3 ms·

> a middleman in the communication of applications and the compositor There's an implicit assumption here, that one is even using a compositing window manager.

by loxias 5y ago

> a middleman in the communication of applications and the compositor There's an implicit assumption here, that one is even using a compositing window manager. I'm guessing that you do, and that's cool -- you do you! But there are lots of people, who, when sitting down at a fresh install of any operating system, start by turning off all the 3d/transparency/drop shadow/animation/eye candy they can find. I'm one of them, and about half of my peers do as well. The first thing I do on Android is disable all the useless (imho) animations and effects, the same on Windows (back when I used Windows), and on Debian, where I have real control, the last time I saw a compositing window manager was I think 2006. I remarked "Ok. I guess this is for people who want their Linux to look like a Mac" and then promptly removed it. I have nothing against people wanting eye candy! Eye candy sells! But... don't pretend that it's a necessary, or even important feature. > you can’t have displays with different DPIs This is factually not true. Right now I'm sitting in front of a thinkpad connected to two monitors, all 3 displays have different DPIs. I can drag my windows around between them just fine. Everything works. I'm happy. What I think you mean is "Wayland supports point based instead of pixel based rendering", or "Wayland does image resampling for you, making it easier for people who don't want to use native resolution" (I don't know Wayland internals). Anyway, I think this whole comment thread is both educational and disturbing. :/ There appears to be two camps, both of which are incorrectly assuming that everyone else thinks like them. I'm guilty of this as well. Other than the comment about security, and use on embedded environments, all of the "features" that Wayland offers (according to these comments) are, from my perspective, things I would turn off because they'd get in the way. And I will follow your suggestion, and sometime soon set up a VM, and try to install Wayland and whatever the current whiz bang desktop environment is.

kaba0 5y ago
> start by turning off all the 3d/transparency/drop shadow/animation/eye candy they can find. I'm one of them, and about half of my peers do as well. That’s just one part of what a compositor does. I assume you prefer watching videos without tearing and those are really apparent with Xorg without a compositor — something solved entirely by wayland’s “every frame is perfect”. Even on window managers like sway which has absolutely no animation or eye candy. Android also uses composition even with animations turned off. I’m not sure we mean the same thing with multiple monitors having different DPI settings. X can’t really handle different screens — it will create a huge framebuffer of all of them together and draw on that. So if you have a high DPI and a “regular” monitor, content will appear right on the regular one, but overly small on the other. If both screens have the same DPI, X can also render at eg. at 2x size. And thank you for trying it out, X is indeed a cool project that spanned 3 decades. But due to the very major improvements in the underlying hardware, its abstraction is simply not up to date.
- loxias 5y ago
  > I assume you prefer watching videos without tearing and those are really apparent with Xorg without a compositor. Of course! I hate tearing, just as much as the next guy. However I honestly haven't seen any tearing in video watching under Xorg, anytime in .. I donno .. at least the last 6 years. And this isn't exactly a powerful machine. :) If I have a video windowed and I move it around while playing, I can see a bit of tear. But.. I don't do that. Most of the time if I'm watching a video it's full screen. It looks perfect. I bet the tearing you've seen using Xorg is attributable to something else. I remember back when video kinda sucked (in anything other than mplayer) but that was years ago. I have a windowed Netflix playing video as I type this and nope, no tearing. shrug I see in the Xorg.0.log that the COMPOSITE extension is loaded, but I'm not running a compositing WM, nor am I running a stand alone compositor. I think we can put this "Xorg video playback has tearing" myth to bed. It was certainly true back when suspend and resume didn't always work right, but that was quite some time ago. Having read much about Wayland in the last few hours, I think a more accurate thing to say would be "In Wayland, there is never any tearing. In Xorg, you can have tearing under some conditions" There are some very compelling reasons to be interested in Wayland that don't require exaggerating Xorg's failings. :) > X can’t really handle different screens — it will create a huge framebuffer of all of them together and draw on that. So if you have a high DPI and a “regular” monitor, content will appear right on the regular one, but overly small on the other. I think we have a different definition of "handle", and I apologize in advance for semantic pedantry. I'm looking at 3 screens right now, one of them is a 14" "4kish" (3200x1800). Xorg "handles" it just fine. As I drag a window to the highest resolution screen (which I have in portrait orientation and use basically only for coding), the content appears exactly as I expect it to. That monitor has a higher DPI, which means the pixels are a different size. It's not a bug... it's expected and desired behavior. Dots Per Inch. It's right in the name! If some software in the display stack was interpolating everything, making my text look fuzzy, now that would be a serious bug to me! I really really think what you mean to say is "Xorg doesn't support rendering things in terms of physical size regardless of the underlying resolution." That might be true. Pleaseeeee say that instead. :) Personally, I wouldn't use that feature but I can imagine one desiring it. But... when you say "X can't have displays with different DPIs" ... I mean this with no offense, but... you sound less intelligent than I'm sure you are. Because I can plainly see multiple displays with different DPIs right in front of my face. :) Xorg has been able to "handle" multiple displays since Xinerama, IIRC. Anyway, I'm encouraged to take Wayland out for a spin for a reasons not mentioned in this comment thread. I like minimalism. :)
md8z 5y ago
"This is factually not true. Right now I'm sitting in front of a thinkpad connected to two monitors, all 3 displays have different DPIs. I can drag my windows around between them just fine. Everything works. I'm happy." Funny thing about that: if you want them to be scaled correctly based on different factors for each monitor, then you need a compositor...
- loxias 5y ago
  > ... "correctly" ... You and I have an opposite definition of "correct" in this context, perhaps neither of us should use it! See enriquto's comment above, this is subjective. To us, we expect a window of size WxH to be WxH pixels, regardless of display. That's my definition of handling it properly, and when I use Wayland that's what will happen. I will (grudgingly!) concede that perhaps it's not "universally and obviously correct" that things stay the same number of pixels, if you concede that perhaps it's not "universally and obviously correct" for windows to be drawn in terms of points and scaled behind the scenes.
  - md8z 5y ago
    We don't though, I mean if you explicitly change the scaling factor. Of course if you don't change the scaling factor then your scaling would technically be correct.
    - loxias 5y ago
      You're right! I'm sorry! You said "scaled correctly" but I misinterpreted as "appear/behave correctly". Before this discussion I didn't have the concept of "scaling" my windows.. because that doesn't make sense to me, and it's something I'd never want. So my scaling factor for everything would be 1. Given that, Xorg "scales" perfectly.
- destructionator 5y ago
  > Funny thing about that: if you want them to be scaled correctly based on different factors for each monitor, then you need a compositor... No, you don't. And using a naive compositor is liable to make things blurry compared to the direct approach (the application requests the physical dpi for its current location and changes its vector drawing).

by loxias 5y ago

kaba0 5y ago

> start by turning off all the 3d/transparency/drop shadow/animation/eye candy they can find. I'm one of them, and about half of my peers do as well. That’s just one part of what a compositor does. I assume you prefer watching videos without tearing and those are really apparent with Xorg without a compositor — something solved entirely by wayland’s “every frame is perfect”. Even on window managers like sway which has absolutely no animation or eye candy. Android also uses composition even with animations turned off. I’m not sure we mean the same thing with multiple monitors having different DPI settings. X can’t really handle different screens — it will create a huge framebuffer of all of them together and draw on that. So if you have a high DPI and a “regular” monitor, content will appear right on the regular one, but overly small on the other. If both screens have the same DPI, X can also render at eg. at 2x size. And thank you for trying it out, X is indeed a cool project that spanned 3 decades. But due to the very major improvements in the underlying hardware, its abstraction is simply not up to date.

loxias 5y ago
> I assume you prefer watching videos without tearing and those are really apparent with Xorg without a compositor. Of course! I hate tearing, just as much as the next guy. However I honestly haven't seen any tearing in video watching under Xorg, anytime in .. I donno .. at least the last 6 years. And this isn't exactly a powerful machine. :) If I have a video windowed and I move it around while playing, I can see a bit of tear. But.. I don't do that. Most of the time if I'm watching a video it's full screen. It looks perfect. I bet the tearing you've seen using Xorg is attributable to something else. I remember back when video kinda sucked (in anything other than mplayer) but that was years ago. I have a windowed Netflix playing video as I type this and nope, no tearing. shrug I see in the Xorg.0.log that the COMPOSITE extension is loaded, but I'm not running a compositing WM, nor am I running a stand alone compositor. I think we can put this "Xorg video playback has tearing" myth to bed. It was certainly true back when suspend and resume didn't always work right, but that was quite some time ago. Having read much about Wayland in the last few hours, I think a more accurate thing to say would be "In Wayland, there is never any tearing. In Xorg, you can have tearing under some conditions" There are some very compelling reasons to be interested in Wayland that don't require exaggerating Xorg's failings. :) > X can’t really handle different screens — it will create a huge framebuffer of all of them together and draw on that. So if you have a high DPI and a “regular” monitor, content will appear right on the regular one, but overly small on the other. I think we have a different definition of "handle", and I apologize in advance for semantic pedantry. I'm looking at 3 screens right now, one of them is a 14" "4kish" (3200x1800). Xorg "handles" it just fine. As I drag a window to the highest resolution screen (which I have in portrait orientation and use basically only for coding), the content appears exactly as I expect it to. That monitor has a higher DPI, which means the pixels are a different size. It's not a bug... it's expected and desired behavior. Dots Per Inch. It's right in the name! If some software in the display stack was interpolating everything, making my text look fuzzy, now that would be a serious bug to me! I really really think what you mean to say is "Xorg doesn't support rendering things in terms of physical size regardless of the underlying resolution." That might be true. Pleaseeeee say that instead. :) Personally, I wouldn't use that feature but I can imagine one desiring it. But... when you say "X can't have displays with different DPIs" ... I mean this with no offense, but... you sound less intelligent than I'm sure you are. Because I can plainly see multiple displays with different DPIs right in front of my face. :) Xorg has been able to "handle" multiple displays since Xinerama, IIRC. Anyway, I'm encouraged to take Wayland out for a spin for a reasons not mentioned in this comment thread. I like minimalism. :)

md8z 5y ago

"This is factually not true. Right now I'm sitting in front of a thinkpad connected to two monitors, all 3 displays have different DPIs. I can drag my windows around between them just fine. Everything works. I'm happy." Funny thing about that: if you want them to be scaled correctly based on different factors for each monitor, then you need a compositor...

loxias 5y ago
> ... "correctly" ... You and I have an opposite definition of "correct" in this context, perhaps neither of us should use it! See enriquto's comment above, this is subjective. To us, we expect a window of size WxH to be WxH pixels, regardless of display. That's my definition of handling it properly, and when I use Wayland that's what will happen. I will (grudgingly!) concede that perhaps it's not "universally and obviously correct" that things stay the same number of pixels, if you concede that perhaps it's not "universally and obviously correct" for windows to be drawn in terms of points and scaled behind the scenes.
- md8z 5y ago
  We don't though, I mean if you explicitly change the scaling factor. Of course if you don't change the scaling factor then your scaling would technically be correct.
  - loxias 5y ago
    You're right! I'm sorry! You said "scaled correctly" but I misinterpreted as "appear/behave correctly". Before this discussion I didn't have the concept of "scaling" my windows.. because that doesn't make sense to me, and it's something I'd never want. So my scaling factor for everything would be 1. Given that, Xorg "scales" perfectly.
destructionator 5y ago
> Funny thing about that: if you want them to be scaled correctly based on different factors for each monitor, then you need a compositor... No, you don't. And using a naive compositor is liable to make things blurry compared to the direct approach (the application requests the physical dpi for its current location and changes its vector drawing).