3 ms·

I'm not going down for the umpteenth time with someone appearing to be interested in what broke, but not taking me up on my offer to help them troubleshoot (bec

by brnt 3y ago

I'm not going down for the umpteenth time with someone appearing to be interested in what broke, but not taking me up on my offer to help them troubleshoot (because Wayland doesn't print any helpful error codes, just freezes my desktop, on a variety of different hardware, a variety of Intel graphics too, variety of distros, all in the same way). Unfortunately you hand wave away Xorg being not an option an account of not much more than fractional scaling issues, which is pretty easily worked around in my experience, while many people happily use it daily, and have for decades. I'm not saying things can be better, I'm saying Wayland proponents are always devvy types doing same-ish things on same-ish hardware. No wonder that by now Wayland supports this well!

jchw 3y ago
Funny enough I didn't mention fractional scale but heterogeneous scale factors across monitors. But frankly, I am a little offended that anyone would try to portray any Xorg scaling scheme as "working". It's a crapshoot at best, and the illusion is shattered the moment you start an app or game that doesn't carefully coordinate its scaling factor. I've tried many things, on both KDE and GNOME, and it's just not reliable. Pop!_OS has its own workarounds, too, and it's still a mess; having to log out to make scaling changes take effect reliably is a terrible experience. Dragging windows across screens and having some of them change scale and others not makes your desktop feel utterly unpredictable, it's just not going to work. Even Windows doesn't have this issue anymore! (Of course, Pop!_OS, being pragmatic, is just going to move to its own Wayland compositor and sidestep all of that non-sense.) Anyway, the true irony is that Xorg doesn't actually have especially great support for a wide range of use cases and hardware, it's more just that NVIDIA specifically holds Wayland compositors back for desktop support. I use AMD graphics and it works great. Intel graphics works, too. Raspberry Pi computers on VideoCore now run Wayfire by default and its about as smooth as it ever has been. Wayland has seen adoption across different use cases, from embedded machines to powering "Linux" features in ChromeOS and Windows, to the Steam compositor on Steam Deck. To paint it as though Wayland only supports developer desktops running Intel graphics is just silly. Anyway, yes, I am not volunteering to debug your machine, but the vast majority of complaints about what Wayland can't do aren't even correct. The common wisdom is still that Wayland can't even do screen capture when I was using it in Zoom calls two years ago, not to mention the newer developments like XWayland Video Bridge in KDE. Obviously, it sucks that people are having stability issues with this switch, but just like "Works on my machine" is not a meaningful retort to issues, "Doesn't work on my machine" is also not a good excuse to hold back the future forever. Whether Wayland compositors are ready or not, X11 is not a viable future. For many users, it's not a viable present. So, if you're not willing to debug your Linux issues, I can't blame you. But, in return, you can't blame the rest of us for continuing without debugging your personal machine issues, either.
- brnt 3y ago
  > Funny enough I didn't mention fractional scale but heterogeneous scale factors across monitors. Even more niche. And I'm not saying it's not worth solving, I'm saying your niche isn't more important than other niches. > it's more just that NVIDIA specifically holds Wayland compositors back for desktop support. As I wrote, my issues were all on Intel graphics. From 3 different generations. > So, if you're not willing to debug your Linux issues, I literally wrote the opposite of that. Happy to see you confirm the impression I initially put forth though.
  - jchw 3y ago
    > Even more niche. And I'm not saying it's not worth solving, I'm saying your niche isn't more important than other niches. It was niche, but partly thanks to Apple, laptops started getting high DPI screens. Now even relatively cheap laptops have high DPI screens, but many monitors that you would dock to are not high DPI. Hence... Many people run head-first into this when they dock, connect a display, plug their laptop into a TV, or simply have a multi-monitor setup with one that would look better at 125% scale anyways. It was niche. It stopped being niche thanks in part to Apple and hardware manufacturers chasing them, and that's when Windows started to support it better, too. > As I wrote, my issues were all on Intel graphics. From 3 different generations. I don't believe you are lying here, so please believe that I am not lying either. I have plenty (frankly too many, it's a bit absurd at this point) Linux desktop/laptop machines, and of the one UHD Graphics 600 machine (a GPD MicroPC), two Tigerlake machines (a Lenovo and a Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 Intel), and one Intel Arc A750 desktop machine, all of them work very well. And while I don't use all of those constantly, I use the MicroPC and Surface Laptop a lot, and they are among the most stable Linux devices I own. So while I believe what you are saying, what I'm trying to suggest is that they're probably not endemic issues. This is pretty important for the sake of this discussion. > Happy to see you confirm the impression I initially put forth though. I hope you are not expecting people who are simply trying to discuss the future of Linux desktop stacks to be volunteering to debug your personal issues. Don't get me wrong, I'd actually love to help if I could, but debugging hangs and freezes that could be an interplay of any of hardware, driver and compositor is not fun and doing so over the Internet indirectly is even less fun. I fully acknowledge the caveats of running bespoke Linux configurations on unsupported hardware. I don't advocate for normal people to do this. For friends who are stubborn and want to run Linux now on hardware they already own, of course I am supportive and try to help debug it, since I do this same thing all the time. But to me, these are issues that your system vendor should be helping to sort out, not something most people should be expected to figure out on their own. Even for the tech-savvy, it's not fun. As for figuring out where to go to debug a hang, there's no particularly special advice for Wayland versus anything else that may cause systems to lock up, since Wayland compositors are just normal DRM/KMS programs that happen to speak the Wayland protocol. If the machine is not kernel panicking and can be accessed over SSH, I'd wager to guess there is probably something indicative in dmesg.

by brnt 3y ago

jchw 3y ago

Funny enough I didn't mention fractional scale but heterogeneous scale factors across monitors. But frankly, I am a little offended that anyone would try to portray any Xorg scaling scheme as "working". It's a crapshoot at best, and the illusion is shattered the moment you start an app or game that doesn't carefully coordinate its scaling factor. I've tried many things, on both KDE and GNOME, and it's just not reliable. Pop!_OS has its own workarounds, too, and it's still a mess; having to log out to make scaling changes take effect reliably is a terrible experience. Dragging windows across screens and having some of them change scale and others not makes your desktop feel utterly unpredictable, it's just not going to work. Even Windows doesn't have this issue anymore! (Of course, Pop!_OS, being pragmatic, is just going to move to its own Wayland compositor and sidestep all of that non-sense.) Anyway, the true irony is that Xorg doesn't actually have especially great support for a wide range of use cases and hardware, it's more just that NVIDIA specifically holds Wayland compositors back for desktop support. I use AMD graphics and it works great. Intel graphics works, too. Raspberry Pi computers on VideoCore now run Wayfire by default and its about as smooth as it ever has been. Wayland has seen adoption across different use cases, from embedded machines to powering "Linux" features in ChromeOS and Windows, to the Steam compositor on Steam Deck. To paint it as though Wayland only supports developer desktops running Intel graphics is just silly. Anyway, yes, I am not volunteering to debug your machine, but the vast majority of complaints about what Wayland can't do aren't even correct. The common wisdom is still that Wayland can't even do screen capture when I was using it in Zoom calls two years ago, not to mention the newer developments like XWayland Video Bridge in KDE. Obviously, it sucks that people are having stability issues with this switch, but just like "Works on my machine" is not a meaningful retort to issues, "Doesn't work on my machine" is also not a good excuse to hold back the future forever. Whether Wayland compositors are ready or not, X11 is not a viable future. For many users, it's not a viable present. So, if you're not willing to debug your Linux issues, I can't blame you. But, in return, you can't blame the rest of us for continuing without debugging your personal machine issues, either.

brnt 3y ago
> Funny enough I didn't mention fractional scale but heterogeneous scale factors across monitors. Even more niche. And I'm not saying it's not worth solving, I'm saying your niche isn't more important than other niches. > it's more just that NVIDIA specifically holds Wayland compositors back for desktop support. As I wrote, my issues were all on Intel graphics. From 3 different generations. > So, if you're not willing to debug your Linux issues, I literally wrote the opposite of that. Happy to see you confirm the impression I initially put forth though.
- jchw 3y ago
  > Even more niche. And I'm not saying it's not worth solving, I'm saying your niche isn't more important than other niches. It was niche, but partly thanks to Apple, laptops started getting high DPI screens. Now even relatively cheap laptops have high DPI screens, but many monitors that you would dock to are not high DPI. Hence... Many people run head-first into this when they dock, connect a display, plug their laptop into a TV, or simply have a multi-monitor setup with one that would look better at 125% scale anyways. It was niche. It stopped being niche thanks in part to Apple and hardware manufacturers chasing them, and that's when Windows started to support it better, too. > As I wrote, my issues were all on Intel graphics. From 3 different generations. I don't believe you are lying here, so please believe that I am not lying either. I have plenty (frankly too many, it's a bit absurd at this point) Linux desktop/laptop machines, and of the one UHD Graphics 600 machine (a GPD MicroPC), two Tigerlake machines (a Lenovo and a Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 Intel), and one Intel Arc A750 desktop machine, all of them work very well. And while I don't use all of those constantly, I use the MicroPC and Surface Laptop a lot, and they are among the most stable Linux devices I own. So while I believe what you are saying, what I'm trying to suggest is that they're probably not endemic issues. This is pretty important for the sake of this discussion. > Happy to see you confirm the impression I initially put forth though. I hope you are not expecting people who are simply trying to discuss the future of Linux desktop stacks to be volunteering to debug your personal issues. Don't get me wrong, I'd actually love to help if I could, but debugging hangs and freezes that could be an interplay of any of hardware, driver and compositor is not fun and doing so over the Internet indirectly is even less fun. I fully acknowledge the caveats of running bespoke Linux configurations on unsupported hardware. I don't advocate for normal people to do this. For friends who are stubborn and want to run Linux now on hardware they already own, of course I am supportive and try to help debug it, since I do this same thing all the time. But to me, these are issues that your system vendor should be helping to sort out, not something most people should be expected to figure out on their own. Even for the tech-savvy, it's not fun. As for figuring out where to go to debug a hang, there's no particularly special advice for Wayland versus anything else that may cause systems to lock up, since Wayland compositors are just normal DRM/KMS programs that happen to speak the Wayland protocol. If the machine is not kernel panicking and can be accessed over SSH, I'd wager to guess there is probably something indicative in dmesg.