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Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

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Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#191

Post by prmoustache »

ACS_Solver wrote: post #181
GuB-42 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X11 remote access have worked really well for me. And the best part is that it worked even when the client machine has no graphical subsystem installed. I can launch GUI applications remotely with a non-privileged account and it shows on my machine as if it was native. Wayland can use RDP and some other remote desktop protocols, but it is not what I want, I want a window, not a desktop. There is Waypipe now, I heard…

This is also where I'm at. I don't care what protocol or whatever is running underneath but I just want things to work and Wayland doesn't do that. It has lately been better, previously I would try Wayland and run into problems within minutes, recent attempts have given me hours without running into a problem. And as an end user I don't want to care that the problems I get aren't with Wayland but rather a particular…

You have some weird memory, screenshots have been a solved issue for something like 6 or 7 years at the very least, if not a decade. I remember taking screenshots on wayland during the Covid era for instance.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#192

Post by prmoustache »

akagusu wrote: post #179
Zardoz84 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The same way x11 broke the workflow of a lot of people coming to Linux or BSD for decades and the same way I can't use a windows or Mac computer without swearing.

You can't expect that everyone will ever be happy, it has never been the case and definitely wasn't when x11 was the default choice.

Despite all that, nothing prevents you to stay on X11 so you have absolutely zero reason to complain.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#193

Post by Asooka »

hparadiz wrote: post #91
Asooka wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is 18 years old (started in 2008 IIRC) and just now approaching something usable. So on the one hand it is a really old project whose original design considerations became obsolete a decade ago - I remember people were very bothered by the performance loss of needing several process switches with the X11 damage model in order to push an update to the screen, but on today's multi-core hardware that is basically fre…

It's biggest hurdle is having to explain even to tech people on HN that it's actually a good idea to have a UI where a user can approve a screen sharing request. You'd think for folks that claim to care about security that'd be a prime concern. It really is so weird how difficult that is for people to grasp. The implementation is likewise not complicated. Seriously how hard is it to draw a box selector and show an ok…

It's because people got used to using screen share in X11 when they really want remote login. You cannot do remote login if there has to be someone sitting at the PC to approve it. Since Wayland has no remote login model, people are left trying to kludge together something out of screen sharing. I can guarantee the moment login over RDP becomes available everyone complaining about the screen sharing will quiet down. And yes, I know this is "not Wayland's concern". Kicking the ball does not fix the problem of "if I switch to Wayland I cannot login remotely". There needs to be a parent project which IS concerned with all the use-cases people require to function for a full working desktop experience. Otherwise you get left with this fragmentation, which isn't good for anyone. Basic OS services being fragmented between implementations really sucks. Microsoft figured this out 30 years ago.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#194

Post by trekkie99 »

Really like River. Written in zig btw, which is something to potentially consider given the language’s adolescence. By default river ships with rivertile as its wm which is quite limited (no monocle layout or per tag configuration). Rivercarro is a fork of rivertile that adds these settings and others so I’d recommend starting there. I also just really enjoy doing all the configuring by default with a shell script.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#195

Post by mega-tux »

bandrami wrote: post #127
Gigachad wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I want software to know where my pointer is other than when the pointer is over the software's window?

Well, in my case, because the VCF on my synth sets its cutoff frequency based on the pointer's Y position and its resonance based on the pointer's X position

I do not know exactly what all that means but does it needs to be desktop wide or just inside a specific app window?

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#196

Post by ACS_Solver »

prmoustache wrote: post #191
ACS_Solver wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also where I'm at. I don't care what protocol or whatever is running underneath but I just want things to work and Wayland doesn't do that. It has lately been better, previously I would try Wayland and run into problems within minutes, recent attempts have given me hours without running into a problem. And as an end user I don't want to care that the problems I get aren't with Wayland but rather a particular…

You have some weird memory, screenshots have been a solved issue for something like 6 or 7 years at the very least, if not a decade. I remember taking screenshots on wayland during the Covid era for instance.

Wayland experiences seem to vary wildly. It was most certainly not working fine for me six years ago. Well, six years ago I don't think I got as far as trying screenshots, I'd run into basic window placement or rendering issues that made the system unusable.

But say a couple years ago, I definitely had screenshot issues. Sometimes it just wouldn't capture a screenshot. Or I could only capture one monitor and not the other. Or I had graphical artifacts while drawing the snipping rectangle. Or the screenshot would be taken fine and fail to copy to the clipboard.

I'm well aware people's experiences are very different based on their setup and the implementations used but for me, last year was the first time I could do some work on Wayland without running into major issues, at least until I got to the part where I'd normally use ssh -X.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#197

Post by blacklion »

GuB-42 wrote: post #160
hedgehog wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote access on X11 is a mess and I won't miss it, at least on Wayland everyone is funneled through EGL or Vulkan and there's a reasonable path to layering remote access on top of that.

X11 remote access have worked really well for me. And the best part is that it worked even when the client machine has no graphical subsystem installed. I can launch GUI applications remotely with a non-privileged account and it shows on my machine as if it was native. Wayland can use RDP and some other remote desktop protocols, but it is not what I want, I want a window, not a desktop. There is Waypipe now, I heard…

And I want (wanted) both. And X11 cannot redirect whole display server until you start your session with some Xnest or other semi-standard middleware (nx?).

It is very convenient sometimes to access your locked session on big desktop from small laptop, do something, and later go to big desktop physically and unlock "local" termianl and continue with all same programs and windows without starting new session. This scenario were not supported by X11 very well, unfortunately.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#198

Post by thewebguyd »

hedora wrote: post #185
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…

First they said we couldn’t have screenshots because they were insecure. Then they added them back in. Next, it was accessibility APIs and I guess copy paste is still flaky. Now, it’s window managers. What’s next, Remote Desktop? The whole reason given for wayland’s replacement of x11 was that those things are all fundamentally bad ideas. It’s been 15 years. Linux desktops are more fragmented than ever, and they’re s…

> like HDR

And variable refresh rate, better fractional scaling (and per-monitor scaling), atomic updates, native touch & gestures. And the isolation/sandboxing is important. The problem is Wayland didn't have portals in the beginning (hence the screenshot issue).

Wayland isn't the problem. The pace at which distros (and GNOME, lets be real who is behind the push here) started stripping out X11 was too fast, and too early.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#199

Post by hparadiz »

Asooka wrote: post #193
hparadiz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's biggest hurdle is having to explain even to tech people on HN that it's actually a good idea to have a UI where a user can approve a screen sharing request. You'd think for folks that claim to care about security that'd be a prime concern. It really is so weird how difficult that is for people to grasp. The implementation is likewise not complicated. Seriously how hard is it to draw a box selector and show an ok…

It's because people got used to using screen share in X11 when they really want remote login. You cannot do remote login if there has to be someone sitting at the PC to approve it. Since Wayland has no remote login model, people are left trying to kludge together something out of screen sharing. I can guarantee the moment login over RDP becomes available everyone complaining about the screen sharing will quiet down.…

https://github.com/KDE/krdp

Works great.

Ya'll are exhausting. Wayland is the one thing where nerds on the internet will not even bother grabbing a livecd of a linux distro just to try it out and then complain about things that have been implemented for years.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#200

Post by simonask »

suby wrote: post #168
FooBarWidget wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how would they be able to "push stuff down people's throats" if people could walk away towards alternatives? When such alternatives don't exist, that's exactly how "they do stuff for free and nobody else is putting in the work to make something else" looks like. The problem isn't they "pushing stuff down your throats", it's nobody else (including you) making alternatives that you like better. You are voluntarily…

> And how would they be able to "push stuff down people's throats" if people could walk away towards alternatives? It's a forcing of their narrow opinion on what should be allowed onto the ecosystem at large, because all of these things are connected. You can leave to a different DE/distro, but if every DE is doing its own thing for global hotkeys or whatever, then software in the ecosystem is going to be hacky/bespo…

I dunno, I think tray icons support is kind of the absurd hill to die on. They're a Windows 95-ism and generally extremely horrible in terms of usability. Apps use them and desktop environments support them mostly out of a lack of imagination, and they are frankly extremely overused.

I'm personally a KDE user, but I'm with the GNOME folks on this one.

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