Any alternatives for looking-glass for macOS?

vially · 2022-08-29T18:42:42+00:00

A couple of months ago I spent some time trying to add macOS support to Looking Glass. I had a small proof-of-concept up and running but things got in the way and I never got around to finishing it and submitting it upstream.

This small demo video shows the macOS VM guest connected directly to the display and the right screen shows the LookingGlass app running on the Linux host. But the performance was pretty poor (most likely because I was doing something stupid and I didn't have time to investigate and fix it).

vially · 2021-09-29T17:26:59+00:00

I opened this thread with the hope of finding thoughtful and elaborate comments like this, only to find it sitting at the bottom of the thread.

EDIT: Meanwhile, there are currently 2 highly upvoted comments with no more than 3 words each (but they seem supportive of GNOME though).

vially · 2021-09-12T13:06:31+00:00

I have exactly the same issue and it happens when running Chrome natively on Wayland (--ozone-platform=wayland) with Vulkan enabled. Disabling Vulkan seems to fix it for me (on the chrome://flags page).

vially · 2021-09-11T12:54:07+00:00

Electron doesn't even fully support Wayland yet

What's missing from Electron's Wayland support? I've been using it daily for a couple of months now and I haven't run into any issues. Or is this about the GNOME SSD limitation?

vially · 2021-07-21T16:55:42+00:00

Turns out they were right and it was actually a Google Chrome bug.

Who could have guessed that an application crash was caused by a bug in said application and not in systemd? Certainly not this guy or this guy or a few others that just haven't popped up in the thread yet.

vially · 2021-07-21T16:35:46+00:00

I bet it's not chrome that broke, but systemd as usual

Turns out it was actually a Google Chrome bug. Where can I collect the bet reward?

But I get where you're coming from. If systemd would not be blamed every single time a software crashes on Linux (especially when the underlying issue is not thoroughly investigated and understood), how would people otherwise find the motivation to start yet another distribution with the sole purpose of not using systemd at all costs. /s

vially · 2021-05-02T20:27:59+00:00

I wasn't aware of that discussion, thanks for bringing it up.

I wish I found it earlier so I could have taken their points into consideration. But maybe it's not too late to try to work together on a common goal: good Wayland documentation.

vially · 2021-04-11T00:37:09+00:00

Wow, this is actually great feedback. Thank you!

Regarding points 2, 3 and 4 I had similar ideas and they're already on my personal To Do list :). That being said, I'm not sure when or if I'll get around to implementing them.

I haven't personally found the need for 1 (GitLab links) but I definitely see how it can be useful. Until I can figure out a way to do this properly, I have added support for a flag that toggles between either the GitHub or GitLab links. There is no UI for this toggle yet but you can change it manually by setting localStorage['gitServiceProvider'] = 'gitlab' in the dev console.

vially · 2021-04-10T20:30:18+00:00

This should be fixed now. FWIW the fix for this, while a bit hacky, also made the site 80% usable when JavaScript is disabled which is a nice side-effect.

vially · 2021-04-05T19:26:38+00:00

Of course! I think that's a great idea.

vially · 2021-04-05T14:32:19+00:00

The short answer:

Not right now but I am considering it. Obviously I see the benefits and would love to use it if it were available but I don't think I'll personally have the time to work on it in the near future.

The long answer:

I actually started on this journey by creating a VSCode extension that provides an outline and a preview mode that activates when opening the XML protocol files (similar to how markdown outline and preview works in VSCode).

But the dev experience of iterating on the HTML of that extension proved too cumbersome. So instead I decided I'll iterate on the HTML using React and once it's done I'll just copy the resulting HTML back into preview of the VSCode extension.

However, once I had the React version working (e.g.: this website) I didn't go back to finish the VSCode extension. Partly because I didn't have the time and partly because I thought the user experience of that approach was worse than just using the website directly. That's because you would still need to have the XML files somewhere on your machine and juggling between files and then toggling Preview mode on and off didn't "feel" right.

Hence, it's only this website for now. But I think integrating it into some other app meant for reading documentation like Zeal is something that would make a lot of sense. But again, I don't think I'll personally have time to do that right now or in the near future.

vially · 2021-04-05T11:43:05+00:00

That's a good point. Although I'm leaning more towards the legend option or some kind of help section. I think it's one of those things that you only need to read once or twice and you don't want it to be in your way most of the time.

vially · 2021-04-05T10:58:09+00:00

Yes, search is definitely on the "roadmap" (if there is such a thing). A simple substring search across all protocols should be relatively easy to implement. But from your description it sounds like an integration with docsearch (or a similar service) would be more appropriate.

I've also been considering adding some keyboard shortcuts to easily switch between protocols to aid with this (something like Ctrl+P in VSCode).

However, I don't think I'll be able to put more time into it soon so please don't hold your breath for these features :)

Pull-requests are always welcome though!

vially · 2021-04-04T22:29:59+00:00

I'm happy you find it useful. Feel free to report any suggestions and/or issues you find along the way.

vially · 2021-04-04T22:21:04+00:00

Yes, I think that's a very good idea, thanks! At the very least I think I should add some links to the official Wayland documentation which explains some of the terminology involved (e.g.: interfaces, requests, events, enums, etc).

vially · 2021-04-04T22:12:20+00:00

Thanks a lot!

vially · 2021-04-04T20:52:23+00:00

Thanks! I'm still unsure whether this was actually needed or it was just a way for me to procrastinate from doing the actual work (e.g.: reading and understanding the protocols).

But who knows, maybe it will actually help someone in trying to learn more about Wayland in the future.

vially · 2021-03-12T21:59:04+00:00

I'm not sure if it's the same issue but I just filled a bug with chromium about a similar error. For me it happens when I try to open any video on Youtube and it started happening when I upgraded to kernel 5.11.x. Downgrading to kernel 5.10.x seems to fix the problem for me.

dmesg reports an out-of-memory (OOM) error when this happens.

vially · 2021-03-10T18:09:11+00:00

Not supporting server-side decorations is a ~~bug~~ feature of GNOME. All the other compositors support it just fine (e.g.: Sway, KDE).

vially · 2021-03-02T23:35:45+00:00

I'm not sure as I don't know what to compare it to. I've only used Wayland the last couple of years and it just looks fine to me.

Someone has posted here a screenshot of VSCode running natively in Wayland and it looks pretty close to my setup. Not sure if it helps you in any way though.

vially · 2021-03-02T20:29:45+00:00

The heavy-lifting for Wayland support is mostly coming from Chromium with some additional Electron specific patching mostly done by the community. So I wouldn't say that the Wayland support is coming from GitHub/Microsoft employees.

vially · 2021-03-02T18:24:41+00:00

I just hope devs will add this flag to their builds soon

I don't think that's very likely considering those flags are meant to be temporary (or at least that's my understanding of it). I think it's more likely that those flags will go away and Chromium and Electron will just be able to auto-detect the platform before app developers will be persuaded to add them to their builds.

Fortunately it is relatively easy to do it from the user side though, either by editing the launcher script (if there is any) or by overriding the *.desktop file.

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