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LFCS 2012: X and WaylandLFCS 2012: X and WaylandPosted Apr 13, 2012 20:13 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413)In reply to: LFCS 2012: X and Wayland by quintesse Parent article: LFCS 2012: X and Wayland
You're being ridiculous.
The statement was clearly that windows would get the positioning confused. Perhaps you're laboring under the misconception that everyone puts the close box in the same place? (This is false, by the way).
From where I sit, nearly every prefab environments gets the window decorations quite wrong, by putting destructive, unrecoverable decoration buttons directly adjacent to nondestructive, recoverable buttons.
For example, nearly everyone puts close adjacent to things like minimize, so an attempted minimize can lose your work.
I'm certainly not going to accept an environment that allows the app developer to inflict this kind of stupidity on me.
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LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 14, 2012 2:55 UTC (Sat) by quintesse (subscriber, #14569) [Link]
Clearly obvious? I beg to differ. The sentence "How long will it be before there are apps where the 'close' button on the window actually does something else?" seems very explicit, a close button that does something else than close the window. (which would of course be very confusing, and which in my opinion would therefore never happen, no need to start worrying about that kind of thing)
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 14, 2012 13:01 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
let us not forget that there is a number of themes without any icon on the buttons. What if they differ in order? I have not seen any argument pro csd and many cons... I usually tend to think it is a bad idea in such cases ;-)
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 14, 2012 13:22 UTC (Sat) by quintesse (subscriber, #14569) [Link]
You haven't seen any argument pro? You just have to read the technical arguments for Wayland, so either you don't like Wayland at all which would mean for you in fact there are no pros, or that should count as a pro in itself because that just how Wayland works. And on the other hand are these "many cons" which I think are highly exaggerated or even fictitious.
People come up with red herrings of things that will surely happen if we allow CSD while ignoring the facts that show that on other OSes they seem to be doing fine, no complete chaos of every app for himself and just drawing the decorations however they feel like (and examples that if an app really wants they can break the rules even on X, ie Chrome).
Apps built on top of the software made by their respective DEs won't even know anything changed, the core software in Gnome and KDE will take over the rendering of the decorations. So in one fell swoop a large quantity of apps will behave exactly as before.
Most other apps will not go through the trouble of rendering their own decoration either and will use some kind of system service/library for that (probably the same Gnome and KDE will be using).
So that only leaves us with those apps that decide to do their own rendering for some reason and that's when we have to remember that Linux/BSD are highly managed environments where apps that misbehave will probably get fixed or ignored.
And that's why I think CSD is not the end of the world.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 14, 2012 15:49 UTC (Sat) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]
How will apps using GNOME's decoration drawing know about my KDE settings, or vice-versa? If I want the close button moved away from other buttons, will I only be able to affect half my applications? Will I need multiple configuration tools?
How will any of these know if I don't want -any- decorations, just a 10px title bar with a title on it?
These "other OSes" you claim are working fine, are so inflexible, and have such insane defaults (which for the most part cannot be changed) that they are nearly unusable to me. This is hardly what I call "working fine". Not to mention the insanity individual apps can, and do, foist on the system..
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 14, 2012 16:11 UTC (Sat) by quintesse (subscriber, #14569) [Link]
How? The way Gnome and KDE do right now, by having special themes (or theme engines) that know about the other DE's theme settings. But this is problem that exists right now as well, if you don't have those compatibility packages installed a Gnome app will look completely out of place on a KDE desktop and vice versa.
Yes those other OSes or less flexible, what does that have to do with anything? We were talking about being able to provide a consistent desktop experience, even when using CSD. And talk about insanity, you *really* want to use the Linux desktop as an example of saneness???
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 16, 2012 18:43 UTC (Mon) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
> Yes those other OSes or less flexible, what does that have to do with anything? We were talking about being able to provide a consistent desktop experience, even when using CSD. And talk about insanity, you *really* want to use the Linux desktop as an example of saneness???
Putting window controls outside of the application is one of the things that the Linux desktop does which is undeniably better than the alternatives. Why do you want to throw away an advantage? You seem to be assuming that the way things work is "just" an accidental side effect of the implementation and not, as it is, a feature.
The correct thing to do is to find a way to retain the experience we have now--which is well liked--and add technically superior underpinnings. So far I have heard that Wayland will throw away valuable and desirable features with the only justification given as "We want to improve the implementation and it's too hard to make it keep working the right way afterwards, so we decided to assume that no one cares."
If the new system really is superior then re-implement the old system on top; if you can't, it isn't.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 16, 2012 21:48 UTC (Mon) by quintesse (subscriber, #14569) [Link]
So what's so superior about it?
We already know that X is better at handling unresponsive apps, but that's not something that's impossible to do with CSD.
So what else is so superior that people will not even wait until Wayland has actually something usable to show to before running it into the ground? (which is by the way the ONLY thing I've been trying to clear up all this time. Of course if Wayland can maintain current X functionality I'll be happy, but I'm just not convinced I'll be unhappy if they can't)
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 17, 2012 11:55 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
> So what else is so superior that people will not even wait until Wayland has actually something usable to show to before running it into the ground?
There's this tendency to say "You should have raised this objection a year ago" when the software is already released and the problems become clear.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 17, 2012 12:04 UTC (Tue) by quintesse (subscriber, #14569) [Link]
Well constructive criticism is great of course, helping out and coming up with solutions would be better, but what I see mostly in these threads is people just assuming the very worst and do nothing but complain. That can be very demotivating and is normally the number one reason for the developers to ignore people. (I can't imagine what it must be like to be Lennart Poettering for example ;) )
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 17, 2012 19:09 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
Hear, hear! I find it very tiresome for so many people to complain so bitterly about the few projects that really seem to be improving and revitalizing the Linux ecosystem. Pottering and Packard seem to be some of the few people who are willing to take on the challenge of improving what has come before instead of casting it in bronze as a museum piece. In this specific case it is particularly ironic because the Wayland developers also seem to be the X developers and if anything Wayland is X12.
Wayland is heavily informed by what does and doesn't work in X by the people who know it most intimately. As you say some people are just assuming the very worst and doing nothing but complain but the developers they are complaining are wrong and the developers they are holding up as right are _the_same_people_!
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 18, 2012 8:12 UTC (Wed) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
> the developers they are complaining are wrong and the developers they are holding up as right are _the_same_people_
Except of course that the same people at different times may do totally different things due to changing priorities, which means you have _no_point_.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 19, 2012 18:46 UTC (Thu) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]
Linux does not do anything regarding window decorations. X and the window manager does things regarding window decorations.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 14, 2012 16:45 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] Individual apps already can "foist insanity" on X desktops. My current choice of audio playback application (they're all crap one way or another, this one happens to annoy me less than most) comes up with its own close/minimize buttons and no WM-applied decorations.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 15, 2012 16:46 UTC (Sun) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link] People come up with red herrings of things that will surely happen if we allow CSD while ignoring the facts that show that on other OSes they seem to be doing fineI'm somewhat staggered by this comment. I don't know which world you live in, but it doesn't seem to be the same one as me. I can't speak about OS X, but client side window decoration causes massive problems on Windows in the real world. Further, the very concept seems fundamentally flawed because it assumes that all applications will be written using an appropriate toolkit, which just plain isn't true. It isn't true now, it hasn't been true for the last 30 years, and it won't be true in the future. Unlike many X fans, I'm not opposed to Wayland. But I'm very strongly opposed to the way it's going about some things. Notably removing my control over my environment.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 15, 2012 17:11 UTC (Sun) by quintesse (subscriber, #14569) [Link]
I'll stagger you some more. Windows and OS X are doing fine. You might not like it but millions of people all over the world use their desktops, and the world does not go up in flames.
But of course, according to you that can't really be true because they have "massive problems". Really now?
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 15, 2012 20:42 UTC (Sun) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link]
Yes, really. To quote Esther Schindler, "Microsoft's biggest and most dangerous contribution to the software industry may be the degree to which it has lowered user expectations." You claim that people are using Windows (and OS X, which as I've said I haven't used, so can't comment on) without problems. But realistically, if you look around an average office, you see people having problems all the time, and just accepting it as normal behaviour. And a perfect example of that is applications that hang and you can't even iconify them because the application is responsible for window management. You can claim that's not a problem until the cows come home. But it happens, and it happens sufficiently frequently that I'm happy calling it a problem.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 15, 2012 21:18 UTC (Sun) by quintesse (subscriber, #14569) [Link]
So these are the "massive problems"? Not being able to iconify an application that hangs? Yes, and you can't move the window around either. Sucks I know, but hardly earth-shattering.
Oh and wait, in Windows 7 I actually *can* do it, seems that MS after many many years finally fixed that one.
But the people working on Wayland have said they've already thought about possible solutions to these problems. So why not wait and see what happens?
And if we have to talk about the lowering of expectations, I've been a Linux user for many years and if it has taught me anything it is not to have too many expectations and lots of patience.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 16, 2012 23:15 UTC (Mon) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]
They fixed minimise and close in Windows 2000; I'm not sure whether moving is a more recent issue.
Windows had the compatibility problem that the window manager used to be just a library that would run in the client processes. While most clients would just pass mouse clicks on the decorations into the default message handler, some of them relied on being notified in advance of any change to their window and being able to override it. Changing that ran the risk of breaking applications.
X applications don't assume they can have this control, and Wayland application won't be able to do so either. Being responsible for rendering decorations doesn't mean becoming the window manager, though certainly lack of visible feedback to window decorations is a pain.
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