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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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441–450 of 453 posts

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it more of a pain to setup then just running freerdp-shadow-cli?

I use xrdp for headless remote sessions, and vnc for remote access to live sessions. I'll give freerdp-shadow-cli a try, thanks!

Tried freerdp-shadow-cli, didn't work very well. Vinagre RDP client was unable to authenticate at all and just showed a black screen. I only knew that it was an authentication issue due to the server log. FreeRDP client didn't work with my multimonitor setup, it only showed the secondary screen. It doesn't scale the display properly either. The client must be set to the same resolution as the host. I'll be sticking with VNC for screen sharing, and continue using RDP for headless sessions.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#442
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what are you using or recommending? Recently switched to kubuntu from gnome-ubuntu, and while some pain points have gone away (lack of global menu can partially be kindof mitigated, didn't have to fiddle with touch acceleration like on 20.04), I'm not impressed: middle-click gets in the way a lot and can't be switched off, power mgmt tray is lagging badly behind power events, weird dock preview and not-so-great ap…

FF crashing (note that the preferred abbreviation is Fx, not FF) Firefox tends to very much like its shared memory buffers and crashes with SIGBUS if they run out: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1245239 How much shm is enough depends on both the browser's rendering engine and the display engine, but apparently 1.5GB shm use isn't out of the ordinary. You won't find any references to shared memory (or ev…

> note that the preferred abbreviation is Fx, not FF

Abbreviations is never something up to the original creator to dictate. And "fx" is alredy commonly used for effect.

Next you will tell us that it's actually called Plasma Desktop and not KDE.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? Just because the linux ecosystem is fragmented doesn't mean that new software has to be, too. The fact that developing a new compositor with wayland basically required wlroots to be even feasable for a one-man project is concerning enough. The amount of stuff you have to handle is insane compared to writing your own x-wm.

That's not a good comparison because it would be even harder to write your own X server. And yet X is still extremely fragmented. And developing a new compositor also does not require wlroots. Originally there was libweston, wlroots is just another option.

It is a good comparison because you don't need to write your own X server to implement your own window manager, which is the part that most people care about.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#444
post #169

The thing I dislike about Wayland is: Sometimes the server will crash. Video drivers or something. Hasn't happened much with 22.04, but used to happen more frequently before. Both with Intel and AMD. When this happens in X11, the server restarts, I see the screen go black for an instant, that's it. When this happens in Wayland, all my open programs are killed. No save prompts or anything, just insta-killed. This make…

A display server crash is fatal under X. A window manager crash is not. A window manager is not particularly affected by GPU drivers. What you see might be a GPU hang or reset that recovered. Some Wayland compositors have a window manager model by using an external process for window positioning logic (e.g. river). This is mostly just for convenience of development though, making it easy to experiment with layout eng…

> A window manager is not particularly affected by GPU drivers.

Since the window manager is also the compositor in many X setups (e.g. GNOME and KDE), the WM is very much affected by GPU drivers. It doesn't have to be the GPU drivers though, plenty of complexity in the WM/compositor itself.

The core complaint is absolutely valid - the protocol and libraries should have been designed so that applications can recover from a server crash/restart, even if the legacy X server does not provide that guarantee.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#445
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I takkede to an X11 dev once about this. I remember him saying that X supports recovering already. The issues was that most compositors and applications did not.

In practice you can't recover and need a reboot even if in theory it's possible.

GPU recovery did use to work on radeonsi with compositing disabled at some point. Of course you are usually better off rebooting anyways because who knows what state all the million bits of the GPU were left in after a crash that is by definition an unanticipated event.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#446
post #169

The thing I dislike about Wayland is: Sometimes the server will crash. Video drivers or something. Hasn't happened much with 22.04, but used to happen more frequently before. Both with Intel and AMD. When this happens in X11, the server restarts, I see the screen go black for an instant, that's it. When this happens in Wayland, all my open programs are killed. No save prompts or anything, just insta-killed. This make…

I think currently we have compositors that are monolithic and due "it all". Sounds like we'd need a separate process to maintain window state, that the compositor interfaces with. is this recreating some of the problems of X11?

Perhaps a better approach would be to make sure that clients can wait for the server to restart and reconnect. Then you don't need any crash-proof server part.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#447
post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dial up latency was never that low. ISDN, yes, but traditional dialup modems were pretty bad. The analog-to-digital conversion introduced a couple hundred milliseconds of latency.

I remember having latency under 100 ms within the metro area, but I could easily be misremembering, and I don't have a PPP account anymore to test. (And I'd have to visit my MIL who has a real POTS line with it's low latency)... But I did find a reference mentioning 150 ms round trips regionally, which I think was US west/east/central, so I think this 150ms is including some intercity latency as well. https://web.arc…

Hmm. Wikipedia is claiming 150 ms latency on dialup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial-up_Internet_access

I remember higher, but it's been over 20 years now (we got broadband pretty early here), so who knows.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will disagree that you can get a Desktop that is perfect for everyone This is not the goal. The goal is to not suck. Design by survey is what got us here.

>The goal is to not suck. But "suck" is some subjective thing, you will find a giant number of GNOME fans that will tell you how great GNOME is, how intuitive it is, and how you just need to give up your own preferences and embrace their UX guru ideas and it will not suck. It seems that many people are in the "I don't want to think for myself camp" . unfortunately people in my family are also in that camp, never ques…

You shouldn't need to "think for yourself" as a prerequisite to have usable tools. Your thinking energy is much better spent solving original problems or channeling your creativity.

Personally - I think KDE 3.5 (yes I'm that old) was near perfect. As of 4.x, they were prioritising adding the ability to freely hand-rotate desktop widgets (who the actual f8ck wants a skewed widget!?) over performance and stability. I could live with a useless feature, but I couldn't continue to run it on a computer with 256MB of memory, which was all I could afford back then. I can't remember what I switched to at the time, but I never came back.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#449
post #61
post #12

As a fellow X11 apologist, this was pretty cool to read. It's nice to see that things are shaping up, even if there are still quite a few rough edges. Having said that, I'm still a die-hard Xfce user, and until someone makes an xfwm4-like Wayland compositor, and ports (at least) xfce4-panel and xfdesktop to Wayland, I'm not gonna switch. Edit: ok, looks like there's Hopalong ( https://github.com/iridescent-desktop/ho…

Every 2 years I take Xfce (Xubuntu, Mint Xfce) for a test drive. It seems light and fast, I want to like it. Then every 2 years, I rediscover that the resize border on each window is 1px wide, which is completely unusable. When I google for a solution, the answer seems to be use Alt-Left-Mouse. I don't understand how that is a solution. I don't want to use 2 hands to resize a window.

[deleted]

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#450
post #61
post #12

As a fellow X11 apologist, this was pretty cool to read. It's nice to see that things are shaping up, even if there are still quite a few rough edges. Having said that, I'm still a die-hard Xfce user, and until someone makes an xfwm4-like Wayland compositor, and ports (at least) xfce4-panel and xfdesktop to Wayland, I'm not gonna switch. Edit: ok, looks like there's Hopalong ( https://github.com/iridescent-desktop/ho…

Every 2 years I take Xfce (Xubuntu, Mint Xfce) for a test drive. It seems light and fast, I want to like it. Then every 2 years, I rediscover that the resize border on each window is 1px wide, which is completely unusable. When I google for a solution, the answer seems to be use Alt-Left-Mouse. I don't understand how that is a solution. I don't want to use 2 hands to resize a window.

It is a well-known forever issue with XFCE- https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4/-/issues/176

Even though it has been 7 years since the initial report and the issue is still very much active, the assigned dev says it's a low priority to him. If you know how some FOSS project still work, there's very little hope for a change anytime soon.

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