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PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

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Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#31

Post by michaelmrose »

coder543 wrote: post #29
michaelmrose wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't 2002 where single core performance had increased by 4x and average ram has quadrupled. Computers can now easily have a 10 year usable lifespan. Heck Nvidia provides drivers for your modern kernel for devices all the way back to 2007.

Single core perf has become more than 50% better on desktop since Sandy Bridge, and it should be even more than that in TDP constrained environments like laptops because of reduced power consumption, which is partly why we now have quad core / eight thread ultrabooks. The total performance of such a device would almost certainly be more than double an X220 in a slimmer package. Maybe 4x is your cut-off point for wher…

There is noticeable on a benchmark and noticeable in actual use.

In actual use newer machines don't seem to come with much improvement in performance for a lot of tasks.

For me my limited supply of money is the primary constraint. I'll probably upgrade when my machine stops working.

Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#32

Post by tomjakubowski »

pmarreck wrote: post #30

What is this? Is this like a new XWindows client/server where the web browser can act as the client?

Wayland is a different display API and protocol altogether. It is an alternative to X, designed with modern graphics hardware in mind.

https://wayland.freedesktop.org

Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#33

Post by TaylorAlexander »

jitl wrote: post #18

Great! I recently set up desktop Linux, and was disappointed to find poor support for fractional scaling on HiDPI screens, which I’m used to coming from retina MacBook Pro. Gnome under X11 only has 1x, 2x and 3x scaling. In Wayland, Gnome has experimental support for fractional scaling - including 1.75x, the size I’m used to. However, Xwayland apps like Firefox stable (and chrome) render blurry with fractional scalin…

I recently ran in to these bumps with Gnome on a new Thinkpad Carbon X1 and the 2560x1440 screen. I love Gnome but Firefox in particular was unusable and it wasn’t the only app with issues. I begrudgingly installed Cinnamon and things are better. But I prefer gnome. Glad to see I can update my Firefox on gnome to this. I can switch back any time so maybe that will make gnome usable for me.

Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#35

Post by zhte415 »

Jonnax wrote: post #6
mbrumlow wrote: post #3

Very exciting, but this is very very slow on my x220 compared to xwayland -- running swaywm.

Isn't that laptop from like 6 years ago? I'd imagine your GPU is very much considered legacy.

My T420 is from 7 years ago, as is my desk neighbour's X220. I don't believe we're legacy. Well made laptops last a long time.

Anything requiring server is in server.

Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#36

Post by kuschku »

JonathonW wrote: post #27
jitl wrote: post #18

Great! I recently set up desktop Linux, and was disappointed to find poor support for fractional scaling on HiDPI screens, which I’m used to coming from retina MacBook Pro. Gnome under X11 only has 1x, 2x and 3x scaling. In Wayland, Gnome has experimental support for fractional scaling - including 1.75x, the size I’m used to. However, Xwayland apps like Firefox stable (and chrome) render blurry with fractional scalin…

Does Gnome under X11 allow you to set the desktop's size higher than the screen resolution and scale that down? Because that's all Apple's "fractional" scaling does-- macOS only supports integer scaling (specifically, 1x and 2x; iOS does 3x but not macOS); the "more space" scaling settings just render the screen at a resolution higher than the physical size of the panel and scale it to fit (for example, current 15" M…

Gnome does exactly that.

While Android, Windows, Qt/KDE and the web went with real fractional scaling,

GTK/Gnome, macOS and iOS went with just increasing the framebuffer size and scaling it down.

As result, when rendering a GTK app (be it a video player or a game like Minecraft) on a 4K screen at 1.5x scale, you're actually rendering it at 6K resolution, which utterly destroys performance.

Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#37

Post by nezirus »

jitl wrote: post #21
mbrumlow wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

master branch of wlroots + sway (I update nearly ever hour). Sway is the most exciting thing going on right now. Sway is really fast, I don't think the slowness is a problem with sway. I am wondering if my x220's Intel card is just too slow. I will try shortly on a much faster system.

Are you on Arch? I’ve been struggling to build sway 1.0-beta.1 on Ubuntu 18.04 - need to build libwayland 1.16 but then all transitive deps on Wayland are sad.

sway beta works great on Arch, maybe you can look up build scripts for sway-git and wlroots-git on aur.archlinux.org, that should probably help with dependency list and building the whole thing.

Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#38

Post by CyberShadow »

JonathonW wrote: post #27
jitl wrote: post #18

Great! I recently set up desktop Linux, and was disappointed to find poor support for fractional scaling on HiDPI screens, which I’m used to coming from retina MacBook Pro. Gnome under X11 only has 1x, 2x and 3x scaling. In Wayland, Gnome has experimental support for fractional scaling - including 1.75x, the size I’m used to. However, Xwayland apps like Firefox stable (and chrome) render blurry with fractional scalin…

Does Gnome under X11 allow you to set the desktop's size higher than the screen resolution and scale that down? Because that's all Apple's "fractional" scaling does-- macOS only supports integer scaling (specifically, 1x and 2x; iOS does 3x but not macOS); the "more space" scaling settings just render the screen at a resolution higher than the physical size of the panel and scale it to fit (for example, current 15" M…

> Does Gnome under X11 allow you to set the desktop's size higher than the screen resolution and scale that down?

FWIW, this is possible under X11 directly. Try running:

    xrandr --scale 2x2

Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#40

Post by hoppelhase »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #33
jitl wrote: post #18

Great! I recently set up desktop Linux, and was disappointed to find poor support for fractional scaling on HiDPI screens, which I’m used to coming from retina MacBook Pro. Gnome under X11 only has 1x, 2x and 3x scaling. In Wayland, Gnome has experimental support for fractional scaling - including 1.75x, the size I’m used to. However, Xwayland apps like Firefox stable (and chrome) render blurry with fractional scalin…

I recently ran in to these bumps with Gnome on a new Thinkpad Carbon X1 and the 2560x1440 screen. I love Gnome but Firefox in particular was unusable and it wasn’t the only app with issues. I begrudgingly installed Cinnamon and things are better. But I prefer gnome. Glad to see I can update my Firefox on gnome to this. I can switch back any time so maybe that will make gnome usable for me.

You can set the scaling to 1x, but the font size to 1.5x in tweak tools. That's what I'm using.
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