feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 26, 2015 13:52 UTC (Thu) by mvetter (guest, #101668)
Parent article: GNOME 3.16 released

With the move to Wayland as the default display mechanism, it seems client-side decorations will become the norm in Gnome. This has a downside, as features present in Mutter are in effect getting removed. For example, vertical maximization (very handy for terminals) got shafted:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=746273

I don't wish to disparage Gnome devs, but the above bz looks very much like a bait-and-switch maneuver. Stuff that worked for eons in Mutter is suddenly labeled as "never supported by GTK". Seriously?

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 26, 2015 20:11 UTC (Thu) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (16 responses)

They're not getting removed, they never were there (in Wayland) in the first place. Patches are welcome; I use toggle maximize vertically a lot, so chances are I'll cook a patch when it's time to switch to Wayland.

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 26, 2015 22:51 UTC (Thu) by deepfire (guest, #26138) [Link] (6 responses)

We can only hope that obviously immature technology, which, let's make a
note, doesn't even meet well established use cases, isn't shoved down our throats.. ..again.

This excuse that, "it wasn't even there" is laughable, in this context.

Seriously, take a look at it from aside..

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 27, 2015 12:12 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (2 responses)

I'd appreciate a bit more positivity and not assume the worst from other people.

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 29, 2015 4:50 UTC (Sun) by ploxiln (subscriber, #58395) [Link] (1 responses)

This isn't a gradeschool project! Or at least it shouldn't be.

Might as well tell people to use Mate or XFCE, it's pretty good advice, and you'll get less criticism from people who gnome no longer targets.

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 29, 2015 19:33 UTC (Sun) by dashesy (guest, #74652) [Link]

Or Cinnamon, it is what a modern desktops should look like.

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 27, 2015 12:28 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> We can only hope that obviously immature technology, which, let's make a
note, doesn't even meet well established use cases, isn't shoved down our throats.. ..again.

Do you mean Wayland? Where one of the lead devs is the guy who was pretty much the SOLE dev of XFree86 towards the end ... ? And is the guy in charge of Xorg ... ?

From what I know of Wayland, all the X functionality is available if you run X over Wayland (or Wayland over X). Large chunks of X "don't work" properly, anyway. And pretty much all of the X use-cases that people want are catered for within Wayland - if they don't exist it's because nobody considers them important enough to step up to the plate and code them.

Cheers,
Wol

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 30, 2015 21:44 UTC (Mon) by deepfire (guest, #26138) [Link]

I can't be absolutely sure, but from what I have seen so far, the X stack under Wayland is second class -- for example the performance of Firefox-over-XWayland is a far cry from Firefox-over-Xorg.

I doubt it's fundamental, and yet.. so far it's second class -- FWIW.

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 27, 2015 14:32 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

They're also breaking GTK apps under other window managers.

E.g., the client-side decoration stuff doesn't work well with other X11 WMs (resizing isn't there, e.g.). It can also look inconsistent with the WM. Unfortunately, GTK3 CSD seems to cause some WMs to not paint their own decorations. There is a global setting to disable some of the CSD stuff in GTK3, but it doesn't undo the "don't paint decorations" thing (least not with WindowMaker - which I went back to) - so then you get windows with no decorations at all.

I wish I knew how GTK3 was suppressing the WM decorations, but I don't see anything obvious in xprops.

The breakage and upheaval the GNOME / GTK 3 project has forced upon the Linux desktop, even beyond GNOME has been sad.

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 27, 2015 6:01 UTC (Fri) by mvetter (guest, #101668) [Link] (8 responses)

"They're not getting removed, they never were there (in Wayland) in the first place."

This is not about whether something was or wasn't in Wayland or GTK.

This is about a feature that has worked for many years, and now all of a sudden it doesn't. It's a regression.

I don't quite understand what processes have led to the disappearance of a widely used feature.

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 27, 2015 7:52 UTC (Fri) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link] (7 responses)

Probably the same that got session saving axed from GNOME 3...

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 29, 2015 4:29 UTC (Sun) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link] (6 responses)

I'm never clear on these threads, people complaining about features removed, again, from gnome, but you would think that people have to use gnome, I mean, really? I KNOW gnome doesn't work for me, I have question about that, for the reasons all these threads always repeat ad nauseum, and that's why I use KDE. scrollbars, yes, of course, I use them all the time. session saving, of course, I have tons of programs open on tons of desktops. I know many people don't want to have this type of desktop, but kde lets me have it. I had to wait for kde 4 to become usable after 4.0's premature to distro release, and that took a long time, 4.8 at least, but even by 4.6 it was ok.

Gnome's attitude about this stuff is clear and obvious, so why do people use it when it's so clearly not suited for them? I am not talking about the people it is suited for, why they use it makes total sense, but is someone holding a gun to your heads forcing you to use something you don't like? KDE has controls, they have settings, they don't insult me by forcing me to do scripting to do a simple adjustment (does gnome terminal remember its last closed position and size yet? That always struck me as the most surreal failure of gnome, but of course, since I have no interest in gnome itself, I never check to see what works and what doesn't.

The entire notion of making a desktop into a mobile interface is stupid, it's stupid in html/css 'responsive design', which is ruining formerly good websites one by one, steadily (unless I run it, then I refuse to scr#w over our users that way), this is so profoundly and utterly confused conceptually that it's hard to put into words. A tiny crippled touch screen interface is not a desktop with a keyboard and mouse, and pretending it is is just silly. Which is of course why kde made their mobile and desktop projects as separate chunks of the kde system. That's a smart way to do it, and it's why I use kde.

Again, I don't care about gnome, and if you like it, you like it, but for the people endlessly complaining about feature x or y being removed, yes, that happens, and it's been the gnome way for ages, so why be so surprised? Or is it because so many posters here work at redhat and have to eat the dogfood? That's my personal guess, otherwise people would just find a better desktop and go on their way, it really works well that way, kde won't really change their basic ideas from what I see, it's a powerful, configurable desktop, panels all over, you want em, you got em, top, left, right, center, whatever you want. I've had very little pain switching to 4x from 3x, some stuff took a while to come back, but the project listens to its users when they ask for stuff, maybe that's because it's not run by redhat types? who knows.

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 29, 2015 4:51 UTC (Sun) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link]

By the way, re gnome sessions being removed, if true (again, I don't use or care about gnome, so I don't know or care what is true or false), but I can tell you from my heavy kde session abuse, doing sessions is HARD programming and your foundation better be in very good shape or it's going to fail. 10 kate sessions with about 250-500 open files total, on different desktops all opening on the same desktop as session shutdown? That took kde a long time to get working, I could see how hard the challenge was for them. Hard stuff. One always wonders about the guts though, if they aren't up to snuff, removing features may actually be a more practical solution than admitting that you can't actually make it work, then you can make up some usability nonsense to explain it away.

Smaller projects like xfce tried it too and had issues, you can see how hard it is.

So that's my guess as to why things like this happen, not because of some usability bs that someone in the gnome project makes up, but simply because it's hard to do, and may point to other weaknesses in the core system, which has always had a lot of trouble doing the simplest things (like remembering last open window size) that windows 95 had solid in 1995. Each to their own, whatever. As for copying osx, man, that's a bad idea, you want choices that are NOT osx, not to copy it, osx is awful, although if I want to be perverse I can emulate it in kde if I want, but why? The only thing worse than osx is a bad osx copy.

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 29, 2015 14:11 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

This stuff doesn't just affect GNOME users.

The CSD changes are and (I strongly suspect) the scrollbar changes will be in GTK+3. Every user of those applications is affected, regardless of whether they use GNOME or not.

E.g., I finally went back to WindowMaker after 12 odd years (or more? not quite sure) of using GNOME or GNOME-based windowmagers. The CSD changes in GTK3 don't work properly with other WMs (maybe just older ones, but damned if I can find what I need to add support to wmaker for to make this work). If you disable CSD in GTK3 globally, it still doesn't work properly with other/older WMs.

These changes are just not affecting GNOME users - apps and interoperability is being broken across desktop environments.

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 29, 2015 16:39 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

If many complain, it is because they use it (and thus find others somehow worse).

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 30, 2015 11:00 UTC (Mon) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (2 responses)

"Gnome's attitude about this stuff is clear and obvious, so why do people use it when it's so clearly not suited for them?"

The answer to that question is distributions defaults.
( For example have a look at Fedora [1] where other options to Gnome have always been buried in the background through poorly visible/hard to find links to alternatives )

Now why most distributions have chosen ( historically or otherwise ) Gnome as their default desktop environments, an environment that is in continues beta state beats me. ( Well why Fedora does it is pretty obvious *cough Red Hat cough* ).

1. https://getfedora.org/

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 30, 2015 12:44 UTC (Mon) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (1 responses)

> Now why most distributions have chosen ( historically or otherwise ) Gnome as their default desktop environments [...] beats me.

My guess: it's because Qt wasn't Free Software, so GTK and GNOME became the "Linux desktop" default. In other words, path dependence.

feature removal due to Wayland

Posted Mar 30, 2015 13:37 UTC (Mon) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

QT not being free software was like ca 15 years ago right?

So that's no excuse for distribution ( still ) defaulting to a desktop environment that is in continues beta stage with an unstable UI which is an result of broken development process and or release cycle.

One could say obviously distribution defaulting and gathering feedback for the Gnome community is not paying of since it's still being released just as half implemented (this release wayland/ accessibility/ui design etc, ) as it was those 15 years ago.
( Arguably with things growing worse since the emerging of the UI designers in the community )