know that the legacy system contains years of embedded knowledge and workarounds for "real world" issues. The new, conceptually beautiful system…

> It's the sort of thing that seems attractive to junior developers, but more seasoned folks know that the legacy system contains years of embedded knowledge and workarounds for "real world" issues. Many seasoned Xorg developers work on Wayland. All the decades of lessons form Xorg _were_ carried over to Wayland.

No. That's exactly what I'm saying doesn't happen with a rewrite, ever. You think you take all of the knowledge with you, because after all, you wrote the thing so you know how it works. But it just doesn't work that way. There is too much complexity to carry around in your head.

I'm sure many lessons from Xorg were carried over to Wayland, but "all" is an insane exaggeration. And I'm sure many new mistakes were introduced. It's inevitable with any new system.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#256

Post by alpaca128 »

vetinari wrote: post #153
rob74 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a complete outsider - ok, I'm a developer, but I haven't had the pleasure (?) of writing something that interfaces directly with Xorg yet - I have been reading for years about Wayland being the way forward and how Xorg is dragged down by a long history of dubious design decisions and features nobody needs anymore, and I was secretly wondering: if this is really the future of desktop Linux, why doesn't it gain more…

> This post is a bit too ranty for its own good, but it has a valid point, and one that is unfortunately common in the open source community: because you have no monetary obligation to your "customers" (=users), there's not really a lot that forces you to maintain backwards compatibility. And yet, distros like Ubuntu are too conservative, because they are too careful not to break something. Their signalling is then c…

> Apple breaks compatibility at much faster rate than Linux world, and everyone is fine with it.

That's news to me. I have yet to read or hear the sentence "removal of magsafe was a great idea", or "I love carrying around this bag of $50 USB-C adapters". Or "this touchbar sure is a gamechanger, who needs the F-row on a Pro device anyway".

> Apple decides and does.

And Linux decides not to break everything just because they got a new favorite technology. I am not sure why you complain so much about Ubuntu when you can just use another distro that does things differently. Because unlike with Apple, you actually can choose, and without buying new hardware.

Which is also the reason I'm not that invested in the whole Xorg vs. Wayland debate; I am certain one distro or another will still support Xorg for a long time, and who knows, maybe one day Wayland is actually mature enough for me to use out of the box.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#257

Post by turminal »

severino wrote: post #201
canofbars wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if this is really the future of desktop Linux, why doesn't it gain more momentum? Nvidia is the major blocker here and there is very little wayland devs can do to fix this. Fedora has actively discouraged using the proprietary nvidia driver for a while now and they ship wayland by default since the open source driver works fine. I saw that ubuntu is also shipping wayland by default soon for amd and intel users.

> Nvidia is the major blocker here and there is very little wayland devs can do to fix this I know, but it can be difficult to understand. I mean, how come we currently have Nvidia drivers for Linux, which work pretty well, and they can't be used for Wayland?

Because the entire linux graphics community uses the same API (GBM) and wayland is mostly built around that, but Nvidia insists on not using it for some reason.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#258

Post by adrusi »

pjmlp wrote: post #191
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be funny that at the point where it seems that Linux desktop hardware support is at its peak, the actual use of Linux desktop would be at its lowest. I don't think that's the case, though.

GNU/Linux gets used alright, on IoT, servers and VMs, where the desktop is irrelevant. While Linux community can pat themselves on the back for having Linux kernel as part of ChromeOS and Android, they tend to forget it is hardly exposed to userspace frameworks used by app developers.

Chrome OS straight up lets you install Linux desktop apps. It runs a wayland compositor.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#259

Post by _d7xz »

In order to support recording on different Wayland compositors (without having to develop tons of other middle layers by yourself), one would need to simply activate their built-in screencasting tool according the specified user settings. This took me a bit of time to figure out for GNOME, and I had to fill a bug-report to speak to one of the compositor developers to understand how to do that, as no documentation was available at all. Even so, some hidden bugs appeared (Quality wasn't too good, audio had to be recorded separately over ffmpeg, and then both audio and video had to be merged together in one file, V9 had a bug that consumes 100% of CPU on some hardware, so we had to use V8 by default... etc).

In order to go further, I had to do the same thing for KWin on Wayland, Sway and other compositors out there in the market and then integrate them into my program. I had to find some workarounds for any bugs that may occur.

Later on, some changes for ffmpeg API broke the Xorg recording (Green Recorder used ffmpeg to record on all desktop environments on Xorg), so I had to do more testing now for multiple versions of ffmpeg and on which distro do they work and don't work.

So I just gave up, as I simply didn't find any particular reason to continue doing that since the only amount of support I received on my then-opened Patreon was $20 per month at its max.

But it shouldn't be said that Wayland can not support screencasting or that it breaks screencasting. It is possible, and the previously mentioned issues are actually on the compositors' developers side, not the protocol.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#260

Post by teekert »

rwmj wrote: post #238
teekert wrote: post #131

So funny to read "Wayland breaks everything", yet I run it everyday (on Ubuntu), it solved my screen tearing and other than that I only switch to X for my sons Minecraft. For me it didn't "break everything" in fact, it fixed something for me. Moreover, it seems to be more secure (which is of course something you only notice by things not happening). So such a title does not really make me want to read what is probabl…

"screen tearing" is this thing which is always rolled out to defend Wayland, and I use X all the time and have never worried about this as a problem (even assuming I understand what the problem is). Maybe my eyes are too slow to see this or something. To throw away everything to get this imaginary benefit seems pretty strange to me.

Watching any video under X is really horrible for me. May depend on settings/hardware?
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