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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#261

Post by j1elo »

torginus wrote: post #244
amelius wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I recently had to uninstall Chrome Remote Desktop, because it was breaking my (Ubuntu) system's ability to handle some basic permissions, such as mounting USB disks.

It turns out that CRD is well known for breaking other seemingly random things, such as accessing your printer:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1196248/automount-when-click...

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#262

Post by erik_seaberg »

kaba0 wrote: post #212
erik_seaberg wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Our datacenters don’t have GPUs, Wayland doesn’t make my desktop’s GPU available to them, and local desktop-only software is getting pretty rare.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#263

Post by pmontra »

wooque wrote: post #68
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…

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.

Gnome on Ubuntu 20.04 does have thumbnails in file picker. I checked that right now before clicking Reply: Slack, upload from your computer, click on PNG, the thumbnail appears to the right of the file list.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#264

Post by prmoustache »

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…

Unless you are writing applications using motif and/or contributing to a better remote X11 experience, the why and how do not really matter if most popular applications are using GTK/QT and electron.

It was really nice and convenient at the time but it is going the way of the dodo the same way cars with manual gearbox are because almost nobody cares and there are other ways to connect remotely.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#265

Post by pizza234 »

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…

I'd be a big fan if that worked, but I haven't found an open remote desktop solution on Linux that works out of the box and acceptably fast¹, to the point that I have to use proprietary software to perform remote desktop sessions - there is a huge gap between the open solutions and the proprietary ones².

¹=they're all either incredibly slow, or clunky to configure/use. interestingly, X2Go, which I think was working out of the box, but was too slow, is based on an old version of the Nomachine (NX) protocol.

²=the recent RustDesk tries to fill that gap.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#266

Post by kjeetgill »

itvision wrote: post #234
bubblethink wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I haven't had screen tearing under X.org for more than a decade. Both under NVIDIA and Intel. A nice made-up issue but it's made up.

Ah yes. Issues you don't have don't exist. Especially, with super consistent, trivial, uniform system components like graphics drivers, display servers, and compositors on linux.

Famously stable, reliable, and uncomplicated.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#267

Post by mariusmg »

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…

>you can use

When was the last time you used this feature ?

X11 is a protocol designed for machines which didn't have the power to draw a GUI locally. That time has long passed.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#268

Post by flohofwoe »

kelnos wrote: post #172
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 k…

> because it doesn't know anything about windows or focus

But that's exactly the problem with the Wayland architecture, isn't it? Input handling, window management and composition are so closely entangled that it shouldn't be spread over several unrelated libraries.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#269

Post by stuaxo »

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.

Not sure on the exact compression but I'm sure Nomachine/NX must use some video compressing n, I'm even able to watch video over it without it dying.
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