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The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

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Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#171

Post by ndriscoll »

reisse wrote: post #162
ndriscoll wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest I've never seen scaling done well. I just plugged my 32" 4k monitor into my 16" windows work laptop (both 4k), and things on the monitor are too big, even after tweaking! I have everything set to 100% scaling because that's a low as you can put it. The defaults had my laptop at 250% (!!!) and external monitor at 150%, which makes the laptop in particular look like some cramped 800x600 monitor out of 1995…

I don't know what to say here because exact scaling parameters are very subjective, but personally I find 250% scaling for 4k@16" okayish? I use 175% for 1440p@14", and 125% for 4k@27", which is slightly smaller than what Windows suggested you. When I had my previous laptop, it had 100% for 4k@16" in Linux by default, and it was causing me a pain in the eyes. Switched to 200% back then, because fractional scaling in…

I just checked, and at the recommended 250% scaling at 4k on a 16" monitor in Windows, I can see 0-3 messages on the screen at once in Slack, and just under 34 lines of code and 113 columns in VS Code at default zoom levels. If I do a vertical split in VS Code, I get 51 columns in each pane, which makes it basically useless. Icons and even things like the minimize button are like a full centimeter across.

I don't understand the point of a high resolution monitor that you scale up. Just to have extremely crisp lines? To me the whole point of a high resolution is that you can have more information on the screen because it remains legible when small. Why not just use a low resolution monitor, which will be cheaper, use less power, and need a less powerful computer/gpu?

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#172

Post by nullc »

hotnfresh wrote: post #111

The good news is we’re only 4 years away from Wayland’s replacement being born, if it follows Xfree86/Xorg’s timeline (yeah, that is how far into its existence it is, shocking given the state of it). Not if it follows the X Window protocol’s timeline, but I don’t think it’s on the same level as that, longevity-wise, even if “wayland’s just a protocol” ( eyeroll ) I’m holding out for that before I do much with the Lin…

Maybe it'll be like pulseaudio... it never got good, but pipewire is actually quite good.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#173

Post by hulitu »

jchw wrote: post #137
JohnFen wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can Wayland do this? Yes! Interesting. I remember asking some Wayland devs a few years back about this and they said this use case would never be supported. I'm glad that's changed! It means that if the day comes that I have to use Wayland, I won't necessarily lose functionality. (Just for clarity, I'm not opposed to Wayland if it can do what I want. But I'm not excited by it, either, because the benefits it does p…

Yeah, as you may gather from my first post, I am not advocating anyone to switch if there's nothing in Wayland for them. But at least with wlroots-based compositors (a decent number of them, but notably not GNOME and KDE which use Mutter and Kwin respectively,) you can definitely do this sort of thing relatively easily. It'd probably be a good idea if every compositor got on the same page here so that the experience…

Does xv runs in wailand ? xpdf ? fvwm2 ? xterm ? xsnow ?

Does wailand supports window managers ?

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#174

Post by bitwize »

henearkr wrote: post #35

I don't understand people saying "X development has stopped". This is false. Bugs continue to be fixed. Yes, features are already there, so they are not developed anymore. Is this bad?

The only version of X still being maintained is -- wait for it -- Xwayland.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#175

Post by bitwize »

From a social standpoint, all of the development and maintenance is going to Wayland. No one wants to fucking support or maintain Xorg anymore. So go ahead, keep clinging to Xorg... and watch things break as other GUI projects either drop support for X or actively stop working in an X environment. (There are GPU drivers in the mainline kernel right now which will refuse to work if they detect they're being opened from X.)

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#176

Post by Izkata »

ndriscoll wrote: post #126
kouteiheika wrote: post #40

This might be a hot take, but you'll have to take X from my cold, dead hands. Or at least until things start breaking, or maybe until Wayland has e.g. stellar HDR support and I'll get a nice OLED monitor. Otherwise, no dice. I know that X is a crusty old spawn of Cthulhu; but honestly, I don't really care? It just works! I set up my system 10 years ago with how the UI works (including my window manager), and it stabl…

Yeah the blog OP is replying to is just silly. > Unless your workflow (and hardware) comes from 20+ years ago, you have almost no reason to stick with Xorg, especially as it continues to get worse and worse when the user experience relies on newer and newer features. My workflow is probably 20+ years old because not much has changed with software in the last 20 years. My computer is getting close to 10 years old. It…

> X doesn't get worse and worse; it continues to just work.

I think some systems might be forcing breakage into it: I recently upgraded from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04 (had to wait for approval for work laptops, and I keep my personal one at the same release as a reference point) and with that upgrade did I start seeing a weird visual glitch, where new windows would be covered in static for a second before drawing.

> Maybe I'd care more if I were running multiple monitors each with different scaling factors and refresh rates, but that sounds pretty niche. I still don't see a reason to want Wayland as a user.

I don't remember how anymore, but years ago I figured out how to do different scaling factors with xrandr. It's just not exposed through the GUI settings.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#177

Post by [deleted] »

ndriscoll wrote: post #126
kouteiheika wrote: post #40

This might be a hot take, but you'll have to take X from my cold, dead hands. Or at least until things start breaking, or maybe until Wayland has e.g. stellar HDR support and I'll get a nice OLED monitor. Otherwise, no dice. I know that X is a crusty old spawn of Cthulhu; but honestly, I don't really care? It just works! I set up my system 10 years ago with how the UI works (including my window manager), and it stabl…

Yeah the blog OP is replying to is just silly. > Unless your workflow (and hardware) comes from 20+ years ago, you have almost no reason to stick with Xorg, especially as it continues to get worse and worse when the user experience relies on newer and newer features. My workflow is probably 20+ years old because not much has changed with software in the last 20 years. My computer is getting close to 10 years old. It…

[deleted]

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#178

Post by ahartmetz »

nullc wrote: post #172
hotnfresh wrote: post #111

The good news is we’re only 4 years away from Wayland’s replacement being born, if it follows Xfree86/Xorg’s timeline (yeah, that is how far into its existence it is, shocking given the state of it). Not if it follows the X Window protocol’s timeline, but I don’t think it’s on the same level as that, longevity-wise, even if “wayland’s just a protocol” ( eyeroll ) I’m holding out for that before I do much with the Lin…

Maybe it'll be like pulseaudio... it never got good, but pipewire is actually quite good.

PulseAudio started as a kind of kitchen sink but badly implemented. It could be fixed by doing it right after all the features were established. Wayland is the opposite.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#179

Post by jchw »

hulitu wrote: post #173
jchw wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as you may gather from my first post, I am not advocating anyone to switch if there's nothing in Wayland for them. But at least with wlroots-based compositors (a decent number of them, but notably not GNOME and KDE which use Mutter and Kwin respectively,) you can definitely do this sort of thing relatively easily. It'd probably be a good idea if every compositor got on the same page here so that the experience…

Does xv runs in wailand ? xpdf ? fvwm2 ? xterm ? xsnow ? Does wailand supports window managers ?

X11 apps run under XWayland, an X server that runs under Wayland compositors, almost always by default. It's possible to run WMs under XWayland too, but most Wayland compositors are WMs and handle the WM for XWayland too.

Wayland doesn't have a single display server. Most of what was the X11 display server is moved to the kernel and libraries. So, the WMs ARE the display server.

xv, xpdf, xterm should work fine. xsnow should work, but will only see X windows. fvwm2, it can run on some Wayland compositors, but the better option here would be a compatible replacement: as far as I know, we still don't have an fvwm2 equivalent, but SwayWM exists as a replacement for i3, for example.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#180

Post by LinAGKar »

ndriscoll wrote: post #148
reisse wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if I were running multiple monitors each with different scaling factors and refresh rates, but that sounds pretty niche So basically you're calling almost every modern laptop + external screen setup "pretty niche". I wonder whose post is more silly.

I think every monitor I've seen in the last 20 years has had a 60 Hz refresh rate. Most people probably don't even know scaling options exist, so using different ones on different monitors is going to be niche, yeah. I just got a new laptop for work last month. HDR 4k display. It's still 60 Hz. More only matters for people who are really into gaming, and then you wouldn't be using a laptop.

A lot of the ones I see available are 75 Hz

Also, is that 60 or 59.94 Hz? Both exist

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