KDE Now Has Virtual Desktop Support On Wayland

[boxie]

Sorry, if you remove aero, set the taskbar font and icon size to max and add some shadows you'll get KDE from Vista

you know, if you fuck with vista you can make it look like XP as well, or mac os...

I get it though - you're not a fan of the default Plasma theme (Breeze), that's fine

[cybertraveler]

It seems like there is a lot of wheel reinventing going on with wayland: badly. X11 has had virtual desktops since the 1980s. Plus Linux had a perfectly fine window system with X11. Plus there is a lot that Wayland does not have like app<->server network transparency, something which is an invaluable feature on X11, plus the fact X11 is simply better designed and more follows Unix philosophy by keeping Window Manager code seperate from the Display Server which helped cut down on competing and incompatible implementations of the display protocol. With Wayland, the display server and window manager is one big ugly ball of code, which introduces the chance of incompatible and broken display protocol implementations, and if the Window Manager part crashes, more likely since it has more complex code, it brings down the whole session, whereas with X11 you could restart the window manager.

Maybe people should spend resources on something we don't have, like decent voice recognition and OCR on Linux, rather than reinventing poorer and badly designed re-implementations of what we already have?

With all of the man hours on Wayland we get exactly nothing that we have not had before, and we actually have LESS than we had before. Imagine if these people were to spend their time working on something we don't have like voice recognition and good OCR. What a waste of time.

Wayland design advantages:

• simpler - less legacy cruft
• more secure - designed to give less privileges to individual applications. IE your browser won't be able to read key presses going to your text editor and your messenger app can't access all the other visual surfaces of other apps.
• built around creating tear-free, pixel perfect rendering with zero-copying at the system memory level. In the case of Intel embedded graphics you can potentially even have zero copying at the system and GPU level. IE your program writes a frame that is to be shown to the user to memory and that exact memory region is what the GPU itself refers to when drawing to the screen. Very efficient and conceptually beautifully.

[ssokolow]

It seems like there is a lot of wheel reinventing going on with wayland: badly. X11 has had virtual desktops since the 1980s.

Wayland released as a Minimum Viable Product. Things like in-vehicle infotainment consoles and smart TVs don't need virtual desktops and that's why extensions are still being prototyped (what KDE is doing here) and then standardized for various features X11 has.

Plus Linux had a perfectly fine window system with X11. Plus there is a lot that Wayland does not have like app<->server network transparency, something which is an invaluable feature on X11, plus the fact X11 is simply better designed and more follows Unix philosophy by keeping Window Manager code seperate from the Display Server which helped cut down on competing and incompatible implementations of the display protocol. With Wayland, the display server and window manager is one big ugly ball of code, which introduces the chance of incompatible and broken display protocol implementations, and if the Window Manager part crashes, more likely since it has more complex code, it brings down the whole session, whereas with X11 you could restart the window manager.

I agree that they need to solve session recovery before I'll use Wayland, but everything else you wrote is either incorrect or has good reasons to be done differently now.

Watch Daniel Stone's talk. The TL;DR is that, if you're running a compositor on X11, it's doing nothing but "terrible, terrible IPC".

He also points out that X isn't "network transparent" anymore, it's "network capable" and you'll get horrendous performance if you actually try to use modern applications that way, compared to RDP, which was designed for this sort of thing. Thus, the proper solution is to implement RDP in your Wayland compositor for remoting.

Maybe people should spend resources on something we don't have, like decent voice recognition and OCR on Linux, rather than reinventing poorer and badly designed re-implementations of what we already have?

People aren't interchangeable. Not everyone has the same skillset. (eg. I want to customize some of the pronunciations in festival TTS, but the documentation assumes a level of familiarity with the problem domain that I just haven't had time to acquire yet.)

Beyond that, employers choose what they think will be useful to them and volunteers choose what interests them. Neither of those will be arbitrarily reassigned from Wayland to OCR and voice recognition either.

With all of the man hours on Wayland we get exactly nothing that we have not had before, and we actually have LESS than we had before.

We get a system that, when paired with Flatpak, can provide Android-style sandboxing.

As Daniel Stone pointed out, we also get things where they couldn't fix them within X11 because "it would just break the X spec too badly", such as eliminating the literal thousands of laggy X11 IPC round-trips it takes for Chrome just to get to the point of displaying a new window, allowing media buttons on your laptop to work when it's locked without opening up a security vulnerability, and having menus and drag-and-drop where your desktop doesn't become unresponsive if the application freezes before releasing the grab. (I'm looking at you, File Roller.)

[Guest]

tear-free

Here's the exact reason why I'm not interested in Wayland. I can't care less whether I get screen tearing, I prefer to enable vsync on per-application basis when I need it somewhere, and I don't want to waste resources of my GPU on useless composititng. The nice thing about X11 is that the compositor is a separate component that can be enabled, disabled or swapped for something else on the fly, and I never had a need for one. Same thing with window managers, you're able to swap them around, and even use X without one. Wayland shoves the idea of a compositor down my throat, and it requires a ton of extensions to match basic functionality of X.

[Weasel]

True. I agree. I've used many languages. I actually know a little C and Python. I can't bring myself to get into using C++ though. I can see why C++ is popular for large userland applications like browsers and game engines; those are the domains where it is most suited I think. However I'm hoping that at some point a language will effectively dethrone C++. There are already a number of languages chipping away at C++. Namely Rust & C#.

Interesting how Apple never seemed to have heavily adopted C++. Or at least, they never seem to go out of their way to use it. They used Objective C heavily and then later built Swift and started using that.

Also interesting how C is popular in the GNU world and is often used instead of C++, even for programs that would more typically (at least on Windows) be programmed in C++.

I think there are many devs out there that share my sentiment towards C++. Obviously there's many who don't also.

C++ is convoluted but everything you listed is just so much worse (other than C). C# is even worse than Rust.

[Weasel]

and we actually have LESS than we had before

This is exactly the problem with Wayland, and it's so by design, so it's hopeless.

[Weasel]

We get a system that, when paired with Flatpak, can provide Android-style sandboxing.

Thing is, I don't want a sandbox for every god damn app. Fuck Android, fuck mobile muppets and fuck catering to normies who can't even use a mouse.

Only the minority of untrusted apps should be sandboxed and pay the price.

[Ropid]

just move the mouse pointer in the top left corner on a proper configured KDE from the last decade

He meant a setup where you can move a viewport around freely so that you can for example scroll just halfway over to a neighbouring desktop. You would then see parts from both virtual desktops on the monitor at the same time which is not possible in normal window managers like KDE's.

[Weasel]

I can't believe that people actually used a PC without virtual desktops. It's second nature to me, like, I can't even use Windows without a VM (the VM is in its own Virtual Desktop) because it lacks this and makes me super uncomfortable.

I heard Windows 10 introduced them but I'm not touching that spyware mobile trash OS. Not surprised that Wayland is even worse than Windows.

[Vistaus]

I've always preferred the look of GTK+ apps.

Never thought I'd ever hear that phrase on Phoronix, as people on here usually dislike GTK+ apps and their looks.