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Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

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Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#171

Post by fasterik »

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.

Another datapoint: I'm a 20+ year off-and-on user of Linux who was never able to switch to desktop Linux for daily use because of the graphics issues. After recently deciding to abandon Windows for good and suffer whatever problems I would have with Linux, I was pleasantly surprised by the experience on Fedora/Wayland/Gnome. No issues with high DPI, per-monitor fractional scaling, tearing, bad performance, etc. which have plagued my Linux experiences in the past. There are still minor issues with Nvidia drivers, but this is very likely the fault of Nvidia and not the OSS community.

Whatever ideological debates there are underneath the X vs. Wayland divide, ultimately what I care about is things working as well as or better than other mainstream operating systems, and Wayland seems to deliver on that.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#172

Post by neop1x »

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.

Recently I fixed my X11 tearing by simply running a compositor (compton). Not having a compositor didn't prevent xserver from working but it was tearing. I remember that historically it was a mess, some x11 gpu driver even had a "TearFree" configuration option.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#173

Post by the__alchemist »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #109
the__alchemist wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hoop I recently jumped through: There's a type of input called "DeviceEvent" which is a bit lower level than "Window event". It also occurs even if the window isn't "active". Windows and X11 support this, but Wayland doesn't except for mouse movement. I noticed my program stopped working on Linux after I updated it. Ended up switching to Window Events, but still kind of irritating.

Isn't being able to read input while unfocused a huge security issue? Meanwhile if you have root you're still free to do so directly.

I don't think so, and it's something every Windows and X11 Linux application can do. Perhaps this perspective is a divide between people writing/using applications, and those using/writing web servers? But maybe the Wayland team disagrees, and this is one of the reasons for this restriction? I'm speculating.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#174

Post by stuaxo »

roenxi wrote: post #161
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…

> I don't get the frustration with wayland (the protocol) in the comments. They took a firm principled stance against screenshots to start with, which set them up for the COVID WFH wave. Then we've got this questionable design that seems hard to make accessible since accessibility is a security risk and we're heading right into Agentic AI which will be interesting. I've been avoiding the Wayland ecosystem for as long…

I'm not sure I get the link between being against screenshots and working from home during COVID ?

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#175

Post by Sharlin »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #108
bandrami wrote: post #102

As predicted, we will re-invent X11 one feature at a time. Maybe someday soon a Wayland window will be able to know its own screen position.

Last I checked the idealists weren't even willing to commit to a virtual 2D rectangular grid of pixels of arbitrary width and height. I think we'll be waiting a while (or more likely using a soft fork of the spec).

I'm sure we'll shift to hex-grid displays any day now. After all, hexagons are bestagons.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#176

Post by Zardoz84 »

akagusu wrote: post #106

Well, it only took 15 years to someone to fix one of many Wayland design flaws and start to make it feel usable. Now it will take another 15 years for people to settle down in a set of common protocols instead of writing their own extension protocols and others 15 years for window managers to mature at the same level of the X11 window managers. Then, people who think they know better than everyone else will throw Way…

I don't know in what parallel world do you live, but current Wayland it's pretty usable and useful for normal users.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#177

Post by allreduce »

evolighting wrote: post #166
roenxi wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't get the frustration with wayland (the protocol) in the comments. They took a firm principled stance against screenshots to start with, which set them up for the COVID WFH wave. Then we've got this questionable design that seems hard to make accessible since accessibility is a security risk and we're heading right into Agentic AI which will be interesting. I've been avoiding the Wayland ecosystem for as long…

I think wayland is OK as a user. But Wayland is just not really that UNIX. As ordinary user, I actually don't care about any of this. However, from another perspective, I think this is a bad thing—open source projects have become product-centered, defaulting to the assumption that users are ignorant fools. This isn't how community projects should behave, but those projects is not that community-driven anyway. After a…

Mostly agree, but X11 does not fit well into the unix model either.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#179

Post by akagusu »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #176
akagusu wrote: post #106

Well, it only took 15 years to someone to fix one of many Wayland design flaws and start to make it feel usable. Now it will take another 15 years for people to settle down in a set of common protocols instead of writing their own extension protocols and others 15 years for window managers to mature at the same level of the X11 window managers. Then, people who think they know better than everyone else will throw Way…

I don't know in what parallel world do you live, but current Wayland it's pretty usable and useful for normal users.

I live in the real world where Wayland breaks by design the workflow of lots of people and Wayland people refuse to acknowledge that.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#180

Post by chriswarbo »

pjmlp wrote: post #163
gf000 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by window shading?

Basically something that us grey beards like in several window managers, it is not supported in GNOME since the version 3.0 reboot, and relates to minimizing a window to the title bar. You can move the title bar around, and depending on the window manager either double clik to drop down again its contents, or by leaving the mouse pointer for a few seconds hover it, it will temporarly reveal its contents. https://en.w…

Yeah, it took me a while to discover that it was removed from KWin. (I eventually ended up reading the sources). It didn't help that KWin also does 3D effects, so all of my Web searches for "shading" were returning results for "shader" :-(
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