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Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

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Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#131

Post by ahartmetz »

toast0 wrote: post #105
_flux wrote: post #44

To me, this is the first time Wayland feels like it's not a waste of time. The display server does not need to have the complexity of window managing on top the surface management. I certainly share the author's sentiment: > Although, I do not know for sure why the original Wayland authors chose to combine the window manager and Wayland compositor, I assume it was simply the path of least resistance. Although I'm not…

X11 has some tricky, imposible to fix (within the confines of the existing protoco) issues because of the seperation between Xserver and window manager. Things like (IIRC) initial window placement and what nots, where ideally the window manager would make choices about things before the process continues, but the reality of distributed systems makes everything hard. Combining some things into an integrated process fi…

Inverse second system effect: Doing everything problematic about the first system in the exact opposite way.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#132

Post by ximm »

I don't get the frustration with wayland (the protocol) in the comments. This project shows that having a separate window manager was always possible. First we got wlroots as a library that did most of the heavy lifting, and now we got river as an even higher level abstraction.

Sure I agree that wayland (the project) could have provided these abstractions much earlier. But anyone else could have done it, too. We get all of this for free, so we shouldn't complain if other people don't do the work that we could do just as well.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#134

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #122

I'm currently using an old window manager that I dug out of the depths of history. 1.0 was released in 1985. 2.0 shortly after. 3.0 a few years later. But version 3.1 was when things really got good. It's been great ever since.

Vagueposting is a serious offence

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#135

Post by [deleted] »

ximm wrote: post #132

I don't get the frustration with wayland (the protocol) in the comments. This project shows that having a separate window manager was always possible. First we got wlroots as a library that did most of the heavy lifting, and now we got river as an even higher level abstraction. Sure I agree that wayland (the project) could have provided these abstractions much earlier. But anyone else could have done it, too. We get…

[deleted]

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#136

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

hparadiz wrote: post #118
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone appears to be missing something that's so easy to understand and implement, perhaps they're not missing it. They could have a different security/threat model than you're using. They could be expressing frustrations with being forced to manually approve something every time. They could be hitting dumb bugs in the implementation. There could be different people clamoring for more security and less intrusive…

Honestly most people are just being lazy about it. You don't even need to prompt the user if you wanna allow everything by default. You just need to implement the screenshots, screensharing, and hot keys APIs. All 3 are super simple.

Then we also hit the question of who we're talking to/about. If you want to tell devs that they should implement a handful of general, simple APIs, that's probably fair. (Please start with the GNOME devs.) But some of us are just users explaining why Wayland doesn't work for us; even if we wanted, we can't fix it.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#138

Post by Nursie »

somat wrote: post #116
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reason for switching from i3 to sway (about 8 years ago) is DPI support. High DPI is a pain in Xorg, and essentially impossible with heterogeneous monitors. The migration was a one way thing. Lots of things are smoother and simpler, and not having to ever again touch Xorg.conf has improved my quality of life. To this day, I still have different monitors with different scale factors.

The funny thing is that X11 can actually do heterogeneous dpi and Wayland can't. Unfortunately you will never find yourself in a situation to actually use a mixed dpi X11 setup (you lose your homogeneous desktop) and Wayland is better at spoofing it (for whatever reason fractional scaling works better in Wayland). http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/ My favorite quote from that writeup. "If you think this…

Yeah I've done that, I used my linux box for years with a 24" 1920x1200 screen and a 32" 4k screen next to each other.

Doing some basic mathematics and xrandr command-line wizardry to apply scaling factors to each display, I was able to get Xorg to render to a virtual framebuffer and treat the monitors as appropriately scaled windows onto it, so that dragging applications from one screen to the other didn't result in any noticeable change in size.

Worked pretty well.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#139

Post by throwthro0954 »

As a 25 year user of Linux I love wayland since cutting over to it about 5 years ago. No tearing ever, which I always had to battle with with X. Certain developers that must interact with the Wayland stack will have to do more work now, and some projects may not still be viable, I get it. I've been following the comments in Linux forums for years. But users exist too, and here is one data point for you.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#140

Post by bjoli »

throwthro0954 wrote: post #139

As a 25 year user of Linux I love wayland since cutting over to it about 5 years ago. No tearing ever, which I always had to battle with with X. Certain developers that must interact with the Wayland stack will have to do more work now, and some projects may not still be viable, I get it. I've been following the comments in Linux forums for years. But users exist too, and here is one data point for you.

I am still a bit sad that window shading isn't supported. I wonder if I am going to continue saying this until I am like all those people 20 years ago complaining about things they liked in CDE not being available in more modern DEs.
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