[LAU] GxPlugins.lv2, Wayland and X (Was: Re: Linux-audio-user Digest, Vol 140, Issue 9)

[Len Ovens]

On Tue, 9 Oct 2018, Dale Powell wrote:

> But neither Xubuntu nor Ubuntu Studio, the two releases based on XFCE, come with
> Wayland. Not sure why you would be using it on an XFCE system at all.... The way
> things currently stand not sure I'd use it on anything but a KDE/Plasma install.

xfce works fine here. But I agree Plasma works well too. The only problem 
I have had with plasma was that it comes with a wayland login choice and 
in some DMs it is not labled that way and so the first Plasma login does 
nothing (well seems to freeze my system... no wayland thanks)

BTW, I have installed Studio and then Plasma on top of it and been quite 
happy with it.

> Biggest issue I had with Ubuntu Studio 18.04 is that no matter what I tried it
> seems to not be possible to use multiple monitors without graphical glitches.

Hmm another case of YMMV. I have used two screens with Studio since 
forever and never had a problem. I do use Intel graphics though I have 
used nvidia in the past both with open and closed drivers and have not had 
trouble with multiple screens. xfce uses xrander based display managment 
and could do more than it does I guess... there are times it would be nice 
to make one screen "sticky" when moving through workspaces but I haven't 
found that a problem.

> Plus there is an annoying bug in Thunar (but XFCE have just released a patch
> upstream, which I suspect will never make it to 18.04 as it's not a security
> patch) which can crash it if you use the tree view in side pane.

I guess I don't use tree view. However, I would still choose Thunar over 
Nautilus which has been gnomed to death...

> Personally I've just managed to get Manjaro to a usable state after tinkering for
> a while and think I'm going to stick with this distro for a bit now....

Enjoy, I did try Majaro, I could make it work in a way I liked, but it was 
much more work that either xfce or Plasma.

One of the "new" gnome-isms that I hate is thew take over of of the window 
decorations. I tend to use many windows on any screen and I want to know 
which window has focus. I look for a desktop theme where the window with 
focus has a different colour than all others. Right now I am using orange 
for focused and grey for unfocused. Any gnome app I use insists on a 
grey title bar no matter what the theme is and merely makes the text 
slightly greyer for unfocused. This forces one to use click to focus 
instead of focus follows mouse (they still don't seem to have focus 
follows mind for some reason) which makes things like copying from one 
window in full view to a window partly covered hard to do.

Skinny window handles is another of complaint I have against many of the 
newer desktop themes. The motif wm may be old and plain but it easy to 
actually use.... though some of the old scroll bars took some getting used 
to  :)   No I am not suggesting a return to motif or fvwm...

I do not know which software installer is normally used for debian 
installs... but the old USC and the newer gnome software are both 
something to run away from. Synaptic and Muon both seem to work fine. 
(commandline programs are fine too) But the newer software installers have 
worked hard to divorce the GUI from the back end so that they can work 
with wayland... however they have not put in place any feedback 
communication from the backend installer to tell you things like "hey we 
are going to remove half your system so we can install this package you 
have asked for" or "this package is asking a question, how would you like 
to answer?" I have spent more time helping people restore/fix their system 
after using a bad sw installer. Jack installs with no RT is also very 
common too.

The short answer is that there is no reason to use Wayland unless you are 
testing/working on it. There is no reason to use Wayland in the audio 
world as all of your software will have to use Wayland's X translation to 
run it. Good Audio plugins do not use QT or GTK or other dynamic library 
based GUI's and so will not have wayland back ends. (This is probably true 
for plugins for other kinds of sw as well... like gimp for example)

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net