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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#271

Post by fsckboy »

jacob019 wrote: post #90
aliqot wrote: 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.

can xrdp or vnc display individual remote windows on my local desktop side by side with local windows? I don't want to import an entire remote desktop. That's what I've always used X for, with seamless mouse X select and middle button paste.

> more comfortable to use than X forwarding. A PITA to set up though.

X port forwarding is painless, not sure what aspect you're referring to?

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#272

Post by lucideer »

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…

> This is a lot to give up

For whom?

Nobody is arguing it's not a great and powerful feature, nor that it's not "a lot to give up". The only argument posited is that not a lot of people will actually have to make that sacrifice (as not many actually use that feature). Is that not true?

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#273

Post by drdebug »

mgraczyk wrote: post #227
drdebug wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your colleagues don't need X forwarding, so requirements from people that are not in the vast majority don't need to be addressed, they'll just have to use RDP/VNC even if it's a step backwards for them. Fortunately X11 is open source, so life can continue for those of us who need it.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#274

Post by ksala_ »

pmontra wrote: post #263
wooque wrote: 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.

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.

What they meant is having thumbnail instead of the icon, so that you can quickly see a preview of all the files instead of having to select them one by one. This article was somewhat recently shared and it explains the whole ordeal https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna... (contains snarky language).

It’s a small(-ish) issue but people often share it as a good example of their frustration with the way Gnome is managed - the bug report has been open for years, there has been several patches proposed, but they’ve always been either rejected or ignored with no discussion. My personal (and similar) pet peeve is that typing in the window will trigger a search instead of selecting the file matching the key like in every other OS.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#275

Post by csande17 »

ddevault wrote: post #230
csande17 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, thanks! I was more familiar with the color management situation than the subpixel anti-aliasing situation.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#276

Post by fsckboy »

skykooler wrote: post #16
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…

On the other hand, this works increasingly poorly as most desktop environments and software assumes there is no network involved (for example, last time I tried running Firefox over a forwarded X session I got a bunch of errors about a broken GL context). And you can do the same thing, with usually better results, by using VNC instead (and there are indeed VNC servers for Wayland, for example wayvnc).

I'm not sure what experience you're describing, for me the real crime trying to run a remote Firefox over a forwarded X session is that it figures out you're doing that and instead decides to run another window of your local Firefox instance. It's been like that a few years now. I can't imagine what they're doing under the hood, haven't looked into it, but it sure is irritating.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#277

Post by ciphol »

adamzegelin wrote: post #21
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 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…

Is there a user-transparent way to run Gimp over RDP/VNC, similar to "ssh -X" for X11?

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#278

Post by sampa »

Wayland on Gnome is no-go for me. My desktop runs for weeks and I often Alt+F2: r[estart] Gnome, cause of memory leaks and sluggishness.

On X11 it is painless, since it doesn't affect my running GUI programs. On Wayland it kills everything. Too bad.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#279

Post by xani_ »

ColonelPhantom wrote: post #162
xani_ wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should put a layer on top of wayland with all of the common stuff that DE uses funneled into common APIs. Like, all the eXtras DM needs We could call it X-Wayland

XWayland already exists and is the name for X.org running on Wayland, to enable X11 apps to run on Wayland desktops. You may be interested to learn about wl-roots though. It's a project that I think originated from sway, and it aims to provide most of the low-level plumbing for writing your own Wayland window manager/desktop environment.

I know, twas a joke

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#280

Post by fsckboy »

resoluteteeth wrote: post #17
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…

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…

> It just seems completely pointless to even bother with something x11's network transparency

this kind of statement astounds me. The internet is essentially based on network transparency, it's the gold standard for local area networking too. If it hadn't been invented yet and somebody just proposed a viable scheme to create network transparency, your eyes should light up with the possibilities... imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.

network transparency is what networks should provide, not for graphics, but across the board. It's the Apples and Microsofts of the world who don't give it to you both because they never understood it, and because it disrupts their walled gardens. You are thinking of a few network features that you want, and instead of conceiving it as properly architected orthogonal software features, you just want special purpose code for your two features (video and video games) in the current context.

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