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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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211–220 of 453 posts

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#211
post #97

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. 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…

> Have you ever tried this? I've never had X11 network transparency be a good experience. I did, nearly 20 years ago. The computers were over 2500 km apart, though it was over a good university to university connection. The Gimp was certainly usable, though I will not go as far as saying it was good since 20 year old memories can be hazy and the standards of the day are different from the standards of today. I also e…

> The one really nice thing about X was the ability to use individual applications across a network connection, rather than dealing with an entire remote desktop

That sounds like a UX problem that’s quite trivial to fix, not a technical one and absolutely not inherent with Wayland.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#212

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. 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…

You honestly believe that Wayland software are not GPU-accelerated?

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#213
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.

Is it more of a pain to setup then just running freerdp-shadow-cli?

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#214
post #86
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.

With X11, I can change scroll speed using the `imwheel` tool. Years ago with Ubuntu and ElementaryOS, I could change it in the system settings GUI. Today, with Wayland now default, I can't change it at all when running Ubuntu or ElementaryOS. You can say this is a GNOME problem, or a distro problem, or whatever. But at the end of the day, I installed two of the most popular Linux distro's out there and my scrolling i…

Welcome to the bazaar style of development.

But don’t blame it on wayland what isn’t its fault.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#215

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.

On a previous laptop I used i3, then after a few years on Windows, I returned to Linux on my current laptop and decided to try Sway, and now I’ve been using it for almost a year and a half, but I set up i3 somewhere along the way too, which I have used when I needed screen sharing on Zoom.

I much prefer Sway. It handles output management much better than i3 (because it’s integrated and integrated well rather than being entirely up to you with xrandr—so this probably wouldn’t apply to full desktop environments like GNOME or KDE), supports mixed-DPI environments, properly supports high-DPI (though I’ve also been using patches for fractional scaling since I want 1.5×), avoids all tearing (which was what really surprised me when I first ran i3, I’d forgotten what the tearing was like), and supports my XF86AudioMicMute key (key code 256; it took a little effort to get it to work, involving dumping the xkb keymap and adding in a suitable entry, but I think that it’s literally impossible to support under X, though you may be able to remap it to a different key like F20 in some way at a lower level, but my attempts at that failed).

It’s not been without its troubles. Screen sharing is only possible at the screen granularity rather than individual windows, and I think Zoom is still broken because they did things stupidly in the past (using a GNOME screenshot API many times per second instead of the compositor-neutral screen sharing API that did exist when they implemented their thing) and are still unravelling them. I’ve also had a couple of apps require tweaks to unbreak, e.g. https://github.com/CadQuery/CQ-editor/issues/266, if you build it with a version of Qt that supports Wayland (the default, though their first-party distribution doesn’t), you have to explicitly tell it to use xcb instead of wayland or it crashes on startup. But honestly that’s all I can think of.

Oh, one more thing, I guess. Cursor sizing is comically broken in Sway. With `seat seat0 xcursor_theme Adwaita 96`, I get cursors at at least five different sizes when hovering over different windows. Some ignore it and use the default size multiplied by the scaling factor. Some use it but ignore the scaling factor. Some use it and multiply by the scaling factor. Some use it and multiply by the scaling factor rounded up to the next integer. Some do different things altogether. I haven’t diagnosed it all yet.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#216
post #77

Mostly, I just hate the treadmill. Over the last decade and a half I've written dozens of small tools, applets, etc to hone my desktop environment I use. Half of those have required patching, some don't work at all (like a nifty oneliner I used to kill of hung ssh connections by targeting the ssh process name, that no longer includes the ip or domain). I will use X11 until I can't - simply because I do not want to re…

Same here. Nothing provided by Wayland gives me a compelling reason to switch as long as X11 keeps working for me.

+1, I'll stick to X and openbox as long as I can

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#217
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…

I'll be holding out for that too, Xfce has been my DE since the day that Gnome 2 was forcibly retired. A simple, configurable, responsive, unopinionated, low fuss DE is essential.

There are lots of stubs of news out there on the web that xfce development may head in that direction, potentially moving from xfwm4 to mutter, so fingers crossed.

(I am definitely an xorg apologist but ... that's because it does what I need, painlessly. As/when wayland can, I'm good to move, especially if the majority of development is taking place there. We just never quite seem to reach that point.)

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#218

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…

> This is a lot to give up for cool compositing effects... Wait, you think this is what this is all about? How about the cool security effects...?!

Support for mixed DPI effects?

Lack of tearing without vsync… effects?

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#219
post #194
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…

If you have a GPU hang and reset, X11 isn't going to be any better. There is some WIP to make recovery from GPU hangs more robust. It's not there yet. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRdnRwPBFBk * https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/wikis/Restarting Though I'm not sure what's the current status of that is or how actively it's progressing. Hopefully it will turn into something usable, it's important.

I takkede to an X11 dev once about this. I remember him saying that X supports recovering already. The issues was that most compositors and applications did not.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#220

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_re…

You’ve got ones like VcXsrv on Windows, which was particularly handy for running GUI stuff in WSL a few years back (before Microsoft provided a first-party solution in WSLg).
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