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Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

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Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#311

Post by account42 »

bandrami wrote: post #228
saurik wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Wayland more modular? It conflates the window manager, the compositor, and the display server, all into a single component that must be replaced as a single unit. This kind of new conflation is exactly what people dislike about systemd.

It's less monolithic in the sense that instead of one creaky unmaintainable ancient mass of software doing the actual rendering gruntwork there are now five (and counting) somewhat incompatible slick untested new masses of software doing it in slightly different ways that application developers have to worry about. It's kind of a pick your poison situation.

IME it's always best to read any claims of "unmaintainable" as "not as fun as designing something new". Nothing is truly unmaintainable if the will is there.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#312

Post by account42 »

hurricanepootis wrote: post #58
ok123456 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does Wayland "feel like the future?" It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. At best, it seems like a huge diversion of time and resources, given that we already had a working GUI. (Maybe that was the intention.) The arguments for it have boiled down to "yuck code older than me" from supposed professionals employed by commercial Linux vendors to sup…

Wayland supports HDR, it's very easy to configure VRR, and it's fractional scaling (if implemented properly) is far superior to anything X11 can offer. Furthermore, all of these options can be enabled individually on multiple screens on the same system and still offer a good mix-used environment. As someone who has been using HiDPI displays on Linux for the past 7 years, wayland was such a game changer for how my sys…

X11 can be made to support HDR as well.

VRR works on X11 without manual configuration.

Fractional scaling can be implemented in the compositor or applications.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#313

Post by bandrami »

account42 wrote: post #311
bandrami wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less monolithic in the sense that instead of one creaky unmaintainable ancient mass of software doing the actual rendering gruntwork there are now five (and counting) somewhat incompatible slick untested new masses of software doing it in slightly different ways that application developers have to worry about. It's kind of a pick your poison situation.

IME it's always best to read any claims of "unmaintainable" as "not as fun as designing something new". Nothing is truly unmaintainable if the will is there.

I know OpenBSD's fork of it is being maintained just fine even though they've declared it feature-complete (which for some reason is anathema to a lot of people).

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#314

Post by account42 »

jcgl wrote: post #195
ok123456 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does Wayland "feel like the future?" It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. At best, it seems like a huge diversion of time and resources, given that we already had a working GUI. (Maybe that was the intention.) The arguments for it have boiled down to "yuck code older than me" from supposed professionals employed by commercial Linux vendors to sup…

> it doesn't have Android-like separation — a feature no one really wants. It's certainly a feature I want. Pretty sure I'm not alone in wanting isolation between applications--even GUI ones. There's no reason that various applications from various vendors shouldn't be isolated into their own sandboxes (at least in the common case).

There is a big reason: It impedes usability, extensibility and composability. If you sandbox GUI applications then the sandbox needs to add support for any interaction between them or they will just not be possible - and to fully support many advanced interactions like automation you will essentially have to punch huge holes in the sandbox anyway.

Meanwhile the advantages of sandboxing are pretty much moot in an open source distro where individual applications are open and not developed by user hostile actors.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#315

Post by account42 »

fmoralesc wrote: post #275
ok123456 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're trying to "nudge" everyone. Major desktop environments and entire distributions are removing X11 support to varying degrees. A lot of this is because they can't get their adoption rates above about half due to various broken workflows or simply user preference. They intentionally don't want you to keep using X11, and they'll keep turning up the heat on the pot until we're all boiling. Gnome just removed the m…

> Gnome just removed the middle-click paste option. Is that because they fixed the clipboard situation on Linux, and there's a universal, unambiguous way of cut and paste that works across every application? No. It's because middle-click to paste is an "X-ism." This is just demagoguery and unserious. They disabled it by default. You can enable it if you want.

We all know that that's a precursor to removing a feature entirely because "telemetry shows it isn't being used".

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#316

Post by account42 »

simoncion wrote: post #269
ok123456 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're trying to "nudge" everyone. Major desktop environments and entire distributions are removing X11 support to varying degrees. A lot of this is because they can't get their adoption rates above about half due to various broken workflows or simply user preference. They intentionally don't want you to keep using X11, and they'll keep turning up the heat on the pot until we're all boiling. Gnome just removed the m…

> They're trying to "nudge" everyone. Once again, Gentoo Linux proves (somewhat regrettably) to be one of the best Linux distros out there. OpenRC and Xorg as defaults, with SystemD and Wayland as supported options is quite a lovely way to do things. > Gnome just removed the middle-click paste option. Gnome removes useful things all the time. "The Gnome folks do something user-hostile just because they feel like it"…

Unfortunately I don't think Gentoo will keep X11 support in e.g. KDE once its dropped upstream (which is already announced), they don't have the manpower for that.

And KDE itself is also not the bastion of user choice it once was, even if they haven't yet gone quite as hostile as Gnome.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#317

Post by account42 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #148
yason wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Wayland only does essential low-level stuff such as display and graphics it forced people to start coming up with a common Linux desktop (programming) interface out of nowhere to basically glue everything together and make programs at least interoperate. Such an effort to rethink Linux desktop alone could've been a major project on its own but as having something was necessitated by Wayland all of it has beco…

Nobody has a user-space stick big enough to force things in the Linux world. When Apple dropped the old audio APIs of classic macOS and introduced CoreAudio, they pissed off a lot of developers, but those developers had no choice. In the GUI realm, they only deprecated HIKit for a decade or two before removing it (if they've even done that), but they made it very clear that CoreFoo was the API you should be using and…

You say that like it's a bad thing. If you have have an actually good design then you can convince people with those advantages instead of forcing them with a stick.

I think that's the main reason many of us use Linux actually - because we didn't like what the big stick corpos wanted to force on us.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#318

Post by account42 »

jcgl wrote: post #196
mikkupikku wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNOME has enough weight to at least force most projects to accommodate them. But unfortunately this has mostly been for the worst, as GNOME is usually the odd one out with most matters of taste and design.

Maybe to some degree that's true. But let's take an example: GNOME is the only (afaik) desktop that requires client-side decorations. They've been like that for years, but nobody else is following them on that. Yes, the toolkits and a number of toolkit-less apps have added support for them. But it's not like they were actually able to employ their gravity to change the world over to CSD (thank goodness).

I don't think GP claimed that everyone copied everything about Gnome, just that every toolkit/program has to implement Gnomes way of doing things even if they continue to support others so you have that as a common (but often bad) interface. CSD is a good example of that - implementations of it have reached libraries like SDL that would rather not care about the desktop user interface at all but because of Gnome they have to.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#319

Post by account42 »

zamalek wrote: post #200
LeFantome wrote: post #108

In my view, this project itself shows some of the reasons why Wayland is the right path forward. On X, we had Xorg and that is it. But at least Xorg did a lot of the work for you. On Wayland, you in theory have to do a lot more of the work yourself when you build a compositor. But what we are seeing is libraries emerge that do this for you (wlroots, Smithay, Louvre, aquamarine, SWC, etc). So we have this one man proj…

> On Wayland, you in theory have to do a late more... This is vaguely a double-edged sword. Yes, more code duplication across disparate projects - but that also allows people who _really care_ (such as the xfce team) to roll up their sleeves and do more. Any WM will only ever be as good as the X11 baseline, Wayland servers have the opportunity to compete on this front. Although I'm probably permanently stuck with the…

By the time we get to that utopia someone will declare Wayland obsolete and we'll all be arguing over how Nextfad is the best/worst thing ever.

And technically, nothing has been stopping the xfce devs or anyone from making their own X11 server / X.org fork if the window manager interface was too limiting.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#320

Post by simoncion »

account42 wrote: post #316
simoncion wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're trying to "nudge" everyone. Once again, Gentoo Linux proves (somewhat regrettably) to be one of the best Linux distros out there. OpenRC and Xorg as defaults, with SystemD and Wayland as supported options is quite a lovely way to do things. > Gnome just removed the middle-click paste option. Gnome removes useful things all the time. "The Gnome folks do something user-hostile just because they feel like it"…

Unfortunately I don't think Gentoo will keep X11 support in e.g. KDE once its dropped upstream (which is already announced), they don't have the manpower for that. And KDE itself is also not the bastion of user choice it once was, even if they haven't yet gone quite as hostile as Gnome.

> Unfortunately I don't think Gentoo will keep X11 support in e.g. KDE once its dropped upstream...

IIRC, the only part that's dropping X11 support is Plasma. From [0]:

  There are currently no plans to drop X11 support in KDE applications outside of Plasma.
  
  This change only concerns Plasma’s X11 login session, which is what’s going away.
I don't really care about Plasma; a taskbar to house a system tray and clock is nice, as is desktop wallpaper, but I don't particularly care about that stuff. I use very little of KDE: kwin, krunner, kmix, kcalc, okular, dolphin (rarely), and whatever handles the global keyboard shortcuts.

Hell, on my ~twenty-year-old computer I don't use Plasma because it's a resource hog, but I still use KDE.

[0] https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...>

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