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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#111

Post by xani_ »

wooque wrote: post #68
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.

No, it's wayland architecture problem.

It forces every single DE that will use it to reinvent same thing. There is no good reason to do that, just a lot of duplicated effort. You will not want to have different mouse behaviour when you use different WM. Having it pluggable is fine, even desired, but pushing it on every DE is just waste of effort and just bumps the bar required for any DE to move to wayland.

> 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.

For me it peaked somewhere in 1.x, 2.x was prettier version of it, after that they completely lost me. And their constant dumb arrogance with assuming what their users want is just cherry on cake of shit. And the "fuck the compatibility, just change APIs will nilly" attitude they got after 2.x

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#112

Post by xani_ »

gpm wrote: post #89
wooque wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Wayland is not GNOME, what you describe is not Wayland problem, but GNOME problem. Which in turn is the biggest problem with wayland. We are fragmenting the ecosystem with every window manager dealing with shared problems in their own custom way, because wayland only takes responsibility for a tiny fraction of the common things that every window manager does.

Maybe we should put a layer on top of wayland with all of the common stuff that DE uses funneled into common APIs. Like, all the eXtras DM needs

We could call it X-Wayland

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#113

Post by scottlamb »

bluedino wrote: post #67
scottlamb wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's certainly possible to do better than raw X11 across the network. Other folks mentioned VLC, RDP, and NX too. I assume these protocols reduce bandwidth usage by compression. Sometimes you can even do prediction (as with mosh for ttys or Stadia for games).

The best is always going to be to use a local copy of the logic and data needed most frequently/immediately. E.g. in the VS Code example, they keep the buffer you're editing locally, the logic for cursor movements, the errors you're flipping through, and maybe even some precached autocompletion/highlight stuff. You don't have to wait for a round trip to see your keystrokes show up. That's the advantage of splitting the system in the right place.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#114

Post by lucb1e »

lostapathy wrote: post #98
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…

> That is, the Gimp runs on your home machine while your notebook has the GUI. Have you actually tried that in recent years? In my experience not much actually works this way anymore, the performance is just terrible.

This. It takes hundreds of megabits per second to work smoothly.

If you're doing this while on the move, your mobile data is going to be gone in a literal matter of seconds, if the network were fast enough to support it, which it isn't so in reality you're going to be frustrated and wondering why you didn't use a different protocol. From VM to host or on gigabit LAN it works okay, which is where I've used it before.

I used X forwarding a lot until last year, so I can find various arguments for it, but "while on the move" makes absolutely no sense.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#115

Post by xani_ »

rvz wrote: post #37
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 googl…

For me X11 got to the level where everything I want "just works" out of the box.

The most I did is to tweak which input goes where on arand

It can only go down from here. I'm not touching Wayland with 100ft pole

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#116

Post by vlovich123 »

> So what you do is, you keep stepping this number up 1 millisecond at a time while playing a smooth animation, until you’ve eliminated any stuttering in the animation. And now you have done something X11 cannot do- eliminated screen tearing with the absolute minimum latency cost possible.

This should be a debugging tool, not something and users should have to do. The system should have a software PLL control system to make sure the rendering starts at the last possible second and not later.

Also, it should be using current mouse pose + velocity to predict where your mouse will be at display time although that may be harder with generic x86 architecture - not sure there’s any software knowledge of what the display scan out time is as it can depend on the physical properties of the display.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#117

Post by jcelerier »

customkitchen wrote: post #107
jcelerier wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...? the bugreport you pasted seem to have been fixed and merged 3 years ago.

The vast, vast, vast majority of the apps i use daily don't do any GPU rendering, just plain classic widget-based productivity apps

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#118

Post by llimllib »

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…

Here's me, 3 years ago, complaining about the exact same bug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21248799

pretty sad to see that absolutely nothing has changed.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#119

Post by ryandrake »

Gigachad wrote: post #65
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.

I have had a set up with a “retina” iMac (5120 × 2880) surrounded by two Thunderbolt displays (2560 × 1440) for close to a decade. No Linux distribution I’ve tried has managed to handle the different DPIs properly during this entire time period. There may be a way to cobble it together but I gave up many times. Neither the display layer, the window manager, nor the apps seem to be able to take full responsibility for figuring it out.

Windows (through Bootcamp) barely understands the setup and even still, dragging windows across the DPI borders results in horrible jank and artifacts.

Only macOS has this “multiple DPI monitors wizardry” figured out, and it worked from day one.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#120

Post by rogers18445 »

thristian wrote: post #84

I've tried to use Sway a number of times, and the biggest reason I keep bouncing off it is environment variables. There's a bunch of environment variables I want set for every process in my desktop session, from basic things like $EDITOR and $LD_LIBRARY_PATH to more complex things like $MOZ_USE_XINPUT2 or $SSH_AUTH_SOCK. When I use i3 under X11, gdm runs my ~/.profile script so I get all my standard login environment…

When you 'exec sway' it inherits the tty env vars... So just stuff your vars into whatever .profile the tty loads when you login after boot. This has never been a problem I spent any amount of time on.

If you are doing something magical like auto starting sway or something, then you need to make sure that a .profile is loaded by whatever is starting sway if it doesn't inherit a .profile.

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