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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#371

Post by II2II »

kaba0 wrote: post #211
II2II wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you ever tried this? I've never had X11 network transparency be a good experience. I did, nearly 20 years ago. The computers were over 2500 km apart, though it was over a good university to university connection. The Gimp was certainly usable, though I will not go as far as saying it was good since 20 year old memories can be hazy and the standards of the day are different from the standards of today. I also e…

> The one really nice thing about X was the ability to use individual applications across a network connection, rather than dealing with an entire remote desktop That sounds like a UX problem that’s quite trivial to fix, not a technical one and absolutely not inherent with Wayland.

If you're talking about shipping a singular rectangular region across the network, possibly. Yet not all windows are rectangular and many applications use more than one window. Then there are issues with how the application interacts with the desktop environment, where the application thinks it is being on computer A when it is actually being displayed on computer B. It is not a trivial UX problem.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#372

Post by gw99 »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #361
gw99 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one fixes the bugs because they’re not interesting. It’s why I’m now a mac user.

I think “not interesting” is an understatement. Making changes in OS project can be downright abysmal - lack of coherent structure, little to guidance, or even hostility toward contributions… It’s certainly not entirely because of the attractiveness of the problem itself.

Yeah I didn’t want to write a couple of pages of rant on here.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#373

Post by jacob019 »

fsckboy wrote: post #271
jacob019 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, it is possible to display individual windows with rdp. X forwarding works ok with a fast LAN, it's very slow to draw over a slower link. SSH compression can help a little. If it works well for you then that's awesome, keep using it.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#374

Post by ziftface »

d110af5ccf wrote: post #163
gbin wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH This response is way too aggressive for the original comment. The facts stated are simply that today it is more efficient to encode video for remote graphical sessions because the X11 applications already changed a long long time ago to adapt to the modern world of GPUs and accelerated compositing. BW, latency, efficiency, everything became better because a super computer with thousands of cores can do that and l…

The problem is that the Wayland fans have a tendency (at least I feel) to significantly misrepresent things in their favor. Statements like "oh that's actually more efficient on Wayland". No, Wayland is incapable of the sorts of optimizations X can do by design . It is only more efficient if the X app is doing things in a specific way that doesn't take advantage of huge parts of the X protocol. Granted, most modern a…

It does just work for some workflows. I think that's really what it boils down to. It is production ready for some people, but it's clearly not for you yet. Maybe that will change.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#375

Post by LtWorf »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #344
dotancohen wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> middle-click gets in the way a lot and can't be switched off, What do you mean by this? What happens when you middle click, that you don't want or expect to happen? > not-so-great app switching How do you like your app switching? I agree that the default isn't great, but in System Settings you can tweak it beyond all reason. I can help if you tell me what you want. > FF crashing I haven't had that happen. What addo…

Half of the time I want to press right-click or even left-click on the touch pad it actually registers as middle-click which is very annoying as it means a window gets closed rather than focussed; don't want middle-click at all. Undesired Middle-click-paste also happens a lot. When I click a link from Thunderbird (weirdly as it sounds when Thunderbird is a Mozilla app) it opens chromium; dialog to set FF as default d…

> Half of the time I want to press right-click or even left-click on the touch pad it actually registers as middle-click

That's a hardware issue. If I press Q I am sure it will not be registered as ctrl+alt+Y for example.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#376

Post by LtWorf »

Izkata wrote: post #356
kaba0 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there is Gnome’s, KDE’s, Weston’s (the reference), and Sway (wlroots)’s implementation. This latter is pretty much a library to build your own de with minimal code up on top.

If that's the case, that there's no common code they're all built on, then why does anyone talk about "Wayland" anything? All these conversations end up kinda pointless because of a sort of "it works on my machine[desktop environment]".

Well the conclusion is that it's never a wayland bug because wayland never defines X feature that users are missing.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#377

Post by LtWorf »

gw99 wrote: post #297
llimllib wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

libinput maintainer refuses patches because he doesn't want more settings to be allowed.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#378

Post by LtWorf »

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.

but doing ssh -X is scertainly easier than setting up vnc.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#379

Post by cqz »

sandreas wrote: post #355
cqz wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use the scroll-factor setting of libinput-config[0] to configure this on DEs that do not provide their own tool (i.e., GNOME). [0] https://gitlab.com/warningnonpotablewater/libinput-config

You sir, deserve a cookie! I can't thank you enough for pointing this out. Now (finally) my scrolling is acceptable on Fedora 36. See https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/qn0o9w/adjust_touch... for some further fedora specific instructions, but also read the instructions of the repository. Do you also know a possibility to stop inertial/kinetic scrolling on two-finger-tap / rightclick? (left click works, but sinc…

No worries. That one is a little harder. My understanding is that libinput doesn't handle kinetic scrolling at all[0], it is now implemented at the toolkit level. For Firefox, the "hold" gesture to stop kinetic scrolling is blocked on either the required event being backported to GTK3 or Firefox being ported to GTK4[1]. My only suggestion for the time being is to try scrolling back a tiny bit in the opposite direction rather than tapping. Works for me, lol.

[0] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/faqs.htm...

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1568722

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#380

Post by rollcat »

simion314 wrote: post #349
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…

>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 is literally unusable You chose GNOME , the answer is you are not the target of the GNOME project, they target people with weak minds that would instantly faint if they see a configuration screen with options. So you are using it wrong, with G…

> You chose GNOME , the answer is you are not the target of the GNOME project, they target people with weak minds that would instantly faint if they see a configuration screen with options.

GNOME's problem is not the lack of configuration options, but lack of empathy. They stubbornly refuse to address (sometimes, even acknowledge) their own users' problems.

> If you decide you want options try KDE [...]

You don't solve this problem with more options. You solve it by understanding your users' needs.

I want a desktop that just works. KDE's promise is I can make it work if I can keep tweaking it; GNOME's promise is it should work if I'm willing to accept the compromises. Both of these options suck.

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