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

101–110 of 339 posts

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#101

Post by 0x1ch »

_fat_santa wrote: post #91
0x1ch wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on and off linux desktops since the advent of Wayland. Unsure of the actual issues people run into at this point outside of very niche workflows or applications, to which, there are X11 fallbacks for. Also, by "commercial linux vendors", you do realize Wayland is directly supported (afaik, correct me if wrong) by the largest commercial linux contributors, Red Hat, Canoncial. They're not simply 'vendors'.

> Unsure of the actual issues people run into at this point outside of very niche workflows or applications, to which, there are X11 fallbacks for. I don't know if others have experienced this but the biggest bug I see in Wayland right now is sometimes on an external monitor after waking the computer, a full-screen electron window will crash the display (ie the display disconnects). I can usually fix this by switchin…

This is probably worth reporting. I don't think I've ever heard or ran into something like that before. Most issues I ran into during the early rollout of Wayland desktop environments was broken or missing functionality in existing apps.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#102

Post by wtallis »

simoncion wrote: post #53
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…

> ...or is that a class of performance we just have to sacrifice for the frame-perfect rendering of wayland? I think I know what "frame perfect" means, and I'm pretty sure that you've been able to get that for ages on X11... at least with AMD/ATi hardware. Enable (or have your distro enable) the TearFree option, and there you go. I read somewhere that TearFree is triple buffering, so -if true- it's my (perhaps mistak…

> I read somewhere that TearFree is triple buffering, so -if true- it's my (perhaps mistaken) understanding that this adds a frame of latency.

True triple buffering doesn't add one frame of latency, but since it enforces only whole frames be sent to the display instead of tearing, it can cause partial frames of latency. (It's hard to come up with a well-defined measure of frame latency when tearing is allowed.)

But there have been many systems that abused the term "triple buffering" to refer to a three-frame queue, which always does add unnecessary latency, making it almost always the wrong choice for interactive systems.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#104

Post by LeFantome »

graemep wrote: post #46
coldpie wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 prim…

It is refreshing to see somebody else notice that the complaints about systemd and Wayland are philosophically incompatible.

Systemd is creating the same kind of monolith monoculture that Xorg represented. Wayland is far more modular.

Regardless of your engineering preferences, rejecting change is the main reason to object to both.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#105

Post by gmueckl »

_flux wrote: post #51
gmueckl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not an argument in the first place: it's describing the current situation. Wayland does exist, and did draw development away from X.

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.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#106

Post by stonogo »

imcritic wrote: post #90
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…

Xfce / xfwm4 doesn't offer focus stealing prevention.

Settings -> Window Manager Tweaks -> Focus -> Activate focus stealing prevention

https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4/-/blob/master/settings-di...

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#107

Post by happymellon »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #61
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? well, the answer is just no, wayland has been consistently slower than X11 and nothing running on top can't really go around that

> wayland has been consistently slower than X11

Wayland is a specification, it has an inability to be "faster" than other options. That's like saying JSON is 5% slower than Word.

And as for the implementations being slower than X, that also doesn't reflect reality.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2504-x11-gaming

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#108

Post by LeFantome »

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 project expecting to deliver a dev release in just a few months (mid-2026 is 4 months from now).

But it is not just that we have addressed the Wayland objection. This project was able to evaluate alternatives and decide the smithay is the best fit both for features and language choice. As time goes on, we will see more implementations that will compete with each other on quality and features. This will drive the entire ecosystem forward. That is how Open Source is supposed to work.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#109

Post by IshKebab »

adzm wrote: post #65
poulpy123 wrote: post #56

Isn't the switch from X11 to Wayland the most painful switch that happened in the linux world ? Even going from python 2 to 3 was not as bad

What about systemd?

I haven't had a single issue with Systemd and the transition was measured in years, not decades.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#110

Post by pjmlp »

amazari wrote: post #98
pjmlp wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least they are honest regarding the reasons, not a wall of text to justify what bails down to "because I like it". Naturally these kinds of having a language island create some attrition regarding build tooling, integration with existing ecosystem and who is able to contribute to what. So lets see how it evolves, even with my C bashing, I was a much happier XFCE user than with GNOME and GJS all over the place.

You know that all the Wayland primitives, event handling and drawing in gnome-shell are handled in C/native code through Mutter, right ? The JavaScript in gnome-shell is the cherry on top for scripting, similar to C#/Lua (or any GCed language) in game engines, elisp in Emacs, event JS in QtQuick/QML. It is not the performance bottleneck people seem to believe.

I can dig out the old GNOME tickets and related blog posts...

Implementation matters, including proper use of JIT/AOT toolchains.

Post reply on HN