Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway914 | Hacker News Reader

There are a couple reasons I can only back Gnome at this point, even though I loved/miss XFCE.

Wayland multi-seat + idle-inhibition HDR + variable refresh Fractional scaling (I think XFCE has some/all of this?)

We're just playing catchup to MacOS for over a decade, and soon enough Linux will have to compete with 3d desktop environments (Apple Vision Pro interface). I think we're almost to the point where the DE will be just a physics simulator (game engine) to help augment your reality.

Anyway, I still use XFCE on resource-limited hardware but Gnome has been the only option for a while because progress isn't being made by other DEs on these critical things (color, refresh, alpha-composition, and some wayland protocols missing in wlroots).

I'm just glad Gnome isn't the dependency hell it used to be, and has slimmed down. I really love what they've done with GJS but I believe there's a competing KDE bindings project.

</naive>

View on HN

I feel like 3D desktops will be about as useful as 3D televisions; to whit, not useful.

Probably 25 to 50% of the usefulness of a monitor is that you can show your neighbor what's on it. Also 3D gives the user headaches often, and you have to wear these huge goggles.

Finally, I have enough trouble wrangling windows and getting them to behave with two dimensions. A third dimension just adds a place where the windows can go that I don't want them to go.

Gnome doesn't work well for me unless I find a bunch of half maintained bug-ridden extensions to fix the problems that have it has and it still doesn't work properly.

KDE is perfect. It used to be slow but now it's not. It's very configurable but doesn't need it most of the time.

XFCE for many including myself is the ideal, and is not playing catch up. At least I hope it isn't.

I switched to a Mac temporarily recently. I had to install an additional app just so that I could tile my windows in a basic way that is already supported by KDE, windows, pretty much everyone else. They have alpha compositing and all that, but it still felt like a step backward.

Not everyone uses a nonlinear video editor for a living.

3D projection technology?

> Wayland multi-seat + idle-inhibition HDR + variable refresh Fractional scaling

The move to Wayland is interesting to observe. On first glance it seems that moving to Wayland provides a load of burden on DEs that they never had before - and not just because of the work required to transition. And that obviously this is all Wayland's fault.

What I think is actually going on though is that we expect quite a rich feature set from a modern DE - exactly as you have listed.

We could never do most of this stuff on X, but Wayland enables it and then follows a load of work to get it all going.

In an ideal world there would be a nice clean abstraction boundary between compositor and DE so that this underlying work was shared between DEs. Maybe that is possible, but people who know what they're talking about seem to agree that the Wayland approach is the right way to go and I don't know enough to disagree. Plus, it makes some intuitive sense that your DE should know how windows share rendering space.

>> In an ideal world there would be a nice clean abstraction boundary between compositor and DE so that this underlying work was shared between DEs.

Not sure what's ideal about that. With Wayland the DE IS the compositor. There are a lot of benefits to that. I would hope basic compositing is a fairly small amount of code and many DEs could build on that - which I guess would your clean boundary even if it's in the same process.

I think my point is that wlroots is a set of building blocks, rather than a single library. You can't build an unopinionated single library that just takes care of the Waylandness of your DE, that you can build on top of. The compositing and the windowing and the event handling are all intertwined, so instead the best you can do is wlroots which gives you some blocks you can put together in the appropriate way.

It makes for complex, significant work for any Wayland DE, with less shared work. I don't think this is wrong - it seems this is the approach we need to get full featured DEs, it's just unfortunate that that's how reality has worked out.

The point of Xfce for me is that it is configurable, the way Gnome is explicitly not.

Of all that, I only care about fractional scaling. If I wanted Apple-like experience, I'd be using a Mac. Imitating Mac experience on different hardware can be a worthy goal, but it's definitely not the only worthy goal.

And still does Windows shading.

Not so sure that VR will take off that much, or that soon. The Apple Vision Pro is still pretty heavy, working for hours with that thing, well I hope you have strong neck muscles.

xfce isn't even useful on resource limited hardware, you are better of using a much lighter weight wm like icewm , openbox or fluxbox + a lightweight launcher and a lighter set of file managers and viewers [1].

[1] even window maker could do it, I saw it was recently updated.

on the topic of XR desktop environments, Linux is possibly well positioned with projects such as monado, xrdesktop, and SimulaVR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXQnWJpMLn4

Reply on news.ycombinator.com