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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#81

Post by twblalock »

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…

I noticed the same thing and it was hard to believe that such a basic thing is actually unsupported in 2022. It's really just not supported by Gnome or KDE when using Wayland.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#82

Post by necovek »

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 :)

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#83

Post by moomin »

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…

I was around back in the days that X-servers were still very much a thing, and even then many thought they were an expensive and inefficient way of doing things.

However, there were many who genuinely believed that networks would get arbitrarily faster and compute would not. Of course, the opposite happened, but in that alternative universe X’s design would have made sense.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#84

Post by thristian »

I've tried to use Sway a number of times, and the biggest reason I keep bouncing off it is environment variables.

There's a bunch of environment variables I want set for every process in my desktop session, from basic things like $EDITOR and $LD_LIBRARY_PATH to more complex things like $MOZ_USE_XINPUT2 or $SSH_AUTH_SOCK. When I use i3 under X11, gdm runs my ~/.profile script so I get all my standard login environment variables, then it runs ~/.xsession so I get all my GUI-specific settings. There's also some integration with systemd so that the SSH agent can set $SSH_AUTH_SOCK and have it show up in my terminals.

With Wayland/Sway, none of this works. gdm does not execute ~/.profile, and there's no equivalent to ~/.xsession. Something starts a user-level systemd instance, but its environment variables aren't synced to the compositor, and the compositor doesn't use it to start apps, so $SSH_AUTH_SOCK isn't available in anything I care about.

Having an SSH agent seems like such a basic feature, but it doesn't work for me and I can't even imagine where I'd begin to look for the problem, or for documentation to learn more about it.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#85

Post by admax88qqq »

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…

> While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine and edit an image stored there.

Have you ever tried this? I've never had X11 network transparency be a good experience.

It would be cool but to be good all apps would have to be designed with it in mind. And they are not.

The software moves on from X11 as a protocol for remote computing.

Even well before Wayland, all the things you'd use X over the network for were moved to web browsers.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#86

Post by slimsag »

wooque wrote: post #68
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…

Wayland is not GNOME, what you describe is not Wayland problem, but GNOME problem. It's possible in both KDE and Sway. GNOME is probably worst DE imaginable. After 20 years, they still don't have thumbnails in filepicker and even dropped preview side pane in GTK4. I can't even.

With X11, I can change scroll speed using the `imwheel` tool.

Years ago with Ubuntu and ElementaryOS, I could change it in the system settings GUI.

Today, with Wayland now default, I can't change it at all when running Ubuntu or ElementaryOS.

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 - and I can't fix it without apparently installing an entirely different desktop environment or a patched version of libinput.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#87

Post by abdullahkhalids »

bxparks wrote: post #61
kelnos wrote: 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.

Used Xfce for a decade. I have never had trouble using the mouse to resize windows. I use 1080p screen, maybe you use a higher resolution and 1px is too small on that.

If you right click the title bar of any window, to open a menu, from which you can select resize.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#88

Post by gpm »

admax88qqq wrote: post #85
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…

> While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine and edit an image stored there. Have you ever tried this? I've never had X11 network transparency be a good experience. It would be cool but to be good all apps would have to be designed with it in mind. And they are not. The software moves on from X11 as a protocol for remote computing. Even well before Wayland, all the things…

I've used it in the past month to impromptu demonstrate something that I had set up on a GUI app at home (with a lot of dependencies) from my laptop.

Yes, it's laggy, but it's nice to have the option, and it's really nice that it's already integrated with ssh and doesn't need extra setup (past passing `-Y` to ssh). If this was the only thing I'd lose by switching window managers it wouldn't be a dealbreaker.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#89

Post by gpm »

wooque wrote: post #68
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…

Wayland is not GNOME, what you describe is not Wayland problem, but GNOME problem. It's possible in both KDE and Sway. GNOME is probably worst DE imaginable. After 20 years, they still don't have thumbnails in filepicker and even dropped preview side pane in GTK4. I can't even.

> 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.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#90

Post by jacob019 »

aliqot wrote: post #51
bayindirh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know whether you used Remote X, but I used it in a project, and it's extremely inefficient, esp. in thin client applications, and if you try to carry anything like a video, a 100mbps connection could easily be saturated by one pair of X server and client. In other words, it doesn't work in any way unless you have a gigabit LAN. NoMachine developed a couple of libraries called NX back in the day, which transfe…

Remote X has been a godsend for me. I'm not always able to lug around a worthy machine, so being able to use lesser hardware as a 'thinclient' to my wireguard'd assets is very handy. Obviously I'm not going to expect high definition video or realtime gaming, but that's not what it's billed as either, so within the scope of what it's for I'm wholly satisfied. People on both sides sound somewhat fanatic, and I've never…

xrdp is so much more comfortable to use than X forwarding. A PITA to set up though. VNC is a sensible choice too.
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