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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#101

Post by jeroenhd »

jacob019 wrote: post #90
aliqot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote X has been a godsend for me. I'm not always able to lug around a worthy machine, so being able to use lesser hardware as a 'thinclient' to my wireguard'd assets is very handy. Obviously I'm not going to expect high definition video or realtime gaming, but that's not what it's billed as either, so within the scope of what it's for I'm wholly satisfied. People on both sides sound somewhat fanatic, and I've never…

xrdp is so much more comfortable to use than X forwarding. A PITA to set up though. VNC is a sensible choice too.

I'm so glad modern GNOME has xrdp support built in. It's just a toggle in the settings.

My previous attempts to make it work have ruined the standard configuration so I'll probably need to do some serious purging/reinstalling to get it to work, but for new installs I'm sure remoting into GNOME must be a LOT easier.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#102

Post by gnull »

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…

Each time I tried running Firefox over ssh with X11 it either lagged or crashed. With Wayland's Waypipe it works flawlessly, I could even watch a Youtube video through it.

I'm double checking it right now using a remove machine a few blocks away from my home. Running `ssh -X remote firefox` lags a lot worse than `waypipe ssh remote firefox`. The latter feels almost native, very responsive.

So no, I don't think we are giving up a lot. X11 was designed to work over network, but it never really did.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#103

Post by erik_seaberg »

admax88qqq wrote: post #85
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. Have you ever tried this? I've never had X11 network transparency be a good experience. It would be cool but to be good all apps would have to be designed with it in mind. And they are not. The software moves on from X11 as a protocol for remote computing. Even well before Wayland, all the things…

This is what I keep coming back to. A backend that targets Javascript can take advantage of the desktop/laptop GPU. A backend that targets Wayland has to render everything locally in software (no GPU), and nobody I’ve ever worked for wants to build a system that runs this way.

Xaw and Motif worked okay, and it’s getting hard to imagine a heavy user who has access to only one computer, yet newer GUI toolkits have lost interest in X11 as a platform for remote rendering.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#105

Post by amaranth »

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…

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

It was often slower and more likely to run in to driver issues than just doing software rendering and sending pixmaps. They're now moving to GL and Vulkan because they can be faster and while they have the same risk of driver issues at least that's the same stack used for video games and CAD and such so more people care about it working well.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#106

Post by xani_ »

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 that feature very rarely but the times I did it was insanely useful. Mostly running some debug software so debugging session could run locally but I could control it remotely, without installing whole graphical environment and somehow setting up vnc session just to run single app

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#107

Post by customkitchen »

jcelerier wrote: post #40
sprash wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

That flag has been broken for years: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-70387

I doubt it will ever be fixed, because it offers no benefits when the application itself uses actual hardware rendering with GL or Vulkan. XCB can't speed that up at all.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#108

Post by kelnos »

bxparks wrote: post #61
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.

Yeah, that's frustrating sometimes, and I don't even have a super hi-res screen.

But I just live with it. Honestly I don't resize windows that often. I either use the window's natural size, or maximize. In the 18 years I've used Xfce it hasn't been a big issue for me.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#109

Post by jonas-w »

rcarmo wrote: post #20

I would love to see a minimalist Linux distro for ARM SBCs that shipped Wayland, river (or Sway) and foot as its default environment. I guess the interest just isn’t there.

From the way you wrote this comment it seems that river is superior to sway for you. Why so? I never used river, only used sway.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#110

Post by gnull »

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…

I never had to do it myself, but I have a feeling it will work better with Wayland. The delay of 50-80ms introduced by the network is not terribly much (everything under 110ms is fine for playing Dota), so if your software doesn't lag itself, like X11 did, maybe it will work.

You could also use something like Zerotier-one to recover from network being shortly disrupted. This service connects your machines into a virtual network with static IPs, so the IP addresses through which your machines talk will stay the same and TCP connections will recover and ssh will keep working if a device briefly goes offline.

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