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Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

alexxcons.github.io

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Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#131

Post by badsectoracula »

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?

Wanting developers to switch projects doesn't have to be malicious, in fact personally i doubt there were any bad intentions in place, the developers of Wayland most likely think they're doing the right thing.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#132

Post by layer8 »

drob518 wrote: post #124
jchw wrote: post #100

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? 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?

I agree. Keyboard-action-to-result-on-screen latency is much more important, and we are typically way above 17 ms for that.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#133

Post by bee_rider »

drob518 wrote: post #124
jchw wrote: post #100

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? 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?

If our mouse cursors are going to have half a frame of latency, I guess we will need 60Hz or 120Hz desktops, or whatever.

I dunno. It does seem a bit odd, because who was thinking about the framerates of, like, desktops running productivity software, for the last couple decades? I guess I assumed this would never be a problem.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#134

Post by elektronika »

drob518 wrote: post #124
jchw wrote: post #100

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? 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?

> how many people were complaining about that over the last decade?

Quite a few. These articles tend to make the rounds when it comes up: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/ Perception varies from person to person, but going from my 144hz monitor to my old 60hz work laptop is so noticeable to me that I switched it from a composited wayland DE to an X11 WM.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#135

Post by bufio »

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…

Then the future is full of high latency.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#136

Post by jchw »

drob518 wrote: post #124
jchw wrote: post #100

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? 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?

Essentially, the only reason to go over 60 Hz for desktop is for a better "feel" and for lower latency. Compositing latency is mainly centered around frames, so the most obvious and simplest way to lower that latency is to shorten how long a frame is, hence higher frame rates.

However, I do think that high refresh rates feel very nice to use even if they are not strictly necessary. I consider it a nice luxury.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#137

Post by drob518 »

jchw wrote: post #136
drob518 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Essentially, the only reason to go over 60 Hz for desktop is for a better "feel" and for lower latency. Compositing latency is mainly centered around frames, so the most obvious and simplest way to lower that latency is to shorten how long a frame is, hence higher frame rates. However, I do think that high refresh rates feel very nice to use even if they are not strictly necessary. I consider it a nice luxury.

Fair

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#138

Post by torstenvl »

Gualdrapo wrote: post #76
torstenvl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you hope they abandon GTK? What would you have them replace it with?

Enlightenment. No, really. If they ever move away from GTK (due to the GNOME shenanigans GNOME-izing GTK) I wish Englightenment and Xfce were together a single thing. But that's if I could ask the Tux genie three wishes.

GTK4 is still pretty usable without libadwaita and all its Gnome-isms.

But frankly I think forking and maintaining GTK3 is preferable to moving to EFL or Qt. GIMP is still on GTK3. MATE is still on GTK3. Inkscape is still on GTK3 (but GTK4 work is in progress). Evolution is still on GTK3.

I think GTK3 will be around for a long time.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#139

Post by badsectoracula »

torstenvl wrote: post #21
mghackerlady wrote: post #14

I love XFCE, with the move to wayland I hope they start thinking about abandoning GTK though

Why do you hope they abandon GTK? What would you have them replace it with?

If they do not mind introducing C++ (they're introducing Rust so i guess multilanguage development isn't out of the question) then FLTK could be an option, though it'd probably need to improve its theming support.

They both have kinda similar roots in that XFCE originally used XForms which was an open source replacement of the SGI Forms library while FLTK also started as a somewhat compatible/inspired opensource replacement of SGI Forms in C++.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#140

Post by bee_rider »

gmueckl wrote: post #129
bee_rider wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, I do interpret your “draw development away from X” as suggesting an attempt to damage X (sorry if I misinterpreted your post, but I do think my interpretation was not really that unreasonable).

This “blessed successor” without and detrimental effects as a main goal: that’s pretty close to my understanding of the project. IIRC some X people were involved from the beginning, right?

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