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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

#121
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sympathize, but unfortunately Tim Cook's stewardship of the Mac, from the embrace of soldered RAM and even storage throughout the Mac lineup, to the increasing annoyances of macOS either in the name of security (e.g., notarization, the popups that request permission to read user directories, which is really annoying when using LLVM's debugger in modern macOS) or to help advertise Apple's subscription services, have…

I do not like the panels Apple uses, they have harsh backlight, due to 450 nm blue primary; nwer panels have 455-460nm blue light peak. My eyes are sensitive and I get tired on Apples.

Have you tried blue-block type lenses? Not those yellow ones from infomercial - it's a clear lens that cuts some wavelength for staring at bright monitor all day. Lots of cheap readers have those.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE is really excellent on HiDPI. Running it here on a 4K 24" screen and it looks amazing

What monitor do you use ? 24" 4K is such a rare thing these days ; I'm using cheapo LG , but I always look out if there's something better

I'm using that cheapo LG 24UD58 :) unfortunately they only make 27" now. I really wish they would start making them again. 27" @ 4K is a little bit too low res for me.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#123
post #22
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be worse. The whole Gnome 3 and Wayland thing pushed me to macOS.

I sympathize, but unfortunately Tim Cook's stewardship of the Mac, from the embrace of soldered RAM and even storage throughout the Mac lineup, to the increasing annoyances of macOS either in the name of security (e.g., notarization, the popups that request permission to read user directories, which is really annoying when using LLVM's debugger in modern macOS) or to help advertise Apple's subscription services, have…

> I'm slowly working on a side project where I'm implementing my dream OS, which is influenced by various alternate paths of workstation and desktop computing explored in the 1980s and 1990s but were overtaken by Windows and Unix, namely Lisp machines, the Smalltalk environment, and 1990s Apple initiatives such as OpenDoc and the original plans for the Newton

Cool, I'll be following that. To me, one of the most interesting aspects of Genera is the command line interface, where commands know their arguments' names, types, defaults, and help strings. The commands can output nicely formatted data such as tables and, because they're just Lisp functions, they can share structured data directly rather than parsing and serializing ad-hoc text formats as is that's typical in the Unix world.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#124
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on X11 still and completely ignored the train wreck, hoping it'll go away eventually.

It's not going to go away. Wayland is here to stay.

And so is X11. We are heading for a dual stack desktops. There are tons of expensive applications that target Linux _because_ of X11 and they will rather force users to switch OSes than get rewritten.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#125
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.

(uninformed outsider) have you considered reaching out to the System76 folks? They are also setting out doing a Wayland compositor for a (decreasingly) gtk-based desktop and are reasonably far along on this goal. I wonder if their compositor would suit your needs?

To me, at least, xfwm4's window management behavior is a big part of what makes Xfce... well, Xfce. So no, I don't think I'd consider using someone else's compositor.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#126
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And , no Client Side Decorations. XFCE died for me the day they adopted it. Inconsistency-hell ensued. LXQt if you want something with less features, Plasma if you want more features. They're both performant.

> And, no Client Side Decorations. XFCE died for me the day they adopted it. Inconsistency-hell ensued.

Not sure what you mean. We have CSDs available for people who like it, but they can be turned on and off.

If you're talking about random GTK apps that run on Xfce, there's not much we can do about that; we don't set app policy.

That's one of the nicer things about Wayland, though: there's a way for the compositor to tell applications "I'll draw the decorations". On X11 there's no protocol for that, only a way for an app to tell the window manager it wants to draw its own, without a way for the WM to say "no, don't do it".

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#127
post #13

In all honesty, the screen sharing situation (and other stuff) in Wayland is currently so brittle that I consider XFCE (my daily driver) lagging behind in its adoption a feature.

Ditto. In terms of other stuff, I'm thinking about x2go, which I still use religiously? I'm curious, is Wayland anywhere on this?

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#128
post #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.

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

How so? We support setting GTK's UI scaling to 2x, and (as of 4.18) I believe all the bugs around blurry icon rendering have been fixed.

What exactly becomes ugly for you?

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#129
post #123
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sympathize, but unfortunately Tim Cook's stewardship of the Mac, from the embrace of soldered RAM and even storage throughout the Mac lineup, to the increasing annoyances of macOS either in the name of security (e.g., notarization, the popups that request permission to read user directories, which is really annoying when using LLVM's debugger in modern macOS) or to help advertise Apple's subscription services, have…

> I'm slowly working on a side project where I'm implementing my dream OS, which is influenced by various alternate paths of workstation and desktop computing explored in the 1980s and 1990s but were overtaken by Windows and Unix, namely Lisp machines, the Smalltalk environment, and 1990s Apple initiatives such as OpenDoc and the original plans for the Newton Cool, I'll be following that. To me, one of the most inter…

I've never used Genera; I was born in 1989 and thus was too young to experience Lisp machines. However, I've read a lot about them over the years, and I wish we had a modern analogue. I think the closest thing we have to Genera is the Squeak implementation of Smalltalk and its derivatives (Pharo and Cuis Smalltalk).

I wholeheartedly agree with you; a system based on structured data or objects would be much better than what we have today. What I've been dreaming about for years is a system where everything is an object, much like Smalltalk. Instead of typing "ls" in a terminal window, you would send a get_files request to the current directory, which would return a list of file names. It's possible to emulate the traditional Unix "ls" command, but interacting programmatically with the system enables so many other uses that's much easier than parsing text or calling POSIX system calls. Because the user is working with objects instead of text, not only would it be easier to write scripts compared to Unix shell scripts, it would also be easier for developers to implement GUI tools for the system. For example, imagine if word processing documents were represented by a class that handled all sorts of manipulations of the document, hiding the details of the underlying file format from the user and developer in most cases. It would be easier to come up with scripts for generating and modifying word processing documents without having to use the word processor's macros (if they're available in the first place) or without having to dive deep into the underlying file formats of the documents.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#130
post #68

The transition to Wayland also seems to correlate with the adoption of client side decorations (CSD). This "modern" approach destroys the traditional UX of XFCE as seen by recent changes in the settings manager. I fear for the future of XFCE. The advantage of XFCE for me has always been that it's a stable implementation of a traditional Win98/XP UX. I hope they don't adopt more Gnome3 patterns.

> The transition to Wayland also seems to correlate with the adoption of client side decorations (CSD)

Not really. The GNOME/GTK folks were already on the CSD bandwagon well before Wayland. Wayland compositors are free to draw their own decorations (and xfwm4 will indeed continue doing that once it's a Wayland compositor), and one of the actually neat things about Wayland is that there is a protocol that allows the compositor to tell applications not to draw their own decorations. (Whereas on X11 an app can tell the WM it will draw CSDs and the WM can't do a thing about it.)

Certainly GNOME has gone all the way to CSDs (IIRC if an app on GNOME doesn't draw CSDs, they get no decorations at all), but that has nothing to do with Wayland.

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