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Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

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231–240 of 339 posts

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#231
This bullet point from the reason to chose one library over another is a prime example of what I love about XFCE:

    • smithay has great documentation.
Not only are they considering it, but they're expressly calling it out. I'm convinced that the publication of the Agile Manifesto was an exercise in Cunningham's Law, and to that end the XFCE team has produced something great by doing the opposite.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#232
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoy working on my computer more at 144Hz than 60Hz. Even on my phone, the switch from 60Hz to a higher frame rate is quite obvious. It makes the entire system feel more responsive and less glitchy. VRR also helps a lot in cases where the system is under load. 60Hz is actually a downgrade from what people were used to. Sure, games and such struggled to get that kind of performance, but CRT screens did 75Hz/85Hz/10…

CRT screens did 75Hz/85Hz/100Hz quite well, but rendered only one pixel/dot at a time. This is in no way equivalent to 60Hz on a flat panel!

It isn't equivelent in the sense that the progressive scanout on CRTs resulted in near-zero latency and with minimal image persistance, versus flat panels which are global refresh adding latency and worsening motion clarity. So it isn't really a "but", it's a "made even better by being rendered only one pixel/dot at a time".

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#233
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I still have a choice to not use systemd.

Depending on your DE, you have a choice not to use Wayland. Like, yes, if you use GNOME then you don't get choices but that's their whole ethos, and unfortunately I've heard about KDE dropping X, but there are other options and as I type this comment in i3 I can assure you Xorg still works.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#234
post #11
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…

> Still I perceive a lot of XFCE's userbase to be more "traditional" and conservative about technologies, and likely to be skeptical of both Wayland and Rust, seeing them as complex, bloated, and unnecessary. Very long time (since 2007) XFCE user here. I don't think this is accurate. We want things to "just work" and not change for no good reason. Literally no user cares what language a project is implemented in, unl…

> Literally no user cares what language a project is implemented in

This is only true most of the time - some languages have properties which "leak" to user.

Like if it's Java process, then sooner or later user will have to mess with launchers and -Xmx option.

Or if it's a process which has lots of code and must not crash, language matters. C or C++ would segfault on any sneeze. Python or Ruby or even Java would stay alive (unless they run out of memory, or hang due to a logic bug)

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because X is not getting much development at this point (personally I still use i3, haven’t switched to Sway, the present works fine for me).

Hmm? Seems to be getting plenty of development. https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/activity

the kind that introduces regressions?

there is a reason lead developer of X11Libre left Xorg project, they did not like broken code: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1760 (and many more if you search)

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#236
post #7

i'm trying to build a Linux desktop and the first thing I got stuck at is X11 versus Wayland for greetd. Next thing Il got stuck at his XFCE4 doesn't exist for Wayland. What the shit. if we want to tell me wayland is the future, fine. sure. great. Tt's been 11 years!

If you're just trying to run Linux you're better off either using one of the many read-made distributions or going with X11 since that works just about everywhere and has done so for decades.

THanks for the encouragement. I'm trying to get Debian Linux to run on a Chromebook and it's been no shortage of frustration, especially because ChromeOS is Linux and ostensibly open source, but just getting the kernel booted was an ordeal and a half. I'm currently stuck at suspend not working because something something EC, for which ChromeOS has a userland program to coax it into working right.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#237
post #217
post #118

Wow, this is annoying. I really like Xfce, but there are plenty of minor things which would need improvements. Instead of fixing all these minor things, they waste a lot of their donations on a rewrite for Wayland / Rust - apparently for exactly the same reason as all the other Wayland stuff and Rust reworks. Developers like to write new code more than actually maintaining / improving fixing existing things and finds…

(xfwl4 author here.) That's a fair criticism sometimes, but, frankly, if you want things the way you want them, learn to code and dig in. Otherwise it's not really fair of you to complain about stuff that people have built for you for free, in their spare time. In this particular case, it's not fully a "new and shiny, must play!" situation. I personally am not even a big fan of Wayland, and I'm generally highly criti…

I am not complaining about what people do in their spare time. If the blog post said "someone does this because he likes to spend his own time on it", I would not complain. I am complaining about a) the justifications given which I think are all nonsense IMHO and rationalizations for something which some likes to do, and b) the use of donations which should be better used to improve the software instead of creating more rewrites.

I also do not agree with the Wayland is inevitable sentiment. There are non-systemd distros, there will also be non-Wayland distros. The idea is that only those things survive which are pushed into the ecosystem by the cooperate bullies is wrong, otherwise Linux would not exist.

The Linux desktop was essentially fine already two decades ago and instead of the needed refinements, bug fixing, and polishments, we get random changes in technology after the other, so nothing ever really improves but we incrementally lose applications which do not keep up, break workflows, sometimes even regress in technology (network transparency), and discourage people from investing into applications because the base is not stable. My hope was that Xfce4 is different, but apparently this was unfounded.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#238
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chea…

Plenty of brand new displays are still sold that only go up to 60hz, especially if you want high quality IPS panels.

They aren't as common now, but when making a list of screens to replace my current one, I am limiting myself to IPS panels and quite a few of the modern options are still 60hz.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#239
post #237
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(xfwl4 author here.) That's a fair criticism sometimes, but, frankly, if you want things the way you want them, learn to code and dig in. Otherwise it's not really fair of you to complain about stuff that people have built for you for free, in their spare time. In this particular case, it's not fully a "new and shiny, must play!" situation. I personally am not even a big fan of Wayland, and I'm generally highly criti…

I am not complaining about what people do in their spare time. If the blog post said "someone does this because he likes to spend his own time on it", I would not complain. I am complaining about a) the justifications given which I think are all nonsense IMHO and rationalizations for something which some likes to do, and b) the use of donations which should be better used to improve the software instead of creating m…

> I am not complaining about what people do in their spare time.

Re-read your original post. You are absolutely complaining about what we do in our spare time.

> If the blog post said "someone does this because he likes to spend his own time on it", I would not complain.

I mean, that's part of it. I wouldn't do it if I wasn't interested in doing it. I have my own long list of Wayland criticisms, but I think it's interesting.

> I also do not agree with the Wayland is inevitable sentiment.

I think that's where we'll be at an impasse.

There are non-systemd distros because there are viable alternatives. Xorg (the server implementation, I mean, not X11 the protocol/system) is dead. I don't like saying that. I've invested a lot of time into X11 and understanding how it works, and how Xorg works. But no one wants to maintain it. There is the XLibre fork, and I wish them well, and do want them to succeed, but sustaining a fork is hard, and only time will tell if that works out.

But I don't think X11 has a future, unfortunately. And that really does make me sad. You're free to disagree with that, but... well, so what.

> The Linux desktop was essentially fine already two decades ago and instead of the needed refinements

That's a view through rose-tinted glasses if I ever saw one.

> we get random changes in technology after the other

Jamie Zawinski called this the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers", and he's right. I do think some of these changes are an earnest and honest attempt to make things better, but yes, people just want to work on what interests them, and what makes them feel good and accomplished.

When we work for a corporation we don't really get to do that, but when it's unpaid, spare-time volunteer work, we have the freedom to do whatever makes us happy, even if it makes other people mad or disappointed or annoyed, or isn't the most "productive" use of our time (whatever that means).

::shrug::

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#240

>The goal is, that xfwl4 will offer the same functionality and behavior as xfwm4 does... I wonder how strictly they interpret behavior here given the architectural divergence? As an example, focus-stealing prevention. In xfwm4 (and x11 generally), this requires complex heuristics and timestamp checks because x11 clients are powerful and can aggressively grab focus. In wayland, the compositor is the sole arbiter of fo…

Compositor overhead even with cheapo Intel laptop graphics is basically a non-issue these days. The people still rocking their 20 year old thinkpads might want to choose something else, but besides that kind of user I don't think it's worth worrying too much about.

That matches what I recall too, back when I ran a very cheap integrated intel (at least that's what I recall) card on my underpowered laptop. I posted a few days ago with screenshots of my 2009 setup with awesome+xcompmgr, and I remember it being very snappy (much more so than my tuned Windows XP install at the time). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46717701
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