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Fresh Wayland Experiences With Weston, GNOME, KDE and Enlightenment
jones_supa writes: Software developer Pavlo Rudyi has written a blog post about his experiences with the various desktop environments currently supporting Wayland. The results are not a big surprise, but nevertheless it is great to see the continued interest in Wayland and the ongoing work by many different parties in ensuring that Wayland will eventually be able to dominate the Linux desktop. To summarize, Pavlo found Weston to be "good," GNOME is "perfect," KDE is "bad," and Enlightenment is "good." He also created a video from his testing. Have you done any testing? What's your experience?
...is perfect? Did he not upgrade? Gnome used to be perfect. Now, not so much.
Fedora is where you will find the best Gnome experience. Either that or arch.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Stopped reading right there...
Poster just means that Wayland support is perfect, I think. In any case, GNOME 3 has gotten better. I tweak it, and yes I wish that wasn't needed for pleasant use, but once tweaks are added GNOME works reasonably well.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
I'm tellin' you, FOSS is just going to hell these days. It used to be fun and exciting back in the late 90s and early 2000s, and reached a peak around 2010 I think, but these days it's just going downhill.
As far as I know, kde5 still not stable.
If distros choose to included anyway is not KDE fault.
source:
http://download.kde.org/stable...
on wayland.
that is, on wayland gnome works just as .. well, dunno. maybe it's not so fucked up as a few years ago.
however, is this more indicative of gtk vs qt libs?
gtk sucks balls though.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If an OS can brick a motherboard - then there is something wrong with the design of the motherboard.
I think 2007.
Ubuntu 7.04 (or 7.10 I forget) was the perfect desktop for me.
either 7.10 or 8.04 introduced an issue where disk activity destroyed responsiveness (one that my be finally fixed with the new kernel queue?
I have up on using Linux for anything but a server shortly after (that and really liking Windows 7 window management).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
It also corrupted your typing and reasoning skills. What on earth made you thinking that the topic of an Ubuntu Beta (which one?) has something to do with an article on Wayland? Next time use less the Caps Lock key and try to write complete sentences.
It shouldn't be so hard understand there are a project with a different version scheme.
In KDE version numbering "X.0.0" doesn't means first stable version, means first version from X development branch. This was no secret in times of KDE4 release and is no news now.
Even if keep up with this is to much for users, distro maintainers should know better.
Well, to be fair... it IS Friday....
I read the article a few hours ago on my way to work, and I don't recall it being mentioned that the KDE port to Wayland is very much a work in progress, but this is slashdot and no one readons TFA's anyway so it's worth mentioning here. Of course the KDE port to Wayland isn't going to be very good as in a work-in-progress and more of a technology preview at this point.
I've been meaning to try Gnome 3 under Wayland... This blog post makes me even more interested. Although I should probably try Gnome 3 under X11 first so I have a basis for comparison.
I've been using XFCE for the last couple of years on Debian, Ubuntu, and FreeBSD and have had a great experience all around. It's not open-source software that's gone to hell, it's these online communities and an abundance of mediocrity.
So then don't release code you don't want people using instead of blaming users for using your buggy, shit code you released to the public.
Brick = break; make unusable even when a working operating system is then installed on it. Incompatible = usually a driver problem (unless it won't run on all motherboards) defective OS = the OS won't run even though the drivers work fine.
If an OS can "break" the hardware, then your hardware is defective or badly designed. I like linux, but whenever it came to bleeding edge hardware there was always something that did not work.... which is why my desktop/laptop operating system runs "OS X" (though I have Fedora Linux installed in a VM for a copy of Oracle RDMS). I am and will be continue to be interested in having Linux (multiple distributions) a reasonable option, and Ubuntu generally gets points for being a relatively friendly distribution (Fedora is sort of bleeding edge).
My experience was that Kubuntu 15.10 (Plasma 5.4) was unstable and crashed a lot. It wasn't a very big issue, because all the open windows always survived the crash and Plasma immediately respawned, but it was nevertheless annoying. However, I've now been running the newest version (Plasma 5.5) under Manjaro for about a month on both my main workstation and laptop, and still haven't experienced a single crash. So whatever was unstable, seems like they fixed it :).
If that's true, Gnome is crap. I recently installed Fedora 23 on my system, hoping I could tolerate the latest version of Gnome. Alas, I could not, so I guess I'm going back to KDE.
I wish I could find something that was 1) usable, and 2) worked with Steam.
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
Yeah, I didn't say proprietary software was doing any better. As much of a Windows-hater as I am, I'll admit that Win7 was the best of the bunch, though I actually liked the look of Vista better (just not its operation). But it's been all downhill from there with the horrid Metro UI.
Basically, software in general seems to be going down the toilet.
But how can one get the html5-experience? My former boss was campaigning for something called html5-experience that he said would replace all the native programs we poor programmers were doing. Too bad our company went under before the customers were ready to suck the experience we were selling them. Who would not want to wait for progress balls to complete after each mouse click and why don't people like the random "this application is not responding, please press ok to close it" behavior?
You must be using Kubuntu or some other amateurish distro.
KDE 5 on OpenSuse Leap is rock solid. I haven't had any crashes, stalling or any other bug.
Let's hope they get it right for Kubuntu 16.04
Rubbish - extensions were put in as a mechanism so that it could age well.
Also how is a dumb framebuffer and asking others to do compositors to work with it "new"? It's video game console and MSDOS territory.
The Wayland developers don't push it as new they push it as more simple. Please try to keep up with the topic you are a fan of.
It is essentially an abstract remove buffer management system, which is still exactly what is needed. So I would say it aged very well and with xrender and more recently DRI3 is supports modern use just cases very well while maintaining compatibility. Wayland is indeed simpler but also breaks compatibility. If Linux distributions make the mistake to adopt it as a replacement for X, this will cause a lot of pain for many of us for almost no gain. I have to disagree in one point though: Wayland developers (at least one of them) push it as far superior as X by spreading FUD about X. (and a lot of clueless phoronix readers help). This sometimes went so far that even rasterman (otherwise a proponent of wayland) had enough and called Daniel Stone a liar in a thread reddit who is setting people up for disappointment.
Considering that it only happens with one brand, and only a few models, then I think it's reasonably fair to place the majority of the culpability on the vendor, yes. If you hurt yourself with a tool, don't blame the toolmaker for providing the tool. Well, that and you'd have to be pretty damned stupid to run the command without knowing what it does.
"This sharp stick lets me poke myself in the eye! Burn the forest!!!" And a bunch of people join in and burn the forest down because some idiot stuck a stick, that they sharpened themselves, in their eye. This is why we can't have nice things.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Using the new "gedit" startup time as evidence that X is slow instead of that gnome3 is slow is a shining example - if it was the fault of X then the older "gedit" that starts extremely quickly would not be so quick.
Mr Stone has publicly held up screenshots of Rasterman's Enlightenment v0.16 as items of ridicule to demonstrate how X has so many features he thinks it should not need. I doubt that went down well since Enlightenment was one of the first projects to offer Wayland support.
Who gives a crap that these desktops don't work with "Wayland"? Just run them under X11. Then you get network transparency and the functionality of tens of thousands of other GUI applications that have been written over the last 30 years.
I do agree that Linux as a desktop has gotten better since then, especially on laptops.
I have to disagree. These days there are a shitload of problems specifically on laptops: suspend/hibernate, hotkeys/leds, screen brightness adjustment, power management, graphics switching, audio pin mapping, touchpad...
What is Wayland?
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
I could be wrong, but I remember reading that Wayland was started by the X11 devs.
I agree that it is a ways off from being production ready.
Linux distros are getting too cavalier about using software that isn't ready. The pulse audio debacle and btrfs being the default in some distros are egregious examples.
Why are you needlessly passive aggressive? You could instead argue, but you only claim stuff and denounce what they do. Here is the thing. X11 was a network transparent protocol for drawing. Later additions like DRM, however, were not network transparent any more. The basic idea behind X11 was that it did not matter where the program run, you could display it anywhere. So maybe Wayland is not the best solution for a graphical interface protocol on present day graphical devices. You can debate that, but please try to address the subject and not people. Thanks.
While I sympathise with our position, why do you act like the "guy" you answering to. Instead of criticising him you first call him a moron. He might be. He might be not. You do not really know and it is also not important if he is either way. Important are the points you make later. Your post would have been much more convincing without the tirade at the beginning. BTW: X11 worked very well for what it was designed in the time. However, it was never well suited to do any of the "modern" things like show video or provide 3D graphics. X11 was a remote drawing and event handling protocol following the same principle as text terminals.
I've had the same experiences with 15.10. 15.04 was much less unreliable. The most common crash I see in KDE (and occurs several times daily for me in 15.10) is with krunner (the run dialog you bring up with alt-F2). It crashes several times a day for me. 50% of the time, krunner is automatically restarted for me, the remaining time I have to manually run "krunner &" in a terminal. For whatever reason, whether it's distribution centric or it's KDE 5.4 (or possibly 5.5, whatever is in the KDE backports ppa for 15.10) has become extremely crashy. More often than not, KDE ends up crashing back to the login screen when I resume on my laptop.
I've been using KDE since the 1.1.x days, and I haven't really liked gnome much since the 1.2.x (although I have yet to try gnome 3 at all)... So it's not like I'm some anti-KDE zealot.
I think I'll give gnome 3 under X11 a try when Fedora 24 comes out, and then try it under Wayland (so I have a basis for comparison). I may or may not like Gnome 3, but I'm very excited to try Wayland which should be a much more complete experience. I've tried Weston and Enlightenment via Rebecca Black OS, and while I certainly encountered too many bugs to even think about daily use, the experience was otherwise much superior. Never do I see random little lags or skips when dragging windows around, etc in Wayland. I see these relatively often on my system under X11 with an i75960x, and Nvidia titan X, so it's certainly not due to lack of hardware...
Maybe you shouldn't have done rm -rf /
Don't you read Slashdot? http://linux.slashdot.org/stor...
Remember that there was a nasty bug in Intel drivers that caused some heavy Qt Quick users (like Plasma) to crash. A significant amount of bad reputation that Plasma 5 has earned should actually be attributed to Intel drivers.
This sounds like a reasonable explanation: Kubuntu 15.10 was crashing a lot on my laptop (Intel GPU), but was relatively stable on my workstation (AMD GPU).
Anyone know where I can get a retail license for win 7?
227-3517
Win7 is obsolete now, you have to use Windows 10, like it or not (or just not use Windows). That's the problem with proprietary software: if the vendor decides to turn it to shit with a horrible UI and load it with spyware, you're stuck with it (or else you don't get security updates, which is suicide on an internet-connected computer). At least with open-source stuff, if there's enough people who get pissed off about a vendor's or maintainer's direction, they can fork it, as we've seen with Linux Mint, Cinnamon, and MATE, and several other examples. Or you can just modify it yourself: when Ubuntu was doing the Amazon Lens thing, it was supposedly really simple to remove it with an "apt-get purge" command, so you didn't have to completely change to another distro if you didn't want to. This isn't so easy with Windows, since it's closed, so people report that they try to remove the spyware telemetry but it doesn't stay gone, and network analysis shows that Windows is still phoning home despite all their attempts at disabling it.
By modern apps you mean gnome3 crap.
Everything else works as intended without needing a fucking 3D accelerated video card.
Wayland is an attempt to deal with that headache instead of solving the underlying problem of some people who wrote stuff for X not having a fucking clue how to write things for X.
That's how the fanboys work. Something like "X sux and the new thing will rock when it's finished" instead of benchmarks or an understanding of where the flaws in the thing they rant against lie.
Pretty well all the flaws Daniel Stone has pointed out are in gnome3, or are just personal dislikes instead of flaws (eg. when he tore into the Enlightenment window manager), and unlike him the fanboys don't have a clue so blame it all and more on X. The fanboys also don't get the context - X may suck when you are porting it to a smartphone with low end hardware and don't have a lot of development experience, I'll take his word for it, but it seems to hold up better than all the current alternatives elsewhere.
You've been misinformed on that point. Unless you have an environment designed to depend upon local 3D acceleration hardware then the network transparency works as designed. Gnome3 is currently broken in that way, as some complained when it was first released, but very little else that runs on X is. The gnome3 stuff still works remotely but performance is terrible. Actually the local performance of gnome3 is dismal as well (see Daniel Stone's comments about "gedit" taking a long time to start) but faster hardware hides that to an extent.
That's not all. There is a lot more to X than the deliberately cut down Wayland project provides - that's kind of the point remember and supposed to deliver performance benefits in the future. Some people find that other stuff useful and others do not.
Either way it's probably about three years too early for the fanboy rants about how a project they do not understand and is not ready for use supposedly rules the roost. It's a pity we can't hear real stuff from the developers of a project with real potential instead of cargo cult bullshit from clueless newbies
With respect, I have a pile of geophysicists doing interactive 3D stuff via X and OpenGL over a network all the time. Just because some people have applications that do things badly does not mean that it does not work when used as intended. I was doing 3D CAD stuff over a network with X in 2000 FFS.
To my knowledge KDE and GNOME both use extension functionality which works better locally including the use of pixmaps. What I know about Wayland is that solves this problem by not addressing network transparency at all. That is an acceptable approach when you only want to execute things locally. Like Mir, Waylan/Weston are one building block for a new display stack in Linux. I personally think we also need a network transparent drawing and interaction layer which allows to transfer UI to a remote machine where it is operated by a user and then essential information is sent back to the service. Surprisingly, HTML/SVG and HTTP are going in that direction. Anyway, I have no time to invest in the issue so I have to use what ever comes out of this development. And I think you might be right about the Gnome3/gedit performance thing. Especially, if there is a problem with X11 performance, I would expect an X11 benchmark and not a test of one application which uses a library which uses Xlib etc. Apart from profiling there are tools available (like Kieker) which allow to monitor application performance at runtime.
My impression was that OpenGL used remotely is not very fast. However, this could also be the effect of bad programming and it might have to do with what they use. The programs work good locally, but not via X11 (some of them even do not work at all).
I actually like the way I hover an app icon on the taskbar and get thumbnails, and then I can hover the thumbnails and it hides all other windows and shows the app.
I can cruise through 7 different explorer windows in a matter of seconds, click when I find the one I want, and it pops to the front with me knowing exactly where it will be.
I was skeptical based on descriptions, but I find it awesome otherwise.
I've personally never been an alt or windows tabber type.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
To date the Wayland people have been unable to supply benchmarks to compare performance with X11 benchmarks, which is fair enough from the developers of a project in early stages, but the fanboys loudly scream about performance despite a lack of benchmarks. It's annoying which is why I comment on the issue in an attempt to cut back on the deliberate misinformation.
It's transported over X via an extension - so X and OpenGL as I said above. Workstation software is usually designed to run well remotely. It takes quite a bit to saturate gigabit so a lot of software runs as well as it would locally, and that's when the local machine is just a desktop PC with a sub $100 gaming card and the remote machine is a 64 core monster with half a terabyte of memory. Your local machine appears to run like that monster only without the noise.
Moving back to a dumb framebuffer takes all the away.
The suggestions of a dumb framebuffer blitting to VNC or RDP show that those suggesting it have no clue at all how users use X remotely - typically items from several machines end up on the users display at once.
The "X sucks so give up and move to Wayland" crowd do not seem the think there is room for two different display projects despite Wayland having a large amount of X code in it (the hardware drivers for a start).