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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#141

Post by taeric »

moomin wrote: post #83
adamzegelin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also use Gimp via a RDP or VNC session, which will give much better performance on low-bandwidth connections, since those protocols do damage detection, only sending updates of what's changed, and (lossy) compression. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the whole X11 is network transparent thing worked great when apps used the X11 drawing primitives. These days a significant number of X11 apps jus…

I was around back in the days that X-servers were still very much a thing, and even then many thought they were an expensive and inefficient way of doing things. However, there were many who genuinely believed that networks would get arbitrarily faster and compute would not. Of course, the opposite happened, but in that alternative universe X’s design would have made sense.

This isn't quite right. Both have gotten arbitrarily faster. That some folks have gigabit fiber is proof of that. Graphics have just outpaced networking. Easily.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#142

Post by jrm4 »

necovek wrote: post #82

The pet peeve of mine is lack of subpixel rendering: if you move from X to Wayland, it's hard to get used to fuzzy fonts. Then again, recent MacOS versions have also dropped it, and I couldn't stand fuzzy fonts either (and so much for their screens being "retina" screens). At least this is coming to Wayland :)

Wait, what? Longtime Wayland hater here and I literally thought this was one of the things I could expect Wayland to be better at.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#143

Post by jrm4 »

For me, further confirming at how badly planned Wayland was/is. I keep hearing that there was no way forward other than "scrapping X and starting over" but given the extent to which X still works just as good, if not better -- I just don't believe it.

Someone forgot "never break backwards compatibility" and it CONTINUES to show.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#144

Post by mbreese »

bayindirh wrote: post #59
misnome wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moreover, the rarity of projects using Remote X, or abstracting it with libraries like NoMachine kinda validates the idea is the feature is considered a novelty and not used much. > While I like the feature, I have feeling that it won't be missed or sought after much. It’s not used or won’t be missed _by you_. It’s extensively used today by science and HPC facilities and clusters, where it’s at best complementary t…

As an HPC cluster administrator, I (and my colleagues) don't see its use on our clusters, either. Instead, researchers either post process their data in the user interface and download it to visualize, or get the raw results and post process and visualize in their systems. Once in a blue moon, a user generates some output window which requires very few interactions to look at their preliminary data, that's all.

Yeah, I’m an HPC user (and small cluster admin by necessity). Remote X11 windows haven’t really been common for years. Occasionally you’ll see an Rstudio server instance, but this is tunneled through an SSH port forward and uses HTTPS.

The last time I needed and X11 remote session in a cluster, it involved Matlab and some kind of toolkit.

The performance of using a GUI remotely is nothing compared to just copying a terminal figure through an SSH tunnel and viewing the figure locally. I’d say that the low performance of remote X11 was the biggest factor in this shift.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#145

Post by aappleby »

amelius wrote: post #63
adamzegelin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also use Gimp via a RDP or VNC session, which will give much better performance on low-bandwidth connections, since those protocols do damage detection, only sending updates of what's changed, and (lossy) compression. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the whole X11 is network transparent thing worked great when apps used the X11 drawing primitives. These days a significant number of X11 apps jus…

Very much this. Running the X11 protocol over the network is usually not a good idea anymore. By the way, does anyone know of a VNC-like solution that can use MPEG compression? Also, VNC could be better if it could increase the quality of parts of the screen once they stop updating. E.g. in TigerVNC setting a low bitrate doesn't improve the quality of text once the text stops changing.

Parsec, I think?

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#146

Post by MichaelCollins »

bxparks wrote: post #61
kelnos wrote: post #12

As a fellow X11 apologist, this was pretty cool to read. It's nice to see that things are shaping up, even if there are still quite a few rough edges. Having said that, I'm still a die-hard Xfce user, and until someone makes an xfwm4-like Wayland compositor, and ports (at least) xfce4-panel and xfdesktop to Wayland, I'm not gonna switch. Edit: ok, looks like there's Hopalong ( https://github.com/iridescent-desktop/ho…

Every 2 years I take Xfce (Xubuntu, Mint Xfce) for a test drive. It seems light and fast, I want to like it. Then every 2 years, I rediscover that the resize border on each window is 1px wide, which is completely unusable. When I google for a solution, the answer seems to be use Alt-Left-Mouse. I don't understand how that is a solution. I don't want to use 2 hands to resize a window.

> When I google for a solution, the answer seems to be use Alt-Left-Mouse. I don't understand how that is a solution. I don't want to use 2 hands to resize a window.

For what it's worth, it works very well one-handed on laptops, this is how I've used it for years and I greatly prefer it. The click target, that is the area you have to aim for with the mouse cursor, is much bigger than even the most absurdly thick window borders, so I find it much easier to use.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#147

Post by luckydata »

giantdude wrote: post #8

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture." X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine…

It's nothing anyone actually needs.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#149

Post by mgraczyk »

giantdude wrote: post #8

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture." X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine…

What percent of Linux users do you think would ever use software this way? What percent of all "desktop" OS users would ever use software this way? It seems like an extremely niche and rare use case and probably not the right thing to target for the main desktop environment.

I've been using Linux as my main OS for ~12 years now. I have personally never wanted to do anything like that. For remote software, I would prefer a web UI or a VNC/remote-desktop tool.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#150

Post by dima55 »

mgraczyk wrote: post #149
giantdude wrote: post #8

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture." X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine…

What percent of Linux users do you think would ever use software this way? What percent of all "desktop" OS users would ever use software this way? It seems like an extremely niche and rare use case and probably not the right thing to target for the main desktop environment. I've been using Linux as my main OS for ~12 years now. I have personally never wanted to do anything like that. For remote software, I would pre…

X-forwarding (over ssh, or directly like this person is doing) is extremely useful and powerful. I use it this way, and I know plenty of people that do too. On top of that, wayland doesn't solve any problems that I have, so there's your data point.
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