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Comment by PlutoIsAPlanet | Hacker News Reader

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PlutoIsAPlanet

> Windows managers?

Sway/wlroots.

> Consistent window decorations?

This is up to individual compositors and toolkits.

> Thousands of applications

Like what? Any that rely on X specific behaviour run via XWayland.

> Consistent performance

Wayland in theory should be faster than X, but again, this depends on compositor.

> Redshift

Gnome has night-light on Wayland already. KDE I think just added it.

> Global keybindings

There are proposals to allow better negotiation of key bindings. But I think it's a bonus that applications can't listen into keys when they're not in focus.

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I always wonder how people use their linux desktops when they claim that wayland works. Why aren't you using anything like wmctrl, xdotool, xprop, xbindkeys, xterm? Or non-Gnome DE? Don't you need custom keybindings for multiple keyboard layouts with caps/scroll led indication? Don't use wacom devices or anything like it?

Wayland ecosystem is literally decades away from being usable and it's very unlikely to survive those decades beyond maybe being a niche project for some special purpose devices, not linux desktop though.

It's already usable. I use it every day.

I've been using Wayland as my...whatever it is (display server, window manager, thing) exclusively for the last year or so. I did hit this bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/1... but it was (eventually) fixed.

As for those other things you mention (xprop, etc.), I don't even know what they are, so I assume I've never used them.

I think you underestimate the degree to which desktop Linux users just want a working system with sane defaults. Maybe you personally value having all the knobs to twiddle, but I'd suggest you're an outlier.

A lot of the things that Stack Overflow claims you need X tools for can also be accomplished using sysfs. Without knowing the details of what you're doing I can't give you any specifics.

I maintain an embedded Linux system which uses Wayland as a compositor for Qt. I use sysfs to EG turn off cursors and set the display mode so I can blit a splashscreen. And sysfs can be used to rotate the console, change display modes, etc..

On my desktop I don't use any of the tools you're listing and haven't needed then for almost 12 years. The wm handles that for me.

> Why aren't you using anything like wmctrl, xdotool, xprop, xbindkeys, xterm? Or non-Gnome DE? Don't you need custom keybindings for multiple keyboard layouts with caps/scroll led indication?

I have used Linux desktops for years and have quite literally never used any of those things (except for non-Gnome DE, which was slightly less "don't make me think" so I eventually went back to gnome). Yes, even xterm. Other tools might have been shelling out to those other utilities you mentioned for me, I guess?

Point is, there are at least some reasonable use cases that don't engage with that stuff. I truly don't know how much of the display stack of my current distro is X or Wayland-related code; I have never had reason to care. I don't have a dog in this particular fight, but there are lots of users who use Linux desktops not because they are customizable, modular, or whatever, but because a) it's a free OS, and b) it's similar to environments we target for development at our jobs. Despite the vocal-ness of customization advocates, I suspect that the vast majority of desktop Linux users are "dark matter" that fall into this category.

I've used Wayland and Gnome ever since they became available in Arch Linux, and I've never needed or missed any of those things. Yes early on there were some annoying bugs but this is life on the bleeding edge ;) These days it all just works.

There's a large group of users that goes to great lengths to customize their desktop experience. This kind of change understandably frustrates them. But it's important to understand that many of us just don't care very much.

Can it run gnome-terminal and Firefox? Can I switch resolutions and do multiple displays? That covers a vast majority of what I ever need from a graphical desktop. Beyond that I don't really care how the sausage is made.

I haven't touched any of those tools in a decade or more. I just haven't needed to? The Linux desktop is so much less demanding than it was through the 90s and early 2000s. You don't need to know about any of that stuff to make it work, to customize things, set your favorite key settings (e.g. making Caps Lock useful), to have reasonable hotkeys, etc.

I would argue that not having to use those tools to have a happy working environment makes it further advanced, rather than behind.

Sway/wlroots aren't written in Common Lisp, like StumpWM.

The decision to leave window decorations up to the client application rather than the window manager is incomprehensible to me. It just doesn't make any sense so far as I can tell.

I don't want to run GNOME or KDE to get redshift behaviour; I want to run a window manager written in Lisp, with a console, emacs & Firefox. Everything else is a distraction from getting work done.

I agree that not allowing clients to listen to all keys by default is good; I disagree that not providing a mechanism for the end user to grant such access is a good idea. It's his computer — let him run what he wants.

Someone has been working on a wlroots-based compositor which is inspired by StumpWM:

https://github.com/sdilts/mahogany

Maybe you're interested in helping?

>But I think it's a bonus that applications can't listen into keys when they're not in focus.

There are applications that do not run as a window, in present I have a global shortcuts that run a bash or python script, I know I am a power user so I will need a way to whitelist my use case.

Then that should be done through a mechanism provided by the desktop environment.

GNOME and I'm pretty sure KDE too has a method to set custom keyboard shortcuts that can execute commands.

> GNOME and I'm pretty sure KDE too

Yeah, that is the problem with Wayland: the solution to many missing features you get out of the box with X largely depends on the environment you are using.

I don't run a desktop environment in X. I run xmonad and terminals. I don't want a desktop environment in wayland, but it seems like that's the only way to get reasonable functionality because it can't be added piecemeal, only monolithically via the compositor.

This is not enough. you fix this use case but there are many others, maybe I want to make a voice/video chat app or a remote desktop app, I will need full control of the display and keyboards not some gimped implementation that is DE specific.

Wayland needs to offer full access to "power users applications" if not we end up where Windows will be more friendly for the users that need this type of applications

> > Windows managers?

> Sway/wlroots.

So you either have to use one of the prescribed Wayland window managers, or completely rewrite your favourite window manager (remembering to include all of the bonus responsibilities it has now for everything the Wayland developers decided was "out of scope and the compositor's responsibility").

Alright, five years of work and debugging later...

> > Consistent window decorations?

> This is up to individual compositors and toolkits.

So it won't be consistent.

> > Consistent performance

> Wayland in theory should be faster than X, but again, this depends on compositor.

So this is the part where you go back to the window manager you wrote in step 1, and fix all the performance problems (collectively, over and over again, for every window manager that exists), right?

> > Redshift

> Gnome has night-light on Wayland already. KDE I think just added it.

Great! What if I'm not using Gnome or KDE? Right, I need to code that into my window manager too...

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