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Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre

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On 13/08/2025 19:13, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
> John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> writes:
>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> Obviously Blender on Wayland has no control over the position of its
>>> GUI relative to other applications’ windows, but I never cared about
>>> that.
>>
>> That's fine for you, but yet again you do not seem to understand that
>> something not being important to *you, personally* does not mean that
>> *other people* don't care about it.
>>
>> Which is sort of the crux of the whole thing, as the Wayland developers
>> also embody this sort of "I don't need XYZ, therefore nobody else does"
>> thinking, and are learning the hard way that that kind of attitude is
>> mostly only gonna win converts from the set of people who *already*
>> think like them.
> 
> Having read around the subject a bit, it’s a lot more complicated than
> that.
> 
> If you’re attached to a narrow set of requirements, and either think
> that only your favorite requirements need to be satisfied, or
> alternatively just want to crow about someone being forced to take your
> favorite requirements seriously, don’t bother reading on, just keep
> arguing with each other.
> 
> Otherwise...
> 
> The question is where decisions are made about window placement, and how
> that is negotiated between an application and a display service. (The
> application and the display service are most likely both component-based
> systems; they might each be more than one process; the various bits
> might not all be on the same physical machine, etc.)
> 
> In Wayland, the answer is: the application communicates intent to the
> display service and the display service decides on how to meet that
> intent.
> 
> The application’s requirements are, normally, not that windows must be
> positioned at specific locations, but rather than windows must be
> positioned in a specific layout with respect to one another and
> (perhaps) with respect to elements of the physical display.
> 
> Simple examples of this would be context menus and dialog boxes. The
> application doesn’t care where they go as long as it’s somewhere
> sensible. If the user wants to include their positioning beyond “they go
> somewhere sensible”, they will want to make one global change, not
> reconfigure every application.
> 
> Another example is for windows to be in the same place they were last
> time the application ran, support for which was added a few years ago.
> 
> The Wayland design seems to be that the application tells the display
> server what it’s trying to achieve, and the display server figures out
> where to put windows in order both to satisfy this and to satisfy any
> user-level preferences.
> 
> The other issue is that left to themselves, applications get it
> wrong. Examples cited include application positioning their windows
> off-screen, or wrongly estimating the size of frames so that
> window-level controls are obscured, or mishandling changes to monitor
> layout and resolution, or ignoring desktop-wide conventions (e.g. a
> tiling window manager).
> 
> The conclusion Wayland seems to have reached from these two things that
> is that since applications shouldn’t need to control absolute positions,
> and since when they do try to control absolute positions they get it
> wrong, the ability to set absolute positions is not available.
> 
> What this means is that the protocol needs to include support for each
> realistic set of application goals. Almost everything has context menus,
> dialog boxes, etc so they were in from relatively early. Persistence of
> positions across session restarts came later. Applications trying to do
> something more complex aren’t there yet.
> 
> A comparison could be drawn with the early days of Linux. In my first
> job a lot of our code started life on SunOS, UnixWare and possibly even
> older things. As time progressed more of it migrated to Linux, and
> sometimes I ran into things that just weren’t there in Linux and had to
> work around them.
> 
> This was mildly annoying, certainly, but nobody concluded from this
> either that the things missing from Linux weren’t needed, nor that Linux
> was deliberately ignoring particular requirements, and when Linux moved
> forward nobody thought it had conceded after some kind of fight.
> 
> Rather, everybody knew it was a work in progress and that missing
> functionality would turn up sooner or later, in some form. It didn’t
> always look the same: anything that used SysV STREAMS had to change to
> use sockets or /dev/ptmx or whatever, for example.
> 
> In a very distributed fashion, the Linux world was empirically searching
> out the requirements imposed on Linux by the applications people wanted
> to run on it, and sometimes taking the opportunity to improve on the
> state of the art as they did so. I’m quite glad not to have had to deal
> with STREAMS for a few decades...
> 
> I think the situation with Wayland is similar. They’re trying something
> novel, and are identifying requirements incrementally and interactively.
> When it comes to the case of applications that want to arrange multiple
> windows in a coherent layout, they are somewhere in the middle of that
> process.
> 
> Sources:
> 
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/264
> https://www.mail-archive.com/wayland-devel@lists.freedesktop.org/msg41606.html
> https://canonical-mir.readthedocs-hosted.com/latest/explanation/window-positions-under-wayland/
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/18
> 
+1 . Thanks for the sanity.

Unusually for me, I am pro Wayland if it gets the bugs sorted out. In a 
way I never was with postscript or X windows, or systemd.

It does seem to be a genuine attempt to *simplify* things rather than an 
exercise in ego massaging obfuscation disguised as ubiquity.

(I agree STREAMS was an even more complicated way to make TCP/IP  more 
inaccessible than sockets. I am rather enjoying the LW-IP stack use on 
pi PICOS).



-- 
Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 
twenty-first century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a 
globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, 
on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer 
projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to 
contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.

Richard Lindzen

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Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Stéphane CARPENTIER <sc@fiat-linux.fr> - 2025-08-09 12:48 +0000
  Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-08-11 11:26 -0700
    Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2025-08-11 21:06 +0000
      Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-08-11 15:19 -0700
        Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-11 22:27 +0000
          Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-08-11 15:54 -0700
          Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2025-08-12 02:28 +0000
        Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2025-08-12 02:27 +0000
    Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-11 22:18 +0000
      Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-08-11 15:49 -0700
        Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-11 23:27 +0000
          Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-08-12 08:37 -0700
            Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2025-08-12 20:15 +0000
            Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-12 23:29 +0000
              Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-08-13 09:05 -0700
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2025-08-13 19:13 +0100
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Marc Haber <mh+usenetspam1118@zugschl.us> - 2025-08-13 21:32 +0200
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2025-08-13 21:29 +0100
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Marc Haber <mh+usenetspam1118@zugschl.us> - 2025-08-14 11:20 +0200
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2025-08-14 12:03 +0100
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-14 00:49 +0000
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Marc Haber <mh+usenetspam1118@zugschl.us> - 2025-08-14 11:21 +0200
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2025-08-14 01:12 +0000
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2025-08-14 13:04 +0100
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2025-08-14 21:00 +0000
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-14 22:48 +0000
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre vallor <vallor@cultnix.org> - 2025-08-15 02:56 +0000
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2025-08-17 09:12 +0100
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2025-08-14 00:16 +0100
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2025-08-14 08:56 +0100
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2025-08-14 09:41 +0100
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2025-08-14 11:58 +0100
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2025-08-14 13:07 +0100
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2025-08-15 08:27 +0100
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-14 00:46 +0000
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2025-08-14 13:03 +0100
                Re: Artix Linux and Xlibre Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2025-08-14 12:31 +0000

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