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

An X11 apologist tries Wayland

artemis.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 453 posts

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#41

Post by bayindirh »

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 don't know whether you used Remote X, but I used it in a project, and it's extremely inefficient, esp. in thin client applications, and if you try to carry anything like a video, a 100mbps connection could easily be saturated by one pair of X server and client. In other words, it doesn't work in any way unless you have a gigabit LAN.

NoMachine developed a couple of libraries called NX back in the day, which transferred images and image deltas over with high compression. We used this instead via in the same project (with X2Go), and I reimplemented the same stack to my university where 20 something users connected remotely to a single "terminal" server to do remote research, and it worked like a charm.

While I like Remote X, it's still very inefficient even today. So, unless it's made extremely efficient over normal internet, over residential connections, it won't be missed.

Moreover, the rarity of projects using Remote X, or abstracting it with libraries like NoMachine kinda validates the idea is the feature is considered a novelty and not used much.

While I like the feature, I have feeling that it won't be missed or sought after much.

On the other hand what killed X is its code state, rather than the complex architecture. It's haphazard development over the years which made the code unmaintainable.

Addendum: Remote X made sense back in the day. Carrying minimal data, mostly terminal windows between terminals and central mainframe/time sharing system, over relatively short distances. I guess it's never designed and considered for long distances like today's internet, hence it's left to the wayside.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#42

Post by jcelerier »

echelon wrote: post #26
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…

> This is a lot to give up for cool compositing effects... I've used networked X windows and it's always felt like a kludgy, crash-prone hack. The better solution is to render the entire desktop remotely and stream it over wholesale, such as with VNC and other protocols. If companies like YC's Mighty have their way, the future will be thin-client based. And it won't be built on X Windows, because that's the wrong lay…

streaming the entire desktop is an absolutely horrendous experience when compared to just ssh -X and running the app I want

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#43

Post by mftb »

This is a good article, one of the best in this vein that I've seen. The author clearly had some features that he really needs from X and has been tracking their progress under Wayland. If you find yourself in a similar circumstance, I think it's a good read.

My own experience was different. I came back to Linux as a daily driver after years away. I bought a machine expressly to be a good Linux workstation and set it up from scratch. So for me the new stuff (Wayland (via Sway), Pipewire, etc..) has simply been excellent. I just didn't have the legacy issues to deal with that other people have.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#44

Post by testermelon »

adamzegelin wrote: post #21
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…

You can also use Gimp via a RDP or VNC session, which will give much better performance on low-bandwidth connections, since those protocols do damage detection, only sending updates of what's changed, and (lossy) compression. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the whole X11 is network transparent thing worked great when apps used the X11 drawing primitives. These days a significant number of X11 apps jus…

> These days a significant number of X11 apps just render _everything_ "server-side" as bitmaps and then send them over the wire to the client to composite them.

Inferring from the quotation, I take it you mean application server-side (instead of display server-side)? Just confirming.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#45

Post by Cloudef »

>Most of the compositing logic is actually handled by a library called wlroots, a project that spawned from sway

wlroots is actually fork of wlc, but i dont think theres any original wlc code anymore, but my name seems to be in the LICENSE file still :)

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#46

Post by shmerl »

smoldesu wrote: post #38
shmerl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whole GBM debacle was simply their masking of a deeper problem. They can't interoperate with the kernel properly because their driver module is not GPL compliant. And proper Wayland support relies on a lot of kernel (DRM) functionality. They have to do convoluted dance workarounds to address the above.

Basically, Nvidia will never work really well on Wayland until their kernel driver is upstreamed. This year they finally decided to open source their kernel module. But it's still some road for them to get to upstreaming.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#47

Post by capitainenemo »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #35

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 re…

Agreed. I use xdotool heavily, ssh -YC quite a lot. underpowered devices...

I'm going to stay on X11 as long as there are options. Thankfully, there are still plenty of options, FOSS seems good at that long tail. Just like MATE still offers me a nice simple desktop that doesn't even force compositing for the particularly wimpy laptop.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#48

Post by mort96 »

commoner wrote: post #11
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'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?

They're talking about scroll speed, not cursor speed. When using those high precision touchpads where you can scroll pixel by pixel (so not line by line scroll wheel emulation), it's impossible to configure the speed of that scrolling in GNOME, and on a whole lot of systems, it's insanely sensitive.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#49

Post by mort96 »

treffer wrote: post #10
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…

Huh, I am on Ubuntu 22.10 (current dev) and changed the track pad speed yesterday. I think it was part of the regular mouse settings in gnome.

Scroll speed, not cursor speed.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#50

Post by DC-3 »

Cloudef wrote: post #45

>Most of the compositing logic is actually handled by a library called wlroots, a project that spawned from sway wlroots is actually fork of wlc, but i dont think theres any original wlc code anymore, but my name seems to be in the LICENSE file still :)

Hey, I recognise you! You're the bemenu guy! I must admit I recently swapped `bemenu` out for `tofi` but I did use it for several years and it worked well, so thanks for that.
Post reply on HN