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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

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree, because experimental support means it's being worked on. Legacy support means the opposite - it's not being worked on and never will be worked on. So for now it happens to work. But none of those DEs are contributing to the X.org implementation of X11, right? So it will slowly break down over time. That's the current status of X11, it's on hospice.

The current status of X11 is that it works. The current status of Wayland is that it doesn't. It's really that simple. I think this exchange can help you understand my position better: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345#issuecomment-201... >Wayland has a myriad of unresolved problems regarding surface suspension blocking presentation and the FIFO (vsync) implementation being fundamentally broken leading to r…

> they can finally stop maintaining X11 legacy code

They already have, this is what I'm trying to tell you. All the X.org maintainers are on Wayland, and none of the DEs are contributed to X.org. It's on hospice. It happens to work just because, but that won't be the case forever.

It's fine if you currently like X and use X. I myself use X on Debian Stable.

But the reality is that it's dead technology, and eventually it won't work right.

Wayland is constantly being improved by many, many different parties. Valve, KDE, Gnome, freedesktop, Redhat... they're all constantly making new protocols and implementing them to solve problems.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#192
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?

System76 is using Rust and Iced to create the COSMIC desktop. It is not GTK anymore. That drags in a lot of dependencies for a project like XFCE.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current status of X11 is that it works. The current status of Wayland is that it doesn't. It's really that simple. I think this exchange can help you understand my position better: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345#issuecomment-201... >Wayland has a myriad of unresolved problems regarding surface suspension blocking presentation and the FIFO (vsync) implementation being fundamentally broken leading to r…

> they can finally stop maintaining X11 legacy code They already have, this is what I'm trying to tell you. All the X.org maintainers are on Wayland, and none of the DEs are contributed to X.org. It's on hospice. It happens to work just because, but that won't be the case forever. It's fine if you currently like X and use X. I myself use X on Debian Stable. But the reality is that it's dead technology, and eventually…

They haven't stopped maintaining it because the programs still run on X11.

GIMP supports PNG. That doesn't mean GIMP contributes code to libpng, or libpng needs updates. It just needs to have code to make it work with PNG.

X11 will stop being supported when the developers literally remove the code to make their programs run on X11 from their projects. Until then, it's still supported.

Why would I need updates when things already work in the current version?

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they can finally stop maintaining X11 legacy code They already have, this is what I'm trying to tell you. All the X.org maintainers are on Wayland, and none of the DEs are contributed to X.org. It's on hospice. It happens to work just because, but that won't be the case forever. It's fine if you currently like X and use X. I myself use X on Debian Stable. But the reality is that it's dead technology, and eventually…

They haven't stopped maintaining it because the programs still run on X11. GIMP supports PNG. That doesn't mean GIMP contributes code to libpng, or libpng needs updates. It just needs to have code to make it work with PNG. X11 will stop being supported when the developers literally remove the code to make their programs run on X11 from their projects. Until then, it's still supported. Why would I need updates when th…

All X11 programs already run under Wayland. There will always be applications that are X11-only and they will always work. This is a fake problem, IMO.

> Why would I need updates when things already work in the current version?

I guess you don't, but then again, I don't see you running Windows 95. I think this is maybe something you like to believe, but in practice people do want new things and new software.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#195
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say X11 is unsupported, and I note with glee that X11 hasn't _broken_ for me _since_ they stopped supporting it.

When software works it just works, and if you don't change it it continues to work. But if you had an issue, its unlikely that it would be fixed or that new features you want would arrive. Unsupported is fine for much software on the world.

Indeed. It is often a feature that core infrastructure doesn't gain new features.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#196
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When software works it just works, and if you don't change it it continues to work. But if you had an issue, its unlikely that it would be fixed or that new features you want would arrive. Unsupported is fine for much software on the world.

Indeed. It is often a feature that core infrastructure doesn't gain new features.

Hardware is evolving, and while the core feature set works, it wont keep up. If you personally don't care about those things, that fine, and its a feature for you. But eternal stagnation isn't actually a realistic option.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven't stopped maintaining it because the programs still run on X11. GIMP supports PNG. That doesn't mean GIMP contributes code to libpng, or libpng needs updates. It just needs to have code to make it work with PNG. X11 will stop being supported when the developers literally remove the code to make their programs run on X11 from their projects. Until then, it's still supported. Why would I need updates when th…

All X11 programs already run under Wayland. There will always be applications that are X11-only and they will always work. This is a fake problem, IMO. > Why would I need updates when things already work in the current version? I guess you don't, but then again, I don't see you running Windows 95. I think this is maybe something you like to believe, but in practice people do want new things and new software.

The only reason I don`t use Windows 7 is because Chrome, VS Code, Steam, and other electron apps stopped working on Windows 7. :-)

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps if the X devs want people to migrate, they should consider giving Wayland all the features of X. Otherwise people are going to keep using the thing that works.

> all the features of X I don't think Wayland should add a print server ;)

No, but there should exist a print server that Wayland applications can use. I don't object to refactors and replacements, but the underlying features should still exist.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

> I cant develop software that targets any reasonable range of desktop environments I highly recommend Qt for this purpose. Gtk has been a hot mess for the past few years with Gtk4 and libadwaita shenanigans. However, Qt has continued to evolve incrementally without dropping any backwards functionality. It's incredibly full-featured and has amazing tooling. In addition to Qt Creator you also have the CLI tools for pa…

> > I cant develop software that targets any reasonable range of desktop environments > > I highly recommend Qt for this purpose.

I really appreciate your comment. QT is a great framework doing a lot of heavy lifting. However, the accessibility software I help maintain needs the ability to know what windows are in the foreground, all applications running and emulating key/text/mouse input in any of those running applications. Wayland is antithetical to those features by design.

I can see your point with QT for standalone applications. However, with interacting with other applications I'm not sure QT can solve the issue.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#200

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.

I had a simillar take until I found keyd:

https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd

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