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Wayland in 2021

shibumi.dev

131–140 of 146 posts

Re: Wayland in 2021

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not true anymore even on X. Also, if you use GNOME or KDE, both of them has unified settings That's why I said Wayland and the modern desktop in general. > So you are fine with X server takes care of most of the stuff, but not fine with wl_roots do the same thing? You're kind of right: conceptually it's not much different, except that a wm is not a full-fledged server, but simply a client talking to the X s…

Just think for a minute, entire industry abandoned xrdb and drawing primitives in X11 applications, even XOrg developers decided to ditch these features, they've started Wayland because they could not fix X11. Either you are unbelievably smarter or you know nothing.

Maybe I know nothing, but it quite common that the technically superior solution don't get a lot of adoption and eventually dies.

Re: Wayland in 2021

#132
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A unified way to change applications settings. This is not true anymore even on X. Also, if you use GNOME or KDE, both of them has unified settings > because the X server takes care of most of the stuff. ... , unless using a big library like wl_roots. So you are fine with X server takes care of most of the stuff, but not fine with wl_roots do the same thing? > A base graphics API based on drawing primitives like th…

> This is not true anymore even on X. Also, if you use GNOME or KDE, both of them has unified settings That's why I said Wayland and the modern desktop in general. > So you are fine with X server takes care of most of the stuff, but not fine with wl_roots do the same thing? You're kind of right: conceptually it's not much different, except that a wm is not a full-fledged server, but simply a client talking to the X s…

> which makes the protocol use a lot of bandwidth.

not true in most of the use cases. ownership of bitmaps are transfered, no actual pixels are being copied.

Re: Wayland in 2021

#133
post #36

Can I run applications transparently over the network yet?

I don't think network transparency is a goal for Wayland. X11 network transparency was awesome in the late 80s and early 90s. In many universities, there would be rooms of X11 terminals that connected to the "big machines" in the server rooms- and you could have each of your applications, even even the window manager itself, all being run on different machines.

This made sense when an institution would license software for their big iron, and when desktop computers weren't nearly as powerful as they eventually became during the 90s.

But most people gave up on it right around the time that Netscape Navigator, with its very bitmap-heavy UI gained traction. The X protocol really wasn't designed around this. Extensions helped, but not enough.

I bet the vast majority of people using X11 today have never run a remote X11 client.

Re: Wayland in 2021

#134
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Nvidia this is not a mess; they support X for their supported use-cases and that's just it, and X works pretty much perfectly for me now, even PRIME is essentially issue-less. I give them a lot of credit for making Nvidia GPUs in laptops on Linux as viable as on Windows.

PRIME is working for you? How? I couldn't get it working at all. Are there any guides for this?

This chapter of the NV driver manual details how: https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/460.56/READ...

On Turing and later, you can also enable this: https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/460.56/READ... to totally turn off the dGPU when not in use.

Re: Wayland in 2021

#135
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re:ydotool. More than risks, I would say the author constantly changing things without testing and breaking the tool is what made me stop using it. I wrote my own version using evdev and never looked back.

Could you post a link to it? Ive been using ydotool for a while, its not working 100% reliably though.

It's not public. I don't really open source most of the tools I write for myself because there's basically no incentive to do so.

Re: Wayland in 2021

#136
post #36

Can I run applications transparently over the network yet?

This isn't really an answer to your question, but under Gnone3+Wayland "ssh -X" works as you might expect. Which amazed me at first, because I wasn't expecting it.

Turns out it's because most applications are X11, Wayland supports X11 applications via XWayland, and X is doing network transparency like it always does.

Re: Wayland in 2021

#137
post #106
post #84

I think Wayland, and the modern desktop in general too, has forgot about a few good ideas that the original X system had. I will miss them once Wayland has taken over: - A unified way to change applications settings. All old X apps used to read the X resources database (xrdb): you could set a global color scheme, fonts, window geometry and what not, all in one place using a simple but powerful text format. - The simp…

> A unified way to change applications settings. This is not true anymore even on X. Also, if you use GNOME or KDE, both of them has unified settings > because the X server takes care of most of the stuff. ... , unless using a big library like wl_roots. So you are fine with X server takes care of most of the stuff, but not fine with wl_roots do the same thing? > A base graphics API based on drawing primitives like th…

> So you are fine with X server takes care of most of the stuff, but not fine with wl_roots do the same thing?

There is big difference in responsibility w.r.t. users in Xserver vs wl_roots case.

In the X11 case, relations are:

wm - user - X11

(Users choose to use Xserver and WM independently, if there is a bug in Xserver, then it is outside of responsibility of WM developers.)

In the Wayland case, the relations are:

user - wm/compositor - wl_roots

(Users choose wm, wm developers choose to use wl_roots to implement wm features instead of doing it themselves, but that is just internal implementation issue of that wm and wm developers are responsible for wm behavior/bugs including ones inherited from wl_roots.)

Re: Wayland in 2021

#138
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do any desktop system handle mixed DPI well? I mainly use Linux so I don't know, but one of my work laptops have windows on it and it freaks out every time I connect it to a 4k monitor. At least in linux I can use triggers and xrandr [1] to manage it even if it's not pretty, never figured out how to do it automatically in windows. Edit: I am using KDE/Qt apps for 99% of my gui stuff. Gnome etc might be worse. [1] htt…

> Do any desktop system handle mixed DPI well? MacOS handles it very well, moving a window from a high-DPI display to a low-DPI display works perfectly. I'm not sure about how Windows handles mixed-DPI, but it handles DPI changes mostly OK. I only access my Windows machines via RDP, so sometimes they get a high-DPI display and sometimes they get a low-DPI one. Apart from one program (there are per-program settings av…

IIUC the macOS approach is functional but not perfect. I believe it renders all apps at a high resolution (higher than the highest attached display), then the compositor downscales them to the display. This means that apps are using more resources to render and are unable to render pixel-perfect.

I believe that on Wayland the apps are told the scaling factors of the monitors that they are on (or the compositor can scale them if they don't want to switch resolution or are across multiple monitors).

AFAIK apps can't work around this very easily (if at all).

Re: Wayland in 2021

#139
post #43

Is it still the case that Nvidia drivers don't work with Wayland?

Yes, but the patch by Erik Kurzinger from Nvidia may soon be merged [1]. It still requires changes to Nvidia's proprietary drivers that I think have not been done, but it maybe that this year it will be settled. Edit: Also it maybe that the Ubuntu choosing Wayland maybe what pushed the Nvidia forward? [2] [1]: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-will- use-wayland-by-default [2]: https://gitlab.freedeskto…

Link should be https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-will-use-wa...

Re: Wayland in 2021

#140

I don’t know how I feel about Wayland. On the one hand it’s being made by x11 devs so I think they more than anyone else know why they would need to start from scratch over improving x11. On the other hand, moving away from x breaks so many things and I haven’t heard anyone singing it’s praises yet about how happy they are to use it. I understand apps are breaking because they relied on features of x that were securi…

> they more than anyone else know why they would need to start from scratch over improving x11.

That's not what they actually say though:

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_5

"It's entirely possible to incorporate the buffer exchange and update models that Wayland is built on into X. "

Again, they literally say "It's entirely possible". They just didn't want to.

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