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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#61

Post by bxparks »

kelnos wrote: post #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/ho…

Every 2 years I take Xfce (Xubuntu, Mint Xfce) for a test drive. It seems light and fast, I want to like it. Then every 2 years, I rediscover that the resize border on each window is 1px wide, which is completely unusable. When I google for a solution, the answer seems to be use Alt-Left-Mouse. I don't understand how that is a solution. I don't want to use 2 hands to resize a window.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#62

Post by skybrian »

bayindirh wrote: post #41
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 transfe…

Also, I suspect that the bandwidth used by a typical X app was far lower back when it was invented. I remember seeing some greyscale X terminals, and probably not many levels of grey either.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#63

Post by amelius »

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…

Very much this. Running the X11 protocol over the network is usually not a good idea anymore.

By the way, does anyone know of a VNC-like solution that can use MPEG compression?

Also, VNC could be better if it could increase the quality of parts of the screen once they stop updating. E.g. in TigerVNC setting a low bitrate doesn't improve the quality of text once the text stops changing.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#64

Post by jmclnx »

kelnos wrote: post #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/ho…

I am in the same boat with you, but I am looking for something similar to FVWM, *twm or fluxbox. I really do not like desktop environments.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#65

Post by Gigachad »

Lio wrote: post #2

Wayland seems pretty good to me now. There are still the odd issues with HiDPI but I think that's mainly down to XWayland support in apps that don't support Wayland natively yet. e.g. If I'm running VLC and I move it from a 1:1 screen to a HiDPI screen then my mouse pointer goes tiny as it passes over it. It's a similar situation for some older Electron based apps too. Support for XWayland is OKish but not seamless.…

Mixed DPI is basically unusable on Wayland due to X11 apps but last I checked, X doesn't even support this at all.

I gave up waiting because years later still almost every non Gnome app is electron or otherwise running in XWayland. Just changed my monitors to have the same dpi scale.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#66

Post by Gigachad »

mroche wrote: post #5
AstralStorm wrote: post #3

How is the multi monitor story? Especially when the resolutions or refresh rates do not match?

If you have mixed resolution, mix refresh rate, and mixed DPI setups, anything Wayland native will be just fine. XWayland can still have some quirks, but I'm not sure if that's an easily solvable problem (or at all). Though I don't have HiDPI displays, I have a triple monitor setup with NVIDIA (2x 1920x1200@75Hz~96ppi and 1x 2560x1440@60Hz~108ppi) and though I use Xorg due to some specific applications, the Wayland s…

By "have some quirks" you mean windows will either show as 200% or 50% size on one monitor which is usually unusable. But you're right, its not anything the Wayland side can control, but as a user, you are better off just getting your monitors to have the same DPI than to wait for every single electron app to update it's base electron version.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#67

Post by bluedino »

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…

NICE DCV works really well as a remote Linux desktop. Not sure what it runs underneath.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#68

Post by wooque »

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…

Wayland is not GNOME, what you describe is not Wayland problem, but GNOME problem.

It's possible in both KDE and Sway.

GNOME is probably worst DE imaginable. After 20 years, they still don't have thumbnails in filepicker and even dropped preview side pane in GTK4. I can't even.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#69

Post by kirbyfan64sos »

mkl wrote: post #13
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…

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.

I've used it successfully several years ago, it was a bit rough around the edges but already worked well; I'd imagine that's only improved since.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#70

Post by chpatrick »

amelius wrote: post #63
adamzegelin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Very much this. Running the X11 protocol over the network is usually not a good idea anymore. By the way, does anyone know of a VNC-like solution that can use MPEG compression? Also, VNC could be better if it could increase the quality of parts of the screen once they stop updating. E.g. in TigerVNC setting a low bitrate doesn't improve the quality of text once the text stops changing.

https://xpra.org/
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