An X11 apologist tries Wayland • Hacker News Board

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#381

Post by kfajdsl » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 1:36 PM UTC

gpm wrote: post #89

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.

> Wayland is not GNOME, what you describe is not Wayland problem, but GNOME problem. Which in turn is the biggest problem with wayland. We are fragmenting the ecosystem with every window manager dealing with shared problems in their own custom way, because wayland only takes responsibility for a tiny fraction of the common things that every window manager does.

I love GNOME (and currently still use it), but the project really has been taking a turn for the worse.

If you want to do something even slightly off the happy path, GNOME is the worst Wayland experience. Because of ideology (and in the name of security), they refuse to implement features and extensions that users and app devs need.

Example: No support for server side decorations. Instead, their solution is to force app devs to use client side decorations.(https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1836)

This is just an issue that I have run into; there are more. Even ignoring wlroots and KWin, users coming from Windows and macOS except features like this.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#382

Post by eitland » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 1:44 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #247

eddyb wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ap…

I have had KDE Neon running on one or more devices the last 6 or so years.

It is built on an Ubuntu base and is almost like Kubuntu, except I think it is set up by people in the KDE community.

For me the difference felt enourmous.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#383

Post by jacob019 » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 1:44 PM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #213

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.

Is it more of a pain to setup then just running freerdp-shadow-cli?

I use xrdp for headless remote sessions, and vnc for remote access to live sessions. I'll give freerdp-shadow-cli a try, thanks!

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#384

Post by blibble » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC

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…

don't use a display manager, use regular login on /dev/tty1 and have your .profile start sway (with whatever environment you want)

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#385

Post by sandreas » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:02 PM UTC

cqz wrote: post #379

sandreas wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 directio…

Ok, well, at least the beast mode scrolling is now off :-) Thank you for pointing this out - lets wait some years until this works like expected ;-)

But for now the ONLY thing that bugged me on fedora is (partially) fixed, I'm so happy.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#386

Post by fock » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:04 PM UTC

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…

> GNOME has kind of always been on the opposite end of the configurability spectrum from KDE, IME.

which gets weird, when they push on you things like:

- opening WiFi-portals in whatever crap browser your distro ships with GTK. Executing random JS code in the process.

- make XWayland startup absolutely inconfigurable and hardcoded in C (or was it Vala) and for whatever reason MAKE IT LISTEN ON ABSTRACT SOCKETS (which no Xconfig anywhere else does)! (problem here: if any user-namespace container shares your network namespace and you do a naive xhost +SI:localuser:user - it works for any container, because abstract sockets are not stowed away in the filesystem).

At least the first issue I'd like to report, but don't know how and where...

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#387

Post by LtWorf » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:17 PM UTC

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…

> When this happens in X11, the server restarts, I see the screen go black for an instant, that's it.

Your windows manager crashed. If xorg had crashed you'd have lost your data.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#388

Post by nikau » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:19 PM UTC

Rediscover wrote: post #312

nikau wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A long time ago I used a Citrix xserver that translated everything to ica, it was very fast and hid the latency well even over an isdn connection.

By any chance, was that at Boeing?

Nah it was an Australian finance company running some in house trading and market data apps.

Would have been very late 90s I think.

I remember it was even faster than the Windows ICA apps at the time which I think were hosted on a NT4 Citrix server.

Curious to know if Citrix even sell the Xwindows version any more.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#389

Post by gnull » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

rcoveson wrote: post #197

gnull wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never had to do it myself, but I have a feeling it will work better with Wayland. The delay of 50-80ms introduced by the network is not terribly much (everything under 110ms is fine for playing Dota), so if your software doesn't lag itself, like X11 did, maybe it will work. You could also use something like Zerotier-one to recover from network being shortly disrupted. This service connects your machines into a virt…

> The delay of 50-80ms introduced by the network is not terribly much (everything under 110ms is fine for playing Dota) I don't think you're giving the Dota client enough credit there. Game clients don't wait for network to pretend to respond to user input, because it absolutely is noticeable at 100ms latency. Instead, they predict as much as they can client side and display it as fast as possible. For this reason, t…

You're right. I just tested it connecting from laptop in Sweden to a VPS in Sweden through a German VPN server. The total ping was 30-40ms, and running `waypipe ssh remote firefox` was right on the edge of being unusable. Navigating and clicking on links was fine with a bit of delay, but typing when the feedback is delayed is annoying.

Although if I connect to something that's 20ms away (within the same country), the experience is really good.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#390

Post by ghosty141 » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:28 PM UTC

kaba0 wrote: post #221

gpm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wayland is not GNOME, what you describe is not Wayland problem, but GNOME problem. Which in turn is the biggest problem with wayland. We are fragmenting the ecosystem with every window manager dealing with shared problems in their own custom way, because wayland only takes responsibility for a tiny fraction of the common things that every window manager does.

Come on, it’s not like the linux user space was ever not fragmented. That’s sort of the deal with bazaar-style development. After enough time some best practices do solidify into standards, but it wasn’t overnight in X either, and first and foremost it wasn’t made with that in mind. Wayland has protocols which are queryable and provide a very good way of implementing more and more standard ones from the experimental…

And? Just because the linux ecosystem is fragmented doesn't mean that new software has to be, too.

The fact that developing a new compositor with wayland basically required wlroots to be even feasable for a one-man project is concerning enough. The amount of stuff you have to handle is insane compared to writing your own x-wm.