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Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

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Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#121

Post by thisislife2 »

happymellon wrote: post #116
thisislife2 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I am staunch proponent of "don't try to fix what is not broken" . Current XFCE is fast, light-weight, usable and works fine without major issues. While I don't fully understand the advantages / disadvantages of XFCE using Wayland instead of X, if, as someone else pointed out here on HN, running XFCE on Wayland is going to make it slower, it means these developers will be crippling one of XFCE's strongest featur…

> running XFCE on Wayland is going to make it slower Citation. None of the other desktops have slowed with Wayland, and gaming is as fast as, if not marginally faster on KDE/Gnome with Wayland vs LXDE on X. https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2504-x11-gaming

I based it on this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780901

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#123

Post by mcswell »

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…

> "yuck code older than me"

You mean like the code that the Manchester Baby, ENIAC, the Manchester Mark 1, EDSAC and EDVAC ran? Or maybe Plankalkül...

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#124

Post by drob518 »

jchw wrote: post #100
Fiveplus wrote: post #28

>The goal is, that xfwl4 will offer the same functionality and behavior as xfwm4 does... I wonder how strictly they interpret behavior here given the architectural divergence? As an example, focus-stealing prevention. In xfwm4 (and x11 generally), this requires complex heuristics and timestamp checks because x11 clients are powerful and can aggressively grab focus. In wayland, the compositor is the sole arbiter of fo…

> Can the compositor replicate the input-to-pixel latency of uncomposited x11 on low-end devices or is that a class of performance we just have to sacrifice for the frame-perfect rendering of wayland? I think this is ultimately correct. The compositor will have to render a frame at some point after the VBlank signal, and it will need to render with it the buffers on-screen as of that point, which will be from whateve…

Love your post. So, don’t take this as disagreement.

I’m always a little bewildered by frame rate discussions. Yes, I understand that more is better, but for non-gaming apps (e.g. “productivity” apps), do we really need much more than 60 Hz? Yes, you can get smoother fast scrolling with higher frame rate at 120 Hz or more, but how many people were complaining about that over the last decade?

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#125

Post by mcswell »

jchw wrote: post #88
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…

Here's my PoV: - Having a single X server that almost everyone used lead to ossification. Having Wayland explicitly be only a protocol is helping to avoid that, though it comes with its own growing pains. - Wayland-the-Protocol (sounds like a Sonic the Hedgehog character when you say it like that) is not free of cruft, but it has been forward-thinking. It's compositor-centric, unlike X11 which predates desktop compos…

> xdg-session-management for being able to save and restore window positions > is still not merged, so there is no standard way to implement this in Wayland

For me, this is a real reason not to want to be forced to use Wayland. I'm sure the implementation of Wayland in xfce is a long time off, and the dropping of Xwindows even further off, so hopefully this problem will have been solved by then.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#126

Post by yason »

LeFantome wrote: post #108

In my view, this project itself shows some of the reasons why Wayland is the right path forward. On X, we had Xorg and that is it. But at least Xorg did a lot of the work for you. On Wayland, you in theory have to do a lot more of the work yourself when you build a compositor. But what we are seeing is libraries emerge that do this for you (wlroots, Smithay, Louvre, aquamarine, SWC, etc). So we have this one man proj…

Because Wayland only does essential low-level stuff such as display and graphics it forced people to start coming up with a common Linux desktop (programming) interface out of nowhere to basically glue everything together and make programs at least interoperate.

Such an effort to rethink Linux desktop alone could've been a major project on its own but as having something was necessitated by Wayland all of it has become hurried and lacking control. Anything reminiscent of a bigger and more comprehensive project is in initial stages at best. If Wayland has been coming on for about ten years now I'll give it another ten years until we have some kind of established, consistent desktop API for Linux again.

X11 did offer some very basic features for a desktop environment so that programs using different toolkits could work together, and enough hooks you could implement stuff in window managers etc. Yet there was nothing like the more complete interfaces of the desktops of other operating systems that tied everything together in a central, consistent way. So, Linux desktop interface was certainly in need for a rewrite but the way it's happening is just disheartening.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#127

Post by badsectoracula »

Fiveplus wrote: post #28

>The goal is, that xfwl4 will offer the same functionality and behavior as xfwm4 does... I wonder how strictly they interpret behavior here given the architectural divergence? As an example, focus-stealing prevention. In xfwm4 (and x11 generally), this requires complex heuristics and timestamp checks because x11 clients are powerful and can aggressively grab focus. In wayland, the compositor is the sole arbiter of fo…

One thing to keep in mind is that composition does not mean you have to do it with vsync, you can just refresh the screen the moment a client tells you the window has new contents.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#129

Post by gmueckl »

bee_rider wrote: post #114
gmueckl wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. Wayland was created in part to draw developers away from X. Seeking buy-in from Xorg developers specifically was a big part of it.

This seems to be implying that the creation of Wayland had some motivation that was essentially malicious toward X. Is that right?

This question sounds to me like you suspect some outright evil getting projected here. That would go too far. The wayland project tried to get the support of X developers early so that they could become a sort of "blessed" X successor early on. Plenty of earlier replacement attempts have failed because they couldn't get bigger community support, so this had to be part of a successful strategy. Any detrimental effects on X from that move were never a direct goal, as far as I am aware, just a consequence.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#130

Post by Rogach »

ca1f wrote: post #80
PunchyHamster wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can the compositor replicate the input-to-pixel latency of uncomposited x11 on low-end devices or is that a class of performance we just have to sacrifice for the frame-perfect rendering of wayland? well, the answer is just no, wayland has been consistently slower than X11 and nothing running on top can't really go around that

Can you cite any sources for that claim? I found this blog post that says wayland is pretty much on par with X11 except for XWayland, which should be considered a band-aid only anyways: https://davidjusto.com/articles/m2p-latency/

Here's one article: https://mort.coffee/home/wayland-input-latency/

It's specifically about cursor lag, but I think that's because it's more difficult to experimentally measure app rendering latency.

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