Ebook-viewer does not work with Ubuntu 22.04 Wayland [6.13]

[Quoth]

I'm hoping for U-turn and that Wayland is scrapped. It's doubtful it can replace X.

See also Unity: Pretty, but awkward to use and hasn't delivered original goals.*

UNIX user from mid 1980s. CP/M from late 1970s to late 1980s. DOS 1981 to 1990s.
Teaching Linux and deploying servers and dual boot since 1998.

Selling, configuring and supporting Windows from 1992 to 2004. Switched to Linux for all day to day workstation & laptop from late 2016. Erased Windows from laptop in 2017.

[* Unity was discontinued in 2017]

[Katsunami]

@KovidGoyal: Thanks for keeping up the maintenance of this program. Even though I don't use it that often these days (my eBook library has been about perfect since 2016, barring occasionally adding a few new books), I'm always happy it's there when I need it. I'll keep some donations per year coming your way.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

It's cause I myself use and develop on Linux (X11 based).

What are you going to do after Red Hat drops X11 support from RHEL 10? Because, no doubt you know...

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

GNOME+Wayland which is the worst offender in the Wayland ecosystem, with its insane refusal to support server side window decorations.

...that Red Hat is both the sole maintainer of X11 right now, they are the main developer of both GNOME + Wayland (and one seems to be developed for the other).

In a year or two, IBM/RH will basically drop everything but GNOME, Wayland, and client-side decorations on LibAdwaita, and *FY* if you'd want to use anything else on Linux.

KDE, as can be expected, is doing a good job in basically supporting everything under the sun: QT5, QT6, server-side and client-side decorations (AFAIK), but with Plasma 6, it will also move to Wayland as the default.

=====

But I agree: Wayland is a joke. Why? (And I'm not even looking at implementations or protocols and concepts.)

It was first announced in 2008 to replace X.org, because X11 was 'old'. Back then, X11 was almost exactly 20 years old. Wayland should have been the finished and the default on Debian 5.0 Lenny (2012), or Debian 6.0 Squeeze (2014) at the latest. However, it finally became the default in Fedora in 2016, but only when running GNOME on an AMD graphics card. It still isn't the default for most distro's in 2023/2024.

It will become the default on Plasma 6, which will probably make Debian 13 Trixie opt for it to be default on every desktop that supports Wayland in March 2025. THAT is the point where I deem Wayland to be the default.

But here's the joke: at that point, Wayland is 17 years old; just 3 years shy of the point where we'll have to start thinking about a replacement

[JSWolf]

Gotta love all these bits of Linux that don't work. Go Windows!

[Katsunami]

With regard to Wayland:

Originally Posted by 3QVKwyNT9hR849t7

> That comes from Qt, the toolkit calibre uses.

That's lucky.

Retesting with the native Wayland backend today after almost a full year (didn't expect it to work based on the overly friendly response, so didn't test until now) Calibre Viewer seems to render now, seemingly even correctly.

I suppose the ton of Wayland-related fixes that were shipped in Qt6 made things usable at some point, combined with the fact Calibre thankfully isn't lagging behind on Qt5.

Tested on Plasma(kwin) 5.27.10, Calibre 7.4, Qt 6.6.1 and a Nvidia series 4000 using the 545.29.06 driver.

Presumably people on Debian will have it working only on the new release (years away), but Ubuntu and its based distributions (i.e. person on Mint from yesterday) should start working properly when 24.04 ships, presumably sometime early May along with extra months for downstream adaptation.

I'm not using Calibre a lot these days because I punched my personal eBook library into shape between 2011 and 2016, and since then I only add an occasional book. (The entire library also on an iPad and on my phone these days.)

I do keep Calibre installed (Flatpak version), and didn't have a problem with it; not in X11, but also not in Wayland. The system is Debian 12, Plasma 5.27.5+hotfixes on Wayland, AMD graphics card, and Calibre 7.6 (Flatpak). Everything works as expected, except these three things:

- The calibre icon appears when starting the application. A second later, a Wayland icon appears, and 10 seconds after that, the calibre icon vanishes. The application itself works fine though.
- When opening an e-book, the viewer doesn't take scaling into account. The window has to be resized a few pixels for the book to be rendered to the correct scale.
- The font-rendering and drop-down lists of the viewer's configuration is messed up.

These things can be remedied as such, if desired:
- Close Calibre
- Install FlatSeal
- Take away Calibre's Wayland permissions, so it renders on XWayland (X11)
- Start Calibre

===

@KovidGoyal: why does the e-book viewer use a completely different GUI? Is it not written in QT? It seems that the GUI and GUI-fonts not rendering correctly under Wayland is a problem of this widget-set and/or GUI-library.

If this could be fixed (maybe by updating the library if possible), Calibre would run perfectly in Wayland on KDE.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Gotta love all these bits of Linux that don't work. Go Windows!

I'd rather navigate something like this, than having Windows trying to foist a Microsoft Account and Edge on me at every other mouse click. If Windows asks me one more time "Do you want to....?" or it "makes another suggestion", I'll probably defenstrate my work laptop.

Updating my Linux computers at home takes about 10 seconds to update the entire system and all the applications. On Windows, it takes 10 minutes and two reboots to install a "Cumulative Security Update".

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

@KovidGoyal: why does the e-book viewer use a completely different GUI? Is it not written in QT? It seems that the GUI and GUI-fonts not rendering correctly under Wayland is a problem of this widget-set and/or GUI-library.

If this could be fixed (maybe by updating the library if possible), Calibre would run perfectly in Wayland on KDE.

It's Qt WebEngine.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

What are you going to do after Red Hat drops X11 support from RHEL 10? Because, no doubt you know...

I am very much a special case

I highly doubt X11 will actually become unmaintained just because RedHat stops using it. If it does and actually stops *working* I will see, probably end up writing my own wayland compositor, just like I currently have my own X11 desktop. Or maybe there will be some Wayland compositor out there that meets my needs, though I doubt it. I basically use only three graphical programs: The browser (written by myself, vise based on Qt), the terminal emulator (written by myself, kitty, renders straight to OpenGL) and calibre (maintained by myself based on Qt). So writing a compositor that works well with these three will be relatively easy and let me avoid most of the wayland headaches by making it actually consistent and well designed (at least as far as the core wayland protocol allows good design which is admittedly not very far) and tested for myself.

The rest of the Wayland ecosystem can go jump off a cliff.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I'd rather navigate something like this, than having Windows trying to foist a Microsoft Account and Edge on me at every other mouse click. If Windows asks me one more time "Do you want to....?" or it "makes another suggestion", I'll probably defenstrate my work laptop.

Updating my Linux computers at home takes about 10 seconds to update the entire system and all the applications. On Windows, it takes 10 minutes and two reboots to install a "Cumulative Security Update".

I've no problem with a Microsoft account. I do use Edge sometimes as I keep it unmodified in case I want a default browser. I use Firefox otherwise. I don't get many suggestions with Windows.

My system takes less then 10 minutes to do Windows updates. It runs well.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I've no problem with a Microsoft account. I do use Edge sometimes as I keep it unmodified in case I want a default browser. I use Firefox otherwise. I don't get many suggestions with Windows.

My system takes less then 10 minutes to do Windows updates. It runs well.

So I gather you're not on Windows 11 24H1. I installed it recently, and it drives me bonkers with all the questions, suggestions, and underhanded anti-patterns it uses in its dialogs. This sits on an older, refurbished Thinkpad so I have a Windows-computer at home in case I need one, but I think I'm going to convert the thing to Linux as well. (It is a laptop dedicated to running chess engines, if you wonder what it's for.)

[Comfy.n]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

So I gather you're not on Windows 11 24H1. I installed it recently, and it drives me bonkers with all the questions, suggestions, and underhanded anti-patterns it uses in its dialogs.

The other day I was thinking about how can people accept things like those you mention. Good OS and software must work well silently IMO. However I remember seeing a lot of acquaintances installing that Avast AV thingy which then would often be found spinning and rolling on the systray Now, this was interesting.

One tool I like is curiously called ShutUp10 - https://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/...ShutUp10.shtml

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

So I gather you're not on Windows 11 24H1. I installed it recently, and it drives me bonkers with all the questions, suggestions, and underhanded anti-patterns it uses in its dialogs. This sits on an older, refurbished Thinkpad so I have a Windows-computer at home in case I need one, but I think I'm going to convert the thing to Linux as well. (It is a laptop dedicated to running chess engines, if you wonder what it's for.)

Odd. My 24H2 install doesn't seem to nag more than 23H2 does.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

With regard to Wayland

I expect it to implode at some stage like Unity did. It was going to be the only true way right till the day it was dropped in 2017.

Also Redhat is owned by IBM. If they mess up it will be like Oracle's Hudson and Open Office. See CentOS.

The Jenkins project was originally named Hudson, and was renamed in 2011 after a dispute with Oracle, which had forked the project and claimed rights to the project name. The Oracle fork, Hudson, continued to be developed for a time before being donated to the Eclipse Foundation. Oracle's Hudson is no longer maintained[6][7] and was announced as obsolete in February 2017

and

Libre Office was forked in 2010 from Oracle's OpenOffice.org (now discontinued), an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice.

This article on Unity was probably written by the Unity Fan Club. The Wayland Fan club seems similarly divorced from reality.
No mention that Unity is essentially dead since 2017.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Comfy.n

One tool I like is curiously called ShutUp10 - https://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/...ShutUp10.shtml

I have Win 10 on a VM and also current version on a 2016 laptop "designed" for it. I eventually found various hard-to-find settings to turn off various nags and ads. It still complains about the pointless firewall being off (I have a real one and the included one only needed if you have direct mobile modem, or at a public Wifi*) despite notification settings and Update has always an advert for Win11 that tells me the PC does not meet the spec. A deal with land fill owners & PC makers?

Also frequently takes ages to shut down or start due to applying upgrades. Upgrade system terrible compared to XP. Also doesn't ask if I want except for some, yet some break.

My newest Laptop from Lenovo came with no OS.


[*Best to have a VPN server in office or at home for using Public WiFi now due to MiM attacks which make the firewall pointless]