8 ms·

Best bit is that X11 runs really well these days -- responsive, fast, reliable. Emacs runs great, gitk, xterm, xosview, mplayer window manager, even Firefox is

by zbuf 10y ago

Best bit is that X11 runs really well these days -- responsive, fast, reliable. Emacs runs great, gitk, xterm, xosview, mplayer window manager, even Firefox is alright. Renoise, Maya, Blender too. Not to mention network transparency when I need it. It's a great environment to get my work done, and 3x hi res displays is the stuff I dreamt of 15 years ago. So it's a good job we're about to throw it all out and start again, eh folks?

tetromino_ 10y ago
If by "responsive, fast, reliable" you mean awful screen tearing when you mix X11, OpenGL, and/or video playback. Fixing it on any given machine is often possible through some voodoo and a hand-rolled combination of driver and software settings, but that voodoo works only for one specific combination of hardware and driver version, and every update means more rounds of trial and error...
- fulafel 10y ago
  This is not because of X11 the protocol though, just implementation bugs. Thus not a good reason to start from scratch.
  - audidude 10y ago
    How would you suggest we fix the core pointer protocol? (It's not an extension)
ldev 10y ago
> X11 runs really well these days -- responsive, fast, reliable Well, you haven't seen Windows then - the graphics stack is phenomenal and a marvel of engineering. nVidia drivers crash? I only get a second of black screen and then resume my work. Yep, that's right - no other GUI program crashed, I didn't had to do anything, literally just 1 second of black screen. Oh and you can have one window on two monitors and both parts of window will have full vsync - insane, huh? :) It's scary how good Windows is.
- insulanus 10y ago
  Yes, and it only took 30 years, too!
- charrondev 10y ago
  I don't much about graphic stacks, but in my experience the best, as least from the perspective of someone using multiple HiDPI displays macOS is far and away the best. Many windows applications don't scale properly or if they do they require special settings to do so. If you have monitors with different levels of scaling your going to have a terrible time on windows.
  - boterock 10y ago
    On the other hand, connecting a 4k display in windows will default to configure it at 200% scaling, in mac it defaults to render everything tiny as ants.
    - Neeek 10y ago
      I think it's only 150%, currently running windows on a 28" 4k monitor makes me think 200% would be too much? Oh I should also add that I haven't ever had any of the DPI issues the parent's parent is referencing. The only problem with multiple display DPI in Windows 10 is the shockingly bad fuzz you get on your secondary display from the thing being rendered either smaller or larger than normal (depending on whether the 4k is your primary or secondary) and then scaled up or down to fit the monitor.
      - ReverseCold 10y ago
        It may somehow be detecting the size of the display. My 13" laptop likes 250% scaling, while my 27" monitor likes 150%.
        Neeek 10y ago
        That would make sense, your DPI scaling is all to do with readability after all :)
bitwize 10y ago
It's the GNOME style of development: as soon as a bug appears which takes effort to fix, mark it EWONTFIX, declare it to be a symptom of the inherent brokenness of the current stack, then burn the whole thing to the ground and start over. Don't even let that which was burned fertilize new growth; it is tainted and must be purged entirely.
- audidude 10y ago
  How have you managed to make an argument about embedding a web browser about GNOME? As it were, GNOME's IDE (which I wrote) uses 0% CPU at idle.
  - killin_dan 10y ago
    Gedit is fantastic. Thanks for all the work on it. I used it for years before VS Code, and I still use it outside of work on my personal projects. Amazing how much work you can get done by just typing the damn code into the editor, sometimes. However, writing typescript in vscode genuinely changed the way I think about editors. It's a smalltalkish sort of feeling where my code (at least the textual level) lives and breathes in the editor, automatic tooltips that are actually relevant, etc. Idk. I like both.
    - audidude 10y ago
      I work on Builder, not Gedit. However, Gedit does get various features as we push them up into Gtk/GtkSourceView. The overview map is one such example. The pixelcache in GtkTextView enabling smooth 60fps scrolling is another.
  - aidenn0 10y ago
    To be fair, the conversation had already shifted to X11/Wayland. GNOME does have a history of starting over from scratch every few years; you probably had a good reason for writing Builder instead of working on Anjuta, and that's just the way the GNOME community seems to do things. This makes people, especially power users, disproportionately angry because when you rewrite something, it will be different (that's sort of the whole point);this is compounded by the fact that at the beginning it will be feature-poor compared to the older system. "Why did you replace X with Y? With X, I could configure it to treat mouse-button-3 as mouse-button-2, but only when my USB mouse was not attached and I wasn't holding down any modifier keys." See also: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ Before I did any serious software development, I was on that side of the table being frustrated (I still cry a little inside any time I remember Galeon. Rest in Peace, my favorite browser). I can also neither confirm nor deny that my windows are being decorated by sawfish and that I wrote a compositor in librep so that I could get modern features while using it.
audidude 10y ago
> Not to mention network transparency when I need it You realize that no X client draws like this nor has for 20 years right? They all use xshm to upload pixels so this "network transparency" is just buffer copying over the network. Not entirely different from a texture upload to a GPU. > So it's a good job we're about to throw it all out and start again, eh folks? Yes, by those of us who have been working on the same platform you claim to love, for the better part of a couple decades.
- zbuf 10y ago
  > You realize that no X client draws like this nor has for 20 years right? They all use xshm to upload pixels [...] You seem to be misinformed. Of the applications I mentioned, the main ones (gitk, xterm, emacs, xosview) are not doing that; seen clearly by analysing the X traffic. Of course, some of these could be built with an optional Qt front-end, in which case I would not be surprised. So you stated clearly "all" applications (for "20 years") which is provably incorrect; and I home in on this because it's a recurrence of another 'well, you never had it before' argument (that really might be better directed at the decaying state of X11 client toolkits) X11 isn't perfect, I have no doubt something better can be engineered (especially if it involves those who worked on X11). But people are missing the point that to replace X11 is a different matter from designing a better one. It involves acknowledging those who are quietly and successfully using X11 on a daily basis for the majority of their work and existing applications -- not telling us how wrong we are.
  - audidude 10y ago
    That's precisely why I stated 20 years. Those programs were written before that and largely haven't changed since. If you wan't anti-aliasing in any of those above (gitk/emacs come to mind) you'll be doing client side rendering of fonts and copying pixels.
    - monochromatic 10y ago
      > no X client draws like this nor has for 20 years If something was written a long time ago and hasn't changed in this respect, BUT is still widely used... you can't say that "no X client draws like this nor has for 20 years."
Hydraulix989 10y ago
To be fair, X11 can't handle multiple displays with mixed DPI.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  You sort of can with xrandr scaling.
  - truncate 10y ago
    Last time I did that, my CPU was always spinning and the rendering looked blurry and non-crisp. Now I just prefer to reduce my emacs and terminal font size, and keep Chrome in one display forever.
Yaggo 10y ago
X11 may "run really well these days" if your reference is X11 twenty years ago, but if you compare X11 to e.g. macOS, it's pretty obvious why Wayland is needed. X11 network transparency was nice feature when 10 mbit ethernet was hot as pizza, but these days remote desktop protocols offer more practical alternative.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

by zbuf 10y ago

tetromino_ 10y ago

If by "responsive, fast, reliable" you mean awful screen tearing when you mix X11, OpenGL, and/or video playback. Fixing it on any given machine is often possible through some voodoo and a hand-rolled combination of driver and software settings, but that voodoo works only for one specific combination of hardware and driver version, and every update means more rounds of trial and error...

fulafel 10y ago
This is not because of X11 the protocol though, just implementation bugs. Thus not a good reason to start from scratch.
- audidude 10y ago
  How would you suggest we fix the core pointer protocol? (It's not an extension)

ldev 10y ago

> X11 runs really well these days -- responsive, fast, reliable Well, you haven't seen Windows then - the graphics stack is phenomenal and a marvel of engineering. nVidia drivers crash? I only get a second of black screen and then resume my work. Yep, that's right - no other GUI program crashed, I didn't had to do anything, literally just 1 second of black screen. Oh and you can have one window on two monitors and both parts of window will have full vsync - insane, huh? :) It's scary how good Windows is.

insulanus 10y ago
Yes, and it only took 30 years, too!
charrondev 10y ago
I don't much about graphic stacks, but in my experience the best, as least from the perspective of someone using multiple HiDPI displays macOS is far and away the best. Many windows applications don't scale properly or if they do they require special settings to do so. If you have monitors with different levels of scaling your going to have a terrible time on windows.
- boterock 10y ago
  On the other hand, connecting a 4k display in windows will default to configure it at 200% scaling, in mac it defaults to render everything tiny as ants.
  - Neeek 10y ago
    I think it's only 150%, currently running windows on a 28" 4k monitor makes me think 200% would be too much? Oh I should also add that I haven't ever had any of the DPI issues the parent's parent is referencing. The only problem with multiple display DPI in Windows 10 is the shockingly bad fuzz you get on your secondary display from the thing being rendered either smaller or larger than normal (depending on whether the 4k is your primary or secondary) and then scaled up or down to fit the monitor.
    - ReverseCold 10y ago
      It may somehow be detecting the size of the display. My 13" laptop likes 250% scaling, while my 27" monitor likes 150%.
      - Neeek 10y ago
        That would make sense, your DPI scaling is all to do with readability after all :)

bitwize 10y ago

It's the GNOME style of development: as soon as a bug appears which takes effort to fix, mark it EWONTFIX, declare it to be a symptom of the inherent brokenness of the current stack, then burn the whole thing to the ground and start over. Don't even let that which was burned fertilize new growth; it is tainted and must be purged entirely.

audidude 10y ago
How have you managed to make an argument about embedding a web browser about GNOME? As it were, GNOME's IDE (which I wrote) uses 0% CPU at idle.
- killin_dan 10y ago
  Gedit is fantastic. Thanks for all the work on it. I used it for years before VS Code, and I still use it outside of work on my personal projects. Amazing how much work you can get done by just typing the damn code into the editor, sometimes. However, writing typescript in vscode genuinely changed the way I think about editors. It's a smalltalkish sort of feeling where my code (at least the textual level) lives and breathes in the editor, automatic tooltips that are actually relevant, etc. Idk. I like both.
  - audidude 10y ago
    I work on Builder, not Gedit. However, Gedit does get various features as we push them up into Gtk/GtkSourceView. The overview map is one such example. The pixelcache in GtkTextView enabling smooth 60fps scrolling is another.
- aidenn0 10y ago
  To be fair, the conversation had already shifted to X11/Wayland. GNOME does have a history of starting over from scratch every few years; you probably had a good reason for writing Builder instead of working on Anjuta, and that's just the way the GNOME community seems to do things. This makes people, especially power users, disproportionately angry because when you rewrite something, it will be different (that's sort of the whole point);this is compounded by the fact that at the beginning it will be feature-poor compared to the older system. "Why did you replace X with Y? With X, I could configure it to treat mouse-button-3 as mouse-button-2, but only when my USB mouse was not attached and I wasn't holding down any modifier keys." See also: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ Before I did any serious software development, I was on that side of the table being frustrated (I still cry a little inside any time I remember Galeon. Rest in Peace, my favorite browser). I can also neither confirm nor deny that my windows are being decorated by sawfish and that I wrote a compositor in librep so that I could get modern features while using it.

audidude 10y ago

> Not to mention network transparency when I need it You realize that no X client draws like this nor has for 20 years right? They all use xshm to upload pixels so this "network transparency" is just buffer copying over the network. Not entirely different from a texture upload to a GPU. > So it's a good job we're about to throw it all out and start again, eh folks? Yes, by those of us who have been working on the same platform you claim to love, for the better part of a couple decades.

zbuf 10y ago
> You realize that no X client draws like this nor has for 20 years right? They all use xshm to upload pixels [...] You seem to be misinformed. Of the applications I mentioned, the main ones (gitk, xterm, emacs, xosview) are not doing that; seen clearly by analysing the X traffic. Of course, some of these could be built with an optional Qt front-end, in which case I would not be surprised. So you stated clearly "all" applications (for "20 years") which is provably incorrect; and I home in on this because it's a recurrence of another 'well, you never had it before' argument (that really might be better directed at the decaying state of X11 client toolkits) X11 isn't perfect, I have no doubt something better can be engineered (especially if it involves those who worked on X11). But people are missing the point that to replace X11 is a different matter from designing a better one. It involves acknowledging those who are quietly and successfully using X11 on a daily basis for the majority of their work and existing applications -- not telling us how wrong we are.
- audidude 10y ago
  That's precisely why I stated 20 years. Those programs were written before that and largely haven't changed since. If you wan't anti-aliasing in any of those above (gitk/emacs come to mind) you'll be doing client side rendering of fonts and copying pixels.
  - monochromatic 10y ago
    > no X client draws like this nor has for 20 years If something was written a long time ago and hasn't changed in this respect, BUT is still widely used... you can't say that "no X client draws like this nor has for 20 years."

Hydraulix989 10y ago

To be fair, X11 can't handle multiple displays with mixed DPI.

nitrogen 10y ago
You sort of can with xrandr scaling.
- truncate 10y ago
  Last time I did that, my CPU was always spinning and the rendering looked blurry and non-crisp. Now I just prefer to reduce my emacs and terminal font size, and keep Chrome in one display forever.

Yaggo 10y ago

X11 may "run really well these days" if your reference is X11 twenty years ago, but if you compare X11 to e.g. macOS, it's pretty obvious why Wayland is needed. X11 network transparency was nice feature when 10 mbit ethernet was hot as pizza, but these days remote desktop protocols offer more practical alternative.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]