LFCS 2012: X and Wayland [LWN.net]

LFCS 2012: X and Wayland

Posted Apr 15, 2012 20:42 UTC (Sun) by Tet (subscriber, #5433)
In reply to: LFCS 2012: X and Wayland by quintesse
Parent article: LFCS 2012: X and Wayland

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.

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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.