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

Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

alexxcons.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 339 posts

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#41

Post by ninth_ant »

ok123456 wrote: post #20
jchw wrote: post #3

I hope that XFCE remains a solid lightweight desktop option. I've become a huge fan of KDE over the past couple of years, but it certainly isn't what you would consider lightweight or minimal. Personally, I'm a big proponent of Wayland and not big Rust detractor, so I don't see any problem with this. I do, however, wonder how many long-time XFCE fans and the folks who donated the money funding this will feel about it…

Why does Wayland "feel like the future?" It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. At best, it seems like a huge diversion of time and resources, given that we already had a working GUI. (Maybe that was the intention.) The arguments for it have boiled down to "yuck code older than me" from supposed professionals employed by commercial Linux vendors to sup…

Even if you dislike Wayland, forwards-going development is clearly centred around it.

Development of X11 has largely ended and the major desktop environments and several mainstream Linux distributions are likewise ending support for it. There is one effort I know of to revive and modernize X11 but it’s both controversial and also highly niche.

You don’t have to like the future for it to be the future.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#42

Post by gmueckl »

bee_rider wrote: post #25
ok123456 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does Wayland "feel like the future?" It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. At best, it seems like a huge diversion of time and resources, given that we already had a working GUI. (Maybe that was the intention.) The arguments for it have boiled down to "yuck code older than me" from supposed professionals employed by commercial Linux vendors to sup…

Because X is not getting much development at this point (personally I still use i3, haven’t switched to Sway, the present works fine for me).

This argument is actually backwards: one of the goals of the wayland project is to draw development away from X. If wayland didn't exist, people would have worked on X11 a lot more.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#43

Post by torstenvl »

throw0101a wrote: post #9

Does Wayland work on non-Linux systems (e.g. *BSD)? If an application is written for Wayland, is there a way to send its windows to (e.g.) my Mac, like I can with X11 to XQuartz?

Yes, but still kind of WIP.

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#44

Post by [deleted] »

ninth_ant wrote: post #41
ok123456 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does Wayland "feel like the future?" It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. At best, it seems like a huge diversion of time and resources, given that we already had a working GUI. (Maybe that was the intention.) The arguments for it have boiled down to "yuck code older than me" from supposed professionals employed by commercial Linux vendors to sup…

Even if you dislike Wayland, forwards-going development is clearly centred around it. Development of X11 has largely ended and the major desktop environments and several mainstream Linux distributions are likewise ending support for it. There is one effort I know of to revive and modernize X11 but it’s both controversial and also highly niche. You don’t have to like the future for it to be the future.

[deleted]

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#46

Post by graemep »

coldpie wrote: post #11
jchw wrote: post #3

I hope that XFCE remains a solid lightweight desktop option. I've become a huge fan of KDE over the past couple of years, but it certainly isn't what you would consider lightweight or minimal. Personally, I'm a big proponent of Wayland and not big Rust detractor, so I don't see any problem with this. I do, however, wonder how many long-time XFCE fans and the folks who donated the money funding this will feel about it…

> Still I perceive a lot of XFCE's userbase to be more "traditional" and conservative about technologies, and likely to be skeptical of both Wayland and Rust, seeing them as complex, bloated, and unnecessary. Very long time (since 2007) XFCE user here. I don't think this is accurate. We want things to "just work" and not change for no good reason. Literally no user cares what language a project is implemented in, unl…

I used XFCE for a long time and I very much agree. it just works, and is lightweight. I use KDE these days but XFCE would be my second choice.

> The X11 diehards will go the way of the SysV-init diehard

I hope you are not conflating anti-systemD people with SysV init diehards? As far as I can see very few people want to keep Sysv init, but there are lots who think SystemD init is the wrong replacement, and those primarily because its a lot more than an init system.

In many ways the objects are opposite. People hate system D for being more than init, people hate Wayland for doing less than X.

Edit: corrected "Wayland" to "XFCE" in first sentence!

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#47

Post by Sharlin »

ok123456 wrote: post #20
jchw wrote: post #3

I hope that XFCE remains a solid lightweight desktop option. I've become a huge fan of KDE over the past couple of years, but it certainly isn't what you would consider lightweight or minimal. Personally, I'm a big proponent of Wayland and not big Rust detractor, so I don't see any problem with this. I do, however, wonder how many long-time XFCE fans and the folks who donated the money funding this will feel about it…

Why does Wayland "feel like the future?" It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. At best, it seems like a huge diversion of time and resources, given that we already had a working GUI. (Maybe that was the intention.) The arguments for it have boiled down to "yuck code older than me" from supposed professionals employed by commercial Linux vendors to sup…

We’re accustomed to "the future" connoting progress and improvement. Unfortunately, it isn’t always so (no matter how heavily implied). Just that it’s literally expected to be the future state if matters.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#49

Post by simoncion »

justin66 wrote: post #23
ok123456 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does Wayland "feel like the future?" It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. At best, it seems like a huge diversion of time and resources, given that we already had a working GUI. (Maybe that was the intention.) The arguments for it have boiled down to "yuck code older than me" from supposed professionals employed by commercial Linux vendors to sup…

It's a downgrade that we have no choice but to accept in order to continue using our machines. Anyone familiar with Microsoft or Apple already knows that's the future.

> It's a downgrade that we have no choice but to accept in order to continue using our machines.

Odd. Xorg still works fine [0], and we'll see how XLibre pans out.

[0] I'm using it right now, and it's still getting updates.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#50

Post by BearOso »

coldpie wrote: post #11
jchw wrote: post #3

I hope that XFCE remains a solid lightweight desktop option. I've become a huge fan of KDE over the past couple of years, but it certainly isn't what you would consider lightweight or minimal. Personally, I'm a big proponent of Wayland and not big Rust detractor, so I don't see any problem with this. I do, however, wonder how many long-time XFCE fans and the folks who donated the money funding this will feel about it…

> Still I perceive a lot of XFCE's userbase to be more "traditional" and conservative about technologies, and likely to be skeptical of both Wayland and Rust, seeing them as complex, bloated, and unnecessary. Very long time (since 2007) XFCE user here. I don't think this is accurate. We want things to "just work" and not change for no good reason. Literally no user cares what language a project is implemented in, unl…

If Rust has one weakness right now, it's bindings to system and hardware libraries. There's a massive barrier in Rust communicating with the outside ecosystem that's written in C. The definitive choice to use Rust and an existing Wayland abstraction library narrows their options down to either creating bindings of their own, or using smithay, the brand new Rust/Wayland library written for the Cosmic desktop compositor. I won't go into details, but Cosmic is still very much in beta.

It would have been much easier and cost-effective to use wlroots, which has a solid base and has ironed out a lot of problems. On the other hand, Cosmic devs are actively working on it, and I can see it getting better gradually, so you get some indirect manpower for free.

I applaud the choice to not make another core Wayland implementation. We now have Gnome, Plasma, wlroots, weston, and smithay as completely separate entities. Dealing with low-level graphics is an extremely difficult topic, and every implementor encounters the same problems and has to come up with independent solutions. There's so much duplicated effort. I don't think people getting into it realize how deceptively complex and how many edge-cases low-level graphics entails.

Post reply on HN