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Ancient X11 scaling technology

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Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#251

Post by LionEgo »

simoncion wrote: post #216
LionEgo wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent a lot of time in my career working on weird rendering issues on websites/devices. Believe me when I said "I checked", I know WTF I am talking about. The only thing that was different was Wayland vs X11. Same browser, same browser settings, same OS and same plugins.

> Same browser, same browser settings, same OS and same plugins. Neat. Did you test outside of the browser? Based on your report, it sounds like you didn't. As you must know, the renderers in web browsers are very, very complex. I suggest you test with a standalone video player before you go blaming the underlying windowing system for performance issues.

[flagged]

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#252

Post by astrange »

atq2119 wrote: post #118
astrange wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually a different kind of scaling. The one at issue here is closer to cmd-plus/minus on desktop browsers, or two-finger zooming on phones. It's hard to make that look good unless you only have simple flat UIs like the one on this website. They did make another attempt at it for apps with Dynamic Type though.

I'm certain that web style scaling is what the vast majority of desktop users actually want from fractional desktop scaling. Thinking that two finger zooming style scaling is the goal is probably the result of misguided design-centric thinking instead of user-centric thinking.

At the time I was trying and failing to get Java apps to do it properly, so please send this feedback to whoever invented Swing in the 90s.

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#253

Post by astrange »

account42 wrote: post #222
astrange wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually a different kind of scaling. The one at issue here is closer to cmd-plus/minus on desktop browsers, or two-finger zooming on phones. It's hard to make that look good unless you only have simple flat UIs like the one on this website. They did make another attempt at it for apps with Dynamic Type though.

User scale and device scale are combined into one scale factor as far as the layout / rendering engine is concerned and thus are solved in the same way.

The difference is developers are a lot more likely to have tested one than the other. So it's what you call a binary compatibility issue.

Similarly browser developers care deeply if they break a website with the default settings, but they care less if cmd-+ breaks it because that's optional. If it became a mandatory accessibility feature somehow, now they have a problem.

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#254

Post by okanat »

uecker wrote: post #159
okanat wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natively in X11? No. Even with Xrandr. It is no. But you can obtain the display size and then draw things differently using OpenGL but now you're reinventing the display protocol in your drawing engine (which is what GLX is after all but I digress). You need to onboard every toolkit to your protocol.

Is this different to Wayland?

Yes. Wayland is designed to be flexible of what does the drawing and where (currently only shared memory and EGL surfaces are implemented / supported). So it needs to define monitors as abstract concepts. They are called outputs and the client can query the size directly in Wayland protocol without needing display drivers or OpenGL.

However, there is no common way of handling different custom DPIs / scaling in the core Wayland protocol. Fractional scaling is implemented optionally by the client and the server and both need to opt-in.

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#255

Post by const_cast »

account42 wrote: post #236
sho_hn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nate (the author of the blog post you linked), who I know personally very well, is a QA/product person focused on integration and fit and finish issues. What he means to say is that as a polished product, this is now available in the form of a Wayland-based desktop session without fiddling, while the same cannot be said of X11-based ones. It's meant as a pragmatic take, not as a history lesson. That's quite similar t…

Well the pragmatic take of many users (myself included) is to stick with X11 because Wayland absolutely is not a polished product and likely won't be before being declared obsolete by the NIH crowd. Of course, newer KWin versions also add many odd issues with X11 so I'm sure they will bug equally buggy soon enough and users can finally switch without such concerns. > The most close analogue I can think of that most i…

Wayland is significantly more polished than X on my experience on new hardware. Everything, literally everything, works and looks better. X, in comparison, seems almost plagued with a thin layer of jank over the whole thing.

X has been on life support for decades now, with new capabilities just bolted on without a care in the world. But the actual system works quite inconsistently, and some things will, presumably, never work.

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#256

Post by const_cast »

rwmj wrote: post #46

It's like the "oh no, X11 suffers from tearing video" problem that they pull out all the time. (A) I have no idea what "video tear" is and (B) I play video all the time on my crappy laptop running X11 and it seems fine for me. But can I ssh to my remote server and run emacs or another program completely transparently yet with Wayland? Nope. I do that with X11 continuously.

> But can I ssh to my remote server and run emacs or another program completely transparently yet with Wayland? Nope. I do that with X11 continuously

The problem is this usecase sucks major ass on X and has for a decade at least. It worked meh at one point, but as modern applications became more complex and X exploded in complexity it no longer makes any sense.

X is an unbelievably chatty protocol. Believe it or not, it's primarily meant to be run on a local socket, which is almost certainly memory mapped. Running it over the network has incredible latency, terrible lag spikes, and your windows will just kill themselves somewhat randomly.

There are newer remote desktop protocols which are literally just better.

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#257

Post by Sophira »

zokier wrote: post #49
pedrocr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I referred to with "we'll be finally getting that in Wayland now". For many years the Wayland protocol could only communicate integer scale factors to clients. If you asked for 1.5 what the compositors did was ask all the clients to render at 2x at a suitably fake size and then scale that to the final output resolution. That's still mostly the case in what's shipping right now I believe. And even in integ…

> That's still mostly the case in what's shipping right now I believe All major compositors support fractional scaling extension these days which allows pixel perfect rendering afaik, and I believe Qt6 and GTK4 also support it. https://wayland.app/protocols/fractional-scale-v1#compositor...

I don't run a compositor, and with Qt6, Some programs like VirtualBox just don't respect Qt's scaling factor setting. Setting the font DPI instead results in weird bugs, like the display window getting smaller and smaller.

As it happens, VirtualBox does have its own scaling setting, but it's pretty bad, in my opinion. But I'm kind of forced to use it because Qt's own scaling just doesn't work in this case.

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#258

Post by aragilar »

ndiddy wrote: post #95
rwmj wrote: post #46

It's like the "oh no, X11 suffers from tearing video" problem that they pull out all the time. (A) I have no idea what "video tear" is and (B) I play video all the time on my crappy laptop running X11 and it seems fine for me. But can I ssh to my remote server and run emacs or another program completely transparently yet with Wayland? Nope. I do that with X11 continuously.

> But can I ssh to my remote server and run emacs or another program completely transparently yet with Wayland? Nope. Yes, you can! Waypipe came out 6 years ago. Its express purpose is to make a Wayland equivalent to ssh -X. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

Except: 1. It's Wayland-to-Wayland (which means you're much more limited to where it can run than X-to-X, where's the MacOS or Windows or BSD Wayland build?). 2. It's not integrated with ssh (X forwarding is part of the protocol). 3. You need it on both the client and the server, so you need to work out how to get it onto the server.

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#259

Post by lproven »

cycomanic wrote: post #133
sho_hn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end-user UIs don't ask you to calculate anything. Typically they have a slider from 100% to, say, 400% and let you set this to something like 145%. This may take some getting used to if you're familiar with DPI and already know the value you like, but for non-technical users it's more approachable. Not everyone knows DPI or how many dots they want to their inches. That the 145% is 1.45 under the hood is really an…

I don't care about what we call the metric, I argue that a relative metric, where the reference point is device dependent is simply bad design. I challenge you, tell a non-technical user to set two monitors (e.g. laptop and external) to display text/windows at the same size. I will guarantee you that it will take them significant amount of time moving those relative sliders around. If we had an absolute metric it wou…

> tell a non-technical user to set two monitors (e.g. laptop and external) to display text/windows at the same size

Tell me, do you not ever use Macs?

This is not even a solved problem on macOS: there is no solution because the problem doesn't happen in the first place. The OS knows the size and the capabilities of the devices and you tell it with a slider what size of text you find comfortable. The end.

It works out the resolutions and the scaling factors. If the users needs to set that individually per device, if they can even see it, then the UI has failed: it's exposing unnecessary implementation details to users who do not need to know and should not have to care.

_Every_ user of macOS can solve this challenge because the problem is never visible. It's a question of stupidly simple arithmetic that I could do with a pocket calculator in less than a minute, so it should just happen and never show up to the user.

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#260

Post by lproven »

atq2119 wrote: post #116
sho_hn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end-user UIs don't ask you to calculate anything. Typically they have a slider from 100% to, say, 400% and let you set this to something like 145%. This may take some getting used to if you're familiar with DPI and already know the value you like, but for non-technical users it's more approachable. Not everyone knows DPI or how many dots they want to their inches. That the 145% is 1.45 under the hood is really an…

Not to mention that only a small fraction of the world uses inches...

This is true, but there are a few things which just happen to be measured in this obsolete and arbitrary unit around most of the world, and pizzas and computer screens are two of the ones that can be mentioned in polite society. :-)

I speak very bad Norwegian. I use metric for everything. But once I ordered a pizza late at night in Bergen after a few beers, and they asked me how big I wanted in centimetres and it broke my decision-making process badly. I can handle Norwegian numbers and I can handle cm but not pizzas in cm.

I ended up with a vast pizza that was a ridiculous size for one, but what the hell, I was very hungry. I just left the crusts.

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