Comment by qwertox
2 years ago
Ever since I've upgraded to Windows 11 I am so extremely frustrated with explorer's performance. The shortest time I have to wait for it to react to a double-click is 5 seconds, sometimes it goes up to 30+ seconds when I've used the machine for a couple of hours. I don't mean the time it takes an application to "boot", but the time for explorer to deal with itself until it is able to launch something. Even a simple thing as showing the context menu and then displaying properties if that was selected. That is on a i9-9880H Laptop with 32GB of RAM and a Samsung 970 PRO.
It's intolerable and I'm preparing to move to Linux. Since there are some tools I first need to write in order to maintain my workflow, mostly mouse-gesture-related stuff, I'm still waiting for the Wayland transition to get settled.
If I could stay on X11 for a decade from now on, I would migrate ASAP, but if the Kubuntu team decides to fully switch to Wayland without using X11 being an option, I'd have a problem.
A way this used to be possible, also before win11, was misbehaving custom extensions to the explorer shell. IE, some applications install extra menus and handlers as part of the windows shell. Particularly, some such extensions may fight with each other - you can have one installed, or the other, but not both. I use the tortoiseGIT extension to integrate git into explorer, and a lot of the bugs it has seen over the years, have really been work-arounds to survive OTHER broken explorer extensions. My point being, the problem may come from one of your staple applications, not from the fresh window install(?).
I have several tools installed, also such which hook into explorer, but not more than I had with Windows 7, which I replaced last year with Windows 11 on a much more modern machine.
Two weeks ago I had to boot into the Windows 7 on the old machine (it now boots into Linux by default and I use it occasionally) and almost tears came to my eyes when I saw how fast that 13 year old machine is.
Windows 7 was pretty good as an OS.
Somehow my windows taskbar crashes... And alt tabbing doesn't work properly, I have to manually click on the windows in the overlay. My taskbar is always on top of windows, and they don't respect it's space so they just go under it and hide important stuff. Except firefox, which does respect the taskbar's space on a non-primary monitor, obviously leaving the space, but on the main screen it overlaps the taskbar entirely.
>If I could stay on X11 for a decade from now on
I think they all talk about that move but i make a bet no one will actually do it. Remember Nvidia?
And i think anything archlinux/gentoo will stay with x11 AND Wayland for at least the next 10 years.
> no one will actually do it. Remember Nvidia?
It's surprisingly usable these days. GSync/VRR has a bit of a frame order problem but the desktop feels really zippy.
It's just snagging at this point. They fix a few more bugs, improve nvidia-settings, maybe sprinkle on some HDR and that's a lot of complaints ameliorated, at least until we all move to Yutani, or whatever the next graphics server's called.
> I think they all talk about that move but i make a bet no one will actually do it.
RHEL 10 is going to be Wayland only. You will be able to run X11 apps via Xwayland, but not full-blown Xorg server and X11-only session.
Yes things that were broken for me by default are explorer, notepad (using it with files over a network), calendar pop up, and start menu. And don't get me started on the UI of the sound/battery/network widget.
Every day I'm reminded of something I think Jo Armstrong said in a talk, paraphrased "Ah, an update! Maybe they made it better ;)".
To paraphrase Foone
"The year on the Linux desktop won't be because Linux got better"
Explorer seems to have always been plagued by some original sin around how it's event model works. Blocking the main thread until every app involved can feed back which can often require network lookups. You can see them trying to move to an intent system but there's too much legacy for them to move past.
i think there is something wrong with your machine, probably malware of some sort, or whatever this "gesture" stuff is doing. clean install probably indicated.
You'd feel at home at answers.microsoft.com as one of their expert "Independent Advisors".
No malware. Clean install is not an option.
There's absolutely no way your computer is functioning properly if you have multi-second delays on a simple double-click in Explorer.
if you are considering switching to linux, presumably a clean install actually is an option.
I think you need to ditch the tape storage system then and maybe move to something from this century
i agree, however windows does have a way of locking you in to explorer with no practically viable alternative
If you wanted, you honestly could stay on X11 for the next decade. I highly doubt it's going anywhere. Also, no matter what your workflow is, you can write a program to do that. I'd guarantee you could write a small script to automate Wayland to do what you need
Right about now KDE is moving to Wayland. KDE Plasma 6 released a week ago will use Wayland by default, with X11 being an opt in mode. I think that X11 while it might exist for the next decade, it will at best be a second class citizen, at worst a buggy and unsupported mess
And even if they pull X support, do you have to use Plasma 6, 7 or 8 in the next decade?
Sometimes it's okay to use old software, especially if it works well for you.
Is it technically possible to guarantee program-agnostic mouse gesture support in Wayland? I would sorta expect wlroots to support it, but I don't think that is a safe bet for an arbitrary Wayland compositor.
This is my main issue, I need full access to input devices and the ability to drop, alter and inject new events.
On Windows I fully rely on StrokeIt, it has been a huge improvement for me which I've used for ~15 years.
Linux's easystroke [0] is now deprecated (and always was mediocre) and the modern alternative "mouse-actions" [1] is not good at all.
I've coded a replacement in Rust+C which works for my simple use-case but it targets X11 and it's unclear for me how I can get low level access to input devices events with Wayland. I've also read something about security getting increased in Wayland so that one does no longer have access to input stuff (unclear to me).
Then the nice thing about X11 is the ability to remotely use a X11 session, which apparently isn't possible with Wayland (except for RDP or VNC which isn't what I need).
[0] https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke/wiki
[1] https://github.com/jersou/mouse-actions
6 replies →
> If I could stay on X11 for a decade from now on
why is that?
I am asking, because so far I have seen old linux users refusing to move because they require some specific x11 feature that is not (yet) supported on wayland. I thought that new linux user wouldn't have such requirements.
Personally for me such migration-blocking X11 feature is "not crashing".
RHEL 9 should give you a guranteed X11 experience until 2032 at least.
What exactly is your problem with Wayland? It works fine.