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Wayland on OpenBSD

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Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#61

Post by mort96 »

hist_thr wrote: post #27
zamalek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have thrown everything difficult out of the spec Not exactly, they have thrown out everything that almost nobody uses - such as networking. They have, however, added things that most people do care about - such as different HiDPI across multiple monitors and an extremely thin (low latency) render path. > That Wayland is 10 years old and still barely usable And that has changed in the past 2 years (with excepti…

>Not exactly, they have thrown out everything that almost nobody uses - such as networking. And color calibration. >such as different HiDPI across multiple monitors I had this working with multiple X11 servers 20 years ago. >And that has changed in the past 2 years I was told that exact same line 5 years ago. I guess it will be just as true in 5 years again.

Good news, color calibration is being worked on! (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...)

Wayland doesn't have all the features we'd like it to have yet, it's missing some big things like global hotkeys and color management. It's not moving as fast as I'd like, but all those things are being actively worked on.

X11 also doesn't have all the features we'd like it to have, such as the ability to render frames without tearing or the ability to lock the screen while a context menu is open or the ability to implement a desktop environment without a ton of race conditions. Those things are not being worked on, and X11 will actually regress as new hardware is released and developers don't focus on hacking X11 to work with that hardware.

For a lot of users (such as myself), Wayland is already better than X; there's a reason lots of distros ship Wayland by default now. The situation is certainly way better now than it was 5 years ago.

But that doesn't mean you have to use it! It's ready for you when it's ready for you, and maybe X's wonkyness doesn't annoy you or you've learned to hack around it (congrats on getting different DPI scaling on different monitors to work! I haven't, despite struggling with it. I didn't even know DPI scaling was a thing 20 years ago. Anyway, it worked out of the box on Wayland.)

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#63

Post by mort96 »

orbital-decay wrote: post #52
growse wrote: 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…

The problem is, X is terrible. It's janky as hell, screen tearing is everywhere unless you're running extremely particular driver + hardware + X configurations, the screen locker doesn't even engage if you have a context menu open, vital things like compositing are hacked on in janky ways.

For some people, Wayland isn't there yet. For a whole lot of other people, Wayland is already better than X. Are distro developers supposed to ignore that and keep pushing X, despite it being the worse option for most of their users? Isn't it enough to provide X as an option for people who need something Wayland doesn't do yet?

Plus, Wayland is getting better, X isn't.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#64

Post by srcthr »

fsh wrote: post #48
hist_thr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not exactly, they have thrown out everything that almost nobody uses - such as networking. And color calibration. >such as different HiDPI across multiple monitors I had this working with multiple X11 servers 20 years ago. >And that has changed in the past 2 years I was told that exact same line 5 years ago. I guess it will be just as true in 5 years again.

> I had this working with multiple X11 servers 20 years ago. People want to move windows between their screens. The lack of proper HiDPI support was really starting to become a problem when trying to run Linux on a laptop that isn't from the early 2000s. Fortunately, with wayland, it now seems mostly solved (at least in Gnome and KDE).

>People want to move windows between their screens.

Yes, you use he fact x is a network server and run each screen as a separate client.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#65

Post by mst »

bitwize wrote: post #47
hist_thr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not exactly, they have thrown out everything that almost nobody uses - such as networking. And color calibration. >such as different HiDPI across multiple monitors I had this working with multiple X11 servers 20 years ago. >And that has changed in the past 2 years I was told that exact same line 5 years ago. I guess it will be just as true in 5 years again.

> I had this working with multiple X11 servers 20 years ago. You had to hack around X11's shorttcomings. X11 does not support HiDPI or multiple DPI across multiple monitors without hacks and workarounds. Wayland does. That makes X a non-starter and Wayland the only choice for many users.

I love X11 dearly but I'm still happy using a single non-HiDPI screen because my normal working environment is basically 2x2 tiled 80x24 xterms (with multiple sets of them on different virtual screens) so the limitations just don't really affect me.

Wayland has clearly chosen a set of trade-offs that are far superior for a lot of users and I fully expect anybody sticking with X11 to gradually become more and more of an outlier over time, and that's entirely fine by me.

(I use fvwm2 with a sub-40 line config that starts by turning almost all the usual features off, plain xterm, and heirloom vi, I'm already perfectly used to being an outlier and so long as I can coax it all into keeping working I don't see any reason to complain that lots of other people prefer to use things from this century instead ;)

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#66

Post by diffeomorphism »

mrighele wrote: post #57
happymellon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which makes sense for cars, infotainment etc.. Depending on the use case you have in mind "core feature" can mean very different things.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#67

Post by nine_k »

growse wrote: post #59
orbital-decay wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 net…

Many, many people care about:

- Screenshots and sharing the screen;

- Global hotkeys;

- Alternative / switchable / tunable keyboard layouts and input methods. Not fancy stuff, just, say, typing Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, and Japanese characters.

All these things are is some sort of disarray under Wayland currently. Once they are properly implemented, I may consider switching.

I want Wayland to succeed. But it's not entirely there yet.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#68

Post by diffeomorphism »

shrubble wrote: post #11

I as a user haven't seen any reason to care about Wayland. And losing/dropping X11's network transparency seems rather surprising in a heavily networked world...

Short comment: ssh -X is not what network transparency means.

You still have ssh -X functionality just fine without any network transparency required, e.g. waypipe or rdp (e.g. builtin on gnome) or vnc, .... Of course that is not going away.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#69

Post by didntcheck »

happymellon wrote: post #50
lmm wrote: 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?

But why is my window manager now also my display server? The (relatively simple) program that decides how to lay out my windows is clearly a separate concern to the (complex) program that actually interfaces with the GPU to render the screen

Having to worry if your WM supports your GPU is like having to worry if your web browser supports your NIC

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#70

Post by teekert »

hist_thr wrote: post #4
themerone wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is about preparing for a post X11 future. As Wayland continues to mature, classic X will attract fewer developer resources. I think it will eventually start to suffer benign neglect, and stop keeping up with new hardware.

Wayland is a replacement for X11 in the same way that a tricycle is a replacement for a tractor. They have thrown everything difficult out of the spec and only implemented the most trivial functionality around a security model which you must actively break to get actual work (like screen shots) done. That Wayland is 10 years old and still barely usable should tell you how far software developers have fallen in the la…

When I'm on Gnome, and I select Gnome on X, my trackpad functions as one expects from Linux. When I'm on Wayland, it's like a macbook.
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