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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#171

Post by ColonelPhantom »

mort96 wrote: post #48
commoner wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm able to set the trackpad speed in both GNOME and KDE on Wayland with libinput. In GNOME, it is under Settings > Mouse & Touchpad > Touchpad Speed. In KDE, it is under Settings > Input Devices > Touchpad > Pointer speed. Do these settings not show up for you?

They're talking about scroll speed, not cursor speed. When using those high precision touchpads where you can scroll pixel by pixel (so not line by line scroll wheel emulation), it's impossible to configure the speed of that scrolling in GNOME, and on a whole lot of systems, it's insanely sensitive.

I have a slider for touchpad scroll speed on my KDE Plasma Wayland laptop.

Also, in my experience XWayland programs seem to exhibit overly sensitive scrolling, while native Wayland is fine (noticed this mainly on Firefox). Perhaps X scrolls by line, while Wayland natively supports pixel-based scrolling?

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#172

Post by kelnos »

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 would think that's a toolkit (GTK, Qt, etc.) issue, not a window manager (well, in Wayland parlance, compositor) issue. The apps just get the scroll events from libinput, and it's up to them to decide how much/how fast to scroll based on what it sees.

It's the same argument that the libinput author makes about why libinput doesn't implement kinetic scrolling, and that it's the job of the toolkit. Only the toolkit knows what's appropriate there.

For reference, the kinetic scrolling rationale goes like this: say you start a scroll movement in one app, and then it continues scrolling after you lift your finger off the touchpad. Then you alt-tab to another app. If libinput implements kinetic scrolling, then scrolling will start happening in the newly-focused app, until the kinetic scroll decays down to zero. That's definitely not what you want, and libinput can't fix that problem, because it doesn't know anything about windows or focus.

Granted, scroll speed isn't exactly the same thing, but I could imagine that a toolkit/application could want different scrolling speed in different contexts, which libinput would have no understanding of.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#173

Post by kelnos »

bubblethink wrote: post #160
throwaway892238 wrote: post #131

Is there a single Wayland supporter who finds the user experience to be better than X11? Because my understanding of Wayland is that the only people who want it are gui devs.

>Is there a single Wayland supporter who finds the user experience to be better than X11? The immediately noticeable improvement with wayland is with respect to screen tearing, especially in multi-monitor rotated configurations. Screen tearing has always been an issue on x11, and while intel/amd drivers do a decent job in basic cases, things that don't work will likely never work given that x11 is mostly deprecated.

> Screen tearing has always been an issue on x11

Screen tearing has not been an issue on X11 for like... a decade? Granted, that's after development on Wayland started.

Also I just don't get this obsession with screen tearing. I've experienced it on occasion in other context and I... just kinda don't care about it? Certainly if you're a video editing/creating/whatever professional, it actually matters for your job, but otherwise it's just cosmetic, and often hardly noticeable at all.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#174

Post by kelnos »

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…

Odd, I was just playing around with Wayland today on my new (12th-gen) Framework laptop, and I didn't see the issue you describe. I also use the libinput driver on X11 without issue.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#175

Post by foxhill »

Shorel wrote: post #169

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 make…

i really want to support Wayland. X has done us well, but it's about time a protocol based around more modern situations supplants it.

Wayland has a myriad of these sharp-edge cases which i also find each time i try it out. what worries me a little is that some of them are clearly design decisions with no simple remidiation, your crashing example (which i have also witnessed first hand) is one of them.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#176

Post by cycomanic »

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.

The problem with X over the network is not bandwidth it is latency. The X11 protocol is very chatty so even very simple things will cause several roundtrips which makes X over the network so painful.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#177

Post by perihelions »

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…

- "When I switch to my Linux laptop to test things, my trackpad is bonkers and I have to move my finger in like 1mm increments because otherwise I'd scroll like 10 pages in Firefox. It's infuriatingly frustrating."

The scroll behavior is highly configurable on Firefox' side: check out some of these about:config flags (if this is still of interest),

    mousewheel.acceleration.factor
    mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_x
    mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y
    mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_z
    mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#178

Post by taeric »

cycomanic wrote: post #176
taeric wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem with X over the network is not bandwidth it is latency. The X11 protocol is very chatty so even very simple things will cause several roundtrips which makes X over the network so painful.

Though, even there, networks are far faster than they used to be. Especially for the size is windows they used to push.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#179

Post by cycomanic »

d110af5ccf wrote: post #163
gbin wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Well the people who are pushing wayland are the same people that are maintaining xorg, so I would argue they know what they are talking about.

I have also not heard of any one who loudly proclaims xorg is much beter and should instead be maintained to step up to actually do that.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#180

Post by foxhill »

i agree with a lot of this;

> I was not happy so see that my mouse felt laggy

i also noticed this immediately and it was infuriating. my display runs at 240hz, so there must be at least 2, maybe even 3 frames of latency for it to be noticeable. it's made more perplexing that wayland was supposed to represent a reduction in latency.

> Out of the box, there’s a bit of that in wayland too, but sway has a way out: max_render_time.

this is possibly the worst way you could reduce input latency - mostly because of the tail-end of render times will be the most noticeable and the worst performing - please never do this unless you're trying to make your users inexplicably angry :)

> when really, other X servers exist, and have varying degrees of support for the extensions Xorg supports

a non-point here from me but i only know of XOrg and Xfree86, and i think the last time i tried that, linux kernels started with a two.. :)

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