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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

#191

Post by eptcyka »

drob518 wrote: post #187
array_key_first wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a projector that can project 4k at 60hz or 1080p at 240, and I can really notice it by just moving the cursor around. I don’t need to render my games anywhere near 240 to notice that too. Same with phones - moving from pixel 3 to pixel 5, scrolling through settings or the home screen was a palpable difference. Pixel 3 now feels broken. It is not.m, it just renders at 60 instead of 90 fps.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#192

Post by eptcyka »

drob518 wrote: post #188
wtallis wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Naive triple buffering shall not be defeated by a faster CPU.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#193

Post by themafia »

adzm wrote: post #65
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

What about systemd?

I still have a choice to not use systemd. The systemd people didn't inhabit and then try to kill sysvinit or runit or any of the other competing technologies.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#194

Post by jchw »

michaelmrose wrote: post #166
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…

I couldn't find ready stats on what percentage of displays are 60 hz but outside of gaming and high end machines I suspect 60 hz is still the majority of of machines used by actual users meaning we should evaluate the latency as it is observed by most users.

The point is that we can improve latency of even old machines by simply attaching a display output that supports a higher refresh rate, or perhaps even variable refresh rate. This can negate most of the unavoidable latency of a compositor, while other techniques can be used to avoid compositor latency in more specific scenarios and try to improve performance and frame pacing.

A new display is usually going to be cheaper than a new computer. Displays which can actually deliver 240 Hz refresh rates can be had for under $200 on the lower end, whereas you can find 180 Hz displays for under $100, brand new. It's cheap enough that I don't think it's even terribly common to buy/sell the lower end ones second-hand.

For laptops, well, there is no great solution there; older laptops with 60 Hz panels are stuck with worse latency when using a compositor.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#195

Post by jcgl »

ok123456 wrote: post #20
jchw wrote: post #3

I hope that XFCE remains a solid lightweight desktop option. I've become a huge fan of KDE over the past couple of years, but it certainly isn't what you would consider lightweight or minimal. Personally, I'm a big proponent of Wayland and not big Rust detractor, so I don't see any problem with this. I do, however, wonder how many long-time XFCE fans and the folks who donated the money funding this will feel about it…

Why does Wayland "feel like the future?" It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. At best, it seems like a huge diversion of time and resources, given that we already had a working GUI. (Maybe that was the intention.) The arguments for it have boiled down to "yuck code older than me" from supposed professionals employed by commercial Linux vendors to sup…

> it doesn't have Android-like separation — a feature no one really wants.

It's certainly a feature I want. Pretty sure I'm not alone in wanting isolation between applications--even GUI ones. There's no reason that various applications from various vendors shouldn't be isolated into their own sandboxes (at least in the common case).

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#196

Post by jcgl »

mikkupikku wrote: post #155
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has a user-space stick big enough to force things in the Linux world. When Apple dropped the old audio APIs of classic macOS and introduced CoreAudio, they pissed off a lot of developers, but those developers had no choice. In the GUI realm, they only deprecated HIKit for a decade or two before removing it (if they've even done that), but they made it very clear that CoreFoo was the API you should be using and…

GNOME has enough weight to at least force most projects to accommodate them. But unfortunately this has mostly been for the worst, as GNOME is usually the odd one out with most matters of taste and design.

Maybe to some degree that's true. But let's take an example: GNOME is the only (afaik) desktop that requires client-side decorations. They've been like that for years, but nobody else is following them on that. Yes, the toolkits and a number of toolkit-less apps have added support for them. But it's not like they were actually able to employ their gravity to change the world over to CSD (thank goodness).

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#197

Post by wmf »

LeFantome wrote: post #108

In my view, this project itself shows some of the reasons why Wayland is the right path forward. On X, we had Xorg and that is it. But at least Xorg did a lot of the work for you. On Wayland, you in theory have to do a lot more of the work yourself when you build a compositor. But what we are seeing is libraries emerge that do this for you (wlroots, Smithay, Louvre, aquamarine, SWC, etc). So we have this one man proj…

As time goes on, we will see more implementations that will compete with each other on quality and features. This will drive the entire ecosystem forward.

Unfortunately there aren't enough developers to maintain all those duplicate implementations to the level users expect so a lot of features will be missing and a lot of maintainers will burn out. Not having a libcompositor remains Wayland's biggest mistake.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#198

Post by zamalek »

bee_rider wrote: post #82
ok123456 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's X.org, which is controlled by the Free Desktop Foundation. The OpenBSD people are still working on Xenocara, and it introduces actual security via pledge system calls.

That seems pretty interesting. I guess it relies on BSD plumbing though? Funny enough, the my first foray into these sort of operating systems was BSD, but it was right when I was getting started. So I don’t really know which of my troubles were caused by BSD being tricky (few probably), and which were caused by my incompetence at the time (most, probably). One of these days I’ll try it again…

Yup, "pledge" is one of my BSD envies. Namespaces and unshare are significantly more complex and we're still told not to use them as a security barrier (which is explicitly in scope for pledge).

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#199

Post by int0x29 »

hurricanepootis wrote: post #58
ok123456 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does Wayland "feel like the future?" It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. At best, it seems like a huge diversion of time and resources, given that we already had a working GUI. (Maybe that was the intention.) The arguments for it have boiled down to "yuck code older than me" from supposed professionals employed by commercial Linux vendors to sup…

Wayland supports HDR, it's very easy to configure VRR, and it's fractional scaling (if implemented properly) is far superior to anything X11 can offer. Furthermore, all of these options can be enabled individually on multiple screens on the same system and still offer a good mix-used environment. As someone who has been using HiDPI displays on Linux for the past 7 years, wayland was such a game changer for how my sys…

Fractional scaling for wayland is broken on a per app basis which feels strictly worse to me than it was before. Libre office currently is broken on wayland and works in x11

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#200

Post by zamalek »

LeFantome wrote: post #108

In my view, this project itself shows some of the reasons why Wayland is the right path forward. On X, we had Xorg and that is it. But at least Xorg did a lot of the work for you. On Wayland, you in theory have to do a lot more of the work yourself when you build a compositor. But what we are seeing is libraries emerge that do this for you (wlroots, Smithay, Louvre, aquamarine, SWC, etc). So we have this one man proj…

> On Wayland, you in theory have to do a late more...

This is vaguely a double-edged sword. Yes, more code duplication across disparate projects - but that also allows people who _really care_ (such as the xfce team) to roll up their sleeves and do more. Any WM will only ever be as good as the X11 baseline, Wayland servers have the opportunity to compete on this front.

Although I'm probably permanently stuck with the Niri workflow, I am looking forward to seeing what the xfce developers come up with.

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