LeFantome

@LeFantome@programming.dev

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LeFantome,

My guess is that somebody has some important “Windows” application that they need to run that is calling into Cygwin. That means that the proper way to run it on Linux is almost certainly just to port it from Cygwin to Linux native. How do you do this though if somebody else wrote the code?

Pretty funny though.

LeFantome,

The only benefit that OpenOffice had was the name. Given the momentum that LibreOffice had early on, OpenOffice should clearly have joined with them and maybe ceded the name.

I am glad that LibreOffice did not try to merge back with OpenOffice as clearly it remains a poorly managed project. The continued existence of OpenOffice is doing tremendous damage to the wider ecosystem. The fact that Apache continues to promote the project not only reflects badly in them but show what poor stewards they are. I would not have wanted their lead ship to have hampered the subsequent success of LibreOffice. The whole episode just proves that LibreOffice was right to break away and not just because of Oracle.

LeFantome,

KDE currently marks Wayland support as experimental. They are expecting full readiness by Plasma 6 ( next quarter ).

Firefox has had Wayland marked as experimental for some time. They are expecting full readiness by…hey, look at that—they say that it is ready now.

So run Firefox on GNOME and enjoy the Wayland I guess.

LeFantome,

When is the last time you tried Intel hardware and with what software? I ask because your links do not really tell the same story as your post.

The first link says that Mesa got “more Intel optimizations”. That sounds like a good thing. It basically says the same thing about AMD and NVIDIA. The only GPU “crash” that was addressed was for AMD which is widely regarded as the best option for Linux. I would not read that article and come away with any concerns about Intel.

The second link says that kernel 6.2 added “full Intel support”. We are now in kernel 6.7. I use a rolling release and how a much newer kernel than 6.2. A brief Google leads me to believe that 6.5 ships with both Ubuntu 23.10 and Fedora 39.

I have not used these cards myself so I do it know but others have said the experience was decent now. The OP does not seem that demanding. If it ok now and actively improving, he may be quite happy. It sounds better than nouveau for sure. Is it really as bad as you say?

LeFantome,

You can remove the /s.

With GNOME and KDE going Wayland only, it is all but over for X. Qt, GTK, and Electron already work on Wayland so most apps are ready. Cinnamon, XFCE, Enlightenment, and MATE all have Wayland plans now. There are a few compositor libraries that other window managers and desktop environments can leverage.

NVIDIA is slowly getting their act together. Many of the legitimate complainants are being addressed. There are desirable features starting to appear that are Wayland only. Even non-Linux systems are adding Wayland support.

It is hard to believe after so many years but I think that, by Christmas 2024, most Linux users will have stopped using X and maybe even stopped talking about it.

LeFantome, (edited )

I thought this was an article talking about how Wayland makes it possible to perform deeply low-level optimizations to improve the performance of things like high-resolution video playback. Thank you for clearing it up for me.

Louvre: C++ library for building Wayland compositors. (lemmy.world)

Hello, yesterday I officially released Louvre v1.0.0, a C++ library designed for building Wayland compositors with a primary focus on ease of development. It provides a default method for handling protocols, input events, and rendering, which you can selectively and progressively override as required, allowing you to see a...

LeFantome,

I agree with your overall sentiment with the caveat that 20 years will be closer to 5. Early adopters are enjoying Wayland only benefits today. For example, the Steam Deck just launched with HDR and mainline support for Linux gamers in general will not be far behind.

Also, the list of window managers being left behind is starting to look less appealing than the list of window managers that are Wayland only. Hyperland is probably already more popular than WindowMkaer. As GNOME and KDE go Wayland only, they will continue to add features that regular users will want. I see more announcements for new Wayland compositors than I do for new X window managers.

Another factor that gets missed is that the main dev support for X comes from Red Hat. RHEL9 is already Wayland based. When RHEL8 comes off support in 5 years, Red Hat will abandon X. How long will X stay viable after that?

As the number of X users dwindle, we will see toolkits drop support for X. GTK5 for example. 5 years may be too soon for that but I cannot see it taking 20 years.

Wayland being “valuable to most users” will come faster than you think.

LeFantome,

What programming language?

LeFantome,

Many people have predicted the death of the small, independent window manager with the coming of Wayland. I have heard multiple times that only large projects like GNOME and KDE would be able to take on the burden of making a compositor.

Now, I do think that lots of no longer actively developed window managers could get left behind. But the idea that it will be too complicated to create a window manager now is turning out to be wrong.

First, fewer desktop environments are getting left behind than feared. XFCE, Cinnamon, and MATE all seem to have Wayland plans now.

The big change is the appearance of not one but multiple compositor libraries designed to make it easier to create a window manager for Wayland. Some of them look like they might make it easier than it was under X. The approach taken by this one makes the idea of hacking around with it very inviting.

Although having to create a compositor has made things difficultly until now, I think the idea of decoupling the compositor for Wayland is going to look smart in the long run.

Being separate from Wayland, compositor devs are free to experiment and window manager authors can select the one that best maps to their goals.

I was reading up on Oasis Linux yesterday. It comes with a Wayland compositor ( SWC ) and tiling window manager ( Velox ) that are less than 20,000 lines of code combined!

It would not be practical for a light-weight distro to trim down Xorg like that. But I the compositor is separate, it can be either smaller or feature rich. SWC is XWayland compatible but obviously that is going to add more size if you need it.

Looking forward to the window manager innovation that projects like Louvre enable.

LeFantome,

SWC has been out there for a long time. It came before Wlroots I think.

github.com/michaelforney/swc

LeFantome,

You forgot the part where this is what is happening.

The Linux ecosystem is not the product of a giant corporation. It is highly distributed and both built and promoted by multiple players with many different goals and interests.

The people actually building the ecosystem have aligned almost completely on Wayland. The strong implication is that X was not working for them.

Distributions have been slower to move but that is happening now. You can look at this as forcing users to move. My guess is that it is more a case of pleasing some uses and frustrating others where more users want what Wayland provides than miss what it doesn’t.

It is always painful to be a laggard during a technology transition. There is usually a period where the new tech becomes common before it does what you want. That is just what technology transitions look like. When that happens, the problem is that the majority is perfectly happy and maybe happier than ever. That is why things happen when they do.

LeFantome,

Have you ever heard of Velox ( based on SWC )?

It is a tiling Wayland compositor that is only a couple of megs in size. On Oasis Linux, I launched into Velox, opened a terminal, and checked the memory usage. It was under 30 MB of RAM. That is for the whole system!

That experience made me think differently about Wayland.

There was only one Xorg. For me, the evidence that it was big and complicated is best expressed by the fact that, over decades, the number of projects that competed to provide X had dwindled to one. There was loads of unhappiness with it and yet, there were no forks. Why?

Now Wayland. There are new Wayland compositors all the time now. I just saw one yesterday—Louvre. The basis for Velox above is SWC. There is Wayfire. There is Weston. There is of course wlroots. And both KDE and GNOME have made their own. I think somebody even wrote one for Haiku! For me, this is evidence in itself that making a Wayland compositor is easier than implementing X.

It also means that all these Wayland compositors can compete with each other and drive each other. It means that I, as the end user, can pick a super stripped down version when that is what I want and an all-singing, all-dancing version when that is what I want instead. In some situations I will be happy with, and thankful for, Velox and in other situations I will want GNOME.

It is taking a long time and the journey has not been smooth. That said, I am becoming quite confident that we are in a much better place. For normal uses, Wayland is in a good place now. The level of innovation is very high. Dev can start to shift from the basics to the extras. I fully expect that we are heading into an exciting time on the Linux desktop.

LeFantome, (edited )

What they are talking about is that some of the Wayland compositors rely on things like libinput and libdrm which are Linux specific.

This is not “Wayland” really but, from the point of view of a regular user, it may as well be. As the OP points out, there is no /usr/bin/Wayland

It is not really a great criticism although it must be frustrating for the BSD folks and others. Of course, the answer like always is to contribute. Nothing stopping anybody from taking wlroots ( or whatever ) and adding abstractions that make it more portable.

Non-Linux operating systems have already added Wayland support ( like Haiku ). If I had the time, I would add it to SerenityOS myself.

Actually, if I had the time, I might write a WaylandServer for X. First, it would be funny. Second, the people that do not want to move could stay on X forever even when everything stops supporting it. I would have to make sure that my WaylandServer could run XWayland of course.

LeFantome,

RavynOS?

LeFantome,

Old and useless stuff that builds up over time

LeFantome,

No, and I do not expect that they will. They consider it a feature independent of the window server. To them, it is a feature, not a bug.

LeFantome, (edited )

Not only is nobody forking X but many people are building Wayland compositors.

Listening to the detractors, you get the impression that Wayland is a failure and / or that X may still be the better choice.

Then you realize the only people still working on X are paid by enterprise distros with long-term support obligations. All the toolkit people have moved to Wayland. The major desktop environments have shifted to Wayland. All the “new” window managers are for Wayland.

Wayland is already supported on BSD ( FreeBSD at least ).

The actual developers have spoken and Wayland has won.

LeFantome,

I have noticed that one of the groups that does not seem to be complaining about Wayland are the toolkit folks. GTK added support back in GTK3. Qt added it. Enlightenment added it. They must have jumped on it for a reason.

When you look at the Wayland readiness docs for things like XFCE, it stands out that all the apps are already ready ( because they are GTK based in this case ).

LeFantome, (edited )

Clearly biased towards BSD as both MacOS and Windows started off with the BSD TCP/IP stack.

Many operating systems use the WiFi from BSD as well.

LeFantome,

Maybe.

That said, everything you said about the Xorg server could be said about wlroots. Nobody has to “implement Wayland because they must” anymore. The X approach is available in Wayland as you can build your window manager on top of wlroots and many do.

Seems fairly apples to apples to me.

Or you can choose a competing compositor library as there are now quite a few available. I think XFCE is looking at using Wayfire. Or you can control more of the stack directly and write your own as GNOME and KDE are doing.

Not only do you not have to implement Wayland to make a window manager, because compositor libraries are available, but people are writing Wayland compositors even though they do not have to. Louvre is a compositor recently released that seems expressly designed to make writing new window managers super easy.

As for innovation, there seems to be lots in Wayland. Valve just added HDR. GTK is looking at using dmabuf. There are already Wayland window managers that are not ports from X. There seems to be innovation at every level.

LeFantome,

That is why I never switched to Linux. I mean, it is over 30 years now and it still doesn’t do everything. Sure it does some cool stuff—but not “everything” I could do before. What is taking them so long?

I mean, really great point.

LeFantome,

Very

What do you think about this? (www.youtube.com)

Since i see so much linux talk on lemmy i got curious and watched a video about the common distros. How true is the information in this video? The person hardly describes why debian and arch are just better than every other distro. At least i’m definitely now curious about Mint or something for gaming.

LeFantome,

Red Hat created Fedora specifically to be the “community” distro. There used to just be Red Hat which tried to be both free and paid. Now they have Fedora and RHEL.

Red Hat releases all their own software as GPL. They are one of the few players releasing new and important GPL software. As you state, they employ and pay people to spend most of their time building an emphatically free and community based distro. I cannot think of a company that does more for Open Source.

LeFantome,

The basic GUI experience in X is provided by the window manager. It controls how your windows are placed ( eg. Tiling vs Stacking / Floating ), how they are decorated ( eg. Max / Min / Close buttons ), and how they behave ( eg. Click to focus ). In X, the window manager runs as an application on the X server. You can only use one at a time.

In Wayland, the “window manager” is the display-server too and is called a compositor. For smaller projects, there are compositor libraries that provide similar capabilities to what the X server did so that these projects can concentrate on the “window manager” part. You can think of a Wayland compositor as equivalent to an X window manager ).

A Desktop Environment comes with a window manager ( or compositor ) and adds other tools that run alongside ( or on top of ) the window manager to provide a full user experience. This may include panels ( eg. think Windows start button, icon bar, and status tray ), docks ( like MacOS ), global menus, notification applets, and the desktop surface itself ( eg. are there icons or other features on the desktop ). A DE usually comes with a standard set of basic applications like a file manager, image viewer, document viewer, media player, and the like.

If you start with a basic window manager then yes you have to add all this other stuff yourself. Of course you may not want some of it and so can have a much lighter experience. You can also just choose tools that you like. Of course, they may not match visually or work perfectly together.

If you use a DE, the experience is curated for you and everything is more likely to work well out of the box. That said, nothing stops you from swapping out whatever components you want. You can even use a different window manager than the DE default.

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