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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#221
post #89
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.

Come on, it’s not like the linux user space was ever not fragmented. That’s sort of the deal with bazaar-style development.

After enough time some best practices do solidify into standards, but it wasn’t overnight in X either, and first and foremost it wasn’t made with that in mind. Wayland has protocols which are queryable and provide a very good way of implementing more and more standard ones from the experimental “fragmented” ones, and I don’t see much problem with this model in practice either.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#223
post #111
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.

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 i…

That is exactly what libraries are for, not protocols.

Should Web Standards mandate the use of a given JS implementation because it hinders the creation of new ones?

Also, the million+1 “de” under X are more like skins, there is absolutely no reason for them to exist in that form, they could just build on top of another wayland compositor.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#224
post #110

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…

I never had to do it myself, but I have a feeling it will work better with Wayland. The delay of 50-80ms introduced by the network is not terribly much (everything under 110ms is fine for playing Dota), so if your software doesn't lag itself, like X11 did, maybe it will work. You could also use something like Zerotier-one to recover from network being shortly disrupted. This service connects your machines into a virt…

50-80ms of non-predicted input lag is not terribly much? Surely you must be joking.

Dota is fine because it has network prediction and a finite and well defined set of inputs.

And that's also ignoring video compression artefacts which are that you introduce if you send a modern GFX pipeline across the network. Computers screens can no longer be described with just filled rectangles and text.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#225
Manjaro uses Wayland with Gnome out of the box and I've been using it for nearly a year on and off. I have a cheap Samsung laptop that I bought to run it which replaced a broken macbook that I've since replaced. I used Manjaro as my daily driver until recently. Mostly I'm pretty happy with it. Gnome isn't perfect but it is widely used. With at least some distributions now defaulting to Wayland (usually with Gnome), things are getting usable. So, I just went with path of the least resistance and ended up with a usable laptop.

The touchpad configuration is indeed a bit sucky in Gnome. I actually connected an Apple magic touchpad at some point (version 2). Aside from the bluetooth support in Linux (which is pretty terrible and seems to not work reliably), it worked really nice with this setup once I plugged it in with the usb cable. That made me realize an important thing: most non Apple touchpads are pretty terrible and need extensive software hackery to compensate for just how terrible they are. The quality of that hackery varies widely between different drivers and hardware suppliers. The Apple touchpads are great on Linux; on par with the experience on MacOS (aside from bluetooth, which is nowhere close to that). In the end, I bought a wireless mouse and problem solved (after jumping through some hoops to get that working). But technically these are not Wayland issues.

And things like screen sharing in various video call tools needed a bit of work before they started working. This too is technically not a Wayland problem but it is bloody inconvenient if you are trying to attend meetings for work. I eventually managed to sort these issues out and have used meets, ms teams, slack, cisco webex, zoom and probably a few others. I struggled with Discord.

Generally the biggest issue in this space is just the wide variety of independent and poorly integrated stuff that all needs to come together for things to work flawlessly. You need a login thingy, a window management thingy and a compositor. And then you need various cruft for making the sound work, Bluetooth, and all the rest. And they all point fingers at each other when things don't work. Getting recent versions of these things definitely helps though. So use a Linux distribution with rolling updates. And use something more mainstream.

With X windows this is actually the same deal except the dust has kind of settled after a few decades to the point where it mostly just works or fails in ways that can be fixed with a few text file tweaks. So, Wayland has probably gotten to the point that with the right hardware, things mostly just work. But your mileage may vary. But that has always been that way with Linux.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percent of Linux users do you think would ever use software this way? What percent of all "desktop" OS users would ever use software this way? It seems like an extremely niche and rare use case and probably not the right thing to target for the main desktop environment. I've been using Linux as my main OS for ~12 years now. I have personally never wanted to do anything like that. For remote software, I would pre…

Using a wayland desktop, remote login into a Linux server, start a graphical text editor like gvim, it fails. This is a very common way to dev on Linux, I too have been doing this daily, and with ssh+X11 it works out of the box. I wonder what is the best way to do this with Wayland. Should I ask an admin to reconfigure the remote server to run a VNC or RDP server, and then use a specific tool to connect? I wonder if…

I do something similar with vim, no gui. I use vim over ssh with tmux. Others I know use vs code with an ssh backend. These two make up the workflow of roughly 60000 Googlers. None of them need X forwarding.

Some people may benefit from X forwarding, but the vast majority of Linux users do not.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#228
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…

A display server crash is fatal under X. A window manager crash is not. A window manager is not particularly affected by GPU drivers.

What you see might be a GPU hang or reset that recovered.

Some Wayland compositors have a window manager model by using an external process for window positioning logic (e.g. river). This is mostly just for convenience of development though, making it easy to experiment with layout engines.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#229
post #206

One upon a time (or long forgotten concepts?) there did exist a window system with full client-side scriptability, .i.e. it implemented what nowadays is "the browser as a thin client" with Javascript for client-side rendering: Gosling, James; Rosenthal, David S.H.; Arden, Michelle J.: The NeWS Book: An Introduction to the Network/extensible Window System NeWS used Postscript as the language for client-side tasks. See…

NeWS was also proprietary to Sun Microsystems, unlike X11, which was free software.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#230
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? Longtime Wayland hater here and I literally thought this was one of the things I could expect Wayland to be better at.

In order to do subpixel font rendering correctly, the application needs to know about the subpixel arrangement of the display hardware. So it falls under the same category as things like color management, which Wayland also doesn't support; they just didn't standardize an API to provide that information.

Wayland has definitely provided subpixel layouts to applications for years:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/blob/main/p...

Whether or not applications are making use of it might be a different story.

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