Xfce 4.16pre2 Is Another Step Forward For This Open-Source Desktop

[birdie]

There a few things better, but it's not so much that it's better, it's just that it's where development happens. Love it or hate it, but Xorg development has almost reached a point of non-development at this point. It's on life-support and waiting for the last person in charge to pull the plug.

Can we stop with "If X.org is not being (actively) developed, it becomes unusable"? How is that even possible, please tell me.

By the same token all the abandonware is unusable, oh, wait, most applications from the past work just fine nowadays and X.org doesn't even require any hacks/workaround as it's quite up to date. And it's not like we are looking at new classes of HW any time soon which need some low-level X.org support. Nope, X.org is pretty modular, so for instance libinput handles all the input and can be developed independently even if X.org is dead in the water.

Also, I'd like to ask people who want to bury the X.org: how much money have you donated to projects which cannot afford a Wayland port because it's a very non-trivial task? Zero? Then why are you expecting Wayland to take off? It looks a little bit far-fetched.

[birdie]

The bare metal xorg server simply isn't getting any new development. There's no one volunteering to work on it, and no one paying to develop it further. And it has some glaring functionality holes (multimotor vrr, mixed refresh rates and dpi, hdr) and performance problems (accelerated video decode in the browser) that can only really be fixed with largely different architecture. So, while xorg still has tons of users, the developers have all moved on to something that can solve those problems.

Also X.org just works for absolute most users and use cases out there.

• Multi-monitor support is there albeit without being able to mix DPIs.
• VRR/mixed refresh rates? Do we already have triple-A games under Linux? Oh, wait, practically none.
• HDR? X.org perfectly supports 10bit per channel color.
• Accelerated video decoding in the web browser? It was implemented first in Adobe Flash using VDPAU 10 years ago and it worked just fine. Now it's implemented in Mozilla Firefox as well albeit quite differently. Also Wayland by itself doesn't do/offer anything to facilitate HW video decoding. Read it slowly, it does absolutely nothing.

Wayland is a protocol for outputting rectangles/pixels on the screen. It's that "advanced". That's why developers have embraced it, oh, wait, many developers refuse to support it.

[Volta]

Ah, the peasant have spoken.

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-b...dynamic-range/

While there are well established tools and workflows for how to do color management on X11, even X11 has not gained support for HDR.

Color management for Wayland has been talked about on and off for many years by dozens of people. To me it was obvious from the start that color management architecture on Wayland must be fundamentally different from X11. I thought the display server must be part of the color management stack instead of an untrusted, unknown entity that must be bypassed and overridden by applications that fight each other for who gets to configure the display.

It seems the peasant doesn't understand the X11 hit the wall already and he also forgot there are many AAA games running on Linux via Proton.

Wayland might be a chance to finally sort out this mess. I've got two monitors that support basic 30bpp input, one a decade old now, and it's never been safe to use on X because so many things make the assumption that every drawable is 24bit (some may even be assuming it can't be *lower*, but I don't want to check).

https://lwn.net/Articles/837844/#Comments

And now nail in the coffin for the peasant and nvidia boy: years ago nvidia said their drivers suck in 2D under Linux, because of.. X11! birdie, show us your desktop, so no one will have doubts what kind of peasant he is dealing with.

[yokem55]

What do you mean? VRR works fine.

I don't know about mixed refresh rates. Do you mean per-window refresh rates or per-display refresh rates?

VRR with multiple monitors active on the X screen does not work. You have to use xrandr to disable the additional monitors for VRR to work in X11. This does work with Sway's vrr implementation. Mixed refresh rates on x11 inevitably leads to tearing on at least one of the monitors.

[Vistaus]

Can we stop with "If X.org is not being (actively) developed, it becomes unusable"? How is that even possible, please tell me.

I think you need to order a pair of glasses, 'cause I didn't say that Xorg becomes unusable, I just said that development is quite inactive and won't be picked up anymore. I never said it'll stop working or anything like that.

Also, I don't want to bury Xorg per se. I'm pretty sure you have seen me post in other Wayland-related topics before, which means you should know that I'm far from a Wayland fan.

[yokem55]

I don't understand why you (seem to) believe that this Xorg issue is fundamentally unfixable. It sounds like a normal bug to me, that can be fixed.

Because VRR only turns on if an application is 100% covering the full 'Screen'. With X11 xrandr multimonitor, the 'Screen' is simply spanned across both monitors. So if an application is only fully covering a single monitor, then VRR doesn't activate. You'd have to completely rebuild how x11 handles multiple monitors (and seamlessly moving windows between them when desired) to fix this.

[Klassic Six]

Just a datapoint: Wayland has 7% (80 users out of 1105 users) market share according to https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics

True, but it will change when Ubuntu switch to Wayland as default display server.

[JeansenVaars]

Just a datapoint: Wayland has 7% (80 users out of 1105 users) market share according to https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics

Funny thing, given that Steam polls show that Steam user base is 1% ? xD Linux is indeed Fragmented and for that self reason there will never be a year of the linux desktop. Wayland or not

[Alexmitter]

Yeah, exactly, the level of fanaticism on Phoronix has reached its peak: if something doesn't support Wayland it's just crap plain and simple. No one cares that Wayland is a hell to code for, and requires 10 times more effort and amount of code than X11. "You suck, guys! You don't support my favourite toy graphical protocol!"




I don't know man. Been running it as my only DE for the past seven years. I've got nothing to really complain about.

I hope your version of hell will be Satan forever forcing you to work on the Xorg code base, because that's what you deserve.

[schmidtbag]

xfce would be a perfect lightweight desktop suite if its video player could replace gstreamer dependency with a lightweight mpv. a lightweight pdf reader is also needed

It's based on GTK, so, gstreamer is a given. That being said, you can always use other GTK-based apps without installing hundreds of MB of dependencies either. Personally, I've always used VLC so I don't care what the default media player is regardless of distro.
As for a PDF viewer, there are plentyof options. XFCE devs don't need to waste their time making one of their own. Besides, all of the major web browsers have a decent built-in PDF viewer. I haven't had to install a separate one in years.

As others have pointed out, XFCE needs Wayland support at this point. Only then would they be a major competitor to all the other light DEs. XFCE is possibly the most complete, functional, and stable DE that isn't huge (I'm hesitant to say "bloated", since relative to Windows, GNOME and KDE aren't bloated).
Funny thing is, if XFCE ever gets Wayland support (and perhaps even ditches X11 support), that makes E the only letter that's still relevant.