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Wayland-Proxy Load Balancer Helping Firefox Cope With Wayland Issues
(www.phoronix.com)
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Would be interesting if this is more on Firefox side, or on compositor side. I've been running Firefox in Wayland for about 9 months now, without any issues.
this is a wayland issue. Due to how wayland works, it cannot drop messages, this means if the messages stop being accepted (IE. the program becomes very slow and not very responsive) the application will wind up dying. EEVDF helped resolve a lot of these issues. but they arent gone yet.
a fairly easy replication cause is to start a large rust project compile since cargo will thread to oblivion if it gets the chance, then use the PC on wayland. Applications can frequently die, Firefox, MPV, Kate, gnome web, chromium, games, etc. it also doesn't matter what compositor you use right now as gnome, kde sway all share the issue
EEVDF really does help stop a lot of these crashing though
BeOS solved the issue of unresponsive GUIs in the 1990s. The GUI just must never run in the same thread as the logic.
I agree. The proxy solution they're proposing seems like a band-aid on a fundamental design issue to me. It's easier to just tack yet another library onto a big project than to refactor large amounts of code. This is exactly why a lot of software is getting more and more shit.
Also this is the kind of issues Wayland will be facing now that it's starting to see widespread adoption, issues that arise from more and more complex situations created by interconnecting more apps with it in more ways.
How the devs handle this will be crucial and imo it can make or break the project in the long run. It's one thing to successfully run a hobby project at a small scale, it's another to shoulder the entire Linux desktop for the foreseeable future. That's the bar that X had to meet; if Wayland intends to be the Linux desktop it has to step up. "Not our problem, deal with it outside Wayland" will not do.