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X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

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Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#121

Post by DonHopkins »

linuxandrew wrote: post #57
return_to_monke wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

does Wayland have network transparency tho?

Network transparency doesn't offer any tangible benefits for a lot of apps and desktop environments because they are drawn with bitmaps and textures rather than vectors. This topic has been done to death for the past decade. VNC and RDP won. X11 was a razor edge case and nothing more.

Yet network transparency was the whole point of (and whole reason for the complex byzantine architecture of) X11. So you have to pay the full expensive complexity and asynchronous distributed api tax, and you still have to reimplement half-assed virtual desktop network transparency at another layer.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#122

Post by destructionator »

goosedragons wrote: post #73
fsh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X11 cannot handle the average user connecting an average laptop to an average external monitor (no usable per-screen scaling). Maybe this was good enough in the 80s, but today it is seriously holding back the platform.

Sigh. X11 actually can. Even in its original release it supported different PPIs for different displays. But a lot of Linux programs (especially GTK ones) will flat out assume the specified monitor PPIs are just wrong and will use 96 PPI. Plus with the way modern multi-monitor usage works with X11 by faking one giant single screen that doesn't work anymore. But when it works, it works. But even with that it's STILL p…

> But even with that it's STILL possible with the right setup using xrandr where you essentially render at a higher res and then downscale.

You actually don't even have to do this for updated programs - hidpi aware applications scale themselves, vector graphics style, so there's no up then down scaling going on. And applications can easily read the xrandr config and adjust their factor when moved to a different monitor. However, xrandr's ppi factor is not the scale factor you likely want, so this isn't really standardized; each toolkit might do it a bit differently. But all the pieces are there.

Non-aware applications might be bitmap scaled if needed though. (Of course, wayland just breaks all legacy applications anyway so that sets the compatibility bar low regardless)

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#123

Post by 3836293648 »

ravishi wrote: post #99
fsh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is the default on Fedora, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Debian. The majority of desktop linux users is probably on Wayland by now.

Until they have to share screen in a meeting and give up tweaking flags in different places, login using X and never look back again. Seriously for anyone who works remotely sharing screen is essential, but it still doesn't work flawlessly in Wayland.

Screensharing works perfectly in firefox and given how awful linux versions of zoom, teams, etc are, that's all that matters

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#124

Post by vetinari »

mort96 wrote: post #118
vetinari wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, Wayland also has the problem that it's intentionally excluding some useful features that X had, like global hotkeys and screensharing Screensharing has been supported for some time already. Some apps support it, some don't. It is up to the apps to use the respective APIs, the times of free reign over framebuffer is over.

I mean, you can get screen sharing to work. But there are like 3 different incompatible "standards" for how to do it. There's no single simple answer to "how to record the screen in Wayland". This has been the state of screen sharing on Wayland for at least 7 years. I'm also very curious about what's envisioned for global hotkeys. Surely we don't expect people to manually go to their system settings and configure som…

There is one standard and single simple answer: xdg-desktop-portal with pipewire. Some compositors might have implemented their own private APIs, but that is not a standard by definition.

Global shortcuts are a bit more thorny, exactly for the reason you mentioned. You present one POV, the another is, that application-defined shortcuts are incredibly hostile, as they allow application to stomp on each other in the better case, or hijaack global state in the worse one. Some other operating systems do not allow it either, for the same reasons. The long-term solution could be defining api, that allows application to advertise global actions, and allow the user to configure shortcuts that might (or might not) call these, in some user-friendly way.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#125

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

kaba0 wrote: post #80
throwawaylinux wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X11 is not usable for everybody without preconditions though.

I honestly don’t get people, like were these people just extremely lucky and never had to tweak anything? Like, I remember times when I had to blindly log into my user and try to fix my setup from there, purely by muscle memory.

> I honestly don’t get people, like were these people just extremely lucky and never had to tweak anything?

Yeah, that's about how I feel about Wayland. I'm not sure quite why there are two groups of people with such wildly different experiences talking past each other, but I suspect it comes down to what each user wants the software to do and what hardware they're running on.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#126

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

sgjohnson wrote: post #69
ddtaylor wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the end result is that nobody can host a service with an ipv4 address only. You would be missing out on the majority of your audience.

You absolutely can. I’m single stacking IPv6 on my fresh hetzner box. Cloudflare in front of web services and it just works(tm). For everything else - Argo can do arbitrary TCP (requires cloudflared though) and then you can start bugging your ISP about the very real need for IPv6.

> Cloudflare in front of web services and it just works(tm).

Well... yeah? That's adding support for both stacks; just because you farmed it out to a middle-man doesn't mean that it's not there.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#127

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

vetinari wrote: post #110
aidenn0 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I restart X11 only when either there's a power failure longer than the battery on my UPS, or I upgrade my kernel, so it's reliable enough.

Having to disable compositing doesn't sound very reliable.

If it works, it works. And some of us never bothered installing a compositor in the first place, so it's hardly a high bar.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#128

Post by BearOso »

Jnr wrote: post #28
Jnr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is usable. It is simply not fully used. Wayland is just a protocol and there are multiple implementations in different compositors. Instead of focusing on a single great implementation, there are multiple average and weak implementations. It puts quite a bit of pressure on desktop environment developers and it seems like they don't really care about many of the defined protocols. https://wayland.app/protocols…

I also want to point out that you will likely get a better Wayland experience on KDE. They are much more active in implementing Wayland protocols and overall it feels more solid. This makes me sad because I really like how Gnome looks like, but Gnome developers don't seem to care as much about Wayland stuff.

I'd also confirm this. Gnome started out ahead by virtue of being the target or idealization of most of Wayland's features, but it's stagnated. Nothing is ever improved and they refuse to fix the technical problems holding them back, like the lack of I/O being separated from drawing in Mutter. They claimed to have improved it several times, but it's just as bad as ever. Either they're hesitant, or they just don't have the time and resources to break and rebuild it properly.

Meanwhile, KDE/Plasma's kwin finally stepped past them. And there's also the kwinft project that's rebasing kwin idiomatically as a wlroots compositor.

We may finally get full Wayland adoption, but I don't think Gnome is going to be prominent in it anymore.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#129

Post by tutuca »

vetinari wrote: post #107
ravishi wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever tried sharing your screen? Do your organization uses Microsoft Teams? It is barely usable for quite some people.

Wayland screen sharing works fine (in Chrome, Webex...). It doesn't work in Teams, but that's Microsoft's issue, since they didn't bother with implementing it.

If it's preventing your users to switch to your platform, it's your problem too...

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#130

Post by kzrdude »

oleg_antonyan wrote: post #14

X is almost 40yo, stable, reliable, difficult to maintain. Wayland is 15yo, barely usable. Any old timers remember 1999 when X was 15? Wayland is like IPv6 of desktops

It's basically imperceptible that I'm using wayland on ubuntu (from default config on install). It works, no problems.
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