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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#241

Post by onli »

bowsamic wrote: post #232
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #231

Can someone explain to me why Linux users seem to like arguing about purely technical pieces of their system like the init manager or the compositor as if it significantly affected them? It’s something I have always found strange.

Because the draw of the system is the technical setup even more so than the end user experience. For a lot of Linux users, liking how the system is constructed technically is more important than actually doing stuff on it

Plus, it affects them significantly. The switch to pulseaudio meant the support forums were filled with people that had no sound. Because the newest ubuntu activated wayland, Teams could not share the desktop anymore, the web app. So it is necessary to know about the technical details to fix the problem (switch back to alsa and X, for example)

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#242

Post by bayindirh »

fulafel wrote: post #235
bayindirh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know whether you used Remote X, but I used it in a project, and it's extremely inefficient, esp. in thin client applications, and if you try to carry anything like a video, a 100mbps connection could easily be saturated by one pair of X server and client. In other words, it doesn't work in any way unless you have a gigabit LAN. NoMachine developed a couple of libraries called NX back in the day, which transfe…

It's interesting how our networks have gotten relatively much slower. When X11 was designed and for a long time afterwards, networks were fast enough. But now end user networking performance has plateaued much earlier and faster than computing power and app bandwidth requirements. 100M became the norm in the mid 90s, 1G in the mid 00s, but there was no 10G norm in 2010s or 100G norm in 2020s, we're still at almost th…

I think it has two reasons, first the price of the hardware required to do these speeds (plus the cable requirements + range limits), and WiFi.

These slowdown is offset by improvements in video and audio codecs, transparent compression and better static compression formats.

So, having 100mbps WAN connection at home is arguably provides more utility than having 100mbps 5 years ago.

Unless you do professional photo/video work, a 10G connection at home makes no sense. A good 802.11AC network plus some gigabit nodes is more than enough for a nice smooth experience at home, for most people.

P.S.: As a sysadmin, I know delights of having a lightning fast network at any place you live/work, but no, I'd rather spend time with my family rather than maintaining that.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#243

Post by brnt »

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…

Same here. Only, Wayland just hangs the entire screen, no recovery possible. I could reproduce this across distros and hardware (Intel, AMD and Nvidia). This was using stock Fedora 34, and I haven't tried since, because those hangs would occur within minutes of boot and I the closest I could come was "must be a driver bug". Exactly the same bug for all three GPU makers...

Unfortunately, nobody seems interested in such user reports or quality control (apparently, turns out there are many like us who're getting "upgrade your hardware", "works for me", "user error", etc. I retreated to Debian stable, which is indeed very stable.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#244

Post by torginus »

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.

If you're not afraid of big brother, I can recommend Chrome Remote desktop. You just install a server on the shared machine, and you can access your stuff using a regular browser thanks to the wonders of WebRTC.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#245

Post by shmerl »

delusional wrote: post #219
shmerl wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In practice you can't recover and need a reboot even if in theory it's possible.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#246

Post by argulane »

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…

Under GDM you can use systemd environment.d(5)[1] to configure those variables. I have some examples in my dotfiles[2]. Your Sway configuration also has to inject it's own environment variables to systemd session like is documented here[3]. Arch Linux does that in `/etc/sway/config.d/50-systemd-user.conf`[4]

If you really want to run some shell scripts before sway then you have to create a new desktop file under `/usr/share/wayland-sessions/` that calls your script that setups environment and does `exec sway`[5]

[1]: https://man.archlinux.org/man/environment.d.5

[2]: https://github.com/artizirk/dotfiles/tree/master/.config/env...

[3]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/SessionStart

[4]: https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-community/blob/package...

[5]: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/100

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#247

Post by tannhaeuser »

eddyb wrote: post #128
slimsag wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

GNOME has kind of always been on the opposite end of the configurability spectrum from KDE, IME. But also I'm not super clear on how libinput fits into the picture, I think there used to be some Synaptics-specific integration in certain places that I never went back to, to confirm the differences (switched to libinput several years before, and I've completely forgotten since what I was trying to solve back then). Any…

So what are you using or recommending? Recently switched to kubuntu from gnome-ubuntu, and while some pain points have gone away (lack of global menu can partially be kindof mitigated, didn't have to fiddle with touch acceleration like on 20.04), I'm not impressed: middle-click gets in the way a lot and can't be switched off, power mgmt tray is lagging badly behind power events, weird dock preview and not-so-great app switching, somewhat fiddly touch targeting at times, FF crashing, updates not smooth, insists on chromium as default browser, point-/tasteless Windows-y sounds and looks, ...

All the while there are ZERO GUI apps or other capabilities I'm using that I didn't already use 15 or 20 years ago.

Eying a return to Mac OS which at least doesn't feel like you're treated as guinea pig by dicks with attitudes. Linux notebooks seem barely good enough for uninspired enterprise work on bloated IDEs and Docker/other container crap only there because said dicks couldn't agree on a set of (really old) lib versions and gui toolkits.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#248

Post by baq »

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.

> By the way, does anyone know of a VNC-like solution that can use MPEG compression?

try this: https://xpra.org/

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#249

Post by aseipp »

jcelerier wrote: post #42
echelon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a lot to give up for cool compositing effects... I've used networked X windows and it's always felt like a kludgy, crash-prone hack. The better solution is to render the entire desktop remotely and stream it over wholesale, such as with VNC and other protocols. If companies like YC's Mighty have their way, the future will be thin-client based. And it won't be built on X Windows, because that's the wrong lay…

streaming the entire desktop is an absolutely horrendous experience when compared to just ssh -X and running the app I want

Run 'waypipe ssh user@machine firefox' and you are done.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#250

Post by jwilk »

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.

Contrary to claims in sibling comments, tearing is definitely still a thing in X11.

mpv has a whole FAQ section about it:

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FAQ#tearing

Some of the solutions presented there are not mpv-specific, and some of them may even actually help.

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