7 ms·

Wayland does not support screen savers

58 points by bobse 3y ago

vfclists 3y ago
Hmmmmmm, interesting!!
_lvbh 3y ago
I’m probably part of the minority but I simply power off my laptop whenever I don’t need to use it for more than 10 minutes. Perhaps PTSD from when battery used to drain if it hibernates
- bobse 3y ago
  "Microsoft Modern standby"? Real hibernation doesn't drain battery.
- rurban 3y ago
  The BIOS will do it for you automatically.
- BrotherBisquick 3y ago
  [dead]
mble 3y ago
Probably for the folks that use CRT, the X11 would be a better option especially, when you consider when the development of Xorg was started.
rixthefox 3y ago
Wayland never fails to impress me with how much stuff has still been left out (are screenshots still broken?) that it hardly shocks me to learn that it doesn't support screensavers. Progress over many years worth of time. This is why whenever people ask me what display I run it's always X. X is a piece of work for sure but it's the only display server that actually works for almost every conceivable use case. Despite all the time and effort Wayland devs have spent to try and wrest control over the Linux graphical rendering server they are still a long ways from replacing X for good.
- bravetraveler 3y ago
  Screenshots have been working for me for years with grim/slurp One selects the area, the other captures it. The joy of a tiling wm, make your own fun (and success)
- genter 3y ago
  > Wayland is the poster child for a rewrite that tries to be 'simple' and in doing so over-complicates things by under specification. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37350221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37350221 (And did JWZ get rid of the special picture for people with Hacker News in the referrer?)
  - guiambros 3y ago
    I was thinking the same. This is the second link I click today to jwz.org mostly expecting to see the usual "welcome HN" page, only to be surprised by actual content. Anyone knows if he has grown out of his hatred for HN, or is this just a misconfigured server?
    - NobodyNada 3y ago
      No, HN has started adding the "noreferer" attribute to outgoing links so that sites cannot detect or block HN traffic.
      - guiambros 3y ago
        Ahh, that makes a lot of sense now. Genius, thank you! (Just bummer that a lot of legitimate sites won't be able to figure out who's sending them traffic. But I guess http referer (sic) isn't very reliable these days anyway)
- squidbeak 3y ago
  I had to abandon it over screenshots. I realise X is deprecated, but it works and it never gives me a reason to notice it. Wayland gave me a few. Till it matures I don't mind sticking with x.
sillywalk 3y ago
It looks like linking to jwz.org doesn't show that picture anymore.
Cu3PO42 3y ago
And yet swaylock(-effects) and swayidle exist. While they don't implement the functionality of classic screensavers right now, it seems that one should be able to implement them using the exact same APIs as these applications use. However, they do use protocol extensions, so you can still make the argument that this is bolted on after the fact.
- ElectricalUnion 3y ago
  Things are "bolted on after the fact" a lot in X11 too, it's just that those are bolted on for so long that people thinks that they're part of X11 already. Things like XDND, XKB, XRender, Xft, Xinerama, RandR aren't "base X".
  - hulitu 3y ago
    That's because there are a lot of CADTs in X's development. Earlier, X will not start without a keyboard. Nowadays it does not have this "issue". Every second year the font system is redesigned.
spookie 3y ago
Just use an extension, plenty of alternatives out there. The more hate I hear about Wayland, the less moved I'm by it.
- basique 3y ago
  Can you list some of these extensions? (and what compositors support them, of course)
  - spookie 3y ago
    https://wayland.app/protocols/ext-session-lock-v1 https://wayland.app/protocols/ext-session-lock-v1 Any wlroots compositor supports it
westurner 3y ago
And X doesn't support multi-finger gestures though Wayland does without an app like touchegg: https://github.com/JoseExposito/touchegg https://github.com/JoseExposito/touchegg And the NVIDIA proprietary Linux module for NVIDIA GPUs hardware video decode doesn't work on Wayland; along with a number of other things: "NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver README and Installation Guide > Appendix L. Wayland Known Issues" https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/535.54.03/README/wayland-issues.html https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/535.54.03/R...
- hulitu 3y ago
  We usually use our computer with a keyboard and a mouse.
PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
It’s the job of the display manager / compositor to handle screensavers.. yes any arbitrary app can’t become your screensaver welcome to the 21st century.
- saurik 3y ago
  Why is the 21st century all about software moving in the direction of becoming a monolithic brick with centralized bottlenecks on adding functionality?
- alerighi 3y ago
  To me Wayland has the problem that too much functionality is done inside it. Basically it does the function of the display manager (X), compositor and window manager. While the last two were usually done by the same component also under X (while not strictly required), having the display manager and the window manager as separate components makes sense. Also having the compositor as a separate application to be fair, since that way the compositor could crash but the window manager would continue to function (without compositing, but this is not a fondamental thing). The window manager can crash, but under X it can be restarted (or is restarted automatically). You don't loose all your windows and open applications. On Wayland this is not possible. In GNOME if you type F2 and r you restart the graphical session under X, useful if some extension created some trouble. Under Wayland no way, log out and log back in and loose all your work. Is this good 21st century design? To me, not. A program should handle a single task and should do it well. X did one thing, the window manager another, the compositor another, XScreensaver another, etc. If I want to substituite a component I could. Also X is a client/server program, Wayland is not. Why does it matter? Under X I can run applications on a remote server and they are rendered locally. I use it time to time, because it uses far less bandwidth than using (let's say) VNC, since the rendering happens locally and only X drawing commands are passed trough the SSH connection (instead of a video stream). Wayland decided that this is not needed. To me Wayland is not that good design. It's not reliable after nearly a decade of being "nearly done", while X still works and it's still solid as a rock. If only they spended some time to improve X instead of rewriting everything from scratch... whatever. And if we want to talk about performance... to me it seemed that 10 years ago Compiz under X with a crappy GPU was more reactive than the modern Wayland window managers. Finally... X did have the possibility to change DPI of the fonts in the ~/.Xresources file! Yes, natively. Thus a window manager that only used X primitives (such as i3) did work flawlessly on HiDPI screens from decades. They seems to be still figuring it out in GNOME under Wayland for fracional values...
BearhatBeer 3y ago
I've noticed that Wayland advocacy (read: bot spam) has dropped off by quite a bit. Used to be you mention X.org or X11 and the bots would pour out of the woodwork to remind you it's "deprecated" or whatever - it's not - but I think the bot herders finally realized they were doing more harm than good. That bot spam left a bad taste in my mouth and I simply will never ever use Wayland because of it. I have no proof but it all seemed to be the same kind of spam that you'd encounter when discussing System D or pulse, so I suspect it was being organized from Red Hat itself. Evil company, that.
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  To play devil's advocate, it's possible that Red Hat wasn't actively evil, but they just believed in throwing cash at open-source projects, which enabled a lot of jerks within the community.
  - bravetraveler 3y ago
    I think there's a bit of selection bias - people interested in esoteric choices like your display manager will be prone to fairly strong opinions. Personally, I'm a fan of Wayland - but I'm not deluded either. Sway offers one of the better experiences, but you have to craft an awful lot of it. I'm also fortunate that everything I need/use either supports Wayland or is a game that benefits from gamescope. Some requires more tweaking/encouragement than others. Mixed environments are awful - ie: copying/pasting between Wayland/XWayland tends to freeze/hang in a specific direction. Making xlsclients return nothing should be the goal before getting too frustrated. Screen sharing is fine thanks to Pipewire... and screenshots with grim/slurp - but again, some curating was involved and limitations apply (ie: no sharing 10-bit color displays)
- creatonez 3y ago
  This is a wild conspiracy theory with no actual basis. No one is organizing people's opinions on random mostly-irrelevant pieces of tech by "herding bots". And no, Wayland is not closely tied to Red Hat.
jcv_fortran 3y ago
When I enable the Screen Blank option (Ubuntu 23.04, Wayland), after the screen is back on, the system operates normally for some time and then completely freezes with no option to unfreeze other than a soft reboot. I'm seeing more and more annoying things like that.

58 points by bobse 3y ago

Hmmmmmm, interesting!!

I’m probably part of the minority but I simply power off my laptop whenever I don’t need to use it for more than 10 minutes. Perhaps PTSD from when battery used to drain if it hibernates

bobse 3y ago
"Microsoft Modern standby"? Real hibernation doesn't drain battery.
rurban 3y ago
The BIOS will do it for you automatically.
BrotherBisquick 3y ago
[dead]

mble 3y ago

Probably for the folks that use CRT, the X11 would be a better option especially, when you consider when the development of Xorg was started.

rixthefox 3y ago

Wayland never fails to impress me with how much stuff has still been left out (are screenshots still broken?) that it hardly shocks me to learn that it doesn't support screensavers. Progress over many years worth of time. This is why whenever people ask me what display I run it's always X. X is a piece of work for sure but it's the only display server that actually works for almost every conceivable use case. Despite all the time and effort Wayland devs have spent to try and wrest control over the Linux graphical rendering server they are still a long ways from replacing X for good.

bravetraveler 3y ago
Screenshots have been working for me for years with grim/slurp One selects the area, the other captures it. The joy of a tiling wm, make your own fun (and success)
genter 3y ago
> Wayland is the poster child for a rewrite that tries to be 'simple' and in doing so over-complicates things by under specification. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37350221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37350221 (And did JWZ get rid of the special picture for people with Hacker News in the referrer?)
- guiambros 3y ago
  I was thinking the same. This is the second link I click today to jwz.org mostly expecting to see the usual "welcome HN" page, only to be surprised by actual content. Anyone knows if he has grown out of his hatred for HN, or is this just a misconfigured server?
  - NobodyNada 3y ago
    No, HN has started adding the "noreferer" attribute to outgoing links so that sites cannot detect or block HN traffic.
    - guiambros 3y ago
      Ahh, that makes a lot of sense now. Genius, thank you! (Just bummer that a lot of legitimate sites won't be able to figure out who's sending them traffic. But I guess http referer (sic) isn't very reliable these days anyway)
squidbeak 3y ago
I had to abandon it over screenshots. I realise X is deprecated, but it works and it never gives me a reason to notice it. Wayland gave me a few. Till it matures I don't mind sticking with x.

sillywalk 3y ago

It looks like linking to jwz.org doesn't show that picture anymore.

Cu3PO42 3y ago

And yet swaylock(-effects) and swayidle exist. While they don't implement the functionality of classic screensavers right now, it seems that one should be able to implement them using the exact same APIs as these applications use. However, they do use protocol extensions, so you can still make the argument that this is bolted on after the fact.

ElectricalUnion 3y ago
Things are "bolted on after the fact" a lot in X11 too, it's just that those are bolted on for so long that people thinks that they're part of X11 already. Things like XDND, XKB, XRender, Xft, Xinerama, RandR aren't "base X".
- hulitu 3y ago
  That's because there are a lot of CADTs in X's development. Earlier, X will not start without a keyboard. Nowadays it does not have this "issue". Every second year the font system is redesigned.

spookie 3y ago

Just use an extension, plenty of alternatives out there. The more hate I hear about Wayland, the less moved I'm by it.

basique 3y ago
Can you list some of these extensions? (and what compositors support them, of course)
- spookie 3y ago
  https://wayland.app/protocols/ext-session-lock-v1 https://wayland.app/protocols/ext-session-lock-v1 Any wlroots compositor supports it

westurner 3y ago

And X doesn't support multi-finger gestures though Wayland does without an app like touchegg: https://github.com/JoseExposito/touchegg https://github.com/JoseExposito/touchegg And the NVIDIA proprietary Linux module for NVIDIA GPUs hardware video decode doesn't work on Wayland; along with a number of other things: "NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver README and Installation Guide > Appendix L. Wayland Known Issues" https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/535.54.03/README/wayland-issues.html https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/535.54.03/R...

hulitu 3y ago
We usually use our computer with a keyboard and a mouse.

PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago

It’s the job of the display manager / compositor to handle screensavers.. yes any arbitrary app can’t become your screensaver welcome to the 21st century.

saurik 3y ago
Why is the 21st century all about software moving in the direction of becoming a monolithic brick with centralized bottlenecks on adding functionality?
alerighi 3y ago
To me Wayland has the problem that too much functionality is done inside it. Basically it does the function of the display manager (X), compositor and window manager. While the last two were usually done by the same component also under X (while not strictly required), having the display manager and the window manager as separate components makes sense. Also having the compositor as a separate application to be fair, since that way the compositor could crash but the window manager would continue to function (without compositing, but this is not a fondamental thing). The window manager can crash, but under X it can be restarted (or is restarted automatically). You don't loose all your windows and open applications. On Wayland this is not possible. In GNOME if you type F2 and r you restart the graphical session under X, useful if some extension created some trouble. Under Wayland no way, log out and log back in and loose all your work. Is this good 21st century design? To me, not. A program should handle a single task and should do it well. X did one thing, the window manager another, the compositor another, XScreensaver another, etc. If I want to substituite a component I could. Also X is a client/server program, Wayland is not. Why does it matter? Under X I can run applications on a remote server and they are rendered locally. I use it time to time, because it uses far less bandwidth than using (let's say) VNC, since the rendering happens locally and only X drawing commands are passed trough the SSH connection (instead of a video stream). Wayland decided that this is not needed. To me Wayland is not that good design. It's not reliable after nearly a decade of being "nearly done", while X still works and it's still solid as a rock. If only they spended some time to improve X instead of rewriting everything from scratch... whatever. And if we want to talk about performance... to me it seemed that 10 years ago Compiz under X with a crappy GPU was more reactive than the modern Wayland window managers. Finally... X did have the possibility to change DPI of the fonts in the ~/.Xresources file! Yes, natively. Thus a window manager that only used X primitives (such as i3) did work flawlessly on HiDPI screens from decades. They seems to be still figuring it out in GNOME under Wayland for fracional values...

BearhatBeer 3y ago

I've noticed that Wayland advocacy (read: bot spam) has dropped off by quite a bit. Used to be you mention X.org or X11 and the bots would pour out of the woodwork to remind you it's "deprecated" or whatever - it's not - but I think the bot herders finally realized they were doing more harm than good. That bot spam left a bad taste in my mouth and I simply will never ever use Wayland because of it. I have no proof but it all seemed to be the same kind of spam that you'd encounter when discussing System D or pulse, so I suspect it was being organized from Red Hat itself. Evil company, that.

phendrenad2 3y ago
To play devil's advocate, it's possible that Red Hat wasn't actively evil, but they just believed in throwing cash at open-source projects, which enabled a lot of jerks within the community.
- bravetraveler 3y ago
  I think there's a bit of selection bias - people interested in esoteric choices like your display manager will be prone to fairly strong opinions. Personally, I'm a fan of Wayland - but I'm not deluded either. Sway offers one of the better experiences, but you have to craft an awful lot of it. I'm also fortunate that everything I need/use either supports Wayland or is a game that benefits from gamescope. Some requires more tweaking/encouragement than others. Mixed environments are awful - ie: copying/pasting between Wayland/XWayland tends to freeze/hang in a specific direction. Making xlsclients return nothing should be the goal before getting too frustrated. Screen sharing is fine thanks to Pipewire... and screenshots with grim/slurp - but again, some curating was involved and limitations apply (ie: no sharing 10-bit color displays)
creatonez 3y ago
This is a wild conspiracy theory with no actual basis. No one is organizing people's opinions on random mostly-irrelevant pieces of tech by "herding bots". And no, Wayland is not closely tied to Red Hat.

jcv_fortran 3y ago

When I enable the Screen Blank option (Ubuntu 23.04, Wayland), after the screen is back on, the system operates normally for some time and then completely freezes with no option to unfreeze other than a soft reboot. I'm seeing more and more annoying things like that.