3 ms·

> Fractional scaling is kind of the most visible thing today. And also perfectly possible with X11 because the pitch information is exposed via the Xrandr exte

by sprash 6y ago

> Fractional scaling is kind of the most visible thing today. And also perfectly possible with X11 because the pitch information is exposed via the Xrandr extention > Problem: tearing, solvable with double buffering, maybe. Solved since ages. Just enable Tearfree in your Xorg.conf. That also shows how great X11 really is. It allows you the choice to turn it on or off. Because Tearfree comes at a cost of latency. > Problem: Xorg runs as root, solvable, there’s ways of making your user have direct control of the frame buffer device. OpneBSD solved that two decades ago. Also it perfectly possible on Linux to run X11 as non-Root. > Problem: Xorg is a network system, and a porous one, meaning it’s possible to intercept keystrokes from any running program. This is a feature not a bug. The security paradigm is blacklisting (which means sandboxing untrusted apps) instead of whitelising (which means locking everything up and only allow the compositor to do stuff). Since the vast majority of Software on FOSS system is trusted X11 is the far superior solution here. > Problem: Xorg is a network system, meaning it is very inefficient. X11 runs even on 386's and beats Wayland in every performance metric, especially latency. After 13 years of development only some compositors come close to X11's performance. > Problem: Xorg needs to be backwards compatible, so it can’t dig much into hardware features. Backwards compatibility is a major feature even 40 year old Software runs on current Xorg which is an impressive feat. As for the "hardware features": DRI3 uses the exact same buffer sharing mechanism as the major Wayland compositors do. Wayland offers zero advantage in exploited Hardware features. On the contrary X11 is capable of using hardware layers that has the effect that you can smoothly move your mouse even on heavy load and OOM events. Wayland still completely craps out in that regard. > Overall, wayland is a good clean slate, it’s been in development a long time. It is a clean slate, but a very bad one. The wrong philosophy ("every frame is perfect") and the wrong abstractions ("everything in the universe is a buffer made of RGB values") make it a major step backwards in computer graphics on Unix/Linux.

Sebb767 6y ago
> The security paradigm is blacklisting [...]. Since the vast majority of Software on FOSS system is trusted X11 is the far superior solution here. This is absolutely not a good solution. Even if you audited all your software enough to consider it trusted (which is unlikely if you're not a purist - see IDEs, browsers, widevine, Docker ...), it does not guarantee anything is secure. Anything that receives input from the outside might be vulnerable to an RCE. If you're running it under a different user or in a jail, the impact is limited - unless it can access your X server, in which case it can simply log everything you type and escalate. Jailing an app is basically impossible under X. Yes, you can use Zephyr, but you're not going to be able to watch a video there and you're WM integration is going to be miserable as well. And realistically you'd really need to jail most apps. X11 might work for a lot of things, but blacklisting is absolutely not a superior approach.
- sprash 6y ago
  > it does not guarantee anything is secure. Indeed. But looking at the state of the average Wayland compositor right now I trust all of my X11 software more than I trust Wayland. Especially when X11 and most clients have been battle tested for up to 35 years. Besides that, you can also use Xpra for sandboxing which has better desktop integration.
floatboth 6y ago
> perfectly possible with X11 because the pitch information is exposed via the Xrandr extention Only the "Windows" kind of scaling where the app works in non-scaled, real pixels and does everything by itself. Not the "Apple" kind of scaling that Wayland supports, where you have logical pixels backed by 2x/3x/… the physical pixels. (Like many things Apple does, this was invented for good reasons. Positioning a window to be on both a 1x and a 2x monitor just works with that kind of scaling, without the app ever having to consider the displays it touches.) > Solved since ages. Just enable Tearfree in your Xorg.conf. That's a driver-specific hack that kinda maybe works sometimes. Sometimes you need to juggle compositor options combined with that and nothing works anyway. > X11 runs even on 386's and beats Wayland in every performance metric, especially latency. Any composited X11 desktop is slower than a Wayland one, with the Xorg server acting as a bloated IPC broker in between the compositor and the client. Yeah, you can get really low latency if you just don't composite at all. Go back to Windows 95 if you think that's acceptable :) > X11 is capable of using hardware layers that has the effect that you can smoothly move your mouse even on heavy load and OOM events. Wayland still completely craps out in that regard. I'm sure pretty much all production Wayland compositors use the cursor layer. wlroots for sure does. (But I don't think it's a big deal under heavy load, there the problem is the display server even processing the mouse events at all first.) Weston goes further and can use HW layers for actual surface compositing when possible. wlroots is going to gain that power soon-ish with libliftoff. > The wrong philosophy ("every frame is perfect") Again, feel free to use Windows 95. For anyone used to current commercial desktop and mobile UIs, any imperfect frames are unacceptable, artifacts like tearing make your system look like a complete joke. Apple computers didn't show imperfect frames since the early early 2000s PowerPC era. Not matching that is a complete shame.
- sprash 6y ago
  > logical pixels backed by 2x/3x/… the physical pixels. This is not fractional scaling. Fractional scaling has to be done by the application itself (even on Wayland). > That's a driver-specific hack It is not a hack. It is a solution and a very good one because DDX drivers can make use of vendor specific 2D acceleration and therefore achieve much better latency with the tearfree option on X11 than Wayland ever will where everything runs through the 3D pipeline by default. > Any composited X11 desktop is slower than a Wayland one If you enable Tearfree you don't need a compositor if the driver works properly. Of course X11 compositors with fancy blur effects have bad performance. I always turn them off. > Go back to Windows 95 if you think that's acceptable :) Why don't you switch to Android? Android already does everything that Wayland fans want and better. > I'm sure pretty much all production Wayland compositors use the cursor layer. I get severe mouse stuttering on high CPU or GPU load. A problem that was solved on X11 20 years ago. I have no idea what wlroots really does but it does it definitely wrong. > Go back to Windows 95 if you think that's acceptable :) The value of X11 is the ecosystem and platform it provides. If you want Linux with a compositor switch to Android. There you also have your sandboxing and whatnot. Don't turn the Linux Desktop into a Phone OS. As Desktop OS I genuinely prefer Windows 95 over Android. > Apple computers didn't show imperfect frames since the early early 2000s PowerPC era. Ever used OS X on those? They are barely usable because of severe lag and stuttering. But yeah the frames were so perfect that most people decided to switch back to MacOS 9 to do real work.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

by sprash 6y ago

Sebb767 6y ago

> The security paradigm is blacklisting [...]. Since the vast majority of Software on FOSS system is trusted X11 is the far superior solution here. This is absolutely not a good solution. Even if you audited all your software enough to consider it trusted (which is unlikely if you're not a purist - see IDEs, browsers, widevine, Docker ...), it does not guarantee anything is secure. Anything that receives input from the outside might be vulnerable to an RCE. If you're running it under a different user or in a jail, the impact is limited - unless it can access your X server, in which case it can simply log everything you type and escalate. Jailing an app is basically impossible under X. Yes, you can use Zephyr, but you're not going to be able to watch a video there and you're WM integration is going to be miserable as well. And realistically you'd really need to jail most apps. X11 might work for a lot of things, but blacklisting is absolutely not a superior approach.

sprash 6y ago
> it does not guarantee anything is secure. Indeed. But looking at the state of the average Wayland compositor right now I trust all of my X11 software more than I trust Wayland. Especially when X11 and most clients have been battle tested for up to 35 years. Besides that, you can also use Xpra for sandboxing which has better desktop integration.

floatboth 6y ago

> perfectly possible with X11 because the pitch information is exposed via the Xrandr extention Only the "Windows" kind of scaling where the app works in non-scaled, real pixels and does everything by itself. Not the "Apple" kind of scaling that Wayland supports, where you have logical pixels backed by 2x/3x/… the physical pixels. (Like many things Apple does, this was invented for good reasons. Positioning a window to be on both a 1x and a 2x monitor just works with that kind of scaling, without the app ever having to consider the displays it touches.) > Solved since ages. Just enable Tearfree in your Xorg.conf. That's a driver-specific hack that kinda maybe works sometimes. Sometimes you need to juggle compositor options combined with that and nothing works anyway. > X11 runs even on 386's and beats Wayland in every performance metric, especially latency. Any composited X11 desktop is slower than a Wayland one, with the Xorg server acting as a bloated IPC broker in between the compositor and the client. Yeah, you can get really low latency if you just don't composite at all. Go back to Windows 95 if you think that's acceptable :) > X11 is capable of using hardware layers that has the effect that you can smoothly move your mouse even on heavy load and OOM events. Wayland still completely craps out in that regard. I'm sure pretty much all production Wayland compositors use the cursor layer. wlroots for sure does. (But I don't think it's a big deal under heavy load, there the problem is the display server even processing the mouse events at all first.) Weston goes further and can use HW layers for actual surface compositing when possible. wlroots is going to gain that power soon-ish with libliftoff. > The wrong philosophy ("every frame is perfect") Again, feel free to use Windows 95. For anyone used to current commercial desktop and mobile UIs, any imperfect frames are unacceptable, artifacts like tearing make your system look like a complete joke. Apple computers didn't show imperfect frames since the early early 2000s PowerPC era. Not matching that is a complete shame.

sprash 6y ago
> logical pixels backed by 2x/3x/… the physical pixels. This is not fractional scaling. Fractional scaling has to be done by the application itself (even on Wayland). > That's a driver-specific hack It is not a hack. It is a solution and a very good one because DDX drivers can make use of vendor specific 2D acceleration and therefore achieve much better latency with the tearfree option on X11 than Wayland ever will where everything runs through the 3D pipeline by default. > Any composited X11 desktop is slower than a Wayland one If you enable Tearfree you don't need a compositor if the driver works properly. Of course X11 compositors with fancy blur effects have bad performance. I always turn them off. > Go back to Windows 95 if you think that's acceptable :) Why don't you switch to Android? Android already does everything that Wayland fans want and better. > I'm sure pretty much all production Wayland compositors use the cursor layer. I get severe mouse stuttering on high CPU or GPU load. A problem that was solved on X11 20 years ago. I have no idea what wlroots really does but it does it definitely wrong. > Go back to Windows 95 if you think that's acceptable :) The value of X11 is the ecosystem and platform it provides. If you want Linux with a compositor switch to Android. There you also have your sandboxing and whatnot. Don't turn the Linux Desktop into a Phone OS. As Desktop OS I genuinely prefer Windows 95 over Android. > Apple computers didn't show imperfect frames since the early early 2000s PowerPC era. Ever used OS X on those? They are barely usable because of severe lag and stuttering. But yeah the frames were so perfect that most people decided to switch back to MacOS 9 to do real work.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]