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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#11
post #7

I recently tried switching to Linux with a few different distro's (Ubuntu, Elementary OS, etc.) and use Wayland. The thing that sticks out like a sore thumb to me, and which I've been unable to solve, is that apparently it's not possible to configure trackpad scroll speed. At all. From what I was able to gather, Wayland/libinput say they shouldn't be responsible for handling it and instead window managers should[0][1…

I'm able to set the trackpad speed in both GNOME and KDE on Wayland with libinput. In GNOME, it is under Settings > Mouse & Touchpad > Touchpad Speed. In KDE, it is under Settings > Input Devices > Touchpad > Pointer speed. Do these settings not show up for you?

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#12
As a fellow X11 apologist, this was pretty cool to read. It's nice to see that things are shaping up, even if there are still quite a few rough edges.

Having said that, I'm still a die-hard Xfce user, and until someone makes an xfwm4-like Wayland compositor, and ports (at least) xfce4-panel and xfdesktop to Wayland, I'm not gonna switch.

Edit: ok, looks like there's Hopalong (https://github.com/iridescent-desktop/hopalong), so we're part of the way there, even if it's pretty new.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#13

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture." X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine…

https://arewewaylandyet.com/ lists Waypipe as a kind of equivalent for that. I haven't tried it; does anyone know how well it works?

It also lists FreeRDP and wayvnc.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#14

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture." X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine…

I actually still use this feature a lot. I run some linux software on a server and can see the window on my main desktop without any need for rdp, vnc or similar. It’s really great!

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#15

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture." X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine…

...and it's usually extremely slow, even if you are connected via 1Gbit wire.

Edit: replaced 10Gbit with 1Gbit. And also I love using this feature even with all its slowness

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#16

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture." X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine…

On the other hand, this works increasingly poorly as most desktop environments and software assumes there is no network involved (for example, last time I tried running Firefox over a forwarded X session I got a bunch of errors about a broken GL context). And you can do the same thing, with usually better results, by using VNC instead (and there are indeed VNC servers for Wayland, for example wayvnc).

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#17

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture." X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine…

Without x2go most apps aren't usable over the internet now because x11 was designed around assumptions that are no longer correct and you end up with multiple round-trips during rendering.

Even X2go provides an experience that's strictly worse than using windows via rdp.

It just seems completely pointless to even bother with something x11's network transparency if you're designing an x11 replacement nowadays.

It would be much better to focus on a new vnc replacement for Linux that can use low latency video codecs when needed for games, etc.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#18
> Wayland wants every frame to be perfect. That means no screen tearing

Such idea was quite central, but it still ignored some uses cases where tearing is acceptable for lowest perceived latency possible (competitive gaming and such).

There is a current effort to address that:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#19

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture." X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine…

It's a lot more than just cool compositing effects. If you are just trying to get some work done reliably with a dynamic multimonitor setup, Wayland is vastly superior.
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