Client Side Decorations For Wayland

[zeealpal]

Really

Umm, that has never worked for me, on any version of Windows including 7. The screen may fade to black, but then
- explorer.exe crashes
- it hangs
- it fades back
- I might get a dialog to close the app

In no case does happen what was described...

When I do something crazy In blender3d for example, it fades to a washed out colour, showing that it is unresponsive.

If I click a gain, I do get the dialogue to close it, which is really nice instead of task manager

Asin it does exactly as described for me

The fading back is when it has started responding again, which happens in blender sometimes if I load a huge file.

[siride]

Umm, that has never worked for me, on any version of Windows including 7. The screen may fade to black, but then
- explorer.exe crashes
- it hangs
- it fades back
- I might get a dialog to close the app

In no case does happen what was described...

You seem to be having an entirely different problem than what we are talking about. I don't know why explorer.exe is crashing for you. I don't know why the screen is fading to black. None of these things have anything to do with unresponsive apps.

[curaga]

You seem to be having an entirely different problem than what we are talking about. I don't know why explorer.exe is crashing for you. I don't know why the screen is fading to black. None of these things have anything to do with unresponsive apps.

Sure they do, that is what happens in Windows when the app becomes unresponsive.

[siride]

Sure they do, that is what happens in Windows when the app becomes unresponsive.

Maybe you need to reinstall. explorer.exe does not crash, the screen does not fade to black (the app becomes desaturated, but that's a much more pleasant experience). If you don't like the Checking for Solutions dialog, you can disable it in one of the control panel modules.

[curaga]

Heh, reinstall

Perhaps it depends on the type of app (3d etc), but that is the behavior, even on freshly installed 7.

[tball]

Heh, reinstall

Perhaps it depends on the type of app (3d etc), but that is the behavior, even on freshly installed 7.

I have never seen any unresponsive application fading to black. They are fading to a washed out colour.

Maybe you are mixing up the behaviour of compiz and windows 7? Compiz does in fact (with the right settings) fade the colour to something greyish.

[etnlWings]

Unresponsive apps on Windows (with compositing enabled) darken and desaturate; the same thing happens in Compiz + Fading Windows plugin + Dim enabled. When using GDI, unresponsive apps don't repaint and can appear completely black, or with partially redrawn widgets, or with a mess of corrupt pixels from other apps. You'll also see this happen when switching from fullscreen D3D/OpenGL windows.

As for explorer-provided dialogues to wrest control of the window, these are hit-or-miss, depending on how the app crashed and to what extent it's crashed. And yes, an app crash does occasionally take down explorer and, consequentially, your whole desktop with it. Never mind that Windows' windowing system is so thoroughly pathetic, that using it as the inspiration for anything in Wayland is laughable, or that forced client-side window decorations are pretty much orthogonal to the whole open source desktop ecosystem.

I wouldn't be surprised to see this idea get the axe. Gnome have been threatening to do this for years - it was on the drawing board for 3.0 until pretty recently. Canonical talked up the idea themselves but that went nowhere as well (like many of Canonical's ideas). The major toolkits already support going naked, with devs able to draw their own decorations and with the exception of Chrome (in which it's optional) and a few lazy pieces of ported software, this is completely ignored by devs. Coupled with the arguments for being almost wholly aesthetic in nature and you've got something that could be very easily dropped.

To play devil's advocate for a minute, however, there's plenty of instances of the touted benefits of server-side (which is a misnomer; they're usually drawn by the window manager) decorations failing to live up to the hype. Lots of WMs don't enforce closing of the window and even when they do, they often leave the process itself running. Many WMs like Compiz and Xfwm have even taken to replicating Windows' 'end task' dialogue windows.

[yotambien]

What never ceases to (positively) surprise me is the degree of expertise seen in these forums. While I would be totally unable to parse what CSD is, people already know the implications of such a system, its advantages and disadvantages, security concerns arising from its use and so forth. It's a shame you guys are too busy writing here while you could be revolutionizing the linux desktop!

: D

[siride]

Unresponsive apps on Windows (with compositing enabled) darken and desaturate; the same thing happens in Compiz + Fading Windows plugin + Dim enabled. When using GDI, unresponsive apps don't repaint and can appear completely black, or with partially redrawn widgets, or with a mess of corrupt pixels from other apps. You'll also see this happen when switching from fullscreen D3D/OpenGL windows.

As for explorer-provided dialogues to wrest control of the window, these are hit-or-miss, depending on how the app crashed and to what extent it's crashed. And yes, an app crash does occasionally take down explorer and, consequentially, your whole desktop with it. Never mind that Windows' windowing system is so thoroughly pathetic, that using it as the inspiration for anything in Wayland is laughable, or that forced client-side window decorations are pretty much orthogonal to the whole open source desktop ecosystem.

I wouldn't be surprised to see this idea get the axe. Gnome have been threatening to do this for years - it was on the drawing board for 3.0 until pretty recently. Canonical talked up the idea themselves but that went nowhere as well (like many of Canonical's ideas). The major toolkits already support going naked, with devs able to draw their own decorations and with the exception of Chrome (in which it's optional) and a few lazy pieces of ported software, this is completely ignored by devs. Coupled with the arguments for being almost wholly aesthetic in nature and you've got something that could be very easily dropped.

To play devil's advocate for a minute, however, there's plenty of instances of the touted benefits of server-side (which is a misnomer; they're usually drawn by the window manager) decorations failing to live up to the hype. Lots of WMs don't enforce closing of the window and even when they do, they often leave the process itself running. Many WMs like Compiz and Xfwm have even taken to replicating Windows' 'end task' dialogue windows.

I think it's a bit unfair to say that CSD is terrible because Windows made some boneheaded decisions when dealing with non-responsive apps. Windows could have easily had a more robust system with better handling in user32 and stricter requirements inside the kernel mode subsystem for win32 allowing it to quickly and effectively take over if the app failed to process non-client window messages appropriately. Instead, probably because of backwards compatibility, or Raymond Chen-style apologetics, applications are given long periods of time where they can start behaving before the window manager does anything. That's unfortunate. But that's a policy decision that the Windows folks made and not something inherent in the idea of CSD.

Since Wayland apps will still require a client-side library, the library can have a tight contract with the server about behavior of the non-client areas. If the contract is broken, Wayland the server can quickly step in and provide a replacement experience for the user until the app is back on its feet or terminated.

[siride]

What never ceases to (positively) surprise me is the degree of expertise seen in these forums. While I would be totally unable to parse what CSD is, people already know the implications of such a system, its advantages and disadvantages, security concerns arising from its use and so forth. It's a shame you guys are too busy writing here while you could be revolutionizing the linux desktop!

: D

I wouldn't call myself an expert by any stretch, but having written a toy windowing system myself, and having done GUI programming under Win32 and .NET, and Qt on Linux, I'd say that I probably know enough to at least make some commentary on the topic, compared to, say, some n00b that just figured out what Wayland was yesterday and chants about how great it is. I'd imagine some of the other commentators here are at least as versed as I am, if not more so.