Changed my #OpenBSD writing-dedicated box from running #cwm to #i3wm -- I like cwm, but it's still a bit too mousey for my taste.

I also changed all of my fonts (both xterm and i3/i3status) to be bitmapped (the "fixed" font), so everything is looking REALLY crisp.

Maybe I'm getting quite crochety, but at this point, I think I'd much rather have a lower res screen with crisp bitmapped fonts than a crazy high-res screen and vector fonts.

The only thing I'm missing is #emoji. My i3status looks like
cpu 31% | load 0.80 | mem 9% | dsk 13.4% | net Gallifrey 82% | chrg 89% 0.00W | Sun 2024.05.26 06:42 AM

instead of
cpu 05% | 📈 load 0.29 |  28.5% |  disk 59.7% |  Gallifrey 67% |  Sun 2024.05.26 06:42 AM

@rl_dane still don't really get the premise of having a bar, it doesn't really do anything helpful.

@sotolf

lol... brofam, #DWM is calling you. Embrace your total eclipse of the scrogneuneurd!! 🤣

@rl_dane I tried DWM, used it for a month or so, really didn't connect well with it, also it does come with a bar by default :p BSPWM if anything is quite a lot simpler than DWM, and I don't need to recompile just because I wanted to change a shortcut... :p

@sotolf

haha, I'm sure there are good patches for a config file. I haven't used it in a good while, but I had my own build of st (suckless' terminal) with some good patches, like for a scrollback buffer and dynamic font sizing.

I recently ran a script I wrote to display the title of a window, and found it didn't work in KDE because it was using swaymsg. So basically, Wayland doesn't have a standard way (so far) of getting window properties that work among all #Wayland compositors.

Man, stuff like that is really frustrating some times. I agree that XOrg is kind of a dead end, code-maintenance-wise, but it's like the designers of Wayland just wanted to come up with something that would work ok with Gnome and KDE and smeg the rest of the universe.

Oh no... I'm complaining about Wayland to Sotolf... I am feeding a monster. XD

@rl_dane I have tried dealing with suckless software and patches, and the more patches you bring into st the more wacked out it becomes, it starts having weird issues, some of the patches don't gel well with each other, and hand merging them are not that much fun.

Xorg is great, it still works, and you can pry it out of my could dead hands, I don't see the value of wayland, sure it does things differently, but in my experience, even after well over a decade of work on it, it still doesn't really work well, it makes things harder for no good reason just "security" well if someone gets so into my box that they can execute code on it I'm screwed no matter what I have on there, I just don't really get it.

Maybe some day it will catch up, but today, no today is not that day :p

@sotolf

> @rl_dane I have tried dealing with suckless software and patches, and the more patches you bring into st the more wacked out it becomes, it starts having weird issues, some of the patches don't gel well with each other, and hand merging them are not that much fun.

@thelinuxcast recently compared Gnome (needing extensions to be usable) to suckless' tools (needing patches to be usable), and now I see how that can go both ways (positive and negative). One time 5 years ago when I was trying to get along with Gnome, I had two conflicting extensions that filled up /var (which was /, derp) within minutes with log messages. sigh. As an old friend would say rather dismissively in these situations, "NEXT VICTIM!"

> Xorg is great, it still works, and you can pry it out of my cold dead hands, I don't see the value of wayland, sure it does things differently, but in my experience, even after well over a decade of work on it, it still doesn't really work well, it makes things harder for no good reason just "security" well if someone gets so into my box that they can execute code on it I'm screwed no matter what I have on there, I just don't really get it.
>
> Maybe some day it will catch up, but today, no today is not that day :p

I have recently re-tooled EVERYTHING to #Wayland: #i3wm -> #sway, and #KDE #Plasma 5.27 to Wayland(-mode), even though it's a touch buggy, and there are things I rely on like Xbanish that just have no replacement in Plasma+Sway. My only XOrg box now is my #OpenBSD box (now running i3, formerly #cwm).

Other than the issue of screen tearing when watching videos, and some purely theoretical performance improvements, I'm no better for being 99% Wayland now. Sway is great, and does absolutely everything I need (even though it's very slow to reload compared to i3wm for some reason), but that's only because the Sway community has done a lot of hard work to re-implement everything that the i3 community needed/wanted (or provide hacks/scripts to do the same). KDE+Wayland is not nearly as nice an experience.

So... uhh.. Wayland is THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE, but just as we have been suspecting for the past decade, the future kinda sucks. :P

@rl_dane @thelinuxcast

Well, there is a reason I neither use GNOME, nor DWM, or ST :p

I have recently re-tooled EVERYTHING to #Wayland: #i3wm -> #sway, and #KDE #Plasma 5.27 to Wayland(-mode), even though it's a touch buggy, and there are things I rely on like Xbanish that just have no replacement in Plasma+Sway. My only XOrg box now is my #OpenBSD box (now running i3, formerly #cwm).

Exactly, there is the reason why I stay on Xorg, there is no real compelling reason to switch.

Other than the issue of screen tearing when watching videos, and some purely theoretical performance improvements,

Yeah, I've heard a lot of people talking about that, haven't really seen it in practice, might be that my brain just learned to compensate from watching too many ultracompressed, full of artifacts videos when I grew up :p

So... uhh.. Wayland is THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE, but just as we have been suspecting for the past decade, the future kinda sucks. 😛

Well I guess I'll leave the future up to the youngsters :p They can enjoy it as they want to, I'll stay here using my old tools for the time being at least :p

@sotolf @thelinuxcast

>> Other than the issue of screen tearing when watching videos, and some purely theoretical performance improvements,
>
> Yeah, I've heard a lot of people talking about that, haven't really seen it in practice, might be that my brain just learned to compensate from watching too many ultracompressed, full of artifacts videos when I grew up :p

I have seen it a good bit on youtube, but there's supposed to be a double-buffering option for Intel graphics cards in XOrg that fixes it. I haven't tried that yet, as editing the XOrg config reminds me of editing XF86Config in the 90s, and I suddenly break out in hives

>> So... uhh.. Wayland is THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE, but just as we have been suspecting for the past decade, the future kinda sucks. 😛
>
> Well I guess I'll leave the future up to the youngsters :p They can enjoy it as they want to, I'll stay here using my old tools for the time being at least :p

I get that, but I also think it's a bit sad that a lot of the old guard (whose opinions I value) will just shut out the #Wayland world instead of wading in and saying stuff like, "What do you MEAN there's no cross-Wayland way of implementing this, and it has to be implemented differently in Gnome, KDE, and wlroots? Do you SERIOUSLY think your only job is schlepping pixels? Tourists."

@rl_dane @thelinuxcast They have made wayland in a monolith way, in something that feels like they are actually working against small well crafted tools, so they seem to have forced out a lot of people on purpouse, to especially cater to the monoliths of gnome and kde.

@sotolf @rl_dane @thelinuxcast
Nothing monolith about it if you don't use a distro that relies of systemd, sway is a separate software, wlroots is a separate software, I think you need elogind for seat management or whatever they call it — that's about it. I hate systemd and I don't use it, but I use Void with Sway on hardware that supports it and it works perfectly.

@sotolf @rl_dane @thelinuxcast
BTW screen tearing isn't about video, it's noticeable even when scrolling the page in Firefox — I've been surprised to see it even on relatively modern hardware (modern = not two decades old in my case 😂), I've tried everything — every Xorg setting, every Firefox setting in the book and couldn't get rid of it, when I switched to sway — it's just gone! Simple as that!

@sotolf @rl_dane @thelinuxcast
Theoretically, it can be solved by using a compositor with Xorg — but it complicates things instead of making them simpler, and would probably result in performance drop.
True, Wayland solves this problem by relying on features of modern hardware instead of relying on lowest common denominator and supporting chipsets like Intel 915, but in the end it pays off.

@sotolf @rl_dane @thelinuxcast
And I'm not someone who uses all the latest-greatest — far from it, most of hardware I use is a decade or more older, and I've been using Linux systems when Xorg itself didn't exist. I just don't stick to my old habits and for me Wayland just works. True, it doesn't support exact window placement — but I don't use that, it might not play well with some hardware, but on the one I have and that supports it, it works fine.

@m0xee @rl_dane @thelinuxcast good for you, what does it just works for you hake to do with the conversation I and dane was having? zilch if it works for you just use it, you saying that doesn't magically solve my issues with it. I don't get how you think this is contributing anything to the conversation, you just keep on misrepresenting everything I say, no need for that.

@sotolf @rl_dane @thelinuxcast
I don't "keep misinterpreting" — maybe I just didn't get what you mean about being monolithic. E.g. for input there is libinput — again a separate software and Xorg can use it too. XFree86 wasn't modular either — it took a great deal of effort to make it such. I don't see anything in Wayland's design that would intrinsically make it monolithic.

@m0xee @rl_dane @thelinuxcast you do, you keep talking about things I never said like I made claims about them. Again, can you make a wm in wayland without writing a compositor?

@sotolf
I might've misunderstood you as you didn't really elaborate on what you mean by being monolithic — if I did, you can always correct me 🤷
> can you make a wm in wayland without writing a compositor
Would it even make any sense if display server itself is called a "wayland conpositor"? Again, Sway might be considered a WM — technically it IS a compositor, but it doesn't implement it from the ground up — it relies on wlroots, in this regard it's quite modular.
@rl_dane @thelinuxcast

@m0xee @rl_dane @thelinuxcast using a library doesn't mean you don't have to have it...

@sotolf @rl_dane @thelinuxcast
Same way as you have to have an X display server to run a WM — even if that would be headless, WM doesn't exist in limbo all by itself.
Having a library means you can replace it with a different library implementing the same interfaces, or build a different WM on top of that library. You can interface with a library, you can communicate using a network protocol — neither approach is monolithic.

@m0xee @rl_dane @thelinuxcast again putting claims in my mouth I never made *sigh* you're only doing this to win a discussion I don't feel like playing that stupid game, have a nice day..