An X11 apologist tries Wayland • Hacker News Board

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#391

Post by sbdncuvh » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:29 PM UTC

perihelions wrote: post #177

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…

- "When I switch to my Linux laptop to test things, my trackpad is bonkers and I have to move my finger in like 1mm increments because otherwise I'd scroll like 10 pages in Firefox. It's infuriatingly frustrating." The scroll behavior is highly configurable on Firefox' side: check out some of these about:config flags (if this is still of interest), mousewheel.acceleration.factor mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_x…

Ah yes. Configuring my scroll wheel sensitivity per app just like hidpi. Just what I want...

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#392

Post by destructionator » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:38 PM UTC

kaba0 wrote: post #221

gpm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wayland is not GNOME, what you describe is not Wayland problem, but GNOME problem. Which in turn is the biggest problem with wayland. We are fragmenting the ecosystem with every window manager dealing with shared problems in their own custom way, because wayland only takes responsibility for a tiny fraction of the common things that every window manager does.

Come on, it’s not like the linux user space was ever not fragmented. That’s sort of the deal with bazaar-style development. After enough time some best practices do solidify into standards, but it wasn’t overnight in X either, and first and foremost it wasn’t made with that in mind. Wayland has protocols which are queryable and provide a very good way of implementing more and more standard ones from the experimental…

> After enough time some best practices do solidify into standards, but it wasn’t overnight in X either, and first and foremost it wasn’t made with that in mind.

Part of what drives me nuts about Wayland is they could have learned these lessons from X's history and actually had it in mind. Instead, they threw it all out without learning a thing.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#393

Post by bobajeff » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:39 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #38

shmerl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say for smooth desktop experience, Nvidia is a bad option in general (at least yet). They only very recently started caring about addressing Wayland support and a lot of things are rough becasue of that. Plus it will be a long time before their kernel driver is upstreamed, and a lot of the above depends on that. So I strongly recommend AMD for good modern Linux desktop experience.

I agree, but that doesn't make it any less valuable of a metric. Nvidia cards are extremely widespread, reporting the performance on Nvidia hardware does a good job of representing what a lot of people will experience. Furthermore, Nvidia made inroads for Wayland support years ago, GNOME just refused to adopt it. Nvidia's terms were always that Wayland implimentations could adopt EGLstreams whenever they wanted, and…

>webkit contributors who don't fix x86-linux bugs.

Webkit on Linux is in a very sad state. Currently can't watch videos on YouTube on Twitch. Not sure why.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#394

Post by destructionator » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:45 PM UTC

adamzegelin wrote: post #21

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 jus…

> since those protocols do damage detection, only sending updates of what's changed

So does X.

> and (lossy) compression.

This is legitimate though, the X protocol has no support for any kind of bitmap compression and it can sometimes be pretty painful. Though internets getting faster and faster too so it isn't necessarily a big deal especially since it does have bitmap caching and some display-side rendering capabilities, but it sure would be nice if you could send other formats on the wire.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#395

Post by destructionator » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:52 PM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #176

taeric wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't quite right. Both have gotten arbitrarily faster. That some folks have gigabit fiber is proof of that. Graphics have just outpaced networking. Easily.

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.

> The X11 protocol is very chatty so even very simple things will cause several roundtrips which makes X over the network so painful.

This simply isn't true. Some operations require roundtrips, drag and drop comes to mind, but very simple things absolutely don't. Events come one way, draw commands go the other.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#396

Post by checkyoursudo » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

I just tried using Wayland/Sway an hour ago. I guess you still cannot really use proprietary drivers? It wouldn't work for me, anyway; not even with the command line option to ignore my heresy.

I'd like to use Wayland. I have used it with Gnome on Fedora on my wife's Surface Pro 8, and it was really nice.

Maybe sometime in the future.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#397

Post by simion314 » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 3:03 PM UTC

rollcat wrote: post #380

simion314 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can say this is a GNOME problem, or a distro problem, or whatever. But at the end of the day, I installed two of the most popular Linux distro's out there and my scrolling is literally unusable You chose GNOME , the answer is you are not the target of the GNOME project, they target people with weak minds that would instantly faint if they see a configuration screen with options. So you are using it wrong, with G…

> You chose GNOME , the answer is you are not the target of the GNOME project, they target people with weak minds that would instantly faint if they see a configuration screen with options. GNOME's problem is not the lack of configuration options, but lack of empathy. They stubbornly refuse to address (sometimes, even acknowledge) their own users' problems. > If you decide you want options try KDE [...] You don't sol…

>GNOME's problem is not the lack of configuration options, but lack of empathy. They stubbornly refuse to address (sometimes, even acknowledge) their own users' problems.

I would agree that this is also a problem, so GNOME has many problems. But IMO is the big EGO s in charge that cause this lack of empathy.

I will disagree that you can get a Desktop that is perfect for everyone, Kubuntu or whatever KDE distro could do a survey and come with the most popular configuration by default but for sure it would be something like

What value you prefer for X ?

- 45% prefer A

- 25% prefer B

- 15% prefer C

- 5% prefer D

- the rest prefer E, F, G or H

so at best you have 45% happy users and 55% of users that need to change an option , but if you are an extremist of no options then you screw the 55%. And this is what GNOME did, they told their users that don\t like the feature removal or changes to leave.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#398

Post by necovek » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 3:06 PM UTC

emersion wrote: post #233

necovek wrote: post #82

The 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.

Thanks: I haven't dove deep enough to know exactly where the issue was, but booting into Gnome wayland session on Ubuntu 22.04 resulted in blurry fonts on my external 32" 4k screen, whereas just switching the session to Gnome on X worked fine.

My search at the time (a few months ago) suggested that subpixel rendering didn't work (changing settings from gnome-tweaks didn't do anything either).

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#399

Post by TobTobXX » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 3:08 PM UTC

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…

IIRC, that's a GTK issue. A fix is already merged [0], but getting that downstream will be a slow process.

[0]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4508

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#400

Post by kaba0 » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 3:14 PM UTC

destructionator wrote: post #392

kaba0 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, it’s not like the linux user space was ever not fragmented. That’s sort of the deal with bazaar-style development. After enough time some best practices do solidify into standards, but it wasn’t overnight in X either, and first and foremost it wasn’t made with that in mind. Wayland has protocols which are queryable and provide a very good way of implementing more and more standard ones from the experimental…

> After enough time some best practices do solidify into standards, but it wasn’t overnight in X either, and first and foremost it wasn’t made with that in mind. Part of what drives me nuts about Wayland is they could have learned these lessons from X's history and actually had it in mind. Instead, they threw it all out without learning a thing.

Or chances are, the more features they would have demanded by spec from the start, the smaller the number of people actually interested in implementing it would have gotten, and it would turn into a single implementation at most, or just hype at the worst.

They absolutely chose to do the protocol with enhanceable protocols, something greatly missing from Wayland, so I don’t think your criticism is fair here.