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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

#181

Post by array_key_first »

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 never complained about 60, then I went to 144 and 60 feels painful now. The latency is noticable in every interaction, not just gaming. It's immediately evident - the computer just feels more responsive, like you're in complete control.

Even phones have moved in this direction, and it's immediately noticable when using it for the first time.

I'm now on 240hz and the effect is very diminished, especially outside of gaming. But even then I notice it, although stepping down to 144 isn't the worst. 60, though, feels like ice on your teeth.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#182

Post by slackfan »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #79
slackfan wrote: post #16

So will it be renamed to Wfce in the end?

It was originally named XFce after the XForms library. As of Xfce 3, it uses GTK though, so it could be called GTKce, but renaming the project every time you change widget toolkits is probably not a good idea.

And what was XForms named after?...

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#183

Post by the_why_of_y »

diath wrote: post #169
gf000 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reviewing PRs and merging them requires great effort, especially in case of a non-trivial behemoth like X. Surely if all these merge requests were of huge value, someone could have forked the project and be very happy with all the changes, right? Not having enough maintainers, and some design issues that can't be solved are both reasons why X was left largely unmaintained.

> Surely if all these merge requests were of huge value There were a lot of MRs with valuable changes however Red Hat wanted certain features to be exclusive to Wayland to make the alternative more appealing to people so they actively blocked these MRs from progressing. > someone could have forked the project and be very happy with all the changes, right? That's precisely what happened, one of the biggest contributor…

My understanding is that the founder of X11Libre was removed from the X.Org project for demonstrated incompetence.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-Lots-Of-Reverts

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#184

Post by graemep »

LeFantome wrote: post #104
graemep wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used XFCE for a long time and I very much agree. it just works, and is lightweight. I use KDE these days but XFCE would be my second choice. > The X11 diehards will go the way of the SysV-init diehard I hope you are not conflating anti-systemD people with SysV init diehards? As far as I can see very few people want to keep Sysv init, but there are lots who think SystemD init is the wrong replacement, and those prim…

It is refreshing to see somebody else notice that the complaints about systemd and Wayland are philosophically incompatible. Systemd is creating the same kind of monolith monoculture that Xorg represented. Wayland is far more modular. Regardless of your engineering preferences, rejecting change is the main reason to object to both.

I do not have a strong opinion about Xorg vs Wayland. My only real concern is that it might make it harder for the BSDs but that seems to be being dealt with. I do like being able to use X over the nextwork but that is a problem that can be solved.

I do dislike System D for two reasons. One is exactly because it s a monolith and, in effect, an extension of the OS. The other is the attitude of the developers which becomes very evident if you browser the issues.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#185

Post by ChocolateGod »

amazari wrote: post #98
pjmlp wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least they are honest regarding the reasons, not a wall of text to justify what bails down to "because I like it". Naturally these kinds of having a language island create some attrition regarding build tooling, integration with existing ecosystem and who is able to contribute to what. So lets see how it evolves, even with my C bashing, I was a much happier XFCE user than with GNOME and GJS all over the place.

You know that all the Wayland primitives, event handling and drawing in gnome-shell are handled in C/native code through Mutter, right ? The JavaScript in gnome-shell is the cherry on top for scripting, similar to C#/Lua (or any GCed language) in game engines, elisp in Emacs, event JS in QtQuick/QML. It is not the performance bottleneck people seem to believe.

It has been the case that stalls in the GJS land can stall the compositor though, especially if it's during a GC cycle.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#186

Post by ux266478 »

gf000 wrote: post #160
throw0101a wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It depends on what you mean by send. Currently I can: $ ssh -X somehost xeyes and get a window on macOS.

For xeyes that works. It is absolutely an inferior and chatty protocol for any other application though, like try to watch a youtube video in chrome through it. X's network transparency was made at a time when we drawn two lines as UI, and for that it works very well. But today even your Todo app has a bunch of icons that are just bitmaps to X, and we can transfer those via much better means (that should probably not…

>It is absolutely an inferior and chatty protocol for any other application though, like try to watch a youtube video in chrome through it.

This is extremely misleading. Web browsers (and games) are the worst case for X11's network transparency. The overwhelming majority of applications belong in the same category as xeyes.

> the original X network transparency's modern analogue might very well be the web

It's Arcan, which solved this problem without sacrificing network transparency at the altar.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#187

Post by drob518 »

array_key_first wrote: post #181
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?

I never complained about 60, then I went to 144 and 60 feels painful now. The latency is noticable in every interaction, not just gaming. It's immediately evident - the computer just feels more responsive, like you're in complete control. Even phones have moved in this direction, and it's immediately noticable when using it for the first time. I'm now on 240hz and the effect is very diminished, especially outside of…

Did you use the same computer at both 60 and 144? I have no doubt that 144 feels smoother for scrolling and things like that. It definitely should. But if you upgraded your system at the same time you upgraded your display, much of the responsiveness would be due to a faster system.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#188

Post by drob518 »

wtallis wrote: post #179
drob518 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Input lag is not the same as refresh rate. 60 Hz is 16.7 ms per frame. If it takes a long time for input to appear on screen it’s because of the layers and layers of bloat we have in our UI systems.

Refresh rate directly affects one of the components of total input lag, and increasing refresh rate is one of the most straightforward ways for an end user to chip away at that input lag problem.

Well, sure. But so is buying a faster processor.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#189

Post by johnny22 »

throw0101a wrote: post #9

Does Wayland work on non-Linux systems (e.g. *BSD)? If an application is written for Wayland, is there a way to send its windows to (e.g.) my Mac, like I can with X11 to XQuartz?

It is in freebsd's official handbook, and the openbsd folks have been playing around with it since 2023 at least https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html

I'm not sure how much farther along they are than that post though.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#190

Post by charcircuit »

kreig wrote: post #168
poulpy123 wrote: post #56

Isn't the switch from X11 to Wayland the most painful switch that happened in the linux world ? Even going from python 2 to 3 was not as bad

Not really, /lib -> /usr/lib was worse for me

How? At worst the user can just add their own symlink or the developer may need to recompile the app.

This is nothing like wayland where the APIs to do what you want may not even exist, or may not exist in some random compositor a user is using.

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