Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

After the author mentions who this is the best/easier Linux distro ever, and how Wayland mades everything so much better, there's this:

>There are some things to bear in mind about using Wayland with GNOME, especially since more than a few GNOME hacks won't work anymore. For example, take desktop icons. These aren't really a GNOME 3.x thing, though you could use Gnome Tweak Tools if you can get them, but they are not supported in Wayland and never will be. I've also been unable to find a clipboard manager that works properly under Wayland. The other problem I've run into is that neither of the tint-shifting applications I use work with Wayland. Neither f.lux nor redshift do anything when running under Wayland. Judging by posts from around the Web, video playback is sometimes an issue too, though I have not actually experienced this problem. In terms of hardware support and Wayland, I would definitely suggest sticking with kernel 4.8.x or newer, which is exactly what Fedora 25 ships with. The other major gripe I have with Wayland is that it doesn't appear to support fractional scaling for HiDPI screens. It works great at 2X, which covers most screens, but there are those where 1X is too small, but 2X is too much. If you have a screen that works best at 1.5X, you might want to stick with X for now. Those are, however, relatively minor issues.

So desktop icons, no proper clipboard, no fractional HiDPI scaling, video playback issues, and those are "relatively minor issues"?

The only actually "relatively minor" issue he mentions is the lack of screen-tinting support (a la f.lux). The above seem quite major to me...

OSX does not support fractional HiDPI scaling, but nobody made a fuss, ever. So I wonder, why is that a bad thing, when Linux doesn't do it either?

I believe it has ever since going Retina. It wasn't always presented up front, but it was an options.

It's even default on the new 2016 pros.

It's still integer only scaling.

OSX uses slightly different trick - it creates a framebuffer that is @2 scale and lets the hardware to scale it down. (iOS goes even further and has @3 scaling).

Which is the right approach - for example, one of the rMBP options is to have 1440x900 (2880x1800) resolution, which to the native 2560x1600 is the ratio 9/8. Nobody is going to track that 9-th pixel for each block of 8 pixels in software. Using hw scaler is simpler, cheaper and has smaller margin for errors.

Frankly, implementing fractional scaling is waste of time, resources and would produce software that is slow, buggy and bloated.

I'm aware of how OSX implements scaling. It's still rendering at a resolution that is a non-integer multiple of the screen's native resolution and then scaling it to the native resolution. How is this not fractional scaling?

User space software stack is not aware of it, the frameworks know only of scale 1, 2 and 3 (on iOS). Nothing between it. That's why it is integer scaling.

The fact that the framebuffer size is not the same as display resolution is known only to the driver and it is not something that is requested to be implemented for Linux.

> User space software stack is not aware of it, the frameworks know only of scale 1, 2 and 3 (on iOS). Nothing between it. That's why it is integer scaling.

Well whatever the case might be, whether it's kernel's fault, GNOME's fault, Wayland's fault or device driver fault, fact of matter is that one can easily get 1920x1200 resolution on Retina Macbook 15" with sharp font and images, and cannot on Fedora. This is why perhaps people are making "a fuss".

OS X CAN do fractional scaling as far as user is concerned (doesn't matter who scales it up or down), while Fedora cannot (with Wayland, at least).

>User space software stack is not aware of it, the frameworks know only of scale 1, 2 and 3 (on iOS). Nothing between it. That's why it is integer scaling.

It doesn't matter whether they know it or not, since they work transparently great with the scaling factor. In fact it's even better than having the software stack aware of it (simpler, less room for errors).

The end result is that fractional scaling resolutions works on OS X and not on Wayland (from what I read, haven't checked Wayland myself recently).

Oh, that's right. I'd forgotten about that.

Thanks.

Whatever the mechanism, it does have it and it IS fractional scaling on non-integral multiple of the screen DPI.

Because these are all regressions.

It is an entirely new compositor, after 30+ years of X, so there will be things to work out yes, but the fact that Wayland is finally here is huge.

> OSX does not support fractional HiDPI scaling

Yes it does. It's right there in the system preferences.

No, it does not. See my reply below.

OS X does. So the rest of the question is moot.

Not sure about on Fedora but I cannot get Hangouts screen sharing working under Wayland/Weston on Arch, though it worked fine under X11.

All screen-sharing and device multiplexing is broken under Wayland, and it's by design. Wayland only lets an application see its own window content and its own input events.

On the one hand this is better than the security free-for-all which is X. On the other hand it breaks a number of useful tools, and at the same time I've never (provably) seen an X exploit in the wild.

However it's the lack of network transparency which stops me from using Wayland in the foreseeable future.

> On the one hand this is better than the security free-for-all which is X. On the other hand it breaks a number of useful tools, and at the same time I've never (provably) seen an X exploit in the wild.

The fact that keyloggers exist on Linux is because of X11's security model.

> However it's the lack of network transparency which stops me from using Wayland in the foreseeable future.

X is not network transparent, and hasn't been for a long time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQoQE_HDG8g

Whatever, X is network transparent "enough" for me to run all applications I care about remotely, and I do it all the time.

In a Wayland session, ssh -X will connect your remote applications with XWayland and they will run fine, no extra setup needed.

If everything still has to go through an X server, what has Wayland accomplished? Is Xwayland just going to become a more easily maintained substitute for Xorg? I can't imagine writing anything other than a twitch game as a raw Wayland client that's completely unusable except on the one and only small computer under my desk.

> If everything still has to go through an X server, what has Wayland accomplished?

ssh -X is hardly "everything". Not to mention that in the Wayland model, forwarding will be handled by the compositor (not Wayland) because the compositor knows what is actually happening on the screen -- lobby GNOME and KDE to add support for remote sessions rather than bashing Wayland for no reason.

> ssh -X is hardly "everything".

It's damn close. How many apps do you exclusively use locally? A terminal emulator, maybe a web browser?

There are engineers out there who are expected to never have work product on their laptop. The age of one computer per user ended a long time ago, and I'm worried how Wayland has been handwaving the normal use case.

> It's damn close. How many apps do you exclusively use locally? A terminal emulator, maybe a web browser?

I mean, I don't use graphical apps enough to care -- ssh/mosh is good enough for me TBH.

> The age of one computer per user ended a long time ago, and I'm worried how Wayland has been handwaving the normal use case.

But it isn't. Implementing "-X" functionality into Wayland wouldn't make any sense -- you want the window manager to implement the forwarding because the window manager knows about the window you want to forward.

The fact that X has this functionality is an accident of history. ssh -X is worse than VNC because at least VNC has some semblance of a sane protocol.

IMHO a sane protocol sends command from the app to the GPU under my desk, rather than requiring every computer in the world to have a headless GPU and a fat enough pipe to stream pixels to my framebuffer.

People keep saying some other part of Wayland will implement remoting. As far as I can tell nobody takes it seriously enough to work on it, and without remoting I can't understand why any non-gamer would try to use Wayland.

Unsupported hacks and a feature needed for an uncommon setup don't work, yeah, those are relatively minor issues.

Just wondering, is clipboard an "unsupported hack" or "feature needed for an uncommon setup"? What about video?

This isn't clipboards in general, but a clipboard manager. This is a program that keeps a history of things in your clipboard so you can go back if you accidentally copied something, or sync things between computers even (it's really nice when it works among VMs, copy on one, paste on the other).

Clipboard managers are needed at least on some desktop environments to make copy/paste functional between applications.

On my XFCE 4.12, with clipboard managers, if I copy from, say, Firefox, then close it, the content of the clipboard disappears.

If it's the same with Wayland, then having a functional clipboard manager is a big deal (at least, as much as such copy/paste operations are).

It's not the same in Wayland. You can quit the app and the clipboard content will remain.

The GPaste clipboard manager works with Wayland.

Clipboard does work, but I wanted to point out that all of these things are specific to the Wayland session, which is very new, you can still switch to Xorg in GDM and everything will work as expected.

Clipboard managers.

What among desktop icons, proper working clipboard, fractional HiDPI scaling and video playback exactly sounds like a luxury, unsupported hack, or uncommon needs to you?

Perhaps you are just an administrator spending 24/7 on the command line, but I assure none of those are uncommon...

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