Development quote of the week [LWN.net]

Now, for the "Xorg is dead" claims - it's very likely that the current release will be the last Xorg release. There is little interest in an X server that runs on hardware, or rather: there's little interest in the effort required to push out releases.

— Peter Hutterer

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Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 23, 2021 6:16 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (3 responses)

I'll be honest, I've put off touching anything to do with Wayland for years because I was used to the piecemeal setup I've built up of openbox and a ton of tiny X programs and shell scripts.

But I might have to soon because it's falling apart for some inexplicable reason lately - the worst of it is having to kill -9 openbox (not even the compositor!) from a VT frequently because the entire screen stops reacting to input and it won't respond to a sigterm. I'm about ready to throw it out and start over.

Has anyone here transitioned away from this kind of rat's nest and got tales of success to tell? I gave Sway a try but I'm not ready for something that raw; KWin looks like a surprisingly unintrusive option going by the package manager output fitting on one screen...

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 23, 2021 10:26 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Just a suggestion - can you run X-over-Wayland?

Try booting into Wayland and seeing whether your X stuff still works fine with that - apparently it's pretty seamless now.

Then you can just move stuff over as it breaks. I've just moved to Wayland (my gentoo system was stuck on KDE4, the replacement is finally up and (almost) running. (Don't ask - circular systemd dependency was the latest problem ...)

But going down that route should be an incremental step, not a throw it all out and start again step.

Cheers,
Wol

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 23, 2021 14:06 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (1 responses)

The only way I have dealt with my own special rats nests is to just save the configs and trash the layout and do something completely different for 6-9 months. Just live in GNOME, KDE, or MATE without any changes. Everytime the brain says 'oh I could customize this' don't. It takes a lot of work for the the first couple of months.. but most of the rats nest is built up out of 1 little thing customizations which were good at some point and we got used to it.

The 6 to 9 months are to do a couple of things:
* Get you to unlearn shortcuts/shorthands which dont' work anywhere else.
* Get you used to the changes in all desktops which have happened in the N years since you started rat-nesting a working a desktop.
* Get you able to see where the changes are actually progress versus 'THEY F*ING CHANGED Y???? WHAT IDIOT WOULD DO THAT I LIKED IT FROM FVWM1"

After that time frame then I usually can do a new rats nest of looking for a desktop which meets my brain mapping of things better to my original rats nest. The reason is that maybe you work best in OpenBox currently and tried to move to OpenWaylandBox. The little things which are almost the same cause the brain to rebel 10 times more in an immediate switch than after 6-9 months of using something completely different. Then you can say 'oooh I understand why that is happening and I like how it does this better than GNOME/KDE/etc.' versus 'AAAAAAAAAARGGGGHHHH BURN ALL COMPUTERS AND FIND ME A POTATO FARM'.

Then start the new rats nest which will work with the newer technologies. I don't know how valid this works in general, but for my own brain it is what I tend to do.

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 25, 2021 0:52 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

All very good advice, thanks. I've definitely picked up some weird habits (these niche WMs all have default keybinds that assume you're using a pre-win95 keyboard)

FWIW I did end up giving KDE a try and it's not giving me feelings of regret like 4.x did. There's a bunch of annoying things and crashes but they're (probably) just side effects of the cruft I need to clean up.

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 23, 2021 14:53 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (11 responses)

Thanks to the Xorg developers. I have recently tried Wayland on my new laptop, and it started out surprisingly familiar (but I din not do much GUI work on that machine). However, eventually I switched back to Xorg when it turned out that Wayland would only give me 1920x1200 on the external monitor, not the 2560x1600 that it can do; I tried fixing that with xrandr, but it turns out that xrandr does not work with Wayland. So I switched back to Xorg, and xrandr did the job just fine.

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 24, 2021 8:49 UTC (Fri) by mgedmin (guest, #34497) [Link] (10 responses)

xrandr is a read-only tool on Xwayland. If you want to actually change monitor settings on Wayland, you're meant to use compositor-specific tools (e.g. gnome-control-center).

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 24, 2021 9:24 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (9 responses)

At first I tried the Ubuntu settings, but it did not offer any resolution beyond 1920x1200. Then I tried xrandr, and the messages I got did not really make it clear that it is not supposed to work for writing; but when reading it also only showed 1920x1200 as maximum resolution. Anyway, after wasting several hours on trial and error and quite a bit of web searching I found that my options were

Stay with Wayland. But the way the web page put it, the Wayland designers don't think mere users should be telling Wayland about modes; apparently Wayland knows all the modes a user should be using. Still there seems to be a loophole: get some kind of mode compiler from github that translates the mode into a binary that is then loaded into the kernel (or Wayland?), so that Wayland thinks it is coming from the monitor.
Switch to Xorg.

I took option 2, and I fear the day when that option will be closed.

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 24, 2021 10:39 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (8 responses)

It's worth mentioning that "Wayland" isn't responsible for deciding what the "maximum resolution" supported by the display should be (ditto for the settings control panel) -- those can only act upon what they're told by the underlying hardware & drivers.

Granted, one would think that it's the same drivers behind the scenes for both wayland vs classic x.org, but clearly there's something going wrong, and this problem needs to be reported to the appropriate developers instead of just complained about here.

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 24, 2021 15:20 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (7 responses)

There probably are the same drivers behind. Xorg only gives me 1920x1200 by default, too. The difference is that Xorg gives me a much better way (xrandr) to add the mode I need than Wayland; I found this page on how to do it in Wayland, but switching to Xorg and using xrandr is much easier and less time-consuming.

As for reporting it, one of the pages I found on the way said something along the lines that the Wayland developers don't want to provide this feature. I could now waste time writing a bug report for a project I don't care for in order to find out whether that's true or fake news, but I won't.

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 24, 2021 16:42 UTC (Fri) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (6 responses)

Nb. you are talking about Wayland as it was a piece of software comparable to Xorg. It is not. It's set of protocols, not a software.
Xorg is an implementation of X11 protocols. Wayland has many implementations – compositors like mutter, kwin, sway, enlightement, lipstick and so on. What you describe sounds like limitation of some specific compositor (you didn't state which one you're using), not Wayland protocols itself.

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 24, 2021 17:22 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

I have no idea what compositor I am using, and I don't care. Ubuntu gives me two options: "Ubuntu" and "Ubuntu on Xorg". I am lucky to know that "Ubuntu" means "Wayland"; or maybe not. According to you, "Wayland" does not mean "Wayland".

Back to the problem: None of the answers to Wayland how to set a custom resolution mentions that it depends on a specific compositor; they all just talk about Wayland. Can you name a compositor that allows adding a mode?

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 30, 2021 0:24 UTC (Thu) by MrWim (subscriber, #47432) [Link] (4 responses)

I believe this is a huge weakness of the Wayland model - it has fragmentation built in. The fragmentation makes it much harder to ask for help. Having multiple independent compositor implementations multiply the testing matrix for authors of software. When difficult or tedious bugs, issues or limitations arise it allows projects to play dodge the responsibility.

I'm not accusing you of this, but whenever I see the "Wayland is just a protocol" it grates. It's technically correct: Wayland is a protocol, but that doesn't diminish responsibility, it just deflects it. It says: "You're not qualified to discuss or complain until you figure out how these projects have decided to organise themselves". Wayland was still designed by people - someone chose for it to be like this. Wayland is a protocol, but it's not just a protocol, it's a project, it's an ecosystem, it's people, it's decisions.

X was better off when all the different competing proprietary X servers died off, UNIX is better off now all the incompatible propitiatory Unices have died out and Wayland would be better off if there was a single dominant Wayland compositor.

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 30, 2021 18:03 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (3 responses)

> X was better off when all the different competing proprietary X servers died off, UNIX is better off now all the incompatible propitiatory Unices have died out and Wayland would be better off if there was a single dominant Wayland compositor.

I disagree that we would be better off with a single compositor—in X11 terms that would be equivalent to saying that we would be better off with a single window manager. One window management style does not fit all use cases. However, we could certainly benefit from compositors relying on a single common library like wlroots which abstracts away the details formerly handled by the X server.

Development quote of the week

Posted Nov 3, 2021 10:41 UTC (Wed) by MrWim (subscriber, #47432) [Link]

I suppose the point is that this model where the compositor and window manager are tightly bound together is a choice, but a different choice could have been made (with different trade-offs).

> in X11 terms that would be equivalent to saying that we would be better off with a single window manager

It didn't have to be that way. This is a (the main?) technical decision in wayland that actually encourages fragmentation. I understand the technical merits of this "window manager is the compositor" model, but in practice I think it's a weakness. I believe it's an example of a good (local) technical decision leading to a worse (global) outcome because of the social impact of that decision.

Development quote of the week

Posted Nov 10, 2021 4:53 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

I see it as inevitable that Wayland ends up with one standard compositor… and then the user-facing WM ends up nested within that exactly like with Xorg, as frustrated users spend the next few years learning all over again why crash-resilient multiprocess architectures were invented in the first place.

Development quote of the week

Posted Nov 10, 2021 5:41 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Obligatory link to the Arcan Crash-Resilient Wayland Compositing post:

https://arcan-fe.com/2017/12/24/crash-resilient-wayland-compositing/

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 24, 2021 14:10 UTC (Fri) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (7 responses)

Meh, not going to Wayland. My laptop’s graphics doesn’t need to be overtaxed with 3D, my .Xresources and .Xmodmap and .xbindkeysrc and stuff won’t work any more, nor evilwm, nor tons of other things.

My setup basically is from XFree86® times, and that’s not a problem.

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 25, 2021 9:05 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (6 responses)

> My laptop’s graphics doesn’t need to be overtaxed with 3D

Are you sure you're not overtaxing your graphics with 2D? Weird as it sounds, I got the impression graphics cards are 3D by default now, and it's actually MORE work to do 2D, because it needs a translation layer ...

Cheers,
Wol

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 25, 2021 10:19 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (5 responses)

Weird as it sounds, I got the impression graphics cards are 3D by default now, and it's actually MORE work to do 2D, because it needs a translation layer

There is no translation layer involved in using a modern GPU to do 2D graphics as a special case of 3D (by having all your triangles lie parallel to the plane of the screen and using an orthographic projection matrix).

What gets messy performance-wise is when you run 2D code that both (a) does a lot of stuff and (b) is written as if the underlying hardware works like a 2D accelerator card from 1992. That ends up going through translation layers that are liable to be horribly inefficient.

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 25, 2021 20:00 UTC (Sat) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (4 responses)

Yeah well I don’t exactly have a modern GPU. My work laptop is state of the art of about… 2007 or so.

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 25, 2021 20:47 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (3 responses)

Ah, yes. I have no idea what a 2007-vintage laptop is going to be like on that score.

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 25, 2021 21:12 UTC (Sat) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]

Well, it works *very* well with GNU/Linux because, unlike proprietary OSes, its hardware requirements do not raise over time.

(At least if you stick to a simple X11 window manager, not a desktop environment.)

And, this, kinda, was my point ☻

With the 8 GiB RAM upgrade (inofficial, but works) and a new SSD, it does well even in this decade.

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 26, 2021 6:42 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

Pretty sure 2007-vintage Intel is going to be using Glamor by default (definitely if using -modesetting, probably if using -intel), so all the 2D codepaths are already being turned into 3D.

Development quote of the week

Posted Sep 26, 2021 17:03 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

2007 sounds like possibly an i915/i945, and those definitely should not use Glamor. (Not to say they *can't*, but the 3D hardware is bad enough that they work better on -intel+SNA)

Development quote of the week

Posted Oct 1, 2021 4:32 UTC (Fri) by gwg (guest, #20811) [Link] (1 responses)

As usual, I will note that on Linux, only X11 supports color management. Without color management on Linux, a lot of users of creative type software will have to move to another platform (i.e. MSWin or OS X).

Development quote of the week

Posted Oct 6, 2021 7:29 UTC (Wed) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

> As usual, I will note that on Linux, only X11 supports color management.

Enjoy it while it lasts. ;)

Colour management support for Wayland clients (Wayland compositors can already support monitor profiles) is currently being worked on. It will exceed X11's capabilities, e.g. it will support HDR and floating point pixel formats.