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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#21

Post by adamzegelin »

giantdude wrote: post #8

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture." X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine…

You can also use Gimp via a RDP or VNC session, which will give much better performance on low-bandwidth connections, since those protocols do damage detection, only sending updates of what's changed, and (lossy) compression.

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the whole X11 is network transparent thing worked great when apps used the X11 drawing primitives. These days a significant number of X11 apps just render _everything_ (often including window decorations) "server-side" as bitmaps and then send them over the wire to the client to composite them. Essentially the X11 wire protocol has become a bitmap pipe.

Wayland does the "bitmap pipe" thing more efficiently than X11.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#22

Post by smoldesu »

mkl wrote: post #9

> KDE, I have heard mixed things about, but can’t speak to. Does anyone here use KDE on Wayland currently? How well does it run? What are the pain points?

I'm using it right now on Nvidia. It 'works' for most Wayland/Nvidia things, but there are still a few things to note.

The Good:

- No weird xWayland flickering like GNOME

- Desktop transitions never drop a frame, even with 1:1 trackpad gestures on my Magic Trackpad

- The kwin implementation seems to be less picky/buggy than Mutter? Might just be my hardware config, but Wayland/Nvidia/GNOME would crash constantly for a number of reasons. It all came down to random gnome-shell segfaults that I couldn't debug.

The Bad:

- Compositing/alpha effects are somewhat broken (on GTK and Qt)

- Sometimes a panel will stop responding or fail to render (or both)

- krunner seems entirely broken

Overall, I'd say it's running pretty well, and is probably better than GNOME for Nvidia users. Their work is cut out for them, and the Wayland-specific bugfixes are starting to roll in on a weekly basis. You'll probably have an even better experience if you aren't using Nvidia hardware.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#23

Post by [deleted] »

emidoots wrote: post #7

I recently tried switching to Linux with a few different distro's (Ubuntu, Elementary OS, etc.) and use Wayland. The thing that sticks out like a sore thumb to me, and which I've been unable to solve, is that apparently it's not possible to configure trackpad scroll speed. At all. From what I was able to gather, Wayland/libinput say they shouldn't be responsible for handling it and instead window managers should[0][1…

[deleted]

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#24

Post by shmerl »

mkl wrote: post #9

> KDE, I have heard mixed things about, but can’t speak to. Does anyone here use KDE on Wayland currently? How well does it run? What are the pain points?

I'm using it currently, including for gaming (AMD GPU). It works very well (at least for me) since may be a few months ago.

Waiting for Wine to add native Wayland support.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#25

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

giantdude wrote: post #8

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture." X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine…

> While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine and edit an image stored there.

How practical is that? I have horrible upload speed at home which ruins all these "just remote into your home machine" workflows for anything more than a terminal.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#26

Post by echelon »

giantdude wrote: post #8

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture." X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine…

> This is a lot to give up for cool compositing effects...

I've used networked X windows and it's always felt like a kludgy, crash-prone hack. The better solution is to render the entire desktop remotely and stream it over wholesale, such as with VNC and other protocols.

If companies like YC's Mighty have their way, the future will be thin-client based. And it won't be built on X Windows, because that's the wrong layer of abstraction.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#27

Post by capableweb »

> If you’re into Gnome, Wayland is probably a good experience today out of the box, even if you aren’t a power user.

I'm not sure this is true, yet. I recently tried Wayland together with Gnome on a Arch installation, and seemingly applications need specific fixes otherwise they are kind of buggy. Firefox had bunch of issues out-of-the-box, that required some incarnation of right environment variables to work properly with Wayland, and seemed the same thing applied to other software as well. If I recall correctly, some other application was also behaving buggy/with artifacts, think it was maybe DaVinci Resolve but not 100% sure...

For now, I'll just stick with Xorg that Just Works(TM), but I'll be back to try Wayland every now and then until it works perfectly.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#28

Post by atq2119 »

giantdude wrote: post #8

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture." X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine…

Realistically speaking, what matters is that openssh comes with X11 forwarding built-in.

Somebody should go and provide equally seamless "Wayland forwarding". That might end up looking more like VNC under the hood, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#29

Post by aaaaaaaaata »

giantdude wrote: post #8

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture." X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine…

> This is a lot to give up for cool compositing effects...

Wait, you think this is what this is all about?

How about the cool security effects...?!

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#30

Post by stefan_ »

giantdude wrote: post #8

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture." X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine…

X11 is the worst remote protocol in the world because save for about one year, it was never developed with that application in mind.
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