Alt text:Twitter post by Daniel Feldman (@d_feldman): Linux is the only major operating system to support diagonal mode (credit [Twitter] @xssfox). Image shows an untrawide monitor rotated about 45 degrees, with a horizontal IDE window taking up a bottom triangle. A web browser and settings menu above it are organized creating a window shape almost like a stepped pyramid.
I was looking into this earlier to try fixing a display that was being offset on an old tv screen. The display was going off the left side of the TV, causing a black bar on the right side.
I was trying xrandr, and fixed it somewhat by offsetting the display back, but somehow it did not fix the right side - it seemed as if the display had went under the black bar.
But yeah you can offset, stretch, skew and rotate with xrandr
It only had two modes for the VGA source, 16:9 and 4:3. The 16:9 is the right ratio for the laptop but had the offset issue. The 4:3 makes it stretched out / squashed, but it doesn’t have the offset issue.
The –rotate normal,inverted,left,right does not work, but you can use the transform option to achieve the same effect. To create the transformation matrix you can use something like: angrytools.com/css-generator/transform/
for translateXY enter half the screen resolution
don’t copy the generated code, it has the numbers in the wrong order just type out the matrix row wise.
Rotating the display by a custom angle is possible through xrandr on X.org.
There’s no Wayland protocol for custom angle rotation, and I don’t expect anyone to create a protocol extension without a use-case.
My wild guess: Theoretically it should be possible for a compositor to support similar custom rotation, as applications simply draw to their surface (window), without knowing how and where it is displayed on the viewport (display).
But it might require quite a bit of work, depending on the project, so I don’t expect to ever see custom rotation on anything besides smaller/niche compositors.
There’s no Wayland protocol for custom angle rotation, and I don’t expect anyone to create a protocol extension without a use-case.
[gestures at thread] Does this not count??? 😁
Seriously, though: I suspect there might be non-novelty use-cases in mobile devices, especially things like smart watches. Those aren’t beyond the scope of Wayland in the long run, are they?
Smart watches tend to be microcontroller class devices because even though you can fit something powerful in there, powering it and heat dissipation make it silly.
The usual embedded-type application for wayland that it’s even especially designed for is automotive: Things without window management but not particularly hardware-restrained. Also think public transit ticket machines, ATMs, such things. In that sense, from wayland’s perspective android is already desktop.
There’s no Wayland protocol for custom angle rotation, and I don’t expect anyone to create a protocol extension without a use-case.
Puh-lease. It’s Wayland; the devs fully and honestly expect every app developer (eg.: calc, Libreoffice, notepad.exe) to implement custom angle rotation on their own.
No one died this kind of stuff because someone asked then to do it. This is the kind of useless insane stuff you do for the lulz, or because someone dared you.
That, right there, is a perfect example of why folks need to stop trying to shoehorn web apps everywhere they don’t belong. It’s a use-case for a proper native mobile app if ever there was one.
That’s why you should’ve just handled arbitrary rotations instead of inventing a finite predefined set of orientation “modes” in the first place.
Things get a lot easier in the long run if you aggressively look for commonalities and genericize the code that handles them instead of writing bunches of one-off special cases.
everything would be fluid in the layout and you would need to set what should go on top of what. And having this feature doesn’t seem worth the hassle of making if work, or even using it.
Who is doing that? In my experience, “web apps” are on the web or occasionally on desktop and are fine. Slack for example, is a fabulous desktop app and has used web tech from day one to great success
VS code is an electron app, there are a few others that have a simple enough purpose that they shouldn’t be using a whole dedicated chrome engine to function.
Vs code is an exemplary app and supports what I’m saying. As far as others…what’s the right amount of complexity for using electron? Imo the maintenance advantages alone almost justify using it. It’s not appropriate for every app but slack and vs code are pretty stellar examples of how well it can work.
VS code is a good app in spite of using electron, not because of it. There’s no reason a simple plaintext editor needs to allocate 300MB of ram even without extensions just to launch, and there is definitely no reason a plaintext editor should require compiling chromium to build from source.
Slack is fine, but only when you exclusively use slack. Throw in an actual browser, discord, VS Code, Whatsapp, teams (?), etc. each with their own chromium instance and now your 16GB of ram are being eaten up at idle.
That just means it shouldn’t be a native app or a web app, but instead should be a plain ol’ webpage that doesn’t try to do app-y things in the first place. The notion that web pages have any legitimate reason to know your viewport size (let alone anything at all about the screen hardware itself) is like one of those “statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged” memes, except not satirical.
Seriously: literally the entire defining principle of HTML (well, aside from the concept of “hyperlinks”) is that the client has the freedom to decide how the page should be rendered, but misguided – or megalomaniacal – graphic designers webmasters front-end web “devs” have been trying to break it ever since.
Lol - in your other comment you suggested that web devs key off of screen rotation to resize the page, but now you’re saying the client shouldn’t know anything about the viewport at all? Which is it? And why would the rotation angle be useful if I don’t know the aspect ratio of the screen? Or are we now assuming that widescreen will be a thing forever? I thought your ingenius idea was to be able to handle any use case.
Lol - in your other comment you suggested that web devs key off of screen rotation to resize the page, but now you’re saying the client shouldn’t know anything about the viewport at all? Which is it?
Legitimate apps key off screen rotation do fancy stuff. Web pages let the browser render them and don’t try to do fancy stuff. It’s not that fucking hard.
or a web app, but instead should be a plain ol’ webpage
I did not know about that distinction.
Hmm, so are there actual inadequacies in the browser-rendered standards that lead people to do this? I’d buy that it’s purely webpage sponsors wanting to be an all-powerful decider that controls what everyone sees and possibly thinks, but on the other hand I don’t know enough about browser rendering and page design to be sure. All my webpages are pretty spartan and scream “backend guy”.
It’d sure be nice if we could go back to circa-2012 with no popups or stupid bloat.
I sort of agree with you to a degree, but I also think that the browser having knowledge of the size of your viewport actually has some use. Now, I would probably like it more if all webpages were just made with the restriction of not knowing the viewport size since that would dictate some design choices. Cellphones can just scroll around the page anyways. They should be second class citizens on the internet anyway in my opinion. The smartphone has been one of the worst inventions for the human race with how much it seems to isolate a lot of people more than connecting them.
This could totally be adapted into a game for a very interesting immersive experience. Imagine entire worlds of gameplay that adapted to the orientation of your viewport.
Linux phones aren’t supported because it’s an Xorg feature. Usually Linux phones use Wayland for the better (touch) experience. If someone wanted to they could implement it on a Wayland compositor, but given that no other OS I know of supports diagonal mode, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
i’d like to know what hallucinogen you’re on or neurological damage you have, as you keep responding to things i never said-- i never mentioned a 30 year-old cell phone.
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