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An X11 apologist tries Wayland

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Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#91

Post by noahtallen »

thristian wrote: post #84

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…

Definitely agree. It took several days to figure out the exact environment variables needed to get basic applications working and scaling properly. For example, if you want “click link and open it in default browser” to work in, say, Slack, you need environment variables to get it working.

And since (like you say) basic profiles are not executed on startup, it’s very difficult to fix anything.

I completely disagree with the Sway author’s approach to go batteries excluded for the project. It means that next to nothing works out of the box, and that you either have to put in hours of work to fix undocumented things, or rely on a distro to package everything exactly right. And there really aren’t any distros packaging Sway right now.

Sway would benefit from integrating more of these things out of the box and it should rely much less on end-user configuration and other software to accomplish basic desktop behavior.

One excellent example is that you need a separate Lock Screen app like swaylock to lock your computer. And since you’re in charge of configuring all its settings, it’s difficult to know if you’ve done something insecure.

Otherwise, I really enjoyed using it.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#92

Post by harshitaneja »

Gigachad wrote: post #65
Lio wrote: post #2

Wayland seems pretty good to me now. There are still the odd issues with HiDPI but I think that's mainly down to XWayland support in apps that don't support Wayland natively yet. e.g. If I'm running VLC and I move it from a 1:1 screen to a HiDPI screen then my mouse pointer goes tiny as it passes over it. It's a similar situation for some older Electron based apps too. Support for XWayland is OKish but not seamless.…

Mixed DPI is basically unusable on Wayland due to X11 apps but last I checked, X doesn't even support this at all. I gave up waiting because years later still almost every non Gnome app is electron or otherwise running in XWayland. Just changed my monitors to have the same dpi scale.

Been away from linux GUI systems for some time but isn't that resolved now with ozone in chromium which brings wayland support. I remember using electron beta with ozone and building vscode with it for proper wayland support. It worked quite well then.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#94

Post by Gigachad »

harshitaneja wrote: post #92
Gigachad wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mixed DPI is basically unusable on Wayland due to X11 apps but last I checked, X doesn't even support this at all. I gave up waiting because years later still almost every non Gnome app is electron or otherwise running in XWayland. Just changed my monitors to have the same dpi scale.

Been away from linux GUI systems for some time but isn't that resolved now with ozone in chromium which brings wayland support. I remember using electron beta with ozone and building vscode with it for proper wayland support. It worked quite well then.

I saw that it was supposedly fixed a while ago but as of this year I can confirm that Steam, Spotify, Telegram, Discord, and VS code do not DPI scale properly.

The most offensive one is that Telegram _used_ to scale properly and somehow they broke it about a year ago. GTK also still does not support fractional scailing despite the majority of monitors being sold right now are optimal at 125% or 150%.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#95

Post by blinkingled »

mkl wrote: post #9

> KDE, I have heard mixed things about, but can’t speak to. Does anyone here use KDE on Wayland currently? How well does it run? What are the pain points?

Most of my desktops run KDE on Wayland - it runs pretty well, especially latest version. All Intel or AMD GPUs - no nVidia though so can't talk about that part - however I have heard it is very usable.

X11 apps like VLC run with fuzzy fonts though - Plasma 5.26 is going to address that to some extent. Then I would have no reason to run anything X11.

VSCode needs electron switches to use Wayland but works fine after you do that. Firefox on Arch at least needed MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 but works really well after you do that.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#96

Post by loeg »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #25
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. How practical is that? I have horrible upload speed at home which ruins all these "just remote into your home machine" workflows for anything more than a terminal.

Not at all practical. Remote X11 isn’t really practical on a LAN, much less over a slower internet link. It’s cool in theory but not especially useful.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#97

Post by II2II »

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…

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

I did, nearly 20 years ago. The computers were over 2500 km apart, though it was over a good university to university connection. The Gimp was certainly usable, though I will not go as far as saying it was good since 20 year old memories can be hazy and the standards of the day are different from the standards of today.

I also experimented with X over a 14.4 kbps modem a few years earlier. It was mostly while writing papers (plotting graphs and viewing dvi files, not the actual writing). It was slow, but it got the job done and was better than juggling documents between software on two computers.

The one really nice thing about X was the ability to use individual applications across a network connection, rather than dealing with an entire remote desktop. All of this remote desktop stuff strikes me as being better suited for accessing a remote system, rather than for running remote software.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#98

Post by lostapathy »

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…

> That is, the Gimp runs on your home machine while your notebook has the GUI.

Have you actually tried that in recent years? In my experience not much actually works this way anymore, the performance is just terrible.

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#99

Post by [deleted] »

Gigachad wrote: post #65
Lio wrote: post #2

Wayland seems pretty good to me now. There are still the odd issues with HiDPI but I think that's mainly down to XWayland support in apps that don't support Wayland natively yet. e.g. If I'm running VLC and I move it from a 1:1 screen to a HiDPI screen then my mouse pointer goes tiny as it passes over it. It's a similar situation for some older Electron based apps too. Support for XWayland is OKish but not seamless.…

Mixed DPI is basically unusable on Wayland due to X11 apps but last I checked, X doesn't even support this at all. I gave up waiting because years later still almost every non Gnome app is electron or otherwise running in XWayland. Just changed my monitors to have the same dpi scale.

[deleted]

Re: An X11 apologist tries Wayland

#100

Post by ranger207 »

AstralStorm wrote: post #3

How is the multi monitor story? Especially when the resolutions or refresh rates do not match?

I have two 1920x1080 60fps screens and one 2560x1440 120fps screen and they work perfectly in sway. The DPI between them is different but it's minor enough that I haven't bothered fixing it
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