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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#31

Post by shmerl »

smoldesu wrote: post #22
mkl wrote: post #9

> KDE, I have heard mixed things about, but can’t speak to. Does anyone here use KDE on Wayland currently? How well does it run? What are the pain points?

I'm using it right now on Nvidia. It 'works' for most Wayland/Nvidia things, but there are still a few things to note. The Good: - No weird xWayland flickering like GNOME - Desktop transitions never drop a frame, even with 1:1 trackpad gestures on my Magic Trackpad - The kwin implementation seems to be less picky/buggy than Mutter? Might just be my hardware config, but Wayland/Nvidia/GNOME would crash constantly for…

I'd say for smooth desktop experience, Nvidia is a bad option in general (at least yet). They only very recently started caring about addressing Wayland support and a lot of things are rough becasue of that. Plus it will be a long time before their kernel driver is upstreamed, and a lot of the above depends on that.

So I strongly recommend AMD for good modern Linux desktop experience.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#32

Post by ISL »

giantdude wrote: post #8

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 used X tunneling over ssh regularly from 2001-2020, when I left that line of work.

For some applications it is radically faster than other options.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#33

Post by scottlamb »

giantdude wrote: post #8

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…

> While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine and edit an image stored there. That is, the Gimp runs on your home machine while your notebook has the GUI.

But that's never where I want the split to be when working across the network.

Remote storage? Sure, sign me up. (The POSIX APIs are horribly unsuitable for network filesystems, but I'm speaking about the concept more than the current implementations.)

Remote heavy computations, like AI workloads and compilation? Definitely.

Remote GUI code? No ugh. Compare the experience of VS Code Remote vs just running VS Code remotely with ssh X11 forwarding, using a high latency connection.

You are fighting the speed of light. It won't go well.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#34

Post by betwixthewires »

I've been using Wayland with sway for about a year as my daily driver. I have xwayland also and a few applications use it, specifically I'm using dmenu because all the wlroots native menus are missing some features I need (why is there no text based menu in the world that can read from bash aliases and PATH at the same time?) and I've got to say, it runs perfect for me. Granted, my machine is mainly a workstation and I don't game really, the most I do is watch a video with vlc. But I have run into problems with game emulation, specifically running retroarch/libretro just doesnt work for me, I haven't dug into it yet. I have run Minetest and several quake 3 engine based games on it with no trouble.

I'm probably going to build an Alpine or NixOS based workstation from scratch using Wayland and Sway at some point in the near future, this was an experiment with Debian I did that worked out so well I just kept using it.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#35

Post by calvinmorrison »

Mostly, I just hate the treadmill.

Over the last decade and a half I've written dozens of small tools, applets, etc to hone my desktop environment I use. Half of those have required patching, some don't work at all (like a nifty oneliner I used to kill of hung ssh connections by targeting the ssh process name, that no longer includes the ip or domain).

I will use X11 until I can't - simply because I do not want to rewrite my tooling.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#36

Post by sprash »

resoluteteeth wrote: post #17
giantdude wrote: post #8

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 woul…

> x11 was designed around assumptions that are no longer correct

Nothing could be further from the truth. If you use Xrender properly you can make very sophisticated drawing operations that are extremely efficient over the wire and that are GPU accelerated even when the process does not run on the local machine.

It is Gtk and Qt that for wahtever reason decided to ditch their Xrender backends.

> multiple round-trips

This is also a problem introduced by badly designed tool-kits like Gtk and Qt. It is trivial to design tool-kits in X11 that require no round-trips.

> It just seems completely pointless to even bother with something x11's network transparency

This is mostly true because desktop software on Linux is mostly written by highly incompetent developers that produced abominations like Gtk3+.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#37

Post by rvz »

emidoots wrote: 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 just don't bother with all of that, since it has been years without any improvement and with confusion of alternatives of alternative system components that are not working together and decide to fight against the OS as you have already explained this inconsistency.

At that point, I just use macOS to just get work done without fiddling or googling cryptic errors for just using the trackpad or hunting down and googling why either GNOME, Wayland, LightDM, Dbus and LibInput and the video driver(s) decided to have a fight and crash the desktop.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#38

Post by smoldesu »

shmerl wrote: post #31
smoldesu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using it right now on Nvidia. It 'works' for most Wayland/Nvidia things, but there are still a few things to note. The Good: - No weird xWayland flickering like GNOME - Desktop transitions never drop a frame, even with 1:1 trackpad gestures on my Magic Trackpad - The kwin implementation seems to be less picky/buggy than Mutter? Might just be my hardware config, but Wayland/Nvidia/GNOME would crash constantly for…

I'd say for smooth desktop experience, Nvidia is a bad option in general (at least yet). They only very recently started caring about addressing Wayland support and a lot of things are rough becasue of that. Plus it will be a long time before their kernel driver is upstreamed, and a lot of the above depends on that. So I strongly recommend AMD for good modern Linux desktop experience.

I agree, but that doesn't make it any less valuable of a metric. Nvidia cards are extremely widespread, reporting the performance on Nvidia hardware does a good job of representing what a lot of people will experience.

Furthermore, Nvidia made inroads for Wayland support years ago, GNOME just refused to adopt it. Nvidia's terms were always that Wayland implimentations could adopt EGLstreams whenever they wanted, and that GBM would not be considered an acceptable alternative until it was faster. Their so-called hostility towards the Linux desktop mostly amounts to not contributing to GNOME and making their drivers proprietary for so long. In that sense, they're about as evil as webkit contributors who don't fix x86-linux bugs.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#39

Post by [deleted] »

scottlamb wrote: post #33
giantdude wrote: post #8

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…

> While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine and edit an image stored there. That is, the Gimp runs on your home machine while your notebook has the GUI. But that's never where I want the split to be when working across the network. Remote storage? Sure, sign me up. (The POSIX APIs are horribly unsuitable for network filesystems, but I'm speaking about the concept more th…

[deleted]

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#40

Post by jcelerier »

sprash wrote: post #36
resoluteteeth wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 woul…

> x11 was designed around assumptions that are no longer correct Nothing could be further from the truth. If you use Xrender properly you can make very sophisticated drawing operations that are extremely efficient over the wire and that are GPU accelerated even when the process does not run on the local machine. It is Gtk and Qt that for wahtever reason decided to ditch their Xrender backends. > multiple round-trips…

Qt didn't ditch it. I use it all the time. If you have Debian it's compiled-in by default - just set QT_XCB_NATIVE_PAINTING=1
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