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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#421

Post by customkitchen »

msla wrote: post #122
amelius wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Running the X11 protocol over the network is usually not a good idea anymore. It works well, though, and I'm not really interested in hearing that my own experience with it working well is a lie or some trick. Wayland gives up some things, and pretending that those things have no value isn't going to convince those of us who know they do. Also, those of us who use non-mainstream window managers (such as Window Make…

>and I'm not really interested in hearing that my own experience with it working well is a lie or some trick.

Your own experiences with it aren't a lie, but they're probably based around ignoring the last 20-30 years of advancements, and ignoring many actual statements from the X11 developers saying that it's bad for remoting.

>Wayland gives up some things

Well in the case of X11 fowarding, no it doesn't. That still works.

>Also, those of us who use non-mainstream window managers (such as Window Maker) are not interested in hearing that we should switch to some UI which doesn't support our workflow just because it's more fashionable these days.

By insisting on using these obscure, non-mainstream and under-maintained environments you are setting yourself up for an extraordinary amount of pain for very little benefit. The more time you spend avoiding the issue the harder it gets to figure out how to adapt your workflow to something else. I'm sure you understand that more deeply than anyone else here. So why keep up with the charade? It is not doing you any favors. At some point we have to let bad habits die.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#422

Post by customkitchen »

michaelmrose wrote: post #238
cycomanic wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the people who are pushing wayland are the same people that are maintaining xorg, so I would argue they know what they are talking about. I have also not heard of any one who loudly proclaims xorg is much beter and should instead be maintained to step up to actually do that.

Look at this very statement it's completely inaccurate in a trivial fashion that ought not required analysis but here we are. The people who actually develop x or wayland are a tiny number of people. The people expressing opinions on the internet on tech is 1000x larger. The implications that the proponents are correct in their analysis because they develop it is fatally flawed if for no other reason than the subject…

You can make all the arguments you want but it won't do anything meaningful. If those 1000x people expressing opinions have the necessary domain expertise, and aren't just tossing out their feelings on what they think might be cool or might be nice in a perfect world, then they should start contributing to these projects and fixing the bugs.

I mean, I think it would be cool if my PC never crashed. Isn't it easy and fun to say things like that?

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#424

Post by customkitchen »

ongy wrote: post #410
d110af5ccf wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are saying that as if the part of the X11 protocol that's reasonable to run over the network was the better API that application developers are simply too lazy to use. While the reality is, that toolkits (and applications) used to use those APIs and were revamped to use the DRI APIs and general bitmap based windowing. The old APIs don't support double buffering, access to GPUs with modern APIs (both opengl[indire…

You might also want to note that the fantasy of being able to use the same protocol to drive the local display and also operate over a network, is long dead. It seems like a clever idea but it doesn't actually work. It ceased to be a thing entirely the moment wide area networks became popular. The local and remote cases are two completely different situations that need their own individual attention. Even when developing against X11 protocol you still have to consider this in modern times because the DRI extension is not available over the network.

Compare to a protocol like RDP which is extremely optimized for efficient and secure network operation, but is also way more complicated as a result, and it would be foolish to use it on a local display server.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#425

Post by customkitchen »

wooque wrote: post #68
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…

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. After 20 years, they still don't have thumbnails in filepicker and even dropped preview side pane in GTK4.

Really disappointing to see this very lazy and trite criticism upvoted. If you look in KDE Plasma or Sway, you can also find plenty of missing features and bugs. You can find those anywhere.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#426

Post by eddyb »

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…

> So what are you using or recommending?

I am using KDE (aka Plasma5) in Wayland mode, on NixOS unstable.

I would not recommend NixOS, just like I mentioned, and I didn't really want to get into the weeds of why, but while Nix is something that more people should try out if they're already familiar with unfortunate asymmetries (e.g. "git's data model is really nice" vs "git's CLI has sharp edges and some workflows the data model implies are entirely unserviced") and/or like to play around with experimental unpolished software, I would maybe avoid it until they actually come up with a "more declarative"/"less computational" flavor for 99% of usecases.

I've used openSUSE in the past, and while YaST2 might be less relevant now, it was shocking how much similar things were outright lacking back then (a lot of this was pre-NetworkManager to be quite fair).

A lot of people like Arch, and if Debian/Ubuntu package management doesn't get in the way I suppose KDE Neon might be nice? (I keep forgetting KDE's Discover exists, it might also help with not dealing with package management directly)

---

> FF crashing

Quite ironically, if it is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144 that's technically a gtk limitation (not only does it lead to the FF main thread having to poll gtk often enough to keep the Wayland connection from breaking, but when it does break it calls `_exit` so Firefox can't even do crash reporting, and they refused a patch to address this), and it can also happen for Chrome (which also uses Wayland through gtk AIUI).

If you want to check if it is the case, you can look in the logs (e.g. through `journalctl -o with-unit -r`) for "error in client communication".

> middle-click gets in the way a lot and can't be switched off

Are you talking about the feature controlled by System Settings -> Input Devices -> Mouse -> "Press left and right buttons for middle-click"? (that is, if you intentionally press both buttons, does it trigger middle-click?)

AFAIK that's off by default, but I am on a different distro and running KDE/Plasma 5.25.4 and maybe it changed at some point, or maybe it's specific to touchpads? (which I sadly can't test because I only have an older Nvidia laptop, that can't use the Wayland-compatible drivers, or rather I would have to switch to nouveau first and deal with that etc.)

> insists on chromium as default browser

I've had issues with this in the past, some apps provide their own configuration instead of going through XDG mechanisms, or at least have suboptimal defaults.

I would check the settings of the apps which cause chromium to start, and maybe play around with Flatpak/forcing the use of XDG Portal, but that might be too much to ask.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#427

Post by jcelerier »

customkitchen wrote: post #408
jcelerier wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find electron apps absolutely horrendous to use. The apps I use most are Zim, QtCreator, Strawberry, and the KDE apps: Okular, etc. - most of the time when I remote ssh it's for pavucontrol-qt, dolphin (the file manager) or mainly the app I develop, https://ossia.io (for instance for working on a show that is taking place over a raspberry pi). None of those force any kind of GPU rendering. Also apps that do gpu ren…

That's not really relevant. You can personally choose to not use Electron apps, but many people cannot or do not want to choose to do that. Like it or not, it's a thing now. I've noticed a lot of developers seem to have this confusion that anyone else can avoid Electron. I guess you can if you spend all day in the terminal and the IDE but most other people cannot. And that sounds like something is seriously wrong wit…

> Compositing should do so as well by avoiding unnecessary redraws.

I use a tiling WM so I doubt it would help much. If anything, if I run a whole system profile with perf, rendering does not even show up when compared to just running a git status here.

> That sequencer would probably benefit greatly on a Raspberry by using GPU rendering, the screenshot even shows it rendering video and shaders...

Sure, the video & shader parts use GPU of course. But for the main GUI, it can be rendered with OpenGL or with Qt's software renderer ; from my tests (and lord knows I've spent entire weeks profiling and doing everything I could to improve rendering performance) the OpenGL backend for the main GUI only becomes more worth it when using a 4k resolution - and GL is absolutely full of bugs on e.g. windows ; yes there are still people with GMA500 GPUs. Qt's software renderer has no issue rendering at a 1080 screen size on a Pi 3.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#428

Post by kaba0 »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #416
kaba0 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As mentioned in the thread, X server does the same thing in practice as we are not using XMotif apps anymore with CPU rendering.

Icons, textures, all these things will be passed as bitmaps with X remoting, in a strictly worse way than a modern compression could do.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#429

Post by 3np »

wooque wrote: post #68
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…

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.

There may be GNOME specific issues as well but I also noticed the other week FF scrolling being bonkers in sway (just a light swipe can "smooth scroll" across several screenfulls way too fast and long, with several seconds of slow trailing scrolling) but not under i3 (IIRC it might even have been fine in sway when running under XWayland). I don't recall the details but got back to somewhat sane behavior with some non-obvious about:config changes.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#430

Post by dotancohen »

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
Are you sure that's not a hardware issue? This doesn't happen in other OSes on the same hardware?
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