4 ms·

Regarding Wayland support, the gap between KDE/Gnome and these smaller DEs (XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate , LXDE etc etc) is getting wider and wider...

smoldesu 3y ago
Yep! Though to be fair, it's mostly because KDE and GNOME are starting to merge really great Wayland support patches. I'm personally not much of a fan of the way Wayland was rolled out or designed, but I do daily-drive it without issue on Plasma. It's far-and-away the better option for gesture-oriented workflows and gaming, and it feels more deeply integrated with the DE (for better and worse). It's the new hotness that all the gimmeck-obsessed Windows and Mac converts are going to want. You, me and the UNIX graybeard in the basement might get our feathers ruffled, but Bob and Alice get touchpad gestures.
- jraph 3y ago
  > get touchpad gestures Which ones? Is there something beyond pinch zooming (which works on both) that works on Wayland and not on X?
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    All the Plasma desktop gestures are broken on x11, and if memory serves it's the same situation on GNOME. I spent a long time on x11 trying to get it to work (via Touchegg et. al) but eventually left for Wayland where it worked out-of-box. And to be fair, some gestures do work on x11. 2-finger trackpad scrolling isn't precise but it works, and Chromium/Firefox both seem to work with libinput-gestures. The situation is completely different for native applications and desktops though (unfortunately). On Wayland, gestures work like they do on MacOS and Windows. On x11 they work like they did in Compiz.
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
Hot take (and sorry ahead of time): A bunch of open source developers drawing a line in the sand on which project they like to contribute to in a fragmented fashion instead of working together isn't great for the "end user". Not that people should be forced to spend their time doing anything they don't want to do when it comes to free, volunteer open-source contributions. Just an interesting callout. It's pretty clear why the gap is getting wider: too few people working on too many ways to skin the same cat.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  Most specifically the design of Wayland was designed in such a way as to actually create this situation by not having a functional reference implementation or capable libraries for individual environments for the first decade of development.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  The gap is getting wider for a very specific reason: Wayland. Unlike X.org, it doesn't have a single reference implementation that virtually everybody is using. Furthermore it is under-specified so DEs are forced to implement their own proprietary solutions to common problems until Wayland comes along with a third "official" way of doing it several years layer. These two factors result in deteriorating compatibility between the different desktop environments. It used to be that if you used Gnome but really liked some KDE applications or utilities, you could just use those KDE applications under Gnome and it was fine. People can and did mix and match whichever parts of the different desktop systems they liked the most. I remember when I first figured out that it worked this way as a teenager, it was absolutely magical. But now, thanks to those two properties of Wayland this interoperability is being ruined. Application developers are burdened to support one, the other, or write even more code to support both. In their pursuit of simplicity, Wayland designers burdened application designers with this complexity.
  - MuffinFlavored 3y ago
    Why do there have to be so many different: C libraries shells window managers / desktop environments package managers Think of the global man hours wasted achieving basically the same thing slightly different ways
    - michaelmrose 3y ago
      Why are there so many different kinds of cars, houses, razors, cereals, fruit, music, phones! Think of all the time we would save if we would save if we drove to work in our Yugos, listening to bubblegum pop on our zunes before sitting down at our DOS workstations to write cobol! You can't just pick a set of present day winners in the marketplace of ideas and pretend you can wave a wand and relocate all the labor that went into what you now think are the best things and make them even better. We arrived at our present day through an open marketplace where people were free to branch off and create and the resulting ideas cross fertilized. If you go back far enough all of the things you now regard as best in class were at some point an upstart which according to your priorities would be dismissed in favor improving something that by now is extinct because as things progressed it was deemed too inferior to continue improving. In fact best being pretty subjective and its highly unlikely that most would even agree at any point in time which ought to be worked on and which abandoned and its entirely likely that if you convinced someone not to work on option B or C their labor isn't magically added to A. You may have noticed that individual projects have a certain vision on how their project is going to progress and B and C exist specifically because their vision differs from A. Deprived of the outlet of making B those developers might take on more commercial work or they might go fishing. It's likely that an ecosystem that believed in your perspective to be impoverished by lack of choice but its unlikely for what you imagine the winners to be enriched. In fact many of them might not even exist.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
I honestly don't understand your comment at all. I'm not super familiar with Wayland. Is it possible for a "smaller DE" or a lightweight WM to properly support Wayland or is Wayland support only possible with layers upon layers of bloat? I'm asking because I'm still on X but I see that either I'll have to quit using Linux or I'll have to eventually move to Wayland. And I like my WM/DE ultra lean and ultra small. If Wayland implies KDE or Gnome, I'm leaving Linux the day I cannot use X anymore...
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  So with X there is an official implementation and a window manager implements a very small amount of functionality on top of that. Wayland has basically nothing anyone would use its merely a specification for each window manager to write their own implementation of X AND a window manager. 15 years in there is now a library or two to make it easier but its still none the less writing X + wm.
- johnny22 3y ago
  there are many wayland compositors like sway, hyprland, labwc and others i'm not aware of. sway is just i3, but done as a wayland compositor. i would expect you'll see more popular ones in the future. XFCE is goign that way as well, but slowly as expected.

smoldesu 3y ago

Yep! Though to be fair, it's mostly because KDE and GNOME are starting to merge really great Wayland support patches. I'm personally not much of a fan of the way Wayland was rolled out or designed, but I do daily-drive it without issue on Plasma. It's far-and-away the better option for gesture-oriented workflows and gaming, and it feels more deeply integrated with the DE (for better and worse). It's the new hotness that all the gimmeck-obsessed Windows and Mac converts are going to want. You, me and the UNIX graybeard in the basement might get our feathers ruffled, but Bob and Alice get touchpad gestures.

jraph 3y ago
> get touchpad gestures Which ones? Is there something beyond pinch zooming (which works on both) that works on Wayland and not on X?
- smoldesu 3y ago
  All the Plasma desktop gestures are broken on x11, and if memory serves it's the same situation on GNOME. I spent a long time on x11 trying to get it to work (via Touchegg et. al) but eventually left for Wayland where it worked out-of-box. And to be fair, some gestures do work on x11. 2-finger trackpad scrolling isn't precise but it works, and Chromium/Firefox both seem to work with libinput-gestures. The situation is completely different for native applications and desktops though (unfortunately). On Wayland, gestures work like they do on MacOS and Windows. On x11 they work like they did in Compiz.

MuffinFlavored 3y ago

Hot take (and sorry ahead of time): A bunch of open source developers drawing a line in the sand on which project they like to contribute to in a fragmented fashion instead of working together isn't great for the "end user". Not that people should be forced to spend their time doing anything they don't want to do when it comes to free, volunteer open-source contributions. Just an interesting callout. It's pretty clear why the gap is getting wider: too few people working on too many ways to skin the same cat.

michaelmrose 3y ago
Most specifically the design of Wayland was designed in such a way as to actually create this situation by not having a functional reference implementation or capable libraries for individual environments for the first decade of development.
mcpackieh 3y ago
The gap is getting wider for a very specific reason: Wayland. Unlike X.org, it doesn't have a single reference implementation that virtually everybody is using. Furthermore it is under-specified so DEs are forced to implement their own proprietary solutions to common problems until Wayland comes along with a third "official" way of doing it several years layer. These two factors result in deteriorating compatibility between the different desktop environments. It used to be that if you used Gnome but really liked some KDE applications or utilities, you could just use those KDE applications under Gnome and it was fine. People can and did mix and match whichever parts of the different desktop systems they liked the most. I remember when I first figured out that it worked this way as a teenager, it was absolutely magical. But now, thanks to those two properties of Wayland this interoperability is being ruined. Application developers are burdened to support one, the other, or write even more code to support both. In their pursuit of simplicity, Wayland designers burdened application designers with this complexity.
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago
  Why do there have to be so many different: C libraries shells window managers / desktop environments package managers Think of the global man hours wasted achieving basically the same thing slightly different ways
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    Why are there so many different kinds of cars, houses, razors, cereals, fruit, music, phones! Think of all the time we would save if we would save if we drove to work in our Yugos, listening to bubblegum pop on our zunes before sitting down at our DOS workstations to write cobol! You can't just pick a set of present day winners in the marketplace of ideas and pretend you can wave a wand and relocate all the labor that went into what you now think are the best things and make them even better. We arrived at our present day through an open marketplace where people were free to branch off and create and the resulting ideas cross fertilized. If you go back far enough all of the things you now regard as best in class were at some point an upstart which according to your priorities would be dismissed in favor improving something that by now is extinct because as things progressed it was deemed too inferior to continue improving. In fact best being pretty subjective and its highly unlikely that most would even agree at any point in time which ought to be worked on and which abandoned and its entirely likely that if you convinced someone not to work on option B or C their labor isn't magically added to A. You may have noticed that individual projects have a certain vision on how their project is going to progress and B and C exist specifically because their vision differs from A. Deprived of the outlet of making B those developers might take on more commercial work or they might go fishing. It's likely that an ecosystem that believed in your perspective to be impoverished by lack of choice but its unlikely for what you imagine the winners to be enriched. In fact many of them might not even exist.

TacticalCoder 3y ago

I honestly don't understand your comment at all. I'm not super familiar with Wayland. Is it possible for a "smaller DE" or a lightweight WM to properly support Wayland or is Wayland support only possible with layers upon layers of bloat? I'm asking because I'm still on X but I see that either I'll have to quit using Linux or I'll have to eventually move to Wayland. And I like my WM/DE ultra lean and ultra small. If Wayland implies KDE or Gnome, I'm leaving Linux the day I cannot use X anymore...

michaelmrose 3y ago
So with X there is an official implementation and a window manager implements a very small amount of functionality on top of that. Wayland has basically nothing anyone would use its merely a specification for each window manager to write their own implementation of X AND a window manager. 15 years in there is now a library or two to make it easier but its still none the less writing X + wm.
johnny22 3y ago
there are many wayland compositors like sway, hyprland, labwc and others i'm not aware of. sway is just i3, but done as a wayland compositor. i would expect you'll see more popular ones in the future. XFCE is goign that way as well, but slowly as expected.