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XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

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Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#151

Post by akdor1154 »

kelnos wrote: post #147
kelnos wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, at least, xfwm4's window management behavior is a big part of what makes Xfce... well, Xfce. So no, I don't think I'd consider using someone else's compositor.

To add a bit, hours later: I've been testing my Wayland support for the other components using Wayfire and Labwc, and honestly I find their window management incredibly frustrating. Part of it is just lack of familiarity, I'm sure, but honestly I just don't like how they do things. A lot of xfwm4's behavior is windowing-independent, or fairly easy to put the windowing-specific calls behind interfaces. There's some of…

Sure, the xfwm4 behaviour is absolutely something you'd need to be able to own in a technical and organisation sense. However all the other stuff around building a Wayland compositor is... big. Sharing portals, XWayland support, high dpi and mixed low/high dpi, display management as a whole, and that's just the stuff I know about..

I love xfce, I don't use it anymore though because I wanted Wayland support. As a (past and potentially future) user, I want to see a healthy xfce, not one that is burning out its devs with the giant task of maintaining a Wayland compositor. :)

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#152

Post by kelnos »

mkgreen wrote: post #124
EasyMark wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not going to go away. Wayland is here to stay.

And so is X11. We are heading for a dual stack desktops. There are tons of expensive applications that target Linux _because_ of X11 and they will rather force users to switch OSes than get rewritten.

Pretty much any app that uses a toolkit won't need to be rewritten. Most of them just need small changes, or even no changes.

Those that are written to use Xlib directly, sure, they'll take some work (though rewritten? doubtful). If their maintainers don't want to do that, they'll still run under Xwayland.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#153

Post by kelnos »

AlienRobot wrote: post #90
panick21_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland. Even the BSD and everybody else relaying on X11 has noticed that and they know they can't maintain X11 by themselves. It will 100x not go away, there is no way. Literally all big stakeholder both open source (Gnome, KDE, Fedora and so on) and companies like Valve are all in on Wayland. The reality is, X11 is a complete train wreck…

>X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland In my view, Wayland is basically unsupported. GNOME and KDE support it. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. It's been over 10 years. You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.

> It's been over 10 years.

For most of those years, fundamental parts of the desktop experience were just not possible on Wayland. Even today, there are some current Xfce features that are just not implementable on Wayland.

> You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.

Depends on your goals and team size. Part of me would love to rewrite Xfce in Rust (yes, I'm one of those people), using a different, lighter, actually-well supported toolkit (unlike GTK3), but with the team we have, that would be another two decades.

Consider that Xfce 4 is a little over 20 years old at this point. It's taken that long to build it to what it is. Starting over wouldn't take any less time to get there with the people and resources we have.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#154

Post by kelnos »

bitwize wrote: post #86
olliej wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, ok, so X apps can run under Wayland, because Wayland DEs can run an X server (an existing X impl, or does Wayland provide an X translation layer/impl?) But the DE/window manager is what is actually responsible for deciding when/where to provide that interface? For actual rendering+windows etc the DE is communicating entirely through Wayland specific APIs? I guess the operation mode is similar to how you would run…

Xwayland is basically Xorg with a Wayland DDX layer -- and it recently got a rootful mode. So that means it's possible to run a complete X desktop, including WM, on top of a Wayland compositor. However, the drawback is that with the exception maybe of Weston, one does not simply start up a Wayland compositor. You need to have support for logind seats and that sort of thing. So unless you want to spend an afternoon as…

> You need to have support for logind seats

Not really. It's perfectly fine to just advertise a single dummy wl_seat, and use whatever non-logind mechanism there is to tell the OS that you want to be in control of the input and display hardware.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#155

Post by pjmlp »

zekica wrote: post #12
IntelMiner wrote: post #3

XFCE being stuck on X11 was what finally made me finally move to KDE when I installed Linux on my machine at work a few months ago When compiling code on a remote machine, a terminal on one window would cause YouTube videos to lag on the other! As far as I could ascertain, there was simply no hardware accelerated playback going on. Both Chrome and Firefox had seemingly abandoned X11 for a Vulkan based render backend…

Firefox on X11 works fine if you enable media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled in about:config

It never worked on my (now dead) Asus netbook, although Chrome could do it.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#156

Post by hggigg »

cesarb wrote: post #140
hggigg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be horribly blunt here but I don't give a shit about any of that any more. It's irrelevant which is why open source is a complete joke for most people. I, much as other users, just want my computer to solve the problems I ask of it, not turn into an activity in its own right or a maze of hosting problems and pain to get a simple task done. The job of the computer is to free us from slavery and everyone seems to…

> No one cares about the political purity and ideology behind it. No one cares, until they do. Everything you mentioned depends on a single company, which follows the commands from just a few people, who can one day decide to lead the operating system in a direction which makes it no longer your "dream OS", and intellectual property law makes it so that no other company can undo their changes. > The job of the comput…

The other side of the fence is just as bad. Look at what Redhat and Freedesktop did to Linux.

While you might have the illusion of control, the exit plan to take control is to take on tens of millions of lines of source code and manage it yourself. That is not control.

Your data is the important bit. If you keep that portable and/or recreatable then it doesn't matter what tools you use.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#157

Post by pjerem »

nine_k wrote: post #57
pjerem wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love XFCE but nowadays it’s unbearable on a HiDPI screen. And so I discovered that Cinnamon is also a very good option when it comes to « a better Windows 2000 ui ». It’s also not incredible on HiDPI but at least Cinnamon is pretty good at not breaking everything when you increase font size by 150 or 200%. On XFCE if you do this everything becomes ugly.

Hmm, can't agree, having run Xfce for years on HiDPI screens. Go to Settings, Appearance, Advanced, set the font DPI to something like 144 or what works for your screen. The only thing that does not obey this is Firefox; the way to adjust it is to set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to something like 1.5 in about:config.

Last time I tried (a few months ago), the text was indeed bigger but most window layouts were broken, the icons kept the same size etc etc …

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#158

Post by kelnos »

akdor1154 wrote: post #151
kelnos wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add a bit, hours later: I've been testing my Wayland support for the other components using Wayfire and Labwc, and honestly I find their window management incredibly frustrating. Part of it is just lack of familiarity, I'm sure, but honestly I just don't like how they do things. A lot of xfwm4's behavior is windowing-independent, or fairly easy to put the windowing-specific calls behind interfaces. There's some of…

Sure, the xfwm4 behaviour is absolutely something you'd need to be able to own in a technical and organisation sense. However all the other stuff around building a Wayland compositor is... big. Sharing portals, XWayland support, high dpi and mixed low/high dpi, display management as a whole, and that's just the stuff I know about.. I love xfce, I don't use it anymore though because I wanted Wayland support. As a (pas…

Yes, I'm well aware it's big. I've already written some toy compositors to play around with, and have even written an embedded compositor library.

But it's worth doing here. And wlroots does so much heavy lifting that it becomes a lot more manageable. Most of the code in xfwm4 will still be window management code, as it should be.

I've worked on Xfce on and off for 20 years (mostly off, I suppose; probably a total of ~7 years in that time), so I get what these big things are like, and what maintainership means. We're also a very small team of volunteers who have other jobs and other things going on in our lives. But that's fine; Xfce does just fine with that level of work, and will continue to do just fine.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#159

Post by hggigg »

kelnos wrote: post #150
hggigg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be horribly blunt here but I don't give a shit about any of that any more. It's irrelevant which is why open source is a complete joke for most people. I, much as other users, just want my computer to solve the problems I ask of it, not turn into an activity in its own right or a maze of hosting problems and pain to get a simple task done. The job of the computer is to free us from slavery and everyone seems to…

> And that's what the community does't get: the last 20% is the hard bit I think a lot of people in OSS do get that, but in many ways it's significantly harder to do that last 20% in an open source project than it is for a proprietary software company to do it. But ultimately I don't care that much, honestly. If you don't get what you need out of open source, that's fine. You not using it isn't a problem for me or fo…

As I've said elsewhere, your data is the important bit. And at least in my case that is 100% portable. The winds of change are inevitable, but you can move house without too much hassle.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#160

Post by kelnos »

hggigg wrote: post #156
cesarb wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one cares about the political purity and ideology behind it. No one cares, until they do. Everything you mentioned depends on a single company, which follows the commands from just a few people, who can one day decide to lead the operating system in a direction which makes it no longer your "dream OS", and intellectual property law makes it so that no other company can undo their changes. > The job of the comput…

The other side of the fence is just as bad. Look at what Redhat and Freedesktop did to Linux. While you might have the illusion of control, the exit plan to take control is to take on tens of millions of lines of source code and manage it yourself. That is not control. Your data is the important bit. If you keep that portable and/or recreatable then it doesn't matter what tools you use.

> Look at what Redhat and Freedesktop did to Linux.

Well now you're just contradicting yourself. I'm not going to say RedHat and fd.o have been perfect all the time or have always made the best decisions or haven't pursued agendas that may have been at odds with others.

But c'mon. On one side you're saying that open source can never be good because no one maintains the cohesiveness and attention span to do "the last 20%", but then you rail on organizations that have tried to set and maintain standards, and reduce fragmentation on the desktop?

You can't have it both ways.

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