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XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

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Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#42
post #34
post #31

Ok, I’m super confused, how much work is involved in supporting Wayland vs Xserver? [editing to add: my assumption that it isn’t is due to this post - xfce is what I used to use because it was lightweight, but if such a lightweight manager requires significant adoption effort it would imply that Wayland isn’t X API+new extension] I had thought that Wayland was still functionally an implementation of the X server prot…

Wayland is an entirely new display system that's completely incompatible with X11. X11 apps can generally run under Wayland, but through XWayland, an X server that runs nested under a Wayland compositor.

Oh, ok, so X apps can run under Wayland, because Wayland DEs can run an X server (an existing X impl, or does Wayland provide an X translation layer/impl?)

But the DE/window manager is what is actually responsible for deciding when/where to provide that interface? For actual rendering+windows etc the DE is communicating entirely through Wayland specific APIs?

I guess the operation mode is similar to how you would run X apps on Mac and windows where you could launch an x server that would act as a layer between the Mac/windows windowing system?

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#43
post #23
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox on X11 works fine if you enable media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled in about:config

Thanks for the tip. I didn't have it enabled, but to be honest I've never noticed any lag when playing back videos or in any other situation.

With all the cores in modern PC's I'd doubt if you would unless you're on a computer that is 8 or 10 years old

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#44

Genuinely find XFCE the only pragmatic option when it comes to "no-fiddling-just-working-and-lightweight" WMs in Linux/BSD land - it's basically like a better Windows 2000 UI with sane defaults throughout. Thanks so much to the devs involved in keeping XFCE up to date. This is major good news.

KDE is actually lighter. And hidpi is much better on Qt.

Source?

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#45

Genuinely find XFCE the only pragmatic option when it comes to "no-fiddling-just-working-and-lightweight" WMs in Linux/BSD land - it's basically like a better Windows 2000 UI with sane defaults throughout. Thanks so much to the devs involved in keeping XFCE up to date. This is major good news.

KDE is actually lighter. And hidpi is much better on Qt.

Alright I do use KDE those days. I have used XFCE before. I don't think I can believe that KDE is lighter in term of response/lag. I didn't check the ram usage because Firefox is taking it all anyways.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#46
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox on X11 works fine if you enable media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled in about:config

Y'all need to remember this in those threads when you say Linux just works and MS's registry is stupid and needs tweaking to work right.

Eh the thing for me is that the config is distributed and fairly easy to correct. If you're fiddling with Windows registry, you better make sure to do a snapshot/backup beforehand. I don't have to do any of that with linux, I just do a simple cp to file.backup and if I hose the system do an emergency boot or linux on usb and fix it.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#47
post #17

To be clear here, we don't have a compositor yet. I've done a little work on it, but it won't be usable for at least a year, maybe (probably) longer. 4.20 will let you run some of our components on another compositor. We mostly test with Wayfire and Labwc, as our compositor will also be using wlroots.

Awesome! A lot of people are excited, XFCE is a very charming and beloved desktop environment. I'm curious to see how people will take this change though... I know a lot of XFCE users either want Wayland or don't care, and then there are a lot who will probably be very resistant to this change. Taking it slow at least allows you to take advantage of the recent growth of Wayland and allows you all to polish XFCE Wayland up so that there are minimal hiccups during the switch. I'd be curious to know what your opinion is on the matter.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#48
post #10
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's pretty much the same story for me; after having found out how to get all the same features in KDE that I had in xfce, there was no way back. I always like to use the lightweight and less resource intensive software, but arguably not using hardware acceleration is actually very resource hungry.

> I always like to use the lightweight and less resource intensive software, but arguably not using hardware acceleration is actually very resource hungry. What hardware are you using where KDE is considered "resource intensive", yet it also has a GPU that supports Vulkan and hardware video decoding? I've used KDE for a long time, and can't remember a time when I noticed its resource usage (and I used to daily drive…

I notice KDE's resource utilization more or less constantly. With KDE's bling turned all the way down, Kwin constantly uses 5-10% CPU when I am literally doing nothing (with my hands off the mouse/keyboard). This causes my laptop fans to noticeably spin up and makes them a lot more prone to spinning up more forcefully while doing a small task. With XFCE, my fan never audibly spins up unless I'm actively doing something. Even if I just do something small/quick, my fans don't spin up most of the time.

edit: typos

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#49
post #6

XFCE being stuck on X11 was what finally made me finally move to KDE when I installed Linux on my machine at work a few months ago When compiling code on a remote machine, a terminal on one window would cause YouTube videos to lag on the other! As far as I could ascertain, there was simply no hardware accelerated playback going on. Both Chrome and Firefox had seemingly abandoned X11 for a Vulkan based render backend…

Yeah, it's pretty much the same story for me; after having found out how to get all the same features in KDE that I had in xfce, there was no way back. I always like to use the lightweight and less resource intensive software, but arguably not using hardware acceleration is actually very resource hungry.

KDE 6 isn't really that much heavier than a "full install" of xfce to be honest. I just prefer the simplicity (probably 1/10th the adjustability of KDE) of xfce for ease of maintenance, but KDE is fine too.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#50

Genuinely find XFCE the only pragmatic option when it comes to "no-fiddling-just-working-and-lightweight" WMs in Linux/BSD land - it's basically like a better Windows 2000 UI with sane defaults throughout. Thanks so much to the devs involved in keeping XFCE up to date. This is major good news.

I love XFCE but nowadays it’s unbearable on a HiDPI screen.

And so I discovered that Cinnamon is also a very good option when it comes to « a better Windows 2000 ui ».

It’s also not incredible on HiDPI but at least Cinnamon is pretty good at not breaking everything when you increase font size by 150 or 200%. On XFCE if you do this everything becomes ugly.

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