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GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

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Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#131

Post by hulitu »

mid-kid wrote: post #128
demetris wrote: post #56

I was working on a carousel library a few months ago. I had made a few stress-test demos so that I could catch obvious issues while I was adding things and tweaking things. One carousel there had 16K slides. On Windows both Chrome and Firefox managed that fine. They scrolled from start to end and back without issue and you could see, I think, all the frames in my 60Hz screen. On GNOME and X11 (dual boot, so same hard…

Firefox remains very conservative on enabling modern features on X11. Some distributions force them on, but otherwise it's up to the user to figure out how to do that. It's likely that some hwaccel flag in about:config wasn't turned on by default. Similarly, if you want smooth touchpad scrolling, you need to set MOZ_USE_XINPUT2

> Firefox remains very conservative on enabling modern features on X11.

So old school throthling if you don't use the "right" version (Apple batterygate, Microsoft wordperfectgate). They could blame it on testing though (we only use Wayland and we are too lazy to test the X11 version)

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#132

Post by hulitu »

bsder wrote: post #120
wakawaka28 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know it's a deliberate choice. It's just wrong. >This decision affords Wayland compositors a greater deal of flexibility — windows could be shown in several places at once, arranged in the 3D space of a VR scene, or presented in any other novel way. Wayland is designed to be generic and widely applicable to many devices and form factors. Do ANY of these other features work? Furthermore, all our applications are bu…

> Maybe some graphics nerds with weird monitor setups are geeking out about fractional pixel coordinates and multiple refresh rates. They're complaining too because Wayland upscales everything (quadrupling the number of pixels and trashing performance) in order to downscale it for fractional scaling.

> They're complaining too because Wayland upscales everything (quadrupling the number of pixels and trashing performance) in order to downscale it for fractional scaling.

Only once ? They could do this 3 times. For smoothness. /s

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#133

Post by the_why_of_y »

chrismorgan wrote: post #18
dminik wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom is dead when a single implementation is replaced with several competing implementations implementing an open standard.

Just so it’s clear: The X Window System (X11) is a protocol with multiple implementations. Sure, the X.Org Server (Xorg) was the most popular by a huge margin, but there were quite a few others (e.g. XFree86, Xming, XWayland), though over time most were discontinued for one reason or another. X11 and Wayland do differ in an important way: in X11 window managers (GNOME, KDE, i3, whatever) all sat atop the Xorg server;…

Every single X server you list is a fork of XFree86, and every X server I'm aware of is a fork of the original X11R1 (or later) release from MIT.

Please cite a single independent implementation of an X11 protocol server.

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#134

Post by pjjpo »

nmstoker wrote: post #105
ginalloa wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As discussed earlier on HN, KDE these days has been the most usable desktop for many users. It is mostly stable, feature rich and can be customized easily.

Yes, fuly agree. And enough time has passed with it being robust and performant that the old bores who used to go on about KDE performance have finally given up bleeting on about that. I wouldn't bash GNOME as clearly plenty of work goes into it and having two decent DE is good for the ecosystem, but for me GNOME never struck a chord compared to the elegance of KDE - it just feels like the Duplo version compared to K…

This was good to read, thanks. Last experience with KDE is probably almost 30 years ago when it was so sluggish I quickly gave up on it. With Gnome being _the default_ in some sense given Ubuntu's control of desktop Linux, it never even came to mind to give kubuntu a try, I think I will.

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#135

Post by roryirvine »

CodeArtisan wrote: post #86
saturn_vk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for that statistic?

Stats from Debian and Archlinux. i can't tell how reliable they are. https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=x11-common+g... https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/compare/packages#packages=gnom...

Be aware that Debian's xwayland depends on x11-common, so your number here will be the combined total of Xorg and Wayland.

You could try comparing xserver-xorg-core instead, but even then that'll only show you the number of submitters who have it installed, not the number that actually use it. The usual way to get a graphical desktop in Debian (task-desktop) pulls in both Wayland and Xorg, but uses the former by default.

The best estimate would be something like the number of xserver-xorg-core installs less the number of xwayland installs.

Using that method, it looks like there are roughly twice as many GNOME users as pure Xorg users.

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#136

Post by 1718627440 »

killerstorm wrote: post #25

I've been using Gnome for years, but, honestly, it just isn't good: seems like it's optimized for very basic use. Something as simple as adding launcher to a panel now requires an extension. Also Wayland has some problem on my system (Thinkpad / Intel Xe) where it randomly just goes slow, this makes it an easy choice to try things other than Gnome.

Mate (aka Gnome 2) is also fine.

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#137

Post by 1718627440 »

hulitu wrote: post #130
wongarsu wrote: post #2

I was mostly surprised by the "Gnome 50" part. Last I remembered Gnome was still version 3. Turns out they jumped from 3.38 to version 40

> I was mostly surprised by the "Gnome 50" part. Last I remembered Gnome was still version 3. Turns out they jumped from 3.38 to version 40 I think GTK is version 5, so they have to converge somewhere. This is an old trick from SW developers to show a suppose maturity: bump the version number.

To me a larger version number doesn't signify a more mature codebase, it signifies less mature developer and developer culture, that doesn't care about backward compatibility and semantic versions.

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#138

Post by cout »

vidarh wrote: post #63
gabrielgio wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we would have a lot less problems if wayland was called X12 /s

We'd have had a lot fewer problems if Wayland had been X12, in the sense of taking an approach of gradual iteration, even if they went at it fairly aggressively. E.g. instead of the Xwayland approach, you could've already ditched "half" of Xorg if you stripped most of the server-side drawing primitives and server-side font support and moved them to Xlib, handling it client side, and then made it clear someone else wo…

There was a schism anyway (wayland vs mir). I was excited about both, though I never understood the difference between the two.

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#139

Post by cout »

ColonelPhantom wrote: post #54
mx7zysuj4xew wrote: post #3

X11 is not going anywhere. If anything it's Gnome adding another nail to its coffin

Rumors of Gnome's demise seem greatly exaggerated to me. It's still the default DE in nearly all major distributions, and it doesn't seem to have incurred major mindshare or marketshare hits recently. I feel like most of the 'complainers' already abandoned the Gnome ship with the release of GNOME 3. Really the only high-profile 'switch' in recent times I can think of is that Fedora promoted KDE to be first-class ('ed…

KDE got better some ways, but I would really like to be able to write an applet without learning QML and everything that goes with it. The learning curve feels higher than when I wrote my first Android app.

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#140

Post by gpderetta »

alextingle wrote: post #125
woleium wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember x11 was initially a client server model, where multiple clients could access a single x11 server. This brought a lot of complexity we don’t use these days

Speak for yourself. I use it every day.

Same. As my main dev environment.
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