6 ms·

XFCE 4.20 Aiming for Usable Wayland Support While Maintaining X11 Compatibility

73 points by torstenvl 3y ago

superkuh 3y ago
XFCE released in 2014 has significantly less bugs than XFCE today: and that's all due to Gtk3 being broken underneath. Things are going to get much harder as the Gtk foundations keep being eroded away by the GNOME people removing features and options from Gtk. And they're basically hard coding in wayland spec now, no considerations for X. The Gtk based DEs like XFCE/MATE/Mint/etc need to band together and fork/mantain Gtk3 if they have any hope of surviving long term or even fixing the multiple bugs introduced by progressive removal of Gtk features (like the 2014 breaking of gtkfilechooserwidget.c so you can't paste in file paths).
- mouse_ 3y ago
  Waiting for the first RedHat+Gnome lawsuit against nerds trying to maintain old software
  - LaSombra 3y ago
    How so? It's all FOSS.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- tristan957 3y ago
  X is in maintenance mode. All new development happens around Wayland. It makes complete sense for GTK to focus on Wayland. COSMIC, MATE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Budgie, and Pantheon are all shipping at least some support for Wayland. What features and options of GTK have been eroded by GNOME? Do you really think XFCE, MATE, and Mint have resources to maintain a GTK fork? Why don't you maintain the GTK fork? GTK maintenance is partially paid for by Red Hat and Endless, among a few other organizations. I think it is really interesting how every time GNOME and GTK get mentioned on this site, you are quick to post negative comments.
  - kaladin-jasnah 3y ago
    I never knew Endless was funding GTK development. The last time I heard about Endless OS was years ago.
    - tristan957 3y ago
      Like I said partially. Other organizations include Igalia, Collabora, and the GNOME Foundation, just off the top of my head.
  - superkuh 3y ago
    New is not better (wayland cannot abolutely position new windows, cannot do mouse keyboard sharing (except via non-standard libei which different waylands reject, etc). Unchanging is not broken (X11 works just fine, just because it's not constantly getting new code doesn't mean it stops working). The primary features I'm missing focus around the way GNOME developers believe files should be interacted with. They believe the file chooser should be a search interface and making things like pathbar the only option and removing filename-entry, and the entire gsettings for it, are part of this. GNOME developers have drastically changed the GUI for file selection so that typing, pasting, or entering filepaths has been made difficult. Everything has to be done through the automagic "search" (which often bugs out) or mouse interface. This would be fine as defaults, but they've literally removed the former options in gsettings to config a gtk application's behavior. They say these are "private" and we should never have been using them all. All bugs since 2014 marked "wontfix" and community patches rejected. Basically, GNOME is anti-keyboard. I think that the gross changes to Gtk3 over the past 10 years have been minimal and that yes, a group of a dozen people could maintain it in it's static form and prevent further eroding of features. I compile my own Gtk3 with fixes for the gtkfilechooserwidget.c that have been rejected by the Gtk team ("gtk3 is frozen" "filechooser is too much spaghetti, any change fixing one thing would break another"). Maybe even apply some of the many community fixes that the GNOME developers consistent reject and ignore (just look at the Arch Gtk3 fixes patch set). Can they develop and add new features like new renderers and support for Wayland? No, but that is not needed. I don't appreciate you turning this into a personal issue, that's generally against HN tos.
- qwery 3y ago
  > XFCE released in 2014 has significantly less bugs than XFCE today The Thunar of today's auto-sized column behaviour irks me, I always end up with a horizontal scrollbar even though the content doesn't actually extend beyond the view. Can't think of anything else buggy. I think I first used XFCE in 2018, but it must have been spectacular in 2014. > XFCE/MATE/Mint/etc need to band together and fork/mantain Gtk3 I'm curious if you have any reason to think that the people working on these projects have any interest in forking Gtk? They are using it (as is?), presumably they aren't that unhappy about it. > the multiple bugs introduced by progressive removal of Gtk features It really annoys me when software updates break my workflow, but it's easy to see how "add new shiny thing" (= progress) often wins out over "tread carefully" (= stagnation). The way you are referring to such changes as bugs is misleading though.
  - superkuh 3y ago
    >The way you are referring to such changes as bugs is misleading though. The deprecation and removal of keyboard inputs literally results in a bug that generates an error message, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872 This is a microcosm for the Gtk3/4 pivot to mouse only as a whole: they don't care about the bugs caused for people who use keyboards. And DE's like XFCE/MATE/etc are unable to fix these bugs because they're Gtk bugs.
    - qwery 3y ago
      I don't see how that issue demonstrates what you are claiming. The error message is confusing, yes. Calling it a clear-cut bug is a stretch. The way you are referring to "bugs" is still misleading. > This is a microcosm for the Gtk3/4 as a whole. Is it? Where is the war on keyboards? Where is the resistance to working patches? Where is the ignored justification for your preferred behaviour?
      - superkuh 3y ago
        >Is it? Where is the war on keyboards? Where is the resistance to working patches? Where is the ignored justification for your preferred behaviour? On #gtk straight out of the typing fingers of the devs. In the form of the non-merged fixes in Arch for Gtk3. And in the bug tracker but you can't see all the closed and deleted bugs. As for "preferred" there's no preferences allowed by modern Gtk anymore. The gsettings for setting preferences were removed which lead to the bug.
- jwells89 3y ago
  I wonder if it might be time for a new “boring” UI framework. GTK often gets selected over Qt because it’s so much easier build high quality idiomatic language bindings for, has a good selection of widgets out of the box, and doesn’t rock the boat following a plain old imperative model like has been used for ages. With that in mind, there’s probably room for a new imperative UI framework that’s designed to be easy to bind to and is highly “batteries included”. It wouldn’t aim to be revolutionizing anything, but would let you build things with minimal fuss or churn on your terms (with allowance for well-defined “happy paths”, of course).
  - Gualdrapo 3y ago
    I was gonna say "How about EFL? It's C after all", but in my concept Enlightenment and XFCE have similar philosophies - one could dream about a fusion between those two..
SubiculumCode 3y ago
I've been more and more impressed with XFCE, purely on a usability, get out of my way, support my workflow basis.
- manaskarekar 3y ago
  It's taken the place for LXQt/LXDE for me. The one notable negative is that I've had a lot of trouble getting bluetooth earphones to work properly.
  - cf100clunk 3y ago
    I'm wondering if that would that be an issue with blueman tools and not XFCE, per se? https://github.com/blueman-project/blueman https://github.com/blueman-project/blueman
    - manaskarekar 3y ago
      It is likely, but the same set of utilities work on Linux Mint flawlessly. I've tried a fair bit of troubleshooting with no luck and eventually given up on getting it running on XFCE.
      - cf100clunk 3y ago
        The versions are the same? Maybe its time for a bug report to blueman or your distro.
      - mort96 3y ago
        I mean Linux Mint is a distro while XFCE is a desktop environment... I'm sure if you installed XFCE on Mint your bluetooth earbuds would work just fine, and that bluetooth would be broken on your current distro regardless of what desktop environment you used.
        manaskarekar 3y ago
        Yes, and I will consider the Linux Mint XFCE edition at the next fresh install opportunity.
SubiculumCode 3y ago
The thing that concerns me right now is the availability of clients supporting remote desktops of Wayland. As far as I've found, 'compatability with Wayland' means turning off Wayland.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Teamviewer seems to work, but it's pretty unstable. The APIs are all there now, but of the limited number of Linux compatible remote desktop applications, even fewer seem to be interested in adding Wayland support. Rustdesk has Wayland support, but that project has all kinds of weird code smells. Hopefully other projects will take inspiration and implement Wayland support as well, though.
  - SubiculumCode 3y ago
    I'm not familiar with the term, "weird code smells". Do you mean that the code looks shoddy?
- not_your_vase 3y ago
  I'm more surprised that the versioning hell that plagues Wayland isn't mentioned usually anywhere: while in theory protocols are supposed to be backwards compatible, in practice this means that writing a new version starts with copy-pasting the previous version, and extending it - but there is no fallback mechanism in case a client doesn't support the latest and greatest. What really bit me with wlroots (which seems to be the choice of XFCE also) is the input-method protocol: wlroots has v2 implemented, but Qt has v1, v3 and v4 implemented, which makes me laugh to this day - so Qt simply doesn't work wlroots, when it comes to this protocol (to add insult to injury, v4 specification seems to exists in a dead feature branch only that hasn't been touched since years, in the wayland protocols repo). Oh well...
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
[flagged]
- kzrdude 3y ago
  Neither systemd nor wayland are actually junk just because they are "new". Wayland is the same people continuing their work, but no longer on Xorg but on Wayland and related technologies instead.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  I don't understand. You are free to keep using X11 as you please on whatever distro you want. Wayland adoption won't mean X11 suddenly stops working.
  - superkuh 3y ago
    But in the long run XFCE depends on Gtk which has signaled it will drop X11 support in Gtk5. And already in Gtk4 X11 is being made a second class citizen and they're hard coding for the various Waylands. Adding support for a particular wayland just encourages them. At some point these old style DE depending on Gtk are going to have to fork it.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      It's OK, it's Linux, things will always be forked to keep some users happy which is how Mate exists. Other projects will come with the aim to keep X11 alive for that niche who wants it.
- cf100clunk 3y ago
  Some distros continue to avoid or navigate around systemd (Devuan or a carefully installed Debian in the former case, MX in the latter) so it seems unlikely that there will be a similar Wayland takeover. I'll dabble with Wayland if the mood or a specific need suits me.
- chlorion 3y ago
  X11 is objectively more bloated and full of junk than Wayland. Nothing wrong with wanting to stick to X11, but if you are doing so because you want to avoid bloat, you are probably confused.

73 points by torstenvl 3y ago

XFCE released in 2014 has significantly less bugs than XFCE today: and that's all due to Gtk3 being broken underneath. Things are going to get much harder as the Gtk foundations keep being eroded away by the GNOME people removing features and options from Gtk. And they're basically hard coding in wayland spec now, no considerations for X. The Gtk based DEs like XFCE/MATE/Mint/etc need to band together and fork/mantain Gtk3 if they have any hope of surviving long term or even fixing the multiple bugs introduced by progressive removal of Gtk features (like the 2014 breaking of gtkfilechooserwidget.c so you can't paste in file paths).

mouse_ 3y ago
Waiting for the first RedHat+Gnome lawsuit against nerds trying to maintain old software
- LaSombra 3y ago
  How so? It's all FOSS.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
tristan957 3y ago
X is in maintenance mode. All new development happens around Wayland. It makes complete sense for GTK to focus on Wayland. COSMIC, MATE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Budgie, and Pantheon are all shipping at least some support for Wayland. What features and options of GTK have been eroded by GNOME? Do you really think XFCE, MATE, and Mint have resources to maintain a GTK fork? Why don't you maintain the GTK fork? GTK maintenance is partially paid for by Red Hat and Endless, among a few other organizations. I think it is really interesting how every time GNOME and GTK get mentioned on this site, you are quick to post negative comments.
- kaladin-jasnah 3y ago
  I never knew Endless was funding GTK development. The last time I heard about Endless OS was years ago.
  - tristan957 3y ago
    Like I said partially. Other organizations include Igalia, Collabora, and the GNOME Foundation, just off the top of my head.
- superkuh 3y ago
  New is not better (wayland cannot abolutely position new windows, cannot do mouse keyboard sharing (except via non-standard libei which different waylands reject, etc). Unchanging is not broken (X11 works just fine, just because it's not constantly getting new code doesn't mean it stops working). The primary features I'm missing focus around the way GNOME developers believe files should be interacted with. They believe the file chooser should be a search interface and making things like pathbar the only option and removing filename-entry, and the entire gsettings for it, are part of this. GNOME developers have drastically changed the GUI for file selection so that typing, pasting, or entering filepaths has been made difficult. Everything has to be done through the automagic "search" (which often bugs out) or mouse interface. This would be fine as defaults, but they've literally removed the former options in gsettings to config a gtk application's behavior. They say these are "private" and we should never have been using them all. All bugs since 2014 marked "wontfix" and community patches rejected. Basically, GNOME is anti-keyboard. I think that the gross changes to Gtk3 over the past 10 years have been minimal and that yes, a group of a dozen people could maintain it in it's static form and prevent further eroding of features. I compile my own Gtk3 with fixes for the gtkfilechooserwidget.c that have been rejected by the Gtk team ("gtk3 is frozen" "filechooser is too much spaghetti, any change fixing one thing would break another"). Maybe even apply some of the many community fixes that the GNOME developers consistent reject and ignore (just look at the Arch Gtk3 fixes patch set). Can they develop and add new features like new renderers and support for Wayland? No, but that is not needed. I don't appreciate you turning this into a personal issue, that's generally against HN tos.
qwery 3y ago
> XFCE released in 2014 has significantly less bugs than XFCE today The Thunar of today's auto-sized column behaviour irks me, I always end up with a horizontal scrollbar even though the content doesn't actually extend beyond the view. Can't think of anything else buggy. I think I first used XFCE in 2018, but it must have been spectacular in 2014. > XFCE/MATE/Mint/etc need to band together and fork/mantain Gtk3 I'm curious if you have any reason to think that the people working on these projects have any interest in forking Gtk? They are using it (as is?), presumably they aren't that unhappy about it. > the multiple bugs introduced by progressive removal of Gtk features It really annoys me when software updates break my workflow, but it's easy to see how "add new shiny thing" (= progress) often wins out over "tread carefully" (= stagnation). The way you are referring to such changes as bugs is misleading though.
- superkuh 3y ago
  >The way you are referring to such changes as bugs is misleading though. The deprecation and removal of keyboard inputs literally results in a bug that generates an error message, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872 This is a microcosm for the Gtk3/4 pivot to mouse only as a whole: they don't care about the bugs caused for people who use keyboards. And DE's like XFCE/MATE/etc are unable to fix these bugs because they're Gtk bugs.
  - qwery 3y ago
    I don't see how that issue demonstrates what you are claiming. The error message is confusing, yes. Calling it a clear-cut bug is a stretch. The way you are referring to "bugs" is still misleading. > This is a microcosm for the Gtk3/4 as a whole. Is it? Where is the war on keyboards? Where is the resistance to working patches? Where is the ignored justification for your preferred behaviour?
    - superkuh 3y ago
      >Is it? Where is the war on keyboards? Where is the resistance to working patches? Where is the ignored justification for your preferred behaviour? On #gtk straight out of the typing fingers of the devs. In the form of the non-merged fixes in Arch for Gtk3. And in the bug tracker but you can't see all the closed and deleted bugs. As for "preferred" there's no preferences allowed by modern Gtk anymore. The gsettings for setting preferences were removed which lead to the bug.
jwells89 3y ago
I wonder if it might be time for a new “boring” UI framework. GTK often gets selected over Qt because it’s so much easier build high quality idiomatic language bindings for, has a good selection of widgets out of the box, and doesn’t rock the boat following a plain old imperative model like has been used for ages. With that in mind, there’s probably room for a new imperative UI framework that’s designed to be easy to bind to and is highly “batteries included”. It wouldn’t aim to be revolutionizing anything, but would let you build things with minimal fuss or churn on your terms (with allowance for well-defined “happy paths”, of course).
- Gualdrapo 3y ago
  I was gonna say "How about EFL? It's C after all", but in my concept Enlightenment and XFCE have similar philosophies - one could dream about a fusion between those two..

SubiculumCode 3y ago

I've been more and more impressed with XFCE, purely on a usability, get out of my way, support my workflow basis.

manaskarekar 3y ago
It's taken the place for LXQt/LXDE for me. The one notable negative is that I've had a lot of trouble getting bluetooth earphones to work properly.
- cf100clunk 3y ago
  I'm wondering if that would that be an issue with blueman tools and not XFCE, per se? https://github.com/blueman-project/blueman https://github.com/blueman-project/blueman
  - manaskarekar 3y ago
    It is likely, but the same set of utilities work on Linux Mint flawlessly. I've tried a fair bit of troubleshooting with no luck and eventually given up on getting it running on XFCE.
    - cf100clunk 3y ago
      The versions are the same? Maybe its time for a bug report to blueman or your distro.
    - mort96 3y ago
      I mean Linux Mint is a distro while XFCE is a desktop environment... I'm sure if you installed XFCE on Mint your bluetooth earbuds would work just fine, and that bluetooth would be broken on your current distro regardless of what desktop environment you used.
      - manaskarekar 3y ago
        Yes, and I will consider the Linux Mint XFCE edition at the next fresh install opportunity.

SubiculumCode 3y ago

The thing that concerns me right now is the availability of clients supporting remote desktops of Wayland. As far as I've found, 'compatability with Wayland' means turning off Wayland.

jeroenhd 3y ago
Teamviewer seems to work, but it's pretty unstable. The APIs are all there now, but of the limited number of Linux compatible remote desktop applications, even fewer seem to be interested in adding Wayland support. Rustdesk has Wayland support, but that project has all kinds of weird code smells. Hopefully other projects will take inspiration and implement Wayland support as well, though.
- SubiculumCode 3y ago
  I'm not familiar with the term, "weird code smells". Do you mean that the code looks shoddy?
not_your_vase 3y ago
I'm more surprised that the versioning hell that plagues Wayland isn't mentioned usually anywhere: while in theory protocols are supposed to be backwards compatible, in practice this means that writing a new version starts with copy-pasting the previous version, and extending it - but there is no fallback mechanism in case a client doesn't support the latest and greatest. What really bit me with wlroots (which seems to be the choice of XFCE also) is the input-method protocol: wlroots has v2 implemented, but Qt has v1, v3 and v4 implemented, which makes me laugh to this day - so Qt simply doesn't work wlroots, when it comes to this protocol (to add insult to injury, v4 specification seems to exists in a dead feature branch only that hasn't been touched since years, in the wayland protocols repo). Oh well...

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

[flagged]

kzrdude 3y ago
Neither systemd nor wayland are actually junk just because they are "new". Wayland is the same people continuing their work, but no longer on Xorg but on Wayland and related technologies instead.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
I don't understand. You are free to keep using X11 as you please on whatever distro you want. Wayland adoption won't mean X11 suddenly stops working.
- superkuh 3y ago
  But in the long run XFCE depends on Gtk which has signaled it will drop X11 support in Gtk5. And already in Gtk4 X11 is being made a second class citizen and they're hard coding for the various Waylands. Adding support for a particular wayland just encourages them. At some point these old style DE depending on Gtk are going to have to fork it.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    It's OK, it's Linux, things will always be forked to keep some users happy which is how Mate exists. Other projects will come with the aim to keep X11 alive for that niche who wants it.
cf100clunk 3y ago
Some distros continue to avoid or navigate around systemd (Devuan or a carefully installed Debian in the former case, MX in the latter) so it seems unlikely that there will be a similar Wayland takeover. I'll dabble with Wayland if the mood or a specific need suits me.
chlorion 3y ago
X11 is objectively more bloated and full of junk than Wayland. Nothing wrong with wanting to stick to X11, but if you are doing so because you want to avoid bloat, you are probably confused.