Xorg update adds touchpad gestures and variable refresh support (2021)

https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2021-September/060773.html

by irthomasthomas • 4 years ago

110 64 4 years ago

lists.x.org

sva_• 4 years ago

(September 2021)

Macha• 4 years ago

Note this update was released 3 months ago.

upofadown• 4 years ago

Yeah, but the release from this month is fairly boring:

* https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2022-January/060861.html

davidkunz• 4 years ago

In KDE, you could add mouse gestures across your desktop (KHotkeys), I used that feature to enable mouse gestures for all browsers 13 years ago: https://store.kde.org/p/1081269/

Golden times.

mkdirp• 4 years ago

These feature changes are not mouse gestures, this is about touchpad gestures. Mouse gestures are nice, but they're not great to perform using a touchpad.

YEwSdObPQT3• 4 years ago

I am glad Xorg is development is continuing. However I don't understand the status of the project, I was under the impression it was simply just being maintained rather than actively developed.

Personally I have been unimpressed with Wayland. Configuration, Stability and the ability to easily record my screen makes me stick with Xorg over Wayland (I am using an AMD GPU with Debian 11).

mmcdermott• 4 years ago

That matches my experience as well. I'll do a fresh distro install and not notice at first if it defaults to Wayland, then I'll run into something. It might be crashe or app compatibility (I had a game on Wine once that crashed on Wayland but not X11), but it drives me to switch things over to X11.

ugjka• 4 years ago

Wine doesn't work on Wayland period. You need wine-wayland and that only does games not regular windows programs

nextos• 4 years ago

Also all tiling window managers will need to be rewritten from scratch basically as Wayland's architecture is very different, which sucks.

zepto• 4 years ago

Did Xorg ever claim it was no longer being developed, or was that just something someone said in a blog post?

lolinder• 4 years ago

I found this:

https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server...

So here's the thing: X works extremely well for what it is, but what it is is deeply flawed. There's no shame in that, it's 33 years old and still relevant, I wish more software worked so well on that kind of timeframe. But using it to drive your display hardware and multiplex your input devices is choosing to make your life worse.
...
So, is Xorg abandoned? To the extent that that means using it to actually control the display, and not just keep X apps running, I'd say yes. But xserver is more than xfree86. Xwayland, Xwin, Xephyr, Xvnc, Xvfb: these are projects with real value that we should not give up. A better way to say it is that we can finally abandon xfree86.

---

I think that to the extent there's confusion, it's because a lot of people (myself included) don't understand the project structure of Xorg. I honestly still don't know what the distinction is between these projects, I just know that around this time people started saying that it was time to switch to Wayland.

irthomasthomas3• 4 years ago

The rumor is that it was abandoned 3 years ago due to resistance from upstream developers that are focused on Wayland. This could be true, since apparently, most of these changes had been done already, but not rolled out. So an independent developer, Povilas Kanapickas took up the challenge of releasing it. Well done, that man. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

ncmncm3• 4 years ago

Note, if you welcome this development, donations are equally welcome, and will probably lead directly to more such development.

TheChaplain• 4 years ago

Huh, there seem to be some activity in the repo over the last year from several people. Not an amazing amount but it's going forward it seems

boudin4• 4 years ago

Debian is definitely not a good distribution to test Wayland in its current state. A lot of packages are quite a few stable version behind, and the whole Wayland ecosystem is moving really quickly (for example, Gnome 3.38 instead of Gnome 41)

Staying on x11 makes more sense unless using Debian unstable or testing.

rmrfchik• 4 years ago

I'm on Debian unstable. Giving wayland a chance once per month on intel and nvidia cards. It seems usable on Intel although many minor X11 habits are broken (like selection), but totally unusable on nvidia (black screen). X11 is still way to go, as 13 year in development is not enough for Wayland.

YEwSdObPQT3• 4 years ago

I've been hearing this for years. I've got another machine with a rolling release distro (Arch) and it isn't any better. Until it is more mature I won't be using Wayland.

It isn't just the weird bugs. It not being able to share and/or record my screen. Everything works fine with X11, nothing works properly with Wayland. For I know there is some way of faffing with it to get it to work but what I have now works perfectly and I see no reason to change.

kunagi7• 4 years ago

As someone who uses a graphics tablet (Wacom) I'm glad Xorg is somehow actively developed again or I would just switch to Mac/Windows.

I tried Wayland for around four years (GNOME, sway, KDE), almost daily. I have a multiple monitor setup. I always had to switch back to Xorg for several reasons, like:

- iBus CJK support was horrible. Languages like English, Russian or Spanish don't need that but Japanese/Chinese needs it. Things like the suggestions window was completely broken (misplaced and disappeared randomly). I used several tricks to work around it but it was quite uncomfortable.

- Wine refusing to work half of the time (even with the Virtual Desktop)

- VSync not working with games (making my GPU go 100%)

- Applications crashing for no apparent reason.

- XWayland crashing completely... Even the whole compositor would crash randomly making me lose all my work.

- But the worst thing was the drawing tablet. It was completely broken. Things like pen sensibility (quite important to get details right), screen locking (it's useless to draw with less than half of the tablet!) and top buttons.

I used Wayland since it was really smooth with an old Intel GPU. The Xorg experience was quite unstable (I couldn't find the right compositor configuration). One day I was quite fed up, got a new rig with an AMD GPU and removed Wayland completely. Compared with Wayland, even with its quirks, Xorg just works.

drran2• 4 years ago

When Xorg will have native support for Wayland protocol (as extension)? I want to use both Xorg clients and Wayland clients, but without Wayland limitations.

titaniumtown• 4 years ago

I don't think that's ever going to happen because XWayland exists.

ZiiS• 4 years ago

Weston has always had an x11 backend.

CyberShadow4• 4 years ago

I think a big part of Wayland's limitations is in its protocol, and are "by design". Getting Wayland to have feature-parity with X would require extending the protocol, and then implementing those extensions in both compositors and clients. Because major Wayland compositor projects are unlikely to want to adopt or maintain such extensions, getting client applications to support them would also be a tough sell.

myownfriend3• 4 years ago

If Xorg could have the functionality of Wayland (mixed refresh rates, mixed DPI scaling, and the performance benefits) then Wayland wouldn't exist.

Things like global cursor coordinates, screen capture, and window automation are intended to or already are being done through things like xdg-desktop-portals which ask for user for permission before an application is allowed to do these things.

drran2• 4 years ago

If I need none of those, but need variable refresh rate for higher FPS in games, and if I trust my system because I use none flatpacks or snaps, then why not let me continue to use X11? Why not just integrate Weston X11 backend into Xorg and then let application developers to drop support for X11 completely, while letting me keep using X11? Do we need an IPv4 vs IPv6 battle again? Moreover, those «program X uses Wayland, but bla-bla-bla... set this environment variable to use X11 backend» are frustrating.

irthomasthomas3• 4 years ago

Sorry, there's actually a newer announcement from October that I couldn't see before. https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2021-October/060799.html

  >Notable changes since 1.20 include:

  - The meson support is now fully mature. While autotools support will still be
  kept for this release series, it will be dropped afterwards.

  - Glamor support for Xvfb.

  - Variable refresh rate support in the modesetting driver.

  - XInput 2.4 support which adds touchpad gestures.
  
  - DMX DDX has been removed.
  
  - X server now correctly reports display DPI in more cases. This may affect
  rendering of client applications that have their own workarounds for hi-DPI
  screens.

jancsika2• 4 years ago

One thing I like about X is I can run x2x over ssh to move my mouse pointer and keyboard control from my laptop to my rpi-hooked-to-a-TV.

So I can watch stuff on the TV, and when I want to choose a new thing I just mouse past the edge of my laptop screen and now I'm mousing and typing on the rpi.

Is this currently possible under Wayland with stock Ubuntu and stock Raspbian?

edgyquant• 4 years ago

Last time I tried (admittedly a couple years ago) this was not possible with wayland

pak9rabid• 4 years ago

This sounds vary familiar to Synergy. If you're familiar with that project, would you say this (x2x) is better?

biomcgary• 4 years ago

I loved Synergy, but it has gone commercial, so I use Barrier, which forked from one of the last free commits. Works well across Linux, Windows, and Mac OS.

Thaxll• 4 years ago

10 years later where is Wayland...

varispeed• 4 years ago

IDK touch pad support seems so buggy in Linux. Often times the cursor will jump randomly or disappear altogether and then all you can do is reboot and pray it won't happen again. No errors logged anywhere and if you try to find a solution, it's just people trying random things that don't work. If I sum the time spent on trying to get touchpad to work it's probably going to be a good work week with no results. Now my touchpad been okay for two months, but you never know when it again will start acting funny.

allisdust• 4 years ago

It depends on laptop and distro. A lot of new laptops don't work with slow release distros like ubuntu/debian.

irthomasthomas3• 4 years ago

Weird, I have used a lot of different laptops and Linux combos and can't say I have ever had touchpad problems, fortunately. In fact, I am frequently delighted at how truly plug-n-play hardware is on Linux now.

smoldesu6• 4 years ago

I'm so happy that Xorg is still being maintained, the more I read about Wayland, the happier I become to stay on Xorg. If you really want to erode your faith in open-source software, open up the bug tracker for Wayland and click through the closed issues, some of them[0] are fairly reasonable requests that are met with hostility and disinterest by the developers.

I'm starting to understand what people mean when they say that Wayland is a self-serving project by the GNOME developers, too. Do we need a status tray API? Nah, GNOME doesn't use it. Should we add stable screenshot interfaces? Nope, GNOME already made one. And here we are, 10 years later, and there's only 3 desktop environments that use Wayland (GNOME, Plasma and Sway), two of which aren't even complete.

I understand the "we aren't remaking x11" argument, but that's not an excuse to design a worse window server and give a middle finger to the rest of the desktop environments and window managers that people want to use. GNOME's continued attempts to divide the Linux community with pointless middleware and poorly designed software is starting to bite them in the ass. Most people I know these days have no intention of switching to Wayland any time soon, which is a shame since x11 really sucks; it shouldn't be this hard to design a successor to software that's as bad as Xorg.

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/233

folkrav• 4 years ago

This intrigued me:

(GNOME, Plasma and Sway), two of which aren't even complete

Which ones are you referring to as non complete? I think it's pretty obvious for Plasma, but the other...?

smoldesu6• 4 years ago

I tried Sway a few months ago and it's still missing rudimentary features like screenshotting and tray icons. I'm not sure if the situation has improved yet, but if Sway is trying to be a drop-in replacement for i3 then they've still got work to do.

dleslie• 4 years ago

Gnome 3 is so bad that it drove my family members, who I had managed to switch to Linux painlessly over ten years ago, back to using Windows.

It's just an awful, painfully dim UX. The Tyranny of the Designer is on full display.

With HiDPI finally getting mature in MATE I may be able to convince them to return. But I suspect the nightmare that is Snap will keep them away.

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

I think the problem is Freedesktop. It is a shill for RedHat and GNOME (actually created by somebody who works for both) so every project gets railroaded by whatever those two want, rather than what users want or what is simpler design. The result is a lot of garbage that just makes users' lives worse.

hulitu3• 4 years ago

What really scares me is that in Wayland programs must do their own window management. I realy hate when a program decides that it shall change position or shape on the screen or when it decides to draw on the titlebar making window operations like maximizing a pain.

CyberShadow4• 4 years ago

Have you heard about GNOME's Client-Side Decorations Initiative? The gist is that GNOME does not want to implement/maintain window decorations (title bars, minimize/maximize buttons) in their Wayland compositor, so instead (in typical GNOME fashion) they want every other Linux desktop app to add code to draw decorations themselves (in whichever style they want).

https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/CSD

ncmncm3• 4 years ago

Notably, QubesOS has demonstrated that a secure X environment is possible.

In Qubes, an isolated VM "dom0" operates the physical display, input devices, and desktop widgets. Apps run in VMs, which each maintain a private X server. Storage for windows in each such X is mapped to address space in dom0. dom0 copies updates to this memory to the physical display. Input events that occur with the pointer in a window are sent to that window's corresponding X server.

The limitation is that the app VMs have no access to a GPU. Some people manage to get a GPU assigned to an app VM, but GPUs generally have DMA access to all of physical memory, so this compromises security if code operating the GPU is not trusted.

There has been work on virtualizing access to the GPU, particularly in the SpectrumOS development effort.

hulitu3• 4 years ago

The limitation is that the app VMs have no access to a GPU. Some people manage to get a GPU assigned to an app VM, but GPUs generally have DMA access to all of physical memory, so this compromises security if code operating the GPU is not trusted.

Well the code executing on the GPU is trusted. What is not trusted is code running in the browser. The problem is that Wayland instead of not trusting the clients which shall not be trusted (browser), trusts only one client at a time. So you have security against local programs (which shall be trusted) but no security against remote code running in the browser.

ncmncm3• 4 years ago

Where did the code executing on the GPU come from?

By definition, nothing running in the app VM is trusted; that is the whole point of fencing off the app in a VM. The VM is safe against remote code running in the browser only until the remote code finds a hole in the browser security, i.e. for about a millisecond. Once the browser is compromised, the remote attacker can run anything they want in the GPU, if the VM has access to one. (Maybe they need a privilege escalation first, but those are a dime a dozen.)

dang• 4 years ago

Recent and related:

Xorg-Server 21.1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016318 - Oct 2021 (164 comments)

Xorg update adds touchpad gestures and variable refresh support (2021)

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