waylandows is crap

quickfur · 2024-01-10 20:02:34

I was only half-serious. Obviously, memory and cpu usage aren't the primary criteria for me to choose ratpoison, though they're nice to haves. I chose ratpoison mainly because I don't believe in the desktop metaphor and generally don't agree with the direction that modern GUIs are going. The rest is just the icing on top.

aluma · 2024-01-10 20:15:02

Quite seriously - this is wonderful!
Freedom of choice is what makes Linux so attractive.

zapper · 2024-01-10 20:18:41

I see, that sounds about right.

I like JWM because of the desktop look and still having the blessings of i3-wm where key bindings exist, etc...

Also, the ability to start up applications when you log into JWM. i3-wm can do that as well ofc.

Long story short, these things are really awesome features to me.

When I think of "modern" I think of LXQT, LXDE, MATE AND EVEN MORE SO, Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE, BUDGIE, UNITY, UKUI and other similar or more bloated desktops.

Whoever thought the tablet look was a good idea, has rocks in their head more than brains. Just sayin...

quickfur · 2024-01-10 21:03:59

I just edit .xsession to start applications upon login. And ratpoison is competely keyboard-driven (this is programmable too).

Basically, I find no need of overlapping windows: usually I'm working with one application, so it makes sense to just maximize it to make use of the entire screen real estate. Occasionally I need to work with two applications at the same time; then I just need to split the screen in half and tile the two applications side-by-side. Ratpoison does both.

I also have no need for eye-candy: window borders are redundant, so are title bars and backgrounds. So a WM that dispenses with these unnecessary things is a plus.

Furthermore, I prefer to keep my hands on the keyboard at all times if at all possible -- it's faster that way than having to keep switching between keyboard and mouse. Ratpoison is fully controlled by keyboard: switching between windows, closing a window, launching a console, etc., are all powered by just a couple of keystrokes. So there's no need for the rodent. Bonus: ratpoison has a dedicated keystroke sequence just for banishing the rat cursor to the lower right corner of the screen, where it's mostly invisible and out of the way.

I also have no need of taskbars or any permanent fixture on the screen: if I wanted the time, for example, a 2-keystroke sequence tells me the time, there's no need to dedicate screen real estate to that. Similarly with listing the currently open windows, etc., etc.. Ratpoison provides no taskbars or any other such fixture; they are all accessible by keystrokes and go away on their own so that they don't bother me all the time. Check.

So basically, Ratpoison lets me focus 100% on the current application with 100% of the screen real estate. Window management is 100% in the background, as it ought to be. There is no desktop, there's only actual applications. This is perfection.

//

The only time I need a mouse these days is to use that annoyance of a web browser. Thankfully, there's addons like Vimperator and Tridactyl that, for the most part, eliminates the need for the rodent and returns control to the keyboard. This lets me reduce rodent use to less than 1% of the time, which are the only times when there's a legitimate need of a pointer: selecting some text on the screen, for example, or drawing stuff in a paint app. (In theory it is possible to be rodent-free even in these circumstances, but here the rat pointer is actually more efficient than the alternatives, so it redeems its existence on my desk. Otherwise I wouldn't even have a rat at all.)

zapper · 2024-01-10 21:31:11

Yeah, I am gonna go on a limb and say that, ratpoison must take patience to learn to use, given that a mouse isn't used.

Btw, I don't use a touchpad or mouse, I use a trackpoint

Which does function like a mouse.

quickfur · 2024-01-10 21:48:19

You're not going out on a limb, it does take patience to learn to use. Took me a while to get used to it. But now that I've learned it, I'm never looking back.

stopAI · 2024-01-11 12:17:50

I like wayland. I used to be skeptical of him, but now my view of him has changed. And most importantly, no tearing with it

chomwitt · 2024-01-12 00:29:25

I try last days stumpwm. I think it was inspired by ratpoison but they wanted it to run on common lisp.
It certainly seems minimal as quickfur describes.

Last edited by chomwitt (2024-01-12 00:31:37)

quickfur · 2024-01-12 00:50:18

Yeah, IIRC stumpwm is the successor of ratpoison, I think one of the devs may even be ratpoison's dev. Supposedly it's better than ratpoison, but I haven't tried it yet, I'm relatively happy with ratpoison as it is. Besides, I'm developing my own WM in the same minimal vein, mainly for my own learning, and to try out some hacks I've been meaning to try.

zapper · 2024-01-12 02:39:14

@quickfur it might be better though. I think it is probably lighter on resources for sure. ~~I recall JWM is supposedly written some what in lisp.~~

Nevermind, its written in C, interesting.

Last edited by zapper (2024-01-12 02:40:02)

quickfur · 2024-01-12 03:54:12

Stumpwm is written in Lisp. I'm not sure how lightweight that would be, but my first inclination is to guess that a C app is likely to be more compact. But that's just a guess, can't say for sure without actually measuring it.

stopAI · 2024-01-12 12:06:11

Stumpwm is written in Lisp. I'm not sure how lightweight that would be

StumpWM is not minimalist. If you want a minimalist tiling window manager, then StumpWM is not what you're looking for. The code base is ~15k lines, the binaries produced are ~60mb.

chomwitt · 2024-01-12 13:19:49

I think minimalist can mean not only the code size but also the graphical elements . Both meanings have be mentioned in that thread. I dont pay much attention to the code size because in my case it doesnt make a difference. On the other hand if a wm in the spirit of X offers maleability and less policy,that could help in creating more interesting workflows..

Speaking of workflows, a supervisor is needed to manage automated workflows. For those interested, the user-workflow supervisor idea 's theoretical exploration (user runit) has been discussed in the elist.

In my case interesting workflows would need support of multi-tagging of windows among other things.

Also speaking of maleability ,X allowed me to pass in a couple of minutes from i3 to testing StumpVM.
So 1983's X DisplayServer project legacy seems to me to favor recombinations . I wonder , evolutionary speaking , in software terms, if Wayland's more integrated style that binds a DS's rendering protocal (DS's RP) and a certain WM and call that DS is going to be fruitfull in the long run..

I say DS's RP because as i have proposed in another thread Wayland is a project that doesnt align with X's 1983 legacy , philosophy, incubator enviroment ,and generaly it's dna. That misalignment is painted in the most striking colors in some presentations in the www that present X as a project that has been stagnated in a bad IPC layer. But i propose a different intepretation. That instead ,the Wayland project represents , if not a stagnation, a narrowing in the scope of a network-centric DS that the Athena X project represented.

Wayland is a notable effort to improve the rendering protocol but by various circumstances of fate , it promotes it self , falsely, as successor to X11 . But if you study the project history, easily, we can see that x386 - xfree86 and xorg represent groups focused only on one aspect of the DS protocol stack.

Thus i think it's more fair to say that Wayland it's an extension or a DS's RP fork. I would like to being able to use Wayland compositors but as co-operating components - extensions of a X12 or Y project that promotes and improves while at the same time aligns and respects the initial unix-centric network-centric philosophy of Athena's X.

Last edited by chomwitt (2024-01-12 15:48:22)

quickfur · 2024-01-12 15:53:07

Ratpoison's code is about 20k lines, and compiles to a 180K binary. So it looks like Stumpwm's code is more compact; the larger binary size is probably because it's written in Lisp and therefore comes with a full Lisp interpreter embedded. It's also much more extensible than ratpoison, since lisp, being lisp, can literally rewrite itself at runtime. But ultimately, the exact binary sizes aren't that important; what matters it the functionality to size ratio.

Wayland's premise is actually not bad. There are a lot of things about the core X protocol that are clearly dated; there are many things that were important to display servers back in the day that today are completely irrelevant. Color palettes being one of many examples. 2D drawing primitives that almost nobody uses because these days most programs render directly to buffer instead, or use the GPU's 3D rendering functions. Font management API that is also mostly useless because these days people use the likes of libfreetype (which renders to bitmaps and completely bypasses the core X font APIs), not to mention that the font management is stuck in the bad ole days of 256 characters per charmap, with many hacks to workaround its limitations so that Unicode could work. In short, many entrenched APIs could use an overhaul to better suit modern devices and usage patterns.

The execution of Wayland, however, leaves some things to be desired. Not caring for rare use cases that X supported is one of them. Pushing the new API down the throats of people who haven't found reason to migrate is another -- this is the same problem that the likes of systemd, etc., suffer from. An overly narrow focus on desktops and neglecting other legitimate use cases like remote clients, while being sold as the be-all and end-all of display protocols -- that just leaves a bad taste in the mouth when you try to use it thinking all the old apps would work as before, and instead hit the brick wall of reality.

They could have done this in a way that did not alienate existing users, but instead, they went and committed the biggest blunder one could when it comes to software engineering.

Last edited by quickfur (2024-01-12 15:53:25)

stopAI · 2024-01-12 17:08:00

Ratpoison's code is about 20k lines, and compiles to a 180K binary. So it looks like Stumpwm's code is more compact

Yes, but on cold start up Ratpoison using 8 MB of memory. Stumpwm using 50 MB.

And if we talk about the minimalism of the interface, then we can also consider the Gnome desktop environment as minimalist.

Last edited by stopAI (2024-01-12 17:08:36)

quickfur · 2024-01-12 19:48:25

Whoa... "Gnome" and "minimalist", in the same sentence...

I think I need to sit down.

chomwitt · 2024-01-12 20:25:34

2D drawing primitives that almost nobody uses because these days most programs render directly to buffer instead, or use the GPU's 3D rendering functions.

You mean that certain set of 2d primitives is outdated or the idea of a network centric DS having 2D primitives is outdated?

trinidad · 2024-01-12 21:01:00

other legitimate use cases like remote clients

Howso?

TC

zapper · 2024-01-13 02:16:50

@quickfur maybe show me a comparison then? I am curious. Probably have to be a vm though.

quickfur · 2024-01-13 06:09:15

A comparison of what? Sorry, not very clear from context.

zapper · 2024-01-13 22:01:36

Whoa... "Gnome" and "minimalist", in the same sentence...
I think I need to sit down. big_smile

Gnome and minimalism go together like the idea of drinking sewer water and being healthy go in the same sentence.

aka, an oxymoron.

Btw, what determines if something is minimalistic is how much it taxes the system on ram and cpu, more than the line of code.

Although, if you have complex code and a lot of it being used, the ram usage and cpu usage is bound to go WAY UP.

So... yeah.

Feel free to disagree, but that's my view.

Last edited by zapper (2024-01-13 22:04:19)

stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn · 2024-01-14 07:36:23

re: wayland

enjoyed this commentary and the comments as well

ttps://blog.tenstral.net/2024/01/wayland-really-breaks-things-just-for-now.html

quickfur · 2024-01-14 10:33:04

Lines of code isn't a very accurate measure of anything. What matters is the complexity of the algorithms used and how much work the code does to perform a given task. If a task is complex the code obviously needs more work and resources to arrive at the result. But given a particular task, we can compare how many resources are required by two programs in performing the task. The less resources the better, obviously.

There's also of how many features the program has, and how many of them are actually required and how many are redundant or superfluous. Kinda subjective, but if you have a specific usage pattern then a program that offers lots of features unrelated to your usage then obviously it's not minimal relative to what you use it for. If a feature isn't used for the majority of use cases, we can say that it's redundant and the program is bloated and not minimal.

zapper · 2024-01-15 04:03:41

@quickfur point taken, but either way, would be surprised if the more complex code didn't have more lines of code usually.

Systemd for example has 1 million lines of code vs openrc which has like less than 100000 lines of code.

Its like wtf lol.

quickfur · 2024-01-15 09:23:18

A more accurate measure is the number of tokens in the code, because LOC can be biased by empty lines, comments, different formatting conventions, etc.. But even that isn't completely objective either, since it changes depending on language and what kind of abstractions are used. Though the general order of magnitude of LOC is pretty indicative of the complexity of the code.

But yeah, a million lines of code in systemd is like what on earth is it trying to do 🤨 And do you really want code of this complexity run as pid 1.

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