Can someone explain to me why Linux users seem to like arguing about purely technical pieces of their system like the init manager or the compositor as if it significantly affected them?
It’s something I have always found strange.
An X11 apologist tries Wayland
231–240 of 453 posts
Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland
#232Can someone explain to me why Linux users seem to like arguing about purely technical pieces of their system like the init manager or the compositor as if it significantly affected them? It’s something I have always found strange.
Because the draw of the system is the technical setup even more so than the end user experience. For a lot of Linux users, liking how the system is constructed technically is more important than actually doing stuff on it
Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland
#233The pet peeve of mine is lack of subpixel rendering: if you move from X to Wayland, it's hard to get used to fuzzy fonts. Then again, recent MacOS versions have also dropped it, and I couldn't stand fuzzy fonts either (and so much for their screens being "retina" screens). At least this is coming to Wayland :)
Wayland does send subpixel info to clients for thus purpose. See wl_output.
Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland
#234Is there a single Wayland supporter who finds the user experience to be better than X11? Because my understanding of Wayland is that the only people who want it are gui devs.
>Is there a single Wayland supporter who finds the user experience to be better than X11? The immediately noticeable improvement with wayland is with respect to screen tearing, especially in multi-monitor rotated configurations. Screen tearing has always been an issue on x11, and while intel/amd drivers do a decent job in basic cases, things that don't work will likely never work given that x11 is mostly deprecated.
I haven't had screen tearing under X.org for more than a decade. Both under NVIDIA and Intel.
A nice made-up issue but it's made up.
Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland
#235From 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…
I don't know whether you used Remote X, but I used it in a project, and it's extremely inefficient, esp. in thin client applications, and if you try to carry anything like a video, a 100mbps connection could easily be saturated by one pair of X server and client. In other words, it doesn't work in any way unless you have a gigabit LAN. NoMachine developed a couple of libraries called NX back in the day, which transfe…
It's interesting how our networks have gotten relatively much slower. When X11 was designed and for a long time afterwards, networks were fast enough. But now end user networking performance has plateaued much earlier and faster than computing power and app bandwidth requirements.
100M became the norm in the mid 90s, 1G in the mid 00s, but there was no 10G norm in 2010s or 100G norm in 2020s, we're still at almost the same spot of the curve 20 years later. Save for some tragicomic attempts at 2.5G etc end user networks.
Part of the reason of course is wireless, apps adapted to flakiness and bandwidth unpredictably alternating between slow and very slow, and also last mile consumer uplinks adapted to this.
Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland
#236As a fellow X11 apologist, this was pretty cool to read. It's nice to see that things are shaping up, even if there are still quite a few rough edges. Having said that, I'm still a die-hard Xfce user, and until someone makes an xfwm4-like Wayland compositor, and ports (at least) xfce4-panel and xfdesktop to Wayland, I'm not gonna switch. Edit: ok, looks like there's Hopalong ( https://github.com/iridescent-desktop/ho…
Every 2 years I take Xfce (Xubuntu, Mint Xfce) for a test drive. It seems light and fast, I want to like it. Then every 2 years, I rediscover that the resize border on each window is 1px wide, which is completely unusable. When I google for a solution, the answer seems to be use Alt-Left-Mouse. I don't understand how that is a solution. I don't want to use 2 hands to resize a window.
I use Chicago95, which seems to fix this issue, among many others
Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland
#237Can someone explain to me why Linux users seem to like arguing about purely technical pieces of their system like the init manager or the compositor as if it significantly affected them? It’s something I have always found strange.
It's far from purely technical.
Wayland destroys backward compatibility, destroys everything we knew about the graphics subsystem, offers to work with graphics in a different totally new way which results in a ton of concessions.
A lot of Linux users do not use either Gnome or KDE and outside these two DEs, Wayland is a total PITA to use. I'd say it's just broken.
Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that the Wayland fans have a tendency (at least I feel) to significantly misrepresent things in their favor. Statements like "oh that's actually more efficient on Wayland". No, Wayland is incapable of the sorts of optimizations X can do by design . It is only more efficient if the X app is doing things in a specific way that doesn't take advantage of huge parts of the X protocol. Granted, most modern a…
Well the people who are pushing wayland are the same people that are maintaining xorg, so I would argue they know what they are talking about. I have also not heard of any one who loudly proclaims xorg is much beter and should instead be maintained to step up to actually do that.
Look at this very statement it's completely inaccurate in a trivial fashion that ought not required analysis but here we are.
The people who actually develop x or wayland are a tiny number of people. The people expressing opinions on the internet on tech is 1000x larger. The implications that the proponents are correct in their analysis because they develop it is fatally flawed if for no other reason than the subject is obviously not solely the tiny number of actual devs. Furthermore the arguments even of devs needs to stand on their own feet.
Look at the prior comments where someone complains that random crashes result in the entire session going down.
Who cares what anyone says about the theoretical design decisions regarding manifestly unsuitable tools.
Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with X over the network is not bandwidth it is latency. The X11 protocol is very chatty so even very simple things will cause several roundtrips which makes X over the network so painful.
Though, even there, networks are far faster than they used to be. Especially for the size is windows they used to push.
Latency hasn't really improved. Dial up or isdn to nearby cities was 25-50ms. Same as I get with hfc or 5g.
Bandwidth has increased by 3 orders of magnitude though.
Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with X over the network is not bandwidth it is latency. The X11 protocol is very chatty so even very simple things will cause several roundtrips which makes X over the network so painful.
Though, even there, networks are far faster than they used to be. Especially for the size is windows they used to push.
Latency hasn't really improved. Dial up or isdn to nearby cities was 25-50ms. Same as I get with hfc or 5g. Cable was slightly better where it was available. International pings got much worse from australia in the 2010s but since improved roughly back to where they were.
Bandwidth has increased by 3 orders of magnitude though.