Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

No instances of the string "browser" or "brows" on that page. 4 instance of "web", but 2 refer to webcams and the other 2 are part of the page's UI.

I wonder if the author realizes that the biggest threat to Linux on the desktop is the possibility that all of the mainstream browsers will drop support for it. By "mainstream" I mean that the browser can be used to interact with almost all the sites that Safari or Chrome can be used to interact with.

Even if the current crop of mainstream browsers on Linux (namely, Firefox, Chrome and Edge) do not actually announce an end of support of Linux, just neglecting it enough will be enough to get me to leave Linux, and I believe many others currently using Linux feel the same way. It's not like a person can do without daily access to a mainstream browser (and I am saying that as someone who does not even like the web).

I've been using Chrome directly under Wayland (i.e., starting it with the flags -enable-features=UseOzonePlatform -ozone-platform=wayland, because Xorg is definitely going away) and the rate of bugs is definitely higher than the Chrome team would tolerate on Windows or Mac. (I've used Chrome for a cumulative 300 hours or more over the last 2 years on Windows and Mac.)

So far I haven't seen any signs that security bugs in the Linux version get any less attention than the Windows or Mac versions get; that is a good sign.

Quite a lot of webdevs use linux, which is a huge reason for browsers to maintain compatibility. Quite a few of the people building the browsers daily-drive linux too, which helps.

If you use a browser with experimental flags don't you expect some bugs? Just the fact that "supporting linux" means dozens of distros, DEs, WMs and two display server protocols (three if you include android and four if you also include some older ubuntu variants) means that the number of bugs is probably expected to be higher.

In short: I expect browsers to be buggier on linux, and I do not think there is a large risk they will stop supporting linux.

> Just the fact that "supporting linux" means dozens of distros, DEs, WMs and two display server protocols (three if you include android and four if you also include some older ubuntu variants)

So five if you use ChromeOS?

Yeah, didn't even think about chromeOS.

I don't really know how separated the concept of the "application" chrome and the "display server" chromeOS are.

I know chromeOS can run x11 apps, but is that within the chrome runtime or beside it?

EDIT: Seems I need to read up about Freon, which is what chromeOS uses (used?) instead of wayland/x11. So yeah, at least 5.

>I wonder if the author realizes that the biggest threat to Linux on the desktop is the possibility that all of the mainstream browsers will drop support for it.

This seems unlikely since most Google employees use Linux workstations.

That's a very good sign!

Do they mostly use Chrome (as opposed to something based on Chromium)?

out of interest are Google employees still on their own version of Debian? I remember them switching from Ubuntu a while ago.

Yup

Yet at Google IO is almost only macs at the sessions.

I've never been to Google IO, but I'd imagine that you see more Macs for presentations/sessions because they just work on the go. Working at a big tech company in the past, I had a beefy Linux workstation and a Thinkpad that ran Windows that I would only ever use for giving presentations/teaching classes, or while travelling for work.

When my friend used to work there, he was issued a macbook pro which was used mainly to ssh into his Linux workstation from a Chrome tab.

I hate to be rude, but IO doesn't exactly bring to mind the most clever or dedicated programmers.

You are only being rude regarding some of the key people working on Android, ChromeOS, Dart, Go and Chrome.

It is a matter of how their lack of cleverness and dedication might affect some of the products you might be using right now.

It's good you are testing their experimental Wayland support, but there might be reasons it is not default yet.

> Xorg is definitely going away

Are you sure about that? I mean Xorg is going away, but XWayland is not. I've heard alsa is going away too for decades. Pipewire still implements support for it's API.

I don't think XWayland is going anywhere for the foreseeable future.

Use of the term "alsa" is confusing here because ALSA refers to both the kernel interface in /dev and the userspace API in alsalib. The ALSA userspace API is mostly not relevant to applications, new apps probably will not target that and will instead target Pulse, Jack or Pipewire. Of course, Pulse, Jack and Pipewire still use the ALSA kernel API internally, and do implement compatibility for its userspace API just so that older applications still work.

You're correct that XWayland is likely not going away any time soon but I would suggest avoiding it if you can, it's only for compatibility with legacy apps. It still has some of the same security issues as Xorg but they're confined only to other concurrently-run XWayland apps.

On my install (Fedora 34, Gnome 40, Chrome Stable) if I run Chrome under XWayland (i.e., if I refrain from giving the flags -enable-features=UseOzonePlatform and -ozone-platform=wayland when starting Chrome) and set Gnome's scaling factor to 200% (gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']", then using the "display" tab of Gnome's Settings app), Chrome is blurry. Probably it is rendering into a framebuffer, then that buffer is being scaled up such that every pixel in the buffer becomes a 2-by-2 square of pixels on my screen, hence my experience of blurriness. I don't own a hi-DPI monitor, but if I did do you know how to avoid everything's being drawn twice as small as usual without blurriness, i.e., without essentially downgrading the hi-DPI monitor to a normal-DPI monitor?

If (as I suspect) a person cannot do what I asked you how to do, i.e., a person cannot currently configure the set of software I described above to be normal sized on a hi-DPI display without blurriness and without "full Xorg" (i.e., not just XWayland, i.e., requiring parts of X11 that definitely aren't being maintained anymore), do you expect XWayland to be improved so that that becomes possible in the future?

If this is working correctly on other apps, then it's probable that Chrome's Wayland support is not complete yet.

No, it works on no app (that hasn't been modified and configured to speak the Wayland protocol) because of a fundamental limitation of XWayland.

Sorry I misread your comment, ignore me. Although I will add: It might be possible that someone gets high-DPI working eventually in XWayland. It's unlikely that X11 will ever support multi-DPI in the same way as Wayland. There is an open MR for something like it though: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

ChromeOS is a Linux based OS to run Chrome. Although Freon is not a Wayland compositor, I still think you are mostly safe for the time being. I think in next ten years we can have a few sad surprises in desktop Linux.

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