Wayland 1.21 Released With New High Resolution Scroll Event

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wayland 1.21 Released With New High Resolution Scroll Event

It's been over a half-year since the last Wayland update with the core code now largely mature, but out today is Wayland 1.21 with the new wl_pointer high-resolution scroll event as well as some smaller additions and fixes...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wayland-1.21-Released

[caligula]

Interesting. What would be the main use cases?

[stargeizer]

Gaming mouses mainly.

Since gaming on Linux on PC hardware is growing in popularity, support for such devices is a must. Windows has support for those since several years now, and in older windows versions (Talking about Vista and older), gaming mouses required external drivers to properly work at the advertised speed and optical resolution.

[RedEyed]

Gaming mouses mainly.

Since gaming on Linux on PC hardware is growing in popularity.

What a bullshit.

I would like to ask you for proof.

The last Steam survey shoved that Linux gaming is not changing.

[billyswong]

I think even without gaming, high-res scrolling is nice to have. It will allow more precise scrolling in web browsing and office document editing. Currently my cheap mouse scroll wheel generate a scroll step equal to 2 [up]/[down] keypress. I think I can probably enjoy a scroll wheel as precise as me dragging the scrollbar. No longer any need of "smooth scrolling" emulation by applications / UI toolkits.

The only downside I can think of, is that it may take more CPU cycles if the scrollable region isn't somehow hardware accelerated. Then such kind of smooth scrolling will trigger a lot more redraw operations.

[qlum]

It may also benefit touchpads more than gaming mice, the later often hsve clearly tactile scroll steps and may not even benefit much from higher ress scrolling.

[Sethox]

What a bullshit.
I would like to ask you for proof.
The last Steam survey shoved that Linux gaming is not changing.

You know that Steam survey show the percentage and not the amount of participants. So if the numbers not changing is hard to decipher and if the percentage does change it could be because less people participates on the survey. Basically you have to take that survey with a grain of salt (like every other survey). Not saying that the survey is useless.

[callegar]

Apart from the core wayland, does anyone know if there is progress on standardizing "ancillary" functionalities that used to be in X11? I am particularly interested in whether a "session protocol" is going to be standardized or not. With X11 it was possible to log-out, log-in again and have all the applications correctly restored as they were before the log-out. With wayland it looks like every DE and toolkit has its own idea of the session (or no idea at all), with the result that this is not anymore possible or even worse that the DE tries to restore some session making a mess of it. While it is clear that the idea of a session is out of the scope of Wayland itself, having a standard idea of how the session should be implemented is quite important and not having it only augments the fragmentation on the linux desktop.

[yump]

Interesting. What would be the main use cases?

Scrolling scrollable GUI elements smoothly, like a trackpad does (for newer GUI toolkits), instead of in big integer jumps.

Gaming mouses mainly.

No. AFAIK, few or zero gaming mice have this capability. It's only found in high-end office mice, unfortunately, which usually have low reporting rates and high latency compared to even entry-level gaming mice.

It may also benefit touchpads more than gaming mice, the later often hsve clearly tactile scroll steps and may not even benefit much from higher ress scrolling.

Touchpads have been able to do this since a few years ago. I first saw it in Nautilus, and it came to Firefox a while later. If you have one that can't, either it's a super crappy one without real multitouch capability, or the program you're testing with is built with GTK2 (or some other toolkit that's too old).

[qlum]

Scrolling scrollable GUI elements smoothly, like a trackpad does (for newer GUI toolkits), instead of in big integer jumps.



No. AFAIK, few or zero gaming mice have this capability. It's only found in high-end office mice, unfortunately, which usually have low reporting rates and high latency compared to even entry-level gaming mice.



Touchpads have been able to do this since a few years ago. I first saw it in Nautilus, and it came to Firefox a while later. If you have one that can't, either it's a super crappy one without real multitouch capability, or the program you're testing with is built with GTK2 (or some other toolkit that's too old).

well I have some chinese keyboard + touchpad which identifies itself as a mouse