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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

artemis.sh

411–420 of 453 posts

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sol…

>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. I would agree that this is also a problem, so GNOME has many problems. But IMO is the big EGO s in charge that cause this lack of empathy. I will disagree that you can get a Desktop that is perfect for everyone, Kubuntu or whatever KDE distro could…

> I will disagree that you can get a Desktop that is perfect for everyone

This is not the goal. The goal is to not suck. Design by survey is what got us here.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. I would agree that this is also a problem, so GNOME has many problems. But IMO is the big EGO s in charge that cause this lack of empathy. I will disagree that you can get a Desktop that is perfect for everyone, Kubuntu or whatever KDE distro could…

> I will disagree that you can get a Desktop that is perfect for everyone This is not the goal. The goal is to not suck. Design by survey is what got us here.

Spot on. Gnome is designed for non-existent user. All the while, worse than ignoring, denying actually existing user that have since moved on. Very sad story.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#413

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 also gives you the freedom to remote selective applications rather than the whole desktop.

X11 remoting took me to a new level in college, when I needed to use Solaris workstations to complete assignments.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The X11 protocol is very chatty so even very simple things will cause several roundtrips which makes X over the network so painful. This simply isn't true. Some operations require roundtrips, drag and drop comes to mind, but very simple things absolutely don't. Events come one way, draw commands go the other.

Well that's not what the xorg website says: https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/Performance... Essentially xlib is latency limited because its a synchronous protocol. Xcb can help if you redesign your applications for it, but we are talking about old applications (motif...)

You know xcb and xlib are just different client libraries for accessing the exact same wire protocol, right?

Moreover, notice the example they gave there is atom interning, which is a roundtrip on the wire (though you can batch them even in xlib...), and they say "most real applications will see less benefit than this" since that's the worst case - most applications do atom work at startup, not in the main use cycle, which is famously both async and buffered (it used to be a FAQ on xlib tutorials reminding people to run the event loop, and error handling is complicated a bit by it).

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#415

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…

> These days a significant number of X11 apps just render _everything_ "server-side" as bitmaps and then send them over the wire to the client to composite them. Inferring from the quotation, I take it you mean application server-side (instead of display server-side)? Just confirming.

Exactly. If GP doesn't even know how X11 works, then the opinion probably shouldn't carry a lot of weight.

The "server" in X11 is the display that's sitting in front of you, not the application running on a remote workstation.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#416
post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sound like a self-made problem. There are waypipe and several other options for using the desktop’s resources.

I was excited about Waypipe until I read that it has to ship compressed pre-rendered video frames over the wire, and all the desktop can do is decompress and composite them. I believe VNC and RDP are much the same, sending bitmaps rather than structured GPU commands from the app.

We could expect everyone to start investing in datacenter GPUs, but architecturally “one GPU per display, plugged directly into the display” always made a lot more sense to me.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. I would agree that this is also a problem, so GNOME has many problems. But IMO is the big EGO s in charge that cause this lack of empathy. I will disagree that you can get a Desktop that is perfect for everyone, Kubuntu or whatever KDE distro could…

> I will disagree that you can get a Desktop that is perfect for everyone This is not the goal. The goal is to not suck. Design by survey is what got us here.

>The goal is to not suck.

But "suck" is some subjective thing, you will find a giant number of GNOME fans that will tell you how great GNOME is, how intuitive it is, and how you just need to give up your own preferences and embrace their UX guru ideas and it will not suck.

It seems that many people are in the "I don't want to think for myself camp" . unfortunately people in my family are also in that camp, never question if maybe there is a way to customize things to make the software more comfortable, they bend their body and minds, causing even distress to follow the defaults.

Something that obviously suck for us is normal for a GNOME user, in GNOME land there is only 1 way of working and if you don't like it you are asked to move on. many tried but you can't change those guys minds this is why there are tons of GNOME forks and probably no KDE fork.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latency hasn't really improved. Dial up or isdn to nearby cities was 25-50ms. Same as I get with hfc or 5g. Cable was slightly better where it was available. International pings got much worse from australia in the 2010s but since improved roughly back to where they were. Bandwidth has increased by 3 orders of magnitude though.

Dial up latency was never that low. ISDN, yes, but traditional dialup modems were pretty bad. The analog-to-digital conversion introduced a couple hundred milliseconds of latency.

I remember having latency under 100 ms within the metro area, but I could easily be misremembering, and I don't have a PPP account anymore to test. (And I'd have to visit my MIL who has a real POTS line with it's low latency)... But I did find a reference mentioning 150 ms round trips regionally, which I think was US west/east/central, so I think this 150ms is including some intercity latency as well.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160305000336/http://www.thefre...

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#420
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.

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…

But GNOME has zero reason to implement server side decorations in Wayland. All GNOME apps use client side decorations and have done so for years. The other major toolkits (Qt and Electron) have also added support for client side decorations. Legacy X apps are still able to use the X decorations. The only thing left is apps that were broken in Wayland in the first place.
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