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Comment by jmhain | Hacker News Reader

I'm typing this from a wayland session of the GNOME 3.14 beta (via Fedora 21 Branched). While there are still some serious bugs, I have to say I am very impressed. The synchronization problems and graphical glitches of X always made the Linux desktop feel second rate compared to Mac or Windows. With wayland, interactions with elements on the screen such as moving and resizing windows or dragging apps to the dash are perfectly in sync with the cursor. Not even Android has achieved this.

In addition, GNOME 3.14 is looking outstanding. With the latest design refinements, I find the interface significantly more attractive than OS X (before or after redesign). It's not quite there yet, but if the community can deliver a system with fully functional wayland, portable sandboxed app containers, and a stable development target, the Linux desktop truly will stand a chance against the proprietary competitors.

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What serious bugs have you encountered so far? Let me know, as I need to fix them before release.

I suspect many of the issues are actually problems with Fedora (it seems I have a mix of 3.13.9 and the previous release) but I'll list them anyway, just in case.

* Apps are actually launching under xwayland by default. Everything segfaults if launched with GDK_BACKEND=wayland.

* I use dvorak. Xwayland honors the setting but the shell is still qwerty.

* Two-finger scrolling works in xwayland (though twice as fast as usual) but not at all in shell.

* Restarting shell kills running apps and afterwards only Web will open. And it has the app menu and min/max button in the headerbar.

* External monitor not recognized, works fine under X

I've been using Linux for two decades and not experienced the graphical glitches you speak of. Moving and resizing windows? Nope. Some infuriating compiz bugs, sure.

You didn't notice in two decades that moving and resizing windows in Linux was an ugly affair plagued by graphical artifacts? I wrote this almost a decade ago and as far as I can tell it's still true today unless you use Wayland: http://www.osnews.com/thread?93850. Obviously a lot of pieces (graphics drivers, etc) have fallen into place since then, but it seems like ditching X was a necessary step to getting a clean, artifact-free experience.

Nope, not seen that.

Sounds like resizing on a poorly written MacOS Classic application.

Possibly it happens and my brain filters it out.

look closer. you mouse cursor will move ahead of the window. check out the Xorg mouse handler code. it performs the update in a signal handler while the rest of the window movement is in the normal path (which could be blocked by chatty Xlib clients).

That's normal and a feature. Mouse pointer is driven by hardware input and rendered independently (was a hardware overlay in the old days) and is soft realtime (hopefully). Because the window manager is a normal process, operating asynchronoysly, the window frame will lag a bit (depends on system load), and the app contents even more (this can't be avoided, even if the WM/compositor was realtime). Making the window frame wait for window content is broken by design.

Its not a feature, its an implementation artifact of the window frame being drawn by a separate process than the window contents. Its broken by design. OS X does it the right way, with the window contents and window frame being redrawn in lockstep and double-buffered so the user never sees partially drawn windows.

This is probably a legacy of X's network oriented history. If your window contents are being rendered by another computer on the end of a high latency connection you want to be able to reorganise your windows on screen without waiting for the other end to finish the reflow.

I assume that window contents are drawn to a buffer before being rendered on a modern system anyway. I can't remember the last time I saw partially drawn window contents.

It's not a historic artefact. You can't trust the app to render in time... (that's also why client side decorations are worthless).

Well, even if you assume the app will take too long to render, is it really worthwhile to render the "rest" of the window (pointer, frames, etc). The main reason you're working with a particular window is the content, not the chrome, so drawing the chrome asynchronously only serves to make things look weird, not actually get things done faster.

But wouldn't that also hold for OSX/Windows?

when i talked to keithp about this last year, he wasn't as enthused as you seem to be about the implementation. it was purely a side effect that causes people to think that Xorg isn't locked up when it actually is.

Nope, smooth here. But now that you mention it, resizing (only) is behind the cursor a bit. Honestly never noticed, I'm not in the habit of resizing my windows often enough for it to matter much.

Each time I've attempted to use Linux as my main OS it's always X11 that scares me off. Booting into console to edit xorg.conf gets tiring after a while, spending hundreds of dollars for graphics card that has more stable drivers, the general ancient 90's feel. I've tried it multiple times, but gave up each time.

Per default, you don't have xorg.conf anymore on modern distros. I have been in the "edit xorg.conf" boat as well, but there have been tremendous improvements since the bad old days.

You may be surprised by the latest versions, then.

I haven't edited xorg.conf in a long time (years?). And I'm using a power user oriented distro, Arch Linux.

As long as you use the open source drivers, you'll be fine. And lucky for you, the cheapest graphics cards (Intel integrated and AMD) have the best open source support.

Again this is very subjective. I have never had to mess with xorg. Things like Nvidia Optimus are obviously a tipping point of the problem.

Question if I may since you seem familiar with gnome. I use 3.12 and really enjoy it, but gnome shell (or mutter, or the js engine) seems to leak memory pretty badly. That is, if I mouse to the top left hot corner, then escape, I see its RSS increase, as probably expected. However, it increases each time I do this. I can get it to 500mb by doing nothing more than going into and out of the dash for a few minutes. In real use, after an eight hour day I see it anywhere from 700m to 1g rss. Any idea what's happening behind the scenes, or if this still happens in 3.14?

What happens if you run looking glass and perform a garbage collection. (<Alt>F2, lg<Return>, click on trash icon).

If you see RSS drop significantly back down, there is a chance it will be fixed in the future. It's pretty difficult to let the JS engine know how big the resources are that are not in JS-land so that it can take things into account for a GC. (There are some patches related to this in bugzilla IIRC).

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