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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#161

Post by galangalalgol »

kelnos wrote: post #156
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 to use X11's network transparency features a lot in college[0], but it's been a good 20 years and I haven't used it since -- even once. I, too, am not comfortable with throwing away such a potentially useful feature (though I believe there's a wayland "protocol" or something that allows for network transparency now), but I personally don't have a need for it. [0] One of our VLSI design labs was a FreeBSD lab,…

I use it quite often. And I am dreading the day the office switches to wayland. I like having terminals open to several machines on the premises and being able to fire up individual applications from each. I don't really like having a workspace devoted to a vnc for each machine. It doesn't work as well. It makes me use the mouse more. I don't want windows into those machines. I want a gui on my machine hooked to the heavy lifting on another. I'm sure I'll adapt. But sonfar, its a productivity killer.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#162

Post by ColonelPhantom »

xani_ wrote: post #112
gpm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

XWayland already exists and is the name for X.org running on Wayland, to enable X11 apps to run on Wayland desktops.

You may be interested to learn about wl-roots though. It's a project that I think originated from sway, and it aims to provide most of the low-level plumbing for writing your own Wayland window manager/desktop environment.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#163

Post by d110af5ccf »

gbin wrote: post #134
msla wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Running the X11 protocol over the network is usually not a good idea anymore. It works well, though, and I'm not really interested in hearing that my own experience with it working well is a lie or some trick. Wayland gives up some things, and pretending that those things have no value isn't going to convince those of us who know they do. Also, those of us who use non-mainstream window managers (such as Window Make…

TBH This response is way too aggressive for the original comment. The facts stated are simply that today it is more efficient to encode video for remote graphical sessions because the X11 applications already changed a long long time ago to adapt to the modern world of GPUs and accelerated compositing. BW, latency, efficiency, everything became better because a super computer with thousands of cores can do that and l…

The problem is that the Wayland fans have a tendency (at least I feel) to significantly misrepresent things in their favor. Statements like "oh that's actually more efficient on Wayland". No, Wayland is incapable of the sorts of optimizations X can do by design. It is only more efficient if the X app is doing things in a specific way that doesn't take advantage of huge parts of the X protocol. Granted, most modern apps do exactly that at this point. That doesn't make such statements any less of a misrepresentation though.

A much more reasonable claim would be that the network transparency afforded by the X protocol adds significant complexity which is no longer utilized by the majority of mainstream apps today. As such there's a reasonable case for dropping all that complexity from the core system and leaving it to peripheral libraries to handle on a case by case basis for the apps that want to make use of it.

And the idea of lossy compression while using an image editing program being a desirable thing (as suggested elsewhere in this comment chain) is laughable. It's already bad enough reading text that's gone through lossy compression. I would never want compression artifacts while manipulating an image.

My impression of Wayland so far is that I like the technicals but absolutely detest the people I encounter pushing it as a solution (it's quite similar to Rust in that regard I suppose). They would probably meet less resistance if they took more care not to misrepresent the overall state of things. I'll leave the link to KDE Wayland "showstoppers" for reference. Certainly that list is far shorter today than it used to be and many (not all) of the items are now solely on KDE's end. Nonetheless, fanboys have been claiming that Wayland is "production ready" the entire time. https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers

I'll switch to Wayland once it "just works" out of the box in terms of app integration on stable distributions including things like screen capture, fractional scaling factors, color management, all the stuff that works on X.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#164

Post by kxyvr »

I'll ask here in case anyone knows: I actually needed to move from Wayland to X11 on the new Framework laptop because of problems with the touchpad, which I believe uses libinput in Wayland. It appeared as though small motions of the touchpad weren't registering and seemingly no amount of fiddling with the libinput parameters helped. I moved to X11 and the synaptics driver and have had zero issues. I'm not really looking for tech support, but I am curious if anyone else has had similar experiences. This was the final issue that pushed me off of Wayland and back onto X11.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#165

Post by stagas »

kxyvr wrote: post #164

I'll ask here in case anyone knows: I actually needed to move from Wayland to X11 on the new Framework laptop because of problems with the touchpad, which I believe uses libinput in Wayland. It appeared as though small motions of the touchpad weren't registering and seemingly no amount of fiddling with the libinput parameters helped. I moved to X11 and the synaptics driver and have had zero issues. I'm not really loo…

Yes, that's the only reason I can't use Wayland as well. The touchpad becomes unusable and as I'm only using that for my work, it's extremely frustrating. Can't seem to be able to aim at anything, tried any configuration possible. Wheel momentum is gone also and doesn't pick up micro motions as synaptics + X11 do. The screen looks great though, graphics and motions feel much better, it's amazing to look at, but it's unusable.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#166

Post by hakfoo »

taeric wrote: post #141
moomin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was around back in the days that X-servers were still very much a thing, and even then many thought they were an expensive and inefficient way of doing things. However, there were many who genuinely believed that networks would get arbitrarily faster and compute would not. Of course, the opposite happened, but in that alternative universe X’s design would have made sense.

This isn't quite right. Both have gotten arbitrarily faster. That some folks have gigabit fiber is proof of that. Graphics have just outpaced networking. Easily.

I think one thing that sort of disappeared was the vision of thin clients everywhere. X11 is an obvious thin-client solution.

Thin client for home use seems like a winning proposition. Rather than giving the kids a Raspberry Pi 400 or garage-sale P4 when they want their own computer, you could hook up another X terminal to a large shared Ryzen box. The hardware gets more efficiently used, files can easily be shared and centrally backed up, and nobody ends up being the guy with the cast-off or otherwise inferior PC.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#167

Post by POPOSYS »

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.

X2GO is the way to go!

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#168

Post by RealStickman_ »

aidenn0 wrote: post #75
amelius wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nomachine used to be open source. X2Go is the open source continuation of that.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#169

Post by Shorel »

The thing I dislike about Wayland is: Sometimes the server will crash. Video drivers or something. Hasn't happened much with 22.04, but used to happen more frequently before. Both with Intel and AMD.

When this happens in X11, the server restarts, I see the screen go black for an instant, that's it.

When this happens in Wayland, all my open programs are killed. No save prompts or anything, just insta-killed. This makes Wayland unusable unless they can guarantee no crashes, ever.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#170

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

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…

> my understanding is that the whole X11 is network transparent thing worked great when apps used the X11 drawing primitives.

It did. It was awesome to be able to run one of the expensive academic apps from any X terminal on campus. Network security was largely non-existent then, and you could run X apps not just across campus but across the Internet. I remember a really early web page that had a text field (for your host name) and a button that would start a particular app on their side and would display on your local X server. It wasn't very fast.

Anyway, all that died as Athena and Motif began to look dated as newer applications in the mid-90s started using more and more bitmaps.

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