GNOME On Wayland Screencasting Is About To Be A Heck Of A Lot More Efficient

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME On Wayland Screencasting Is About To Be A Heck Of A Lot More Efficient

Pending GNOME Mutter changes in conjunction with the new PipeWire 0.3 will offer a big improvement in making use of GNOME's screencasting support from Wayland sessions...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Wayland-Screencast-DMA

[re:fi.64]

These performance MRs also got merged. This time from Christian Hergert who happens to maintain sysprof. Neto happened to review and merge some of Hergert’s work.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1087

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1071

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1083

He's also the creator and maintainer of GNOME Builder. Guy is literally a software ninja.

[Sonadow]

At this rate, Gnome (Mutter) will end up being the only usable graphical desktop on Linux under Wayland.

Not that I have anything against it. But the others better get their game on quickly if they want to stay relevant in desktop linux under Wayland. KWin is still incomplete on the Wayland front (flickering / non-updating windows, Wayland applications not launching), complete system lockup on Nouveau), MATE + Mir is still a pipe dream and Sway (and wlroots) are still not even on the radar despite having early complete Wayland implementation.

[kaprikawn]

I used this just the other day, I needed to record a short clip of a game I'm making, I googled it and discovered it's as easy as pressing Shift+CTRL+Alt+R and it just starts recording. And it just worked, it's a far cry from the monster of the ffmpeg command I used to use to do the same on X11. And the ffmpeg command absolutely chewed up CPU resources when I had a budget CPU (Pentium G4560 at the time).

I'm very impressed, especially considering this is the type of thing that Xorg remoaners say is the reason why Wayland is so bad and X is so good.

[jacob]

I used this just the other day, I needed to record a short clip of a game I'm making, I googled it and discovered it's as easy as pressing Shift+CTRL+Alt+R and it just starts recording. And it just worked, it's a far cry from the monster of the ffmpeg command I used to use to do the same on X11. And the ffmpeg command absolutely chewed up CPU resources when I had a budget CPU (Pentium G4560 at the time).

I'm very impressed, especially considering this is the type of thing that Xorg remoaners say is the reason why Wayland is so bad and X is so good.

Now I'm waiting for the VUA neckbeards to start whining about Unix Philosophy (tm), because implementing functionalities that actually Just Work on Linux is Verboten. The only way that is allowed is shitty solutions using buggy shell scripts.

[Sethox]

On the brightside, good performance even on 4K. The downside is, that gnome desktop with smaller menu/header/window title. Obviously you can manually change that but you know, as a end-casual-user I don't like to do that.

[cybertraveler]

At this rate, Gnome (Mutter) will end up being the only usable graphical desktop on Linux under Wayland.

I've tried Sway and Gnome under Wayland and they both worked perfectly for me.

[Guest]

Great news!

[Chugworth]

At this rate, Gnome (Mutter) will end up being the only usable graphical desktop on Linux under Wayland.

Not that I have anything against it. But the others better get their game on quickly if they want to stay relevant in desktop linux under Wayland. KWin is still incomplete on the Wayland front (flickering / non-updating windows, Wayland applications not launching), complete system lockup on Nouveau), MATE + Mir is still a pipe dream and Sway (and wlroots) are still not even on the radar despite having early complete Wayland implementation.

KDE still has a lot of work to do with their Wayland implementation, but they are making progress. In the past it was so bad that it would become unusable after a short time, and when you tried to change back to Xorg you would find that your profile has been screwed up. But I tried it again just a few days ago and it does seem to be much improved. Still not quite ready yet though. However, Plasma's Wayland mode does something interesting that I don't see in Gnome or even Windows. If you take two monitors, one 4K with scaling at 200% and the other 1080P at 100%, you can drag an app window half way between both monitors and the app appears the same size on both of them. In other implementations, what would happen is as the app moves from the 4K to the 1080P screen, the app would appear extremely large on the 1080P screen until the majority of the app has moved to the 1080P screen. At that point, the app would resize to appear normal on the 1080P screen, but look extremely small on the 4K screen. Somehow, Plasma seamlessly shows the app at 200% scaling on one monitor and 100% scaling on the other monitor - both at the same time.

[Britoid]

KDE still has a lot of work to do with their Wayland implementation, but they are making progress. In the past it was so bad that it would become unusable after a short time, and when you tried to change back to Xorg you would find that your profile has been screwed up. But I tried it again just a few days ago and it does seem to be much improved. Still not quite ready yet though. However, Plasma's Wayland mode does something interesting that I don't see in Gnome or even Windows. If you take two monitors, one 4K with scaling at 200% and the other 1080P at 100%, you can drag an app window half way between both monitors and the app appears the same size on both of them. In other implementations, what would happen is as the app moves from the 4K to the 1080P screen, the app would appear extremely large on the 1080P screen until the majority of the app has moved to the 1080P screen. At that point, the app would resize to appear normal on the 1080P screen, but look extremely small on the 4K screen. Somehow, Plasma seamlessly shows the app at 200% scaling on one monitor and 100% scaling on the other monitor - both at the same time.

That's actually really cool. I have noticed that GNOME does that on mixed-dpi setups.

I think macOS might do something similar.