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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

#131

Post by kelnos »

tristan957 wrote: post #94
darren0 wrote: 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.

CSD has nothing to do with UX. CSD just means the application draws the window controls and borders.

> CSD has nothing to do with UX.

Sure it does. Allowing windows to draw their own decorations, often in different ways and with different styles and themes, and not respecting the settings in xfwm4 as to what window-control buttons should be drawn (and where)... that's a huge UX issue.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#132

Post by pkkm »

linguae wrote: post #129
pkkm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

Oh, I'm also too young to have experienced the Lisp hardware. I've tried Genera in an emulator, though, and I've read some of the manuals because it's so interesting. There's a nice user interface programming manual preserved at [1]. Defining commands starts on PDF page 39.

[1] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/symbolics/software/genera_8/Pro...

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#133

Post by kelnos »

guilhas wrote: post #41

Hope XFCE still keeps xorg reliable Most projects introduced bugs in xorg trying to support wayland, which is not reliable for many use cases, making everything unusable every other month

That's the plan, anyway. And I expect Wayland won't be usable for most as a daily driver until 4.22 or even 4.24, so obviously X11 will remain a high priority. And even after then, the X11 code paths will still work. Most of the difference is handled inside GDK anyway; the work we've done for Wayland support is mainly where GDK doesn't handle what we want to do, and where we've had to write libX11 code.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#134

Post by kelnos »

EasyMark wrote: post #55
olliej wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is no reverse equivalent of Wayland->X11 to my knowledge. Just the X11->Wayland via XWayland .

You can run any wlroots- (and possibly smithay-) based Wayland compositor nested inside an X11, but it won't be rootless; you'll get a separate window that all the Wayland apps will be drawn into.

There's really no reason why someone couldn't write a "WX11" or something of that nature, but I'm not sure it would be worth the effort.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#135

Post by sylware »

kelnos wrote: 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.

Until wlroots is statically linked into xfce compositor... you know, if we could avoid the mess of the bazillion of x11 libs all over again...

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#136

Post by FloatArtifact »

bitwize wrote: post #91
FloatArtifact wrote: post #71

My accessibility needs are dead under Wayland. There needs to be shortcuts that can be emulated per application and global shortcuts. Their security model won't allow this. I don't know how accessibility and automation tools are going to get by trying to support every wayland compositor.

If accessibility is a serious concern, Linux is probably not the OS for you. It's so far behind in accessibility compared to Windows it's not even funny.

> If accessibility is a serious concern, Linux is probably not the OS for you. It's so far behind in accessibility compared to Windows it's not even funny.

Linux is fine with X11 per my requirements above. The biggest problem is the fragmentation caused by Wayland. I cant develop software that targets any reasonable range of desktop environments much less, the features needed. If Wayland was left and X11 was right the community needs something in the middle paradigm.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#137

Post by sweeter »

cwillu wrote: post #110
tristan957 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSD has nothing to do with UX. CSD just means the application draws the window controls and borders.

The application having the ability to change how the title bar works is an anti-feature for me.

On Wayland, the compositor can either let windows draw their own borders, or it can disallow it. On X11, if a window want's to draw its own decorations... it will just do it, and you won't be able to do anything about it.

Pretty much every single Wayland compositor follows this except for GNOME, who refuse to do so. It causes problems with windows like Davinci Resolve who don't draw their own decos. This leaves some windows without any controls at all lol. But this is a tangent and purely a GNOME problem.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#138

Post by ac29 »

mkgreen wrote: post #124
EasyMark wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the apps target Linux/X11, wouldnt they also have to be rewritten to switch OS?

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#139

Post by ac29 »

AlienRobot wrote: post #90
panick21_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland. Even the BSD and everybody else relaying on X11 has noticed that and they know they can't maintain X11 by themselves. It will 100x not go away, there is no way. Literally all big stakeholder both open source (Gnome, KDE, Fedora and so on) and companies like Valve are all in on Wayland. The reality is, X11 is a complete train wreck…

>X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland In my view, Wayland is basically unsupported. GNOME and KDE support it. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. It's been over 10 years. You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.

> XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't.

XFCE, Lxqt, Mate all have at least partial wayland support.

Cinnamon has experimental support.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#140

Post by cesarb »

hggigg wrote: post #35
linguae wrote: 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'll be horribly blunt here but I don't give a shit about any of that any more. It's irrelevant which is why open source is a complete joke for most people. I, much as other users, just want my computer to solve the problems I ask of it, not turn into an activity in its own right or a maze of hosting problems and pain to get a simple task done. The job of the computer is to free us from slavery and everyone seems to…

> No one cares about the political purity and ideology behind it.

No one cares, until they do. Everything you mentioned depends on a single company, which follows the commands from just a few people, who can one day decide to lead the operating system in a direction which makes it no longer your "dream OS", and intellectual property law makes it so that no other company can undo their changes.

> The job of the computer is to free us from slavery and everyone seems to have bloody well forgotten that.

We haven't, and that's why we prefer operating systems we fully control, instead of being bound by the whims of some foreign megacorporation, enforced by intellectual property law.

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