Asahi Linux To Users: Please Stop Using X.Org

[Luke]

Have you checked if you can benefit from any of the compositor R&D the LXQt folks have done? (Specifically, whether they've come up with any workarounds that didn't occur to you.)

No I have not, with the chaos in my country I do not have the time to bottomline this myself anymore. We really need someone familiar w wayland on the team if we want to do this. LXQT of course is QT based and a completely different codebase

[Luke]

Did you guys look at Labwc? I saw some people using the mate-panel on it.

Mate-panel should work (with only in-process applets of course) on most wayland compositors supporting gtk layer shell. This is needed for the menus

[Luke]

Just merged two long-waiting mate-panel wayland PR's: one gives icons in window list buttons, the other gives working context menus. Wayfire can now run with wayland using an x11 backend, which allows bypassing the messy dbus-launch issue with mate-panel and so many other apps

[ssokolow]

No I have not, with the chaos in my country I do not have the time to bottomline this myself anymore. We really need someone familiar w wayland on the team if we want to do this. LXQT of course is QT based and a completely different codebase

I was referring more to their exploration of means to enable X11-style "Hey, compositor. I'm a desktop/panel/etc. window" signalling on Wayland compositors without massive rewrites. After all, last I checked, LXQt relied on PCManFM-Qt for desktop icons.

[rmoog]

I like the general idea of Wayland, and so keep trying KDE under it every month-or-two in the hope of switching, but it still won't do fundamental things like render window decorations/widgets reliably for me. Though I am running on a Radeon 260 GPU which is a bit on the old side and I wouldn't be surprised when I one day upgrade to more contemporary hardware, my experience might suddenly be better. And on Asahi, of course, their target GPU is another story again, so for their platform Wayland might be rainbows and lollipops (or at least basically functional) already.

Sorry to break it to you bud but by the time Wayland becomes usable your Radeon 260 will probably get removed from amdgpu by some unpaid RedHat intern, who's so desperate to keep the job they make up fake tasks for their kanban board, like "remove old code", so that when they get back to their scrum master at the daily, they have story points and JIRA tickets to prove they aren't completely useless on the payroll.

[caligula]

Do you realize how funny this is?

I'm reminded of an old MADtv skit called Lowered Expectations.

Imagine if someone bought a Mac or a Windows PC from Dell or HP and they had to deal with rearing issues and you offered the same excuses to them as you just did.

I've seen tearing issues with Windows as well. There can be multiple causes for this like the video player. I've seen one system where the GPU drivers supported tear-free (at least in full screen), but the embedded paid stream video player in the browser did not.

Dunno what to say here. I'm usually awake ~16 hours per day. Spend 8 hours working at the company. We often use big screen for telcos, powerpoint presentations etc. I have no fucking clue if those are tear-free. They simply don't need it. At home, I watch streaming services for 1-2 hours per day. I usually use Chromecast, Apple TV, or integrated video players in the smart TV. Those all support tear-free video. Sometimes plug in the PC for some casual gaming session or stolen pirate movies. Yea, it's annoying if it doesn't work properly, but like I said, only a fraction of movies do that kind of scrolling. Even some games don't scroll/pan too often so you don't really see the issue.

I don't have very high expectation because both audio and video are full of proprietary shit. I've paid for DRM services where you can't see any video if there's a legacy non-DRM compatible monitor plugged in to the same system. This also happens on Windows. So you've spent 4000 USD on a new DRM capable HDR screen but can't see any image due to DRM issues. Another problem is, if you want multi-channel audio, yea movies typically have a bit perfect bitstream on the media. And it works if your AV receiver is recent enough. But for games it's different. You want latest Atmos audio? Well too bad most games don't have any driver infrastructure for such modern audio standards. Same problems on Mac as well. TBH Linux has lot of potential here. AFAIK both PA and PW technically support all these. But there's always the issue with DRM & proprietary codecs.

[KingKrouch]

On the topic of the Wayland debate, Since I moved to a Radeon GPU, I haven't had significant issues with Wayland on either GNOME or KDE. My GTX 1060, 1070, and RTX 3070 GPUs were giving me a ton of problems with Linux (Whether that's games running far worse with more framedips and stuttering than the Steam Deck, GSync support being busted, or extremely bad screen flickering problems on XWayland that could potentially give someone a seizure, especially with how often it happened), and that probably was one of my biggest reasons why I kept moving back to Windows after wiping my install and distro-hopping for a bit. NVIDIA's drivers on Linux are still a mess, and I see why the X11 copium is still continuing (outside of some applications, Cinnamon DE, BSD, and a bunch of window managers not supporting Wayland). I like the fact that VRR/FreeSync + DPI scaling + Per device mouse settings are a thing, how Gamescope makes resolution scaling and problematic ports of games that handle resolutions incorrectly an easier pill to swallow (Which otherwise would have a ton of problems on Windows), and the fact that HDR support is coming (Which will come in handy on my 4K TV for games). X11 is the path of least resistance in some use cases (NVIDIA cards and the other things I mentioned comes to mind), and I'm not here to change anyone's minds on that, just that it may potentially cause problems in the future if it doesn't get maintained or if people aren't willing to give constructive feedback and help bring Wayland up to where it should be. People should be asking for NVIDIA to improve their drivers, just like how Wayland should work towards making their project more flexible (And the fact that they were willing to compromise and offer a protocol to allow screen tearing for games to reduce latency comes as one example).

I think that a free and open desktop can coexist with those needing modern features and either proprietary+paid software while not being on a dog-water operating system that is barely maintained and rots by the day like Windows. The fact that these things are willing to be improved is already a lot better than how Microsoft has hand-waived a lot of things. You can make your own distribution if you dislike certain changes, BSD also exists.

The advantage that the Macs have is the OS, because whether the Linux faithful want to admit it or not, OSX is a way better OS than Linux will ever be, way more feature complete, more robust and there is a plethora of software for it that will never run on Linux.

Extremely debatable, I feel like you're missing the point. Especially when you consider the amount of software that no longer works on OSX thanks to Apple discontinuing x86 application support (Not even bothering with an application emulation layer), deprecating OpenGL support, and not bothering to support Vulkan. There's a reason people still stick with Windows, and that's because it's relatively easy to get a bunch of old software running. I can see why someone would want to install Linux on an Apple Silicon system. You get the power efficiency that comes with an ARM SOC, which while gaming laptops could potentially beat performance wise, battery suffers as a result (Not to mention that the 120Hz OLED screens and keyboards on any recent Apple Macbook singlehandedly beat a majority of gaming laptop displays or keyboards). Microsoft wasn't bothered to co-operate with Apple to provide Bootcamp support to run Windows on said devices (probably due to a deal with Qualcomm), so they instead partnered with a Virtual Machine developer to offer "support". Valve discontinued SteamVR on Mac OSX, despite their partnership with Apple, because they saw the writing on the wall (if not for VR in general, just application support).

In terms of content creation tools, like image or video editing, you'd have a point that Mac and Windows supports stuff that Linux doesn't have support for (Adobe products come to mind). But then again, if you actually pay $50/month for Adobe CC with how little those software suites change over the years (So similar to how Autodesk 3DS Max is close to dead), while also not expecting them to actually put work into supporting platforms that people would like to use, then you gotta be a big sucker to fall for the Software as a Service scam. Windows, Clip Studio Paint, Adobe, and the modern state of gaming tells you everything you need to know about how cancerous that service model is.

[KingKrouch]

Not my/our fault X11/Xorg just works!
Anyways systemd/puleaudio/wayland users, stop complaining... this is Unix/Linux and not Windows!
Funny how our Linux software just works, until somebody starts wanting Linux to be more like Windows.

Funny you say that considering PulseAudio was a jank solution for audio that caused weird stuff like low/high pitched YouTube videos and audio crackling as soon as you do something else. Pipewire replaced it, and just like with NetworkManager, your average user hasn't looked back since. That alone probably lowered the income from Aspirin and Acetaminophen sellers.

Some people on here are similar to intel iGPU laptop users (with PCMR stickers plastered on it) on the Steam forums that get salty over people criticizing bad PC ports of games because their standards for how a product works is like everything wrong with the Xbox 360 and PS3 era of systems and hasn't changed in 20 years, just like their laptop.

[DMJC]

Just merged two long-waiting mate-panel wayland PR's: one gives icons in window list buttons, the other gives working context menus. Wayfire can now run with wayland using an x11 backend, which allows bypassing the messy dbus-launch issue with mate-panel and so many other apps

Thanks Luke for all your hard work. MATE is the best desktop environment on Linux. It's an absolute joy to use.

[alevan]

No I have not, with the chaos in my country I do not have the time to bottomline this myself anymore. We really need someone familiar w wayland on the team if we want to do this. LXQT of course is QT based and a completely different codebase

If I may ask, what country are you referring to?

Also, thanks for Mate, mate!