Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

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Also, there are no guarantees that any mainstream browser will ever use the Wayland protocol directly without going through an X compatibility layer like XWayland. And XWayland consists of most or all of the X11 code base.

Yes, Firefox and Chrome are open source, but they're atypical of open source projects in that (a) the amount of implementation effort required to make the kind of changes under discussion here are much larger than for typical open-source projects and (b) institutional users and knowledgeable (or simply well-advised) individual users of Firefox and Chrome won't use your fork unless you have a credible story about how you can protect them from 0days. I know of no fork of either Firefox or Chrome that has ever had a credible story, but I've spent only a couple of hours looking.

Google has their own replacement for X11 which they use in some Chromebooks, which reduces the probability that they'll throw in behind Wayland.

Not every OS install needs a mainstream browser (in-vehicle entertainment systems do not seem to: they're heavy users of Wayland) but if your OS install does, and you're waiting for Wayland (more precisely, software that uses the Wayland protocol) to replace xorg or X11, you might be waiting a long time.

"mainstream": provides a decent experience on most popular web sites including e-commerce sites.

> Also, there are no guarantees that any mainstream browser will ever use the Wayland protocol directly without going through an X compatibility layer like XWayland.

There's already a Wayland version of Firefox available: https://firefox-flatpak.mojefedora.cz/

Relevant bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134

OK, even though "As expected it is not stable nor usable yet"[1], that make me more optimistic. Thanks.

[1]: https://project-insanity.org/blog/2017/02/14/try-out-firefox...

Aren't Google using Wayland in ChromeOS? If not, it's pretty bad and just another rift like their SurfaceFlinger on Android.

I'm also waiting for Firefox to start supporting Wayland without X11, but it's progressing really slowly.

Besides browsers another very major work is required for Wine. It's not even moving anywhere now, since developers aren't sure how to address it. They are too dependent on X11 for windows placements and etc.

So XWayland will need to be adequate, to address these cases, including gaming, until the time major projects will complete all that work.

>Aren't Google using Wayland in ChromeOS?

Not the last I heard (579 days ago):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10996545

> Aren't Google using Wayland in ChromeOS? If not, it's pretty bad and just another rift like their SurfaceFlinger on Android.

Except SurfaceFlinger predates Wayland by years. Kinda hard to use something that doesn't exist. ;)

At the time the complaint was that Android didn't use X11 but I think it's safe to say that was a good decision at the time. As for merging them at this point they both have too much inertia combined with some fundamental design differences that'd be hard to reconcile.

Their main failure wasn't just the fact that they didn't collaborate with Wayland (which wasn't a lot later by the way), but the fact that they didn't want to work on big problem that benefits Linux as a whole (replacing X11), but made something that benefits only them, and that created a huge and damaging rift. That they can be blamed for.

In contrast, Nokia didn't want to make such rift, and until it went bust, used common graphics stack (with SailfishOS becoming Meego descendant, using Wayland).

> (which wasn't a lot later by the way)

Wayland was started the same year that Android shipped and Wayland didn't have it's first release until 4 years later. That's obviously way too late for Android to have used it or collaborated on it.

> but the fact that they didn't want to work on big problem that benefits Linux as a whole (replacing X11), but made something that benefits only them, and that created a huge and damaging rift. That they can be blamed for.

At the time nobody wanted a replacement to X11. That was a big complaint against Wayland, too.

Getting into mailing list wars and trying to make everyone happy ensures you end up like Nokia - too late to matter and with no more money. That's not helpful to anyone.

Also please explain how Google created a "huge and damaging rift"? What damage resulted from this at all?

> Also please explain how Google created a "huge and damaging rift"? What damage resulted from this at all?

Hardware becoming Android only. See https://lwn.net/Articles/504865/

A major part of that problem is that rift that created incompatibility and prevented reusing of the existing progress. That was the whole reason for making libhybris, to unblock that issue.

That article is long outdated. Mainline and Android kernels have mostly converged at this point.

But that's also wholly unrelated to the specific context here which was Wayland vs. SurfaceFlinger.

Wayland was your "huge damaging rift" here if anything. Divorcing itself from both xorg and surface flinger, for no particular reason at the time in the case of the later.

The article doesn't focus on drivers, but idea is the same. Android did create the rift, and it's still here. It's new "Windows" in hardware compatibility sense.

> Getting into mailing list wars and trying to make everyone happy ensures you end up like Nokia - too late to matter and with no more money. That's not helpful to anyone.

Not arguing about the rest of your post, but the above is incorrect.

Nokia didn't go bust because they tried to cooperate with the rest of the world. You can be cooperative and still say no to people.

If I'm not mistaken Android was developed in submerged mode for a long time, for business reasons.

Well you can also look at how attempts by Google and others to upstream went initially. Mainline outright rejected some of the core tenants of what Android was doing just because it hadn't been an issue on desktop/servers. Things have since slowly changed, but even stuff that shouldn't have been controversial (like ashmem) still took years and when mainline finally added an equivalent (memfd_create) it is just incompatible enough in core behavior that Android can't switch to it.

It was the other way around, it went badly because they didn't collaborate from the start. Android was a huge code drop when it was published and upstreaming wasn't exactly their primary focus.

Google is only using Wayland in ChromeOS for their Exosphere component to embed Android apps.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=549781

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