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Wayland on OpenBSD

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Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#41

Post by klardotsh »

I've been wanting to give OpenBSD an honest shot on the desktop for years, but going back to X has always been a deal breaker for me (HiDPI and mixed/scaled DPI support, and tear-less graphics, are hard requirements that X handles horribly - yes, before the X apologists brigade me, I know because I used to hack X into horribly supporting these things).

This could finally let me dive into the only BSD that really catches my attention for potential to switch over - I applaud this effort!

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#42

Post by pengaru »

bitwize wrote: post #33
pengaru wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't work poorly back when X clients were actually using Xlib for drawing primitives performed by the display server. It started working poorly when X clients started rendering everything locally in the client and simply pushing pixels to the display server.

> It started working poorly when X clients started rendering everything locally in the client and simply pushing pixels to the display server. Which means it works poorly for modern apps. Modern apps use the GPU for client-side rendering. And it absolutely worked poorly even in the 90s. It was virtually impossible to run X apps over anything but a fast local LAN. That's what "Broadway"/LBX was about. It was kind of a…

> Let's not fool ourselves that X isn't obsolete on every axis.

I'm not sure who you're replying to here, because it certainly isn't me.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#43

Post by sprash »

rodgerd wrote: post #6
hist_thr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is a replacement for X11 in the same way that a tricycle is a replacement for a tractor. They have thrown everything difficult out of the spec and only implemented the most trivial functionality around a security model which you must actively break to get actual work (like screen shots) done. That Wayland is 10 years old and still barely usable should tell you how far software developers have fallen in the la…

The software developers who were maintaining X? Perhaps you could show them how it's done, since apparently you can do a better job. They've certainly been clear that they're happy for anyone who wants to take over Xorg, yet no-one from the peanut gallery ever does.

It's a matter of funding. X11 development is not funded anymore whereas Wayland is heavily funded through proxies like Collabora or Igalia. It is unclear who are the originators of that money since those proxy orgs don't disclose who funds them.

Since Wayland is a horribly complicated protocol that makes doing even the simplest tasks a major chore I would consider it sabotage. There are multiple billion+ dollar corps out there with a severe interest in a non fuctional FOSS ecosystem.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#44

Post by growse »

orbital-decay wrote: post #39
kiwijamo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Wayland daily and haven't run into the issues you mention. It has worked better than X11 as a daily driver for a few years now. I appreciate may not work for some To be honest I associate 'barely usable' more with X11. I haven't forgotten the good old days when I had to hack various configuration files just to get a working desktop and then hack some more to work around issues with tearing, video acceleration,…

> I use Wayland daily and haven't run into the issues you mention. I appreciate may not work for some Such as having a modern wide gamut/HDR display, or a display without a blue spectrum spike. Or printing anything in color. Or doing photography or digital painting. Or switching to another compositor on a non-default keyboard layout (as Wayland doesn't have the replacement for this basic X functionality, compositors…

> It's fine to have the "works on my machine" attitude for a user discussing this on the web. I just hope the devs of what is being pushed as a replacement for what works don't have it. (and the signals aren't good)

The people "pushing" Wayland are the people who previously worked on X. They stopped because it's ancient, broken and untenable.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#45

Post by bitwize »

badsectoracula wrote: post #25
jmclnx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In my experience, running X11 over a network worked very poorly. Well in my experience, running X11 applications using network transparency works perfectly fine. It can be a life saver when your server is a proprietary UNIX, these are still in many Fortune 500 companies. I have/still use network transparency as: Linux/BSDs BSDs/Linux and Linux AIX. I even ran a few (Xlib/Motif) applications as "Linux Linux AIX" wher…

I haven't tried it (because i do not really need network transparency and i'm using Xorg anyway) but supposedly this project[0] implements the Wayland protocol on top of Xorg in a way that integrates mostly seamlessly with X11-based desktops (instead of creating a window and running Wayland inside it as if it was a monitor isolated from the rest of the desktop). It might be useful to be able to run Wayland applicatio…

Waypipe can run Wayland applications remotely in a more modern fashion that doesn't suck ass on all but the fastest network links.

But this will be a useful stopgap for those who stubbornly cling to X11 (or are forced to, e.g. by NVIDIA hardware) as more and more useful software drops X support and goes Wayland-only.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#46

Post by growse »

lmm wrote: post #37
kiwijamo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Wayland daily and haven't run into the issues you mention. It has worked better than X11 as a daily driver for a few years now. I appreciate may not work for some To be honest I associate 'barely usable' more with X11. I haven't forgotten the good old days when I had to hack various configuration files just to get a working desktop and then hack some more to work around issues with tearing, video acceleration,…

> Wayland on the other had has just worked right out of the box since Debian 11. With a compositor other than the Gnome one?

Works out of the box on arch, with KDE/plasma.

Is that using the Gnome compositor?

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#47

Post by bitwize »

hist_thr wrote: post #27
zamalek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have thrown everything difficult out of the spec Not exactly, they have thrown out everything that almost nobody uses - such as networking. They have, however, added things that most people do care about - such as different HiDPI across multiple monitors and an extremely thin (low latency) render path. > That Wayland is 10 years old and still barely usable And that has changed in the past 2 years (with excepti…

>Not exactly, they have thrown out everything that almost nobody uses - such as networking. And color calibration. >such as different HiDPI across multiple monitors I had this working with multiple X11 servers 20 years ago. >And that has changed in the past 2 years I was told that exact same line 5 years ago. I guess it will be just as true in 5 years again.

> I had this working with multiple X11 servers 20 years ago.

You had to hack around X11's shorttcomings.

X11 does not support HiDPI or multiple DPI across multiple monitors without hacks and workarounds. Wayland does. That makes X a non-starter and Wayland the only choice for many users.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#48

Post by fsh »

hist_thr wrote: post #27
zamalek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have thrown everything difficult out of the spec Not exactly, they have thrown out everything that almost nobody uses - such as networking. They have, however, added things that most people do care about - such as different HiDPI across multiple monitors and an extremely thin (low latency) render path. > That Wayland is 10 years old and still barely usable And that has changed in the past 2 years (with excepti…

>Not exactly, they have thrown out everything that almost nobody uses - such as networking. And color calibration. >such as different HiDPI across multiple monitors I had this working with multiple X11 servers 20 years ago. >And that has changed in the past 2 years I was told that exact same line 5 years ago. I guess it will be just as true in 5 years again.

> I had this working with multiple X11 servers 20 years ago.

People want to move windows between their screens.

The lack of proper HiDPI support was really starting to become a problem when trying to run Linux on a laptop that isn't from the early 2000s. Fortunately, with wayland, it now seems mostly solved (at least in Gnome and KDE).

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#49

Post by growse »

sprash wrote: post #43
rodgerd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software developers who were maintaining X? Perhaps you could show them how it's done, since apparently you can do a better job. They've certainly been clear that they're happy for anyone who wants to take over Xorg, yet no-one from the peanut gallery ever does.

It's a matter of funding. X11 development is not funded anymore whereas Wayland is heavily funded through proxies like Collabora or Igalia. It is unclear who are the originators of that money since those proxy orgs don't disclose who funds them. Since Wayland is a horribly complicated protocol that makes doing even the simplest tasks a major chore I would consider it sabotage. There are multiple billion+ dollar corps…

A wild conspiracy theory appears!

Of course, like any good conspiracy, it's very competent and expansive, managing to simultaneously secretly convince all the major distros to use it by default and cruelly suppressing any efforts to provide funding and engineering effort towards X11.

In reality, Wayland works great for most Linux desktop users (on the mainstream distros) and no-one is funding X because no-one wants to.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#50

Post by happymellon »

lmm wrote: post #37
kiwijamo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Wayland daily and haven't run into the issues you mention. It has worked better than X11 as a daily driver for a few years now. I appreciate may not work for some To be honest I associate 'barely usable' more with X11. I haven't forgotten the good old days when I had to hack various configuration files just to get a working desktop and then hack some more to work around issues with tearing, video acceleration,…

> Wayland on the other had has just worked right out of the box since Debian 11. With a compositor other than the Gnome one?

Well, that would imply that it's not a Wayland issue but a compositor.

Or is all maths broken because I found a calculator that doesn't have a working addition key?

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