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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#291

Post by mark254 »

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?

You want xpra.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#292

Post by retcore »

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…

>which will give much better performance on low-bandwidth connections,

Er, IRIX was pushing 12 bits and alpha channel around over X on twisted pairs c.a. 1993.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#293

Post by j-james »

skerit wrote: post #283
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 is probably worst DE imaginable I agree. And yet I also still use GNOME. I just really like the GTK aesthetic. And you'll have to pry dash-to-dock from my cold, dead hands.

Same here, only with Dash to Panel. But man - I have so many workarounds for standard functionality GNOME either breaks or refuses to implement. A symlink in place of /usr/bin/gnome-terminal, patch sets for GTK 3, custom scripts to work around that you can't configure the screenshot folder...

https://github.com/home-sweet-gnome/dash-to-panel

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#294

Post by epakai »

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…

I settled on pam_env and ~/.pam_environment for handling these. Required a small change to pam config to load it by default, but it felt like a sane solution at the time.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#295

Post by kaba0 »

xani_ wrote: post #281
kaba0 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Okay ? It can be lib. Just make wayland use it, not be thing every DE needs to. DE shouldn't care about where the mouse movement data comes from and should not need to compensate based on device.

There is no wayland.exe, it is a protocol.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#296

Post by j-james »

ksala_ wrote: post #274
pmontra wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I have had success getting typeahead search working again in some applications with https://github.com/lah7/gtk3-classic.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#297

Post by gw99 »

llimllib wrote: post #118
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…

Here's me, 3 years ago, complaining about the exact same bug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21248799 pretty sad to see that absolutely nothing has changed.

No one fixes the bugs because they’re not interesting.

It’s why I’m now a mac user.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#298

Post by arghwhat »

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 big misunderstanding. Network handling is stripped from the core design, but is very much available on all compositors.

The equivalent to X11 forwarding is waypipe[1], which is far superior to X11 forwarding. Rendering happens entirely on the host and clients can therefore use accelerated resources as they wish, and the (accelerated) h264 encoded buffer feeds means much lower network utilization.

1: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#299

Post by msh »

ncmncm wrote: post #209
cat_plus_plus wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Editing my photos over a layer of video compression artifacts doesn't sound fun. Web apps are a more reasonable replacement for X11, with browser client much more capable to do low latency local processing. The only problem is lack of easy support for local apps and LAN-distributed apps. Probably still easier to add than to support low input latency eventually consistant Canvas over X11 or VNC.

The roles of client and server being force-swapped is another perhaps unfortunate development.

Why?

I think who should be client and who should be server is entirely context/application specific.

Sometimes I want to be able to connect to a server from any random client and continue the session.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#300

Post by arghwhat »

pizza234 wrote: post #265
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 o…

waypipe[1] is the wayland equivalent people are looking for. It gives you the UX and ease of use of X11 forwarding, but with the performance and efficiency of things like RDP (which is gross, but can run quite well on Windows Server if you throw enough money at Microsoft).

Wayland applications will render entirely on the host using host resources and acceleration as needed, buffer content gets transmitted using (hardware accelerated) h264 encoding, while messages in general get passed as-is to give a fully local experience.

And it of course works over SSH.

1: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

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