Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Long live Xorg, I mean Xlibre

dedoimedo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 212 posts

Re: Long live Xorg, I mean Xlibre

#43

Post by yongjik »

Well, it's my understanding that Xorg still cannot do per-monitor fractional scaling these days, have they fixed it? That was the major selling point of Wayland for me, as an occasional linux desktop user.

Retina MacBook Pro was released in 2012, about 13 years ago. Personally, I don't think Xorg is in a position to sneer at its competitor for being "beta in quality" after "15 years into making."

Re: Long live Xorg, I mean Xlibre

#46

Post by Arch-TK »

anglesideangle wrote: post #28

As someone who actively uses a wayland compositor and has done so since switching to linux ~4 years ago, I often feel like I live in a different world from the authors of articles discussing its usability. Just to discuss a few points made about wayland's supposed inferiority: > Wayland cannot do (or do well) tons of things: > VNC server > remote desktop I don't regularly use either of these so I cannot attest to whe…

The only wayland compositor that I know of that handles XWayland correctly is hyprland.

And when I say correctly, I mean that if I am on a non 96 DPI display, e.g. a 168 DPI display (1.75x) and want things scaling properly, Xwayland gets told to pretend that the display size is some resolution in the vicinity of ~1097 by ~686 (not sure how this part works, and honestly I don't think it's relevant) and a DPI of 96. Then xwayland does the most idiotic thing imaginable, it takes the output of applications running under it and stretches it.

And now I have vaseline on my screen.

No thanks.

I may try hyprland at some point to see if there's actual value to using Wayland over X but so far every time I've tried to switch it has been random obstacle after random obstacle.

One of the most baffling has been arbitrary restrictions on the scaling factor.

Re: Long live Xorg, I mean Xlibre

#47

Post by JoshTriplett »

zdragnar wrote: post #18
moomin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I’m a Windows user so I have no dog in this fight, but it seems like the principal implants are that it’s slower, less responsive and less stable than the alternative. This seems like a primary use case. I’m not sure what the wider use cases you’re thinking of that justify the switch.

I used daily drive Wayland. It's fine; for most of what I do I'm happier with it than I am macos or windows. I frequently ran into screen tearing on X, something that I've not struggled with at all on Wayland. I feel for people who are bitten by Wayland, but there's a really vocal negative group on here that I suspect are very much in the minority. Much like the switch from init to system, most people are fine with i…

It's understandable that people who aren't having problems aren't vocal; people don't usually go out of their way to say "everything's working fine, no issues".

Wayland works for the vast majority of people, and it's improving steadily. One of the main differences that leads people to complain is that in X, there wasn't any security between applications, and anyone could write a quick hack that makes things work for them (e.g. watch the keyboard for a key globally, or mirror the display remotely). In Wayland, there's no escape hatch: either the desktop environment needs to handle something, or you need to add a protocol for it. People experiment with new protocols all the time, but the Wayland project itself is (by design) slow and careful about adopting extensions.

It is understandable to wish for simpler times. But retrocomputing isn't a path forward here.

Re: Long live Xorg, I mean Xlibre

#49

Post by dsr_ »

timewizard wrote: post #11
devmor wrote: post #7

I agree with the sentiment of this post in general (annoyance with Wayland being shoved down my throat, despite missing core features of Xorg) but I am rather concerned about Xlibre's future as a project. The README being stuffed with reactionary political dogwhistles is downright weird and doesn't inspire confidence in longevity.

> The README being stuffed with political dogwhistles is downright weird For reasons I've never understood politics started invading open source about 10 years ago. What's weird is that these political ideas all seem to be highly aligned and this is the first major project that breaks that alignment. Personally I'd prefer to see the politics, on both sides, disappear forever. It only pollutes the engineering and it f…

I would guess that you started to be aware of politics about 10 years ago. You're off by at least 30 years or so...

For example, the removal of Jerry Pournelle's free account at MIT because he kept mentioning ARPANET in his column in Byte magazine. Then he accused MIT's sysadmins of being communists who wanted to destroy America's military...

That was 1985. The X project started the year before that.

Post reply on HN