X.Org vs. Wayland Browser Performance With Firefox + Chrome

[mppix]

To be fair, the project has only been going on for 11 years.

Even Mutter (wait, I thought we agreed to get rid of the of the middle man?) couldn't run without xwayland until November 22th 2019, which means it took 9 years to be able to make them talk directly. Turns out X11 handles a lot of indirect and obscure things. And those things were simply reintegrated into the new solution. It's not like it was bloat they could cut. They had to cut it and re-attach it.

I think it's a natural instinct to want to eliminate middlemen, but middlemen are actually often the best solution to many problems, and why they are so prevalent. It's why when I go to a restaurant the chef doesn't take my order and bring me my plates. He has enough to worry about in the kitchen, and it turns out so does the waiter. I would wager that wayland will eventually become much harder to maintain than Xorg, which I understand might sound like a very ignorant opinion. And perhaps it is.

We shall see, in the future.

After all, we are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.

To be fair, Mutter had to build a full X11 compatibility layer before before the Gnome ecosystem and applications would start the transition to Wayland. There is a lot more to Gnome than Xorg. Weston was available in 2012...

[bug77]

To be fair, the project has only been going on for 11 years.

Even Mutter (wait, I thought we agreed to get rid of the of the middle man?) couldn't run without xwayland until November 22th 2019, which means it took 9 years to be able to make them talk directly. Turns out X11 handles a lot of indirect and obscure things. And those things were simply reintegrated into the new solution. It's not like it was bloat they could cut. They had to cut it and re-attach it.

I think it's a natural instinct to want to eliminate middlemen, but middlemen are actually often the best solution to many problems, and why they are so prevalent. It's why when I go to a restaurant the chef doesn't take my order and bring me my plates. He has enough to worry about in the kitchen, and it turns out so does the waiter. I would wager that wayland will eventually become much harder to maintain than Xorg, which I understand might sound like a very ignorant opinion. And perhaps it is.

We shall see, in the future.

After all, we are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.

Unfortunately for me, I'm currently on a project that is setup to do exactly what you describe (code too old, needs rewrite).

[AndyChow]

Yes, I've seen this is other instances, too.
Lo and behold, in the thread discussing Firefox performance on Wayland and X, I am being told Wayland will actually improve performance. Maybe that's what a forward looking solution is suppose to do these days: resolve everything sometime in the future

To be fair, the project has only been going on for 11 years.

Even Mutter (wait, I thought we agreed to get rid of the of the middle man?) couldn't run without xwayland until November 22th 2019, which means it took 9 years to be able to make them talk directly. Turns out X11 handles a lot of indirect and obscure things. And those things were simply reintegrated into the new solution. It's not like it was bloat they could cut. They had to cut it and re-attach it.

I think it's a natural instinct to want to eliminate middlemen, but middlemen are actually often the best solution to many problems, and why they are so prevalent. It's why when I go to a restaurant the chef doesn't take my order and bring me my plates. He has enough to worry about in the kitchen, and it turns out so does the waiter. I would wager that wayland will eventually become much harder to maintain than Xorg, which I understand might sound like a very ignorant opinion. And perhaps it is.

We shall see, in the future.

After all, we are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.

[bug77]

It's almost like old projects are bloated because they fully solve a complex solution. New projects always come along that claim they will be much leaner, but the initial simplicity is only because it covers a subset of the solution, maybe a large subset, but of the very simple problems. We've seen the same thing with GCC and LLVM/Clang. Yeah, initially Clang was super fast, when it couldn't compile any complex code, like the kernel. Once it's able to cover the same surface, it starts to show it's own bloat and problems.

To quote my favorite game: "The problems began to outpace the solutions, first geometrically, then exponentially."

Yes, I've seen this is other instances, too.
Lo and behold, in the thread discussing Firefox performance on Wayland and X, I am being told Wayland will actually improve performance. Maybe that's what a forward looking solution is suppose to do these days: resolve everything sometime in the future

[AndyChow]

I don't think he's trolling. X is constantly getting bashed because it's bloated, outdated and such. And yet, you remove X out of the equation, insert the new, modern solution and performance barely moves. It's obvious something doesn't add up.

It's almost like old projects are bloated because they fully solve a complex solution. New projects always come along that claim they will be much leaner, but the initial simplicity is only because it covers a subset of the solution, maybe a large subset, but of the very simple problems. We've seen the same thing with GCC and LLVM/Clang. Yeah, initially Clang was super fast, when it couldn't compile any complex code, like the kernel. Once it's able to cover the same surface, it starts to show it's own bloat and problems.

To quote my favorite game: "The problems began to outpace the solutions, first geometrically, then exponentially."

[bwat47]

Firefox leading Chrome in many benchmarks? What happened?

Firefox is way ahead of chrome when it comes to wayland support

[ehansin]

Well, duh?

I don't care about who backs Wayland, because I know that, I care about changing stuff while regressing 30 years in usability. No Wayland compositor implements all of the functionality available in their Xorg counterparts. Try explaining to a new user why tooltips show up on the other side of the window. If you don't want to be called a cultist, don't act like one.

Btw, I didn't mean to take a cheap shot with your name, that was kind of aiming low, I think that call that an ad hominem. I get there is resistance to change in regards to this, and I am no expert. I just kind of trust if that the major players behind graphics on Linux see this a necessary, their might be a reason. Anyway, just wanted to say sorry.

[leipero]

Then, use mutter. Why XFCE refuses to use mutter? The use other libs from GNOME, no? Mutter has a plugin structure, gnome shell is a plugin for mutter, XFCE can create a new XFCE plugin for it.

It always amazes me that people are this stubborn, they refuse to utilize what is available because of NIH and pride. Mutter is the best Wayland compositor around, the Linux Mint guys forked it and created Cinnamon, and yet DE devs refuse to utilize Mutter because of pride. They do utilize gtk though, i suppose it doesn't hurt their pride.... They use a crapton of libs from GNOME, they use Xserver (which they didn't build themselves), but Mutter? Oh noes not invented here.

Mutter does not handle what is 'usually' handled by traditional window manager. Gnome Shell itself acts like window manager really. Cinnamon (Mint) developers, same as Pantheon (Elementary OS) developers didn't have any other option but to fork mutter for that reason alone (GS acts like WM while functionality is removed from mutter).
Both 'gala' (Pantheon WM) and 'muffin' (Cinnamon WM) implement those features back to mutter really, I am not sure if there's any other change to the mutter code (could be, but I don't think there is a reason for it).

So really, it's not about being stubborn, it's about the fact that since 3.xx version (not sure exact version in question), gnome project developers decided to move functionality from mutter to be handled by GS, hence reason for forking.

[Hibbelharry]

Searching for a new release over and over for everything is a disease.

Releases happen due to multiple reasons: One of them is new features you want to give to your users. The other one is reacting to changes in your ecosystem, keeping the status quo. Even if we would assume X11 doesn't need to advance because it's perfect, other dependencies like gcc, glibc and many other important components move on advancing. All X11 components will need to be maintained just to stay compileable, because rules to obey derived from dependencies of X11 change. As long as the ecosystem around your stuff strives you need releases, or your software is gonna die.

Now stop throlling and change distro.

Quite frankly I'm amazed by your short sight. This is no distro specific thing. RedHat used to be one of the sponsors of X11, giving manpower and money to X11 development. If X11 gets neither manpower nor money there will be no progress and less maintenance of components. So if Redhat stops throwing money your problem is even bigger. Your loved old stuff will fade. You can moan and cry like you want, the money has already moved.

Just for you, and those needing the new game against boredom.

No, it's more for those of us that want to see a better desktop experience than now. Linux needs this.

[jacob]

I am not a GNOME developer either, but i find it hard to believe that it can't be easily used outside of GNOME. It might need some GNOME libs, yes, but you don't have to use gnome-shell or gnome-apps with it. And XFCE IIRC already uses gtk, so why not?

There is more to GNOME than gnome-shell or gtk. Obviously Mutter can't live without dconf (but I presume XFCE has it too), and then there is the whole problem of session management and handling. In 3.34 GNOME dropped its gnome-session implementation to leave systemd in charge and obviously Mutter would reflect that. I don't know whether XFCE has migrated to systemd-based session management (yet?) but since it seems to be the desktop of choice of some of the systemd dissidents, I would guess probably not. There is also a bunch of features such as multi-head support, window decorations and other that are implemented through gnome-shell extensions, so I'm not sure how independent Mutter really is from gnome-shell and how well it can work without it.