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

How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

jichu4n.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 250 posts

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#31

Post by torginus »

Arnavion wrote: post #19
josefx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xorg is on life support, it has been getting bug fixes and nothing else for the past several years. Imagine two cars: X11 its an old one, it doesn't quite start right, the windows are chipped, the paint is peeling of and no one really wants to invest money into maintaining it, it defaults to brakes and a steering wheel from 1980 but has seen continous upgrades over time and you can generally swap in a steering whee…

>Who cares that getting it to run on half of the roads (NVIDIA) is still not a solved problem because they stripped out any abstraction. a) nvidia's refusal to implement GBM in their driver was their own choice. The abstraction was never removed; GBM is the abstraction over all drivers. b) nvidia already relented and implemented GBM in their driver. The latter doesn't necessarily mean nvidia is a good choice of GPU e…

Afaik the Steam Deck will use KWinFT, so if Valve is willing to bet on it, I don't think it's such a fringe project.

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#32

Post by jcelerier »

perth wrote: post #28
loxias wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> replacemeant for Xorg WHY. What's the compelling reason for Wayland? How will it make my life better? As someone who's used Linux as their only computing environment for 20 years, I'm terrified of my Xorg being taken away. It works! I understand it! And, I'm still bitter over my init system becoming unnecessarily complicated and stupid with systemd. There's what feels like a rising attitude in the F/OSS community o…

Well it doesn't rely on using a giant buffer for multiple monitors so it supports hidpi scaling. Have you ever tried hidpi on xorg? It's a mess, even on Ubuntu where they tried their best to clean it up. The xorg apps from the compatibility layer still suffer from it, probably until they update to Wayland. Sidenote: Google tried to use xorg for ChromeOS and ended up writing their own UI system for hidpi scaling among…

Setting DPI in .Xresources had worked fine for me since 2014 except for Firefox and Chrome which took a year or so to adapt

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#33

Post by sprash »

perth wrote: post #28
loxias wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> replacemeant for Xorg WHY. What's the compelling reason for Wayland? How will it make my life better? As someone who's used Linux as their only computing environment for 20 years, I'm terrified of my Xorg being taken away. It works! I understand it! And, I'm still bitter over my init system becoming unnecessarily complicated and stupid with systemd. There's what feels like a rising attitude in the F/OSS community o…

Well it doesn't rely on using a giant buffer for multiple monitors so it supports hidpi scaling. Have you ever tried hidpi on xorg? It's a mess, even on Ubuntu where they tried their best to clean it up. The xorg apps from the compatibility layer still suffer from it, probably until they update to Wayland. Sidenote: Google tried to use xorg for ChromeOS and ended up writing their own UI system for hidpi scaling among…

The final "composing" step in Wayland does require Wayland to use a "giant" buffer as well. Also My GPU has 16 GB of GDDR how can any frame buffer be "giant" in that context?

The support of hidpi scaling is something Toolkits have to manage (on both Wayland and X11). On X11 all the necessary pitch information to do so is available via the xrandr extension.

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#34

Post by [deleted] »

Arnavion wrote: post #19
josefx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xorg is on life support, it has been getting bug fixes and nothing else for the past several years. Imagine two cars: X11 its an old one, it doesn't quite start right, the windows are chipped, the paint is peeling of and no one really wants to invest money into maintaining it, it defaults to brakes and a steering wheel from 1980 but has seen continous upgrades over time and you can generally swap in a steering whee…

>Who cares that getting it to run on half of the roads (NVIDIA) is still not a solved problem because they stripped out any abstraction. a) nvidia's refusal to implement GBM in their driver was their own choice. The abstraction was never removed; GBM is the abstraction over all drivers. b) nvidia already relented and implemented GBM in their driver. The latter doesn't necessarily mean nvidia is a good choice of GPU e…

[deleted]

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#35

Post by loxias »

perth wrote: post #28
loxias wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> replacemeant for Xorg WHY. What's the compelling reason for Wayland? How will it make my life better? As someone who's used Linux as their only computing environment for 20 years, I'm terrified of my Xorg being taken away. It works! I understand it! And, I'm still bitter over my init system becoming unnecessarily complicated and stupid with systemd. There's what feels like a rising attitude in the F/OSS community o…

Well it doesn't rely on using a giant buffer for multiple monitors so it supports hidpi scaling. Have you ever tried hidpi on xorg? It's a mess, even on Ubuntu where they tried their best to clean it up. The xorg apps from the compatibility layer still suffer from it, probably until they update to Wayland. Sidenote: Google tried to use xorg for ChromeOS and ended up writing their own UI system for hidpi scaling among…

What's hidpi? I mean, pragmatically. I can guess that that acronym means "high dots per inch", but I don't follow.

One of my desktops uses 2x 4k monitors, is that hidpi? X works fine... X also worked fine on an older setup with 4 monitors.

Also, I don't know Wayland internals, but I'm gonna assert without proof that any low level graphics interface is gonna involve a framebuffer at some point...

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#36

Post by zephyr9 »

emersion wrote: post #25
zephyr9 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does upstream Wayland work on any platform except for Linux? Does this display server have any form of colour management for, you know, the stuff it's displaying? Wayland is taking off like the Spruce Moose...

Feel free to continue using X11 of course, no one's forcing anybody to switch. That said: > Does upstream Wayland work on any platform except for Linux? Yes, FreeBSD. Patches welcome to make it work on other BSDs. > Does this display server have any form of colour management for, you know, the stuff it's displaying? No more than X11 right now, ie. none. But it's in the works.

I was under the impression Wayland on FreeBSD required a lot of patching on their end, but this has been merged upstream? If so that's pretty good news.

Also good news re colour management. The last I heard about this was Drew DeVault (and I'm paraphrasing) calling it "precious horseshit".

[0] https://drewdevault.com/2021/02/02/Anti-Wayland-horseshit.ht...

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#37

Post by josefx »

Arnavion wrote: post #19
josefx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xorg is on life support, it has been getting bug fixes and nothing else for the past several years. Imagine two cars: X11 its an old one, it doesn't quite start right, the windows are chipped, the paint is peeling of and no one really wants to invest money into maintaining it, it defaults to brakes and a steering wheel from 1980 but has seen continous upgrades over time and you can generally swap in a steering whee…

>Who cares that getting it to run on half of the roads (NVIDIA) is still not a solved problem because they stripped out any abstraction. a) nvidia's refusal to implement GBM in their driver was their own choice. The abstraction was never removed; GBM is the abstraction over all drivers. b) nvidia already relented and implemented GBM in their driver. The latter doesn't necessarily mean nvidia is a good choice of GPU e…

> So having your problems ignored is something you'll have to get used to if you choose to use hardware that requires proprietary drivers

3..2..1 and the floss copy pasta has arrived a bit delayed but still as expected. Might want to check if the server your bot is running on is a bit overcapacity to fix that delay.

Still not going to amputate my leg over a stubbed toe even if RMS considers the toe cancer.

> GBM is the abstraction over all drivers.

One that never worked with half the hardware on the market, an issue that wasn't visible to anyone using X11.

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#38

Post by perth »

loxias wrote: post #35
perth wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it doesn't rely on using a giant buffer for multiple monitors so it supports hidpi scaling. Have you ever tried hidpi on xorg? It's a mess, even on Ubuntu where they tried their best to clean it up. The xorg apps from the compatibility layer still suffer from it, probably until they update to Wayland. Sidenote: Google tried to use xorg for ChromeOS and ended up writing their own UI system for hidpi scaling among…

What's hidpi? I mean, pragmatically. I can guess that that acronym means "high dots per inch", but I don't follow. One of my desktops uses 2x 4k monitors, is that hidpi? X works fine... X also worked fine on an older setup with 4 monitors. Also, I don't know Wayland internals, but I'm gonna assert without proof that any low level graphics interface is gonna involve a framebuffer at some point...

Basically:

You have a Microsoft Surfacebook, Chromebook Pixel, or Macbook with retina display, let's say at 300 DPI, and you try to plug it into a monitor that is 70 DPI. The buffer will not be possible to adjust to properly handle both monitors because 1 is 300 DPI and 1 is 70 DPI. This is because xorg is internally designed around the philosophy that every monitor will have the same DPI. There are tricks and hacks that teams, specifically I've seen the canonical team pull this off, where they can "trick" xorg into displaying properly with some minor visual artifacting. The last time I tested this was with Ubuntu a few years ago, back when Wayland support was "experimental" and I had this exact sort of setup, and Wayland was easily able to pull this off 100% better in every way because it is not designed around this limitation.

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#39

Post by perth »

jcelerier wrote: post #32
perth wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it doesn't rely on using a giant buffer for multiple monitors so it supports hidpi scaling. Have you ever tried hidpi on xorg? It's a mess, even on Ubuntu where they tried their best to clean it up. The xorg apps from the compatibility layer still suffer from it, probably until they update to Wayland. Sidenote: Google tried to use xorg for ChromeOS and ended up writing their own UI system for hidpi scaling among…

Setting DPI in .Xresources had worked fine for me since 2014 except for Firefox and Chrome which took a year or so to adapt

Try to set two different DPIs in that.

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#40

Post by Seirdy »

loxias wrote: post #24
fyrn- wrote: post #2

Maybe don't write an Xorg window manager right as the replacemeant for Xorg starts to take off though

> replacemeant for Xorg WHY. What's the compelling reason for Wayland? How will it make my life better? As someone who's used Linux as their only computing environment for 20 years, I'm terrified of my Xorg being taken away. It works! I understand it! And, I'm still bitter over my init system becoming unnecessarily complicated and stupid with systemd. There's what feels like a rising attitude in the F/OSS community o…

The biggest reason is security. X offers no GUI isolation. This is a basic mitigation that should have been the norm a decade or two ago.

Advanced mixed DPI also comes to mind.

Another is performance: Sway easily outperforms DWM/i3/AwesomeWM on most ARM devices when configured for minimal latency.

Post reply on HN