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Wayland on OpenBSD

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51–60 of 214 posts

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#51

I've been wanting to give OpenBSD an honest shot on the desktop for years, but going back to X has always been a deal breaker for me (HiDPI and mixed/scaled DPI support, and tear-less graphics, are hard requirements that X handles horribly - yes, before the X apologists brigade me, I know because I used to hack X into horribly supporting these things). This could finally let me dive into the only BSD that really catc…

OpenBSD is pretty sweet! been daily-driving as desktop OS (as in, not a server) for ~2 years now. Though, on a 1366x768 ThinkPad, so not too concerned about DPI hahah

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#52
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use Wayland daily and haven't run into the issues you mention. I appreciate may not work for some Such as having a modern wide gamut/HDR display, or a display without a blue spectrum spike. Or printing anything in color. Or doing photography or digital painting. Or switching to another compositor on a non-default keyboard layout (as Wayland doesn't have the replacement for this basic X functionality, compositors…

> It's fine to have the "works on my machine" attitude for a user discussing this on the web. I just hope the devs of what is being pushed as a replacement for what works don't have it. (and the signals aren't good) The people "pushing" Wayland are the people who previously worked on X. They stopped because it's ancient, broken and untenable.

If Wayland just existed on its own, nobody would have had a problem. The people pushing Wayland are not just its authors, but the distro devs, and the entire fuss is about Wayland being declared as the "future" by certain distro developers recently. This future has an issue - it only supports an opinionated subset of maybe 3/4 use cases of the "past". However broken the past was, replacing it with something that is similarly broken but in different non-overlapping ways is not the proper way forward.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#53
post #49
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a matter of funding. X11 development is not funded anymore whereas Wayland is heavily funded through proxies like Collabora or Igalia. It is unclear who are the originators of that money since those proxy orgs don't disclose who funds them. Since Wayland is a horribly complicated protocol that makes doing even the simplest tasks a major chore I would consider it sabotage. There are multiple billion+ dollar corps…

A wild conspiracy theory appears! Of course, like any good conspiracy, it's very competent and expansive, managing to simultaneously secretly convince all the major distros to use it by default and cruelly suppressing any efforts to provide funding and engineering effort towards X11. In reality, Wayland works great for most Linux desktop users (on the mainstream distros) and no-one is funding X because no-one wants t…

EEE was a conspiracy theory as well until the Heloween documents were published.

Also no Wayland does not work great for most Linux desktop users. Even not in reality. It works incredibly well at making the life for application developers extra hard though.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#54
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wayland on the other had has just worked right out of the box since Debian 11. With a compositor other than the Gnome one?

Well, that would imply that it's not a Wayland issue but a compositor. Or is all maths broken because I found a calculator that doesn't have a working addition key?

It's more like replacing an old calculator with a new shiny graphing one that can solve ODEs but the basic addition is declared "out of scope" so it doesn't have it. Well, now you need another calculator to add numbers built into your toaster, with every vendor implementing it differently.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#55
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, running X11 over a network worked very poorly. There is significant overlap between former X11 developers and Wayland developers. They didn't drop it because they are incompetent which seems to be what your are implying. The people that decided to drop it are probably the people that know X11 the best.

> In my experience, running X11 over a network worked very poorly. In my experience, when combined with SSH compression (ssh -XC) it works well enough that even running Firefox over Internet is usable (although with noticeable latency). Without compression, it is unusable (for Firefox) even on gigabit LAN.

In my experience running Firefox over X11 remotely is fine as long as you only use X11 and don’t wrap it in SSH, i.e. instead you expose your local X11 server port to the computer running Firefox and use the DISPLAY environment variable to point it at you local X11 server. Secure the connection with Wireguard and it’s fine. With SSH I’d see frame tearing all the time, regardless of compression options.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#56
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your memory of config file nightmares (I had them too) is a decade old now. X11 works without config for the vast majority of users. Yes it took a while to get there, but it's been there for a good while now and not really anything for Wayland to point at as a differentiator.

> Your memory of config file nightmares (I had them too) is a decade old now. It's at least 2 decades old, if it was ever a real problem in the first place.

> ... if it was ever a real problem in the first place.

It definitely used to be a huge pain in the arse. There used to be pages after pages after pages of random "HOW TO ..." style guides for people to configure X11 config files around the net (many just working for specific hw).

It was an incredible mess, with pretty much nothing positive about it. ;)

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#57
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wayland on the other had has just worked right out of the box since Debian 11. With a compositor other than the Gnome one?

Well, that would imply that it's not a Wayland issue but a compositor. Or is all maths broken because I found a calculator that doesn't have a working addition key?

The issue is that Wayland developers decided that a working addition key was not a core feature of a calculator.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#58
post #2

I know this is just a "hack it together" effort, but I wonder if it even makes sense to emulate/support libevdev and libinput on non-Linux OSes. While the Wayland protocol does reuse some libinput names/enums/etc., I don't believe there's anything in it that requires those particular implementations or APIs (that is, wl_pointer and wl_keyboard doesn't have to be populated by libinput). Maybe wlroots should have OpenB…

seatd isn't just about multi-seat. In fact, seatd doesn't even support multi-seat at the moment. See this post for more details: https://lists.sr.ht/~kennylevinsen/seatd-devel/%3C3561460.kQ...

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#59
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's fine to have the "works on my machine" attitude for a user discussing this on the web. I just hope the devs of what is being pushed as a replacement for what works don't have it. (and the signals aren't good) The people "pushing" Wayland are the people who previously worked on X. They stopped because it's ancient, broken and untenable.

If Wayland just existed on its own, nobody would have had a problem. The people pushing Wayland are not just its authors, but the distro devs, and the entire fuss is about Wayland being declared as the "future" by certain distro developers recently. This future has an issue - it only supports an opinionated subset of maybe 3/4 use cases of the "past". However broken the past was, replacing it with something that is s…

I disagree. The distro devs are pushing it because it furthers their mission, which on the face of it (for a lot of them) seems to be "ship software that works for people and have them stop bugging us".

> However broken the past was, replacing it with something that is similarly broken but in different non-overlapping ways is not the proper way forward.

That "opinion" is well founded. Most people don't care about network transparency (to pick one example), and those that do can club together and keep X alive. Or write an extension for Wayland. Open source is easy in that it gives you many chances and ways to contribute!

Personally, I'd prefer those "LOOK IT'S MY DESKTOP OVER THE INTERNET" people kept their weirdness out of my compositor, but that's just my take.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#60
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your memory of config file nightmares (I had them too) is a decade old now. It's at least 2 decades old, if it was ever a real problem in the first place.

> ... if it was ever a real problem in the first place. It definitely used to be a huge pain in the arse. There used to be pages after pages after pages of random "HOW TO ..." style guides for people to configure X11 config files around the net (many just working for specific hw). It was an incredible mess, with pretty much nothing positive about it. ;)

I've been using Linux for 20 years now and I've never needed more than 5 lines of Xorg config, only a couple lines of which has had meaningful information.
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