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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#71

Post by Sunspark »

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…

You cannot say a developer is highly incompetent if you yourself do not have the ability to be at least as incompetent as them.

I agree there are problems with various stacks and widgets, but it isn't going to change anytime soon. At the end of the day, it requires someone who can create something from scratch, and those people are few and far between due to the amount of vision and work required. Especially if it's a non-paying task.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#72

Post by wooque »

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?

it runs better than GNOME that is for sure.

You can't adjust scroll speed in GNOME.

Bunch of applications are without titlebars, like Electron apps or MPV, because they refused to support kind of server (or compositor) side decorations.

Some apps don't have proper icons (because they don't set properly app_id, but KDE works around that).

They are also some weird GNOME specific glitches I didn't encountered in KDE or Sway (like Slack crashing when you try to bring it to foreground).

Only problem I have with KDE is that it re-arranges windows when it comes back from sleep.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#73

Post by customkitchen »

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…

>GNOME just refused to adopt it

No idea where you heard that information but it is extremely incorrect. See here:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Mutter-Mainline-EGLStrea...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Better-EGLStreams-Mutt

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#74

Post by donatj »

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…

A friend had an oscilloscope that worked like this. X across the network.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#75

Post by aidenn0 »

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.

Nomachine's server and client are closed-source but work great.

For open-source solution for quickly remoting into an existing display, I use freerdp-shadow-cli which is way more stable than x11vnc and uses the RDP protocol instead.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#76

Post by aidenn0 »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #54
atq2119 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically speaking, what matters is that openssh comes with X11 forwarding built-in. Somebody should go and provide equally seamless "Wayland forwarding". That might end up looking more like VNC under the hood, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Wayland forwarding has been there for years now: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe Is it seamless enough for what you had in mind?

I think GP was talking about how ssh has the -X and -Y flags for forwarding X, but you need to do something like -L XXXX:localhost:YYYY to ssh forward.

TigerVNC (and some others) will do e.g. "-via foo@bar :1" which GP might not know, but is rather convenient.

Xpra is still a better replacement for -X when launching a single application though.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#77

Post by vidarh »

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…

Same here. Nothing provided by Wayland gives me a compelling reason to switch as long as X11 keeps working for me.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#78

Post by nikau »

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…

A long time ago I used a Citrix xserver that translated everything to ica, it was very fast and hid the latency well even over an isdn connection.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#80

Post by zeotroph »

Can someone address various criticism, possibly slander of Wayland, along the lines of "well it works now, but it is already outdated"?

I can't remember were I read it, but among the claims were that it is too closely coupled to GNOME, and various things like fractional scaling, apps having to provide min/max/close buttons/decorations, or window shading not being in the core protocol because of that. Also - and more seriously - the rendering was claimed to be based an outdated/wrong model meaning GUI applications can't detect and optimize for things like when to render or not, e.g. make decisions based on refresh rates or not being focused, resulting in performance or battery life problems.

The other point about missing native network support I can dismiss myself, but for the others I am not knowledgeable enough.

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