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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#181

Post by sprash »

amaranth wrote: post #105
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…

> 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 work…

> It was often slower

Any data on this? I can remember that your typical Cairo backend ran much faster on a PC from 2004 than todays GNOME/Gtk runs on current machines. If performance is your only argument you clearly lose with the modern GNOME/KDE + wayland stack. The only way you could make GLAMOR accelerated Xrender faster is by putting the spline tesselation step into a shader. (This was not possible when Xrender was introduced but can be done today without breaking any APIs)

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#182

Post by diffeomorphism »

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…

Considering there is waypipe, what exactly is being "given up"?

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#183

Post by cycomanic »

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…

I saw a breakdown of how the X11 protocol over a network works (IIRC It was by one of the wayland proponents who also was a an xorg maintainer so he knew what he was talking about).

The protocol was very poorly designed everything needed essentially several trips back and forth between the client and server. That applies also if you're using Athena or motif widgets, it just becomes much worse with QT or gtk because they also transmit bitmaps, because otherwise they can't guarantee the look.

So it's latency not bandwidth which kills the performance. If you need 3 or 4 roundtrips just moving a window around, that's fine on your home network where you have a ping of 10ms, over the Internet with 100ms latency 3 roundtrips become 300ms so just a cursor move becomes painful.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#184

Post by kouteiheika »

bsder wrote: post #138

For starters, I do agree that the X11 model is fundamentally broken on the modern computing platform. However, sadly, I'm beginning to think that Wayland has made some fundamental architectural choices that are not fixable and are also broken on the modern computing platform. The biggest problem is that Wayland takes the "compositor" route and turns it up to 11. Unfortunately, nobody does multi-window compositor to a…

> The whole "You need link a library and draw your own decorations" is, put simply, ludicrous.

Isn't that simply because of GNOME, where they refuse to support server side decorations[1]?

[1] -- https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#185

Post by moring »

hakfoo wrote: post #166
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.

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 a…

I think quite the opposite happened, just not on X11 level. The web browser is essentially a thin client nowadays. The fact that you have full client-side scripting is one thing that was IMHO a bit underdeveloped in classical thin-client systems because with that you can mask network latency much easier (though, admitted, I don't know a lot about how X11 handles this).

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#186

Post by thrwawy74 »

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 think currently we have compositors that are monolithic and due "it all". Sounds like we'd need a separate process to maintain window state, that the compositor interfaces with. is this recreating some of the problems of X11?

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#187

Post by rhn_mk1 »

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…

To be nitpicky, if the X server crashes, you're just as hosed with X as with Wayland.

The difference is that X survives a window manager crash, whereas Wayland typically does not, because on Wayland it's usually the same process as the server.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#188

Post by cycomanic »

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…

This is not really a wayland or sway problem, but really a systemd problem. It's really annoying because the documentation around this is very scattered and contradictory.

The advice used to be that you should use pam user environment (~/.environment and you need to edit pam configuration on some distributions to allow user environments). However, IIRC there are some possible security implications around this so this has been deprecated. I think you are now supposed to use systemd user variables (or so). I'm not on my computer right now so can't look it up, but hopefully that gives you enough Google keywords to set things up.

It seems like the main developers behind systemd and several of the other fundamental layers of the system stack only use gnome/KDE and assume everyone else is. So some things become quite frustrating to set up for regular users.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#189

Post by Nursie »

ryandrake wrote: post #119
Gigachad wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is a pain in Xorg, and a manual process, but doable with xrandr. Effectively you can over-render and scale to make things consistent.

But it is a pain in the ass and I have to run the script every session.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#190

Post by cycomanic »

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.

Well GUI devs and xorg devs who want to stop having to support the X mess.

But as a user the experience is noticeable superior. One thing I noticed that I wasnt expecting was that things actually got subjectively snappier.

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