Xfwl4's First Preview Release
28 points by mariusor
28 points by mariusor
This is a really good step, and I'm happy that Xfce diehards won't be stuck on X11 forever! This website might need some @media queries, though, the reading column is very narrow on mobile (Firefox Android).
won't be stuck on X11 forever
I am an Xfce diehard.
I am not stuck on X11. I am perfectly happy with X11. X11 is fine and does all I need, and it does more than Wayland does.
I am also 58 years old and I have been myopic for over half a century; I have worn glasses since the age of 7. Now, they are about -6 dioptres, but with them, I have better than 20:20 vision.
I can't see the difference between standard definition and HiDPI. I cannot see refresh rates over about 50Hz. I cannot see flicker-free or tear-free video because I can't see the flicker or the tearing. I can't see the difference between an HDR display and an ordinary one. I can't see the difference between 300dpi laser print and 600dpi. I owned an iPhone 3GS and an iPhone 4, and I couldn't tell a "retina display" from the older one unless I held it within 2-3cm of my eye.
(Being myopic confers an advantage which is almost never discussed: I have extremely good close-up vision, like a typical person using a hand-lens. This is probably why it evolved and persisted: there are always trade-offs.)
I have excellent colour vision for a male, though, and I can see the horrible posterisation that afflicts most LCD TVs. That's why I stuck with CRTs as long as possible. From a distance, they have better colour blends and gradients. It mystifies me that most people with ostensibly better eyesight are not bothered by this. They praise the crispness of a 4K or 5K screen but they just ignore the huge bands and stripes across the sky!
I am unable to percieve 99% of the supposed advantages of Wayland. They are literally invisible to me. But I can detect that labwc doesn't implement the standard window-resizing keystrokes that I use every day. As an example of something I do many times an hour, I maximise windows with Alt+Space then X, as I have been doing since I learned Windows 2.01, 38 years ago. It doesn't work on GNOME, or KDE 6.x, or Xfce under Wayland via Labwc. Minimise is alt-space, N.
But the people who designed Wayland didn't think of keyboard UI. I think they don't know how to drive a GUI with only the keyboard. I don't think they know how to use a mouse effectively, either: they don't support the middle mouse button any more. My blind friends tell me that Wayland-based environments' accessibility with screen readers is pretty bad, too.
UI matters more than shiny like HDR, VRR, etc. UI should come first, features second.
So, no, I am not stuck on X11. I chose X11 and I will stay with X11 as long as I can, and I will not be forced onto Wayland until I have no alternative.
And it is not just me. See this post on LWN, too.
We're not stuck on it.
We prefer it.
But the people who designed Wayland didn't think of keyboard UI. I think they don't know how to drive a GUI with only the keyboard.
I can resize windows, move them, etc, with sway and niri just fine. You could probably even set up the exact configuration you mentioned on sway by having alt-space enter a "mode" where M and N are both bound to "maximize/minimize, then exit" (however you phrase that in sway's model, it's been a while). I don't think niri allows keybinds that aren't "a bunch of modifiers plus a single key" but that's just a design decision the dev made, there's nothing inherent to Wayland that prohibits it (as can be seen by the fact that sway supports it!).
Like, there are a lot of things that Wayland is missing compared to X11, but "controlling the WM with the keyboard" is definitely not one of them.
I think you're missing my key point: that there is already an industry-standard keyboard UI for this, and I am looking for tools which respect the existing standard. I am not interested in learning new UIs. (A), I'm old. (B), they are inevitably vastly inferior to a cross-industry multi-$million R&D effort.
This is a core problem of the Unix world: at the end of the 1980s, there was an industry-wide UI standardisation event.
The commercial software world, to a rounding error, standardised on IBM CUA. Those that didn't went extinct. (Of course many others went extinct too!) DOS apps went CUA, and the new generation of Windows and OS/2 and other GUI apps were by default because the GUIs were CUA-compliant.
Aside:
Summary for those who don't remember the 20th century:
As Windows 3 caught on, the DOS world frantically mimicked it for die-hards who stayed on the older cheaper OS and older cheaper hardware, but wanted a mouse-led UI. This led to DOS apps with proper fully graphical GUIs that look just like Windows, such as WordPerfect 6 and Borland Quattro.
End aside.
But it was too late to affect the commercial Unix world, which was preoccupied by dying, and the FOSS Unix world was busy being born and as a tiny semi-academic sideline, ignored by commercial vendors, it went untouched.
Result: as Linux GUIs came along, they all mimic CUA.
One exception: in 2006 MS said it would sue Linux vendors selling GUIs that were copies of Windows. SUSE paid up, Mandriva went broke, Xandros switched to email servers. Just 2 significant vendors did not. Red Hat and Canonical said "f you" and built new desktops that made an intentional choice to do something different. RH/Canonical were primary sponsors of GNOME. Soon after, GNOME 3 and Unity appeared, with totally non-Windows-like UIs. The GNOME team insists this is a total coincidence.
Previously: https://lobste.rs/s/xcwljr/xfwl4_roadmap_for_xfce_wayland
Nice to see the good progress. The choice of Smithay (and Rust) seems daring for such a conservative project, but it is welcome from my perspective.
XFCE's window manager was one of my first open source contributions. I was responsible for making windows maximize when they snapped to the top of the screen, and jump back to their previous size when you dragged them away. I also rewrote the alt-tab dialog.
It's been a long time. 2006.