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Comment by sergeykish | Hacker News Reader

This criticism looks like "free as beer and I know better".

1. The old, mostly working thing waits your commit

2. That new thing can have some help too

I recommend developers story about this "mostly working thing" (2014) [1]. It is quite fun and eye opening, he clearly knows his subject better than most of the comments.

Wayland demo worked almost from day one. I've run it in 2010 [2]. But we need applications, that is migrating toolkits and this took 10 years.

It is very toxic development culture, cancel culture, mob.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ

[2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=858020#p858020

View on HN

Saying Wayland is just non-functional for reasonable use-cases without significant user workarounds (usually going back a decade in execution and clarity) isn't toxic culture, it's the truth. Yes, people can work on what they want. By the same logic, anyone can say that the direction they're taking is bad.

I believe you assert that Wayland failure is that is not ready for end user.

Strange point, it should have been burned 10 years ago than. I use X.Org, works perfectly in Arch Linux, some claim problems on in their distribution. It should be critique of that distribution.

> Chromium is making its first shy bumbling steps towards actually working on Wayland

And Firefox support is behind MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 flag. Clearly Wayland is in "early adopters" stage. Early adopters should not whine.

> By the same logic, anyone can say that the direction they're taking is bad.

You've clearly not watched presentation. Some people know better than developer of that technology. It would be insult on my job. I've had enough people stating "technical debt is not real".

> Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

Open source is nothing like Google deprecating its services, anyone can run code, but it is naive to expect free indefinite support.

Truth is you are not going to maintain X.Org.

this is all going to end in X12.

you would preach but you would not contribute

I don't see anything wrong with that.

you mean i would predict but not contribute?

yes.

no, like in "preach the end of the world", contribution and prediction requires intimate knowledge, preaching does not

My grandfather was a preacher and a millennialist, which means he thought the world would end soon. He based this out of his intimate knowledge of the Bible, spanning over 60 years of study. He was also a missionary who starting churches and had a radio show.

Surely that fulfills both contribution and prediction.

I therefore disagree with your characterization.

Now, he appears to have been wrong, but just like preachers may be wrong, critics may also be right even without contribution.

I am sorry for your grandfather.

He knew Bible and he was right by his interpretation of Bible. In programming world word is reality, there is only one meaning. Those who know word forge reality. This requires knowledge.

Critics who do not posses knowledge appeal to emotions, spread FUD. They may be right by coincidence like standing clocks.

What one meaning does "preach" have in the programming world?

Because I think you used it wrong.

https://www.google.com/search?q=preach

I've described context. You've confirmed it. Statement supported not by fact but by inner voice. My morale stems from Christianity, I believe Enlightenment got it right — discovery of nature is discovery of God. I've been to church, I've seen priest who shared joy. I've seen other priests, I would rather not see them.

X.Org developer described what's wrong with the project [1]. Not one of the Wayland critiques addressed his points. They have no facts, they just want it to fail. Those who work hard and share for free get anger in return. Sway / wlroots maintainer (ddevault) got off the edge from this misinformation and I do not agree with him but I am not maintainer either. Where is love and God in this story?

> That’s not even considering any personal goals, which I have vanishingly little time for. I get zero exercise, and though my diet is mostly reasonable the majority of it is delivery unless I get the odd 2 hours to visit the grocery store. That is, unless I want to spend those 2 hours with my friends, which means it’s back to delivery. My dating life is almost nonexistent. I want to spend more time studying Japanese, but it’s either that or keeping up with my leisure reading. Lofty goals of also studying Chinese or Arabic are but dust in the wind. I’m addicted to caffeine, again.

> Less healthy ways have included walking to the corner store to buy unhealthy comfort foods, consuming alcohol or weed too much or too often, getting in stupid internet arguments, being mean to my friends and colleagues, and googling myself to read negative comments. [3]

That's story behind Linux infrastructure. Because of such work I have Linux and I am grateful for it, but no mob wants to finish them.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24896917

[3] https://drewdevault.com/2020/01/21/Stress-and-happiness.html

My observation is that "preach" is orthogonal to contribution.

Which is why I think it's the wrong term, and why utxaa was confused.

Your link to Google for a dictionary definition says:

1) deliver a sermon or religious address to an assembled group of people, typically in church.

This wasn't a sermon or religious address, and HN isn't church.

2) publicly proclaim or teach (a religious message or belief).

Okay, so posting a comment on HN is public, which means we're all preaching? This doesn't seem what you mean.

3) earnestly advocate (a belief or course of action).

This is the closest. However, "this is all going to end in X12" seem far from earnest advocacy.

Your own comments seem far more earnest - are you not also preaching?

It's far easier for me to believe you simply used the wrong term.

"preach the end of the world" does not contribute to the facts based world. Even if you don't agree with that I'm fine to end this discussion.

why do you assume i don't know what i'm talking about?

Please address [1] or you don't know what you are talking about. Similar point in next post [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24922936

i either address [1] or i don't know what i'm talking about?

sure pal, you got it.

Wayland is X12.

I strongly disagree. Since switching to Fedora almost 4 years ago, I've only booted to X.org once, three years ago. I haven't needed it since.

I do browser-based screensharing (of both individual windows and the whole screen), I have a mixed DPI monitor setup, I've played games on Steam, &c. I need no workarounds. GNOME just works.

About the only things I don't use are nvidia's crappy drivers.

nVidia is the overwhelming leader in GPUs that people care about, so if you don't mind excluding the majority then it sounds like a great direction.

Hope it works out for you.

There is nothing Wayland can do about "nvidia's crappy drivers".

GamingOnLinux stats — AMD GPU 40% and raising.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi...

40% is still less than the majority, and Wayland chose to break compatibility with X11 drivers, so they get to own half of this breakage

I expect they do not target world domination.

Anyone who wants stable, performant GPU today can buy AMD. Future is here. That's Wayland target.

I live in the past — Intel GPU, X.Org, xmonad. I've thought to wait a few more years but I've checked Sway, it works. I'll check waymonad, maybe it works, maybe I'll make it work.

Wayland GNOME and KDE works with NVIDIA.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland#Requirements

You've got two primary use cases for nVidia's GPUs:

1. Gaming. Just about nobody games on Linux with nVidia. Most people I know who game (from Linux) with nVidia GPUs use PCI passthrough to a guest VM running Windows. Very few use nVidia GPUs on their host system. My primary setup is a 2950x/128GB DDR4/Vega 56/2080 Super -- the latter goes to kvm exclusively.

2. "Research" such as machine learning. You don't need Wayland or X11 for this, and the proprietary drivers work the best. To be honest, this is a space where Ubuntu Server performs best. I keep one of these around in a VM (see above) for this purpose. (Mining also goes in this category)

Everything else can probably be done with an Intel or AMD GPU tbh.

The GPU stats at https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi... disagree with your first point. A few years ago I did all of my gaming direct on Linux with an nVidia GPU, and did so for over a decade, on various laptops with and without mixed Intel/nVidia GPU setups.

>>>1. Gaming. Just about nobody games on Linux with nVidia.

I guess I'm the oddball here. 95% of my gaming is native Steam Linux apps on my Kubuntu box with a GTX1060 6GB.

It took python community 10 years to migrate to python 3, and the migration process from python 2 to python 3, while tedious, is certainly a lot easier than porting a gui app from xorg to wayland. It could take some time until most app developers finally migrated their apps from xorg to wayland.

worth noting that in the python 2 to 3 story, a migration path was mostly provided along with tools that tried to automatically refactor your code, the latest 2.x release was supported for nearly a decade, and there have been directions on how to temporarily write code to work on both python2 and python3.

Python 3 is only unusual in its failure. Perl6 Apocalypses [1] is wonderful. Python 3000 is pointless [2].

I've been Python developer at that time, the writing was on the wall. They have not provided migration path. PEP 414 "Complaint: This PEP may harm adoption of Python 3.2" [3], this is insane. Community voted with feet — they've stayed with Python 2 until clean migration path arrived. I've switched to Ruby and been happy since.

Ruby 1.8.7 was supported for five years.

You had to write Python 2 code and run 2to3, you had to live in the past or abandon it.

[1] https://raku.org/archive/doc/apocalypse.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Features

[3] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0414/

Python 3 changed nothing

* print is function

* string is unicode by default

Should have been clean and easy migration path

    # python 2
    from __future__ import print_function
    print(u"foo")
    u"" # was u""
    b"" # was  ""

But u"" was not supported in Python 3 until PEP 414 (python 3.3) [1]. That's four years [2]:

    Python 3.0.0 Dec.   3, 2008
    Python 3.3.0 Sept. 29, 2012

Ruby string switched from codebytes to codepoints with encoding in 1.9. Ruby 2.0 switched default literal encoding to UTF-8 [3], timeline [4]:

    Ruby 1.8.7          2008-05-31
    Ruby 1.9.1          2009-01-30 # first 1.9
    Ruby 1.9.2          2010-08-18 # people already switched to 1.9
    Ruby 2.0.0          2013-02-24 # first 2.0
    Ruby 1.8.7-p352     2013-06-27 # last 1.8

Switch to Ruby 2.0 was even simpler than 1.9.

How specifically Wayland harms you? I've opened GTK+ tutorial [5], compiled code, works both on X.Org and Wayland. How it is not clean migration path?

And no, it is not XWayland which is additional migration path, I've removed it for this test:

    $ xterm
    xterm: Xt error: Can't open display: :1

[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0414/

[2] https://www.python.org/downloads/

[3] https://medium.com/rubycademy/the-evolution-of-ruby-strings-...

[4] https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/releases/

[5] https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-getting-started....

> Python 3 changed nothing.

Sorry, have you tried to maintain a C extension for both 2/3? Or a unicode heavy application?

This is a silly statement, there's a reason that major packages took a decade to migrate. There are thousands of little details that are incompatible.

From user perspective. Gains.

Nothing required big 2/3 change. Ruby and Go done it right — a series of small changes. Python 2.* had it right. The attitude of language developers was clearly stated in PEP 414 and 2to3 approach — no backward compatibility. That is nonsense, every python program had backward compatibility several minor versions deep.

Select one issue and work on it. Unicode:

    # python prev
    u"" # or from __future__ import unicode_literals
    b""

    # python next
    u""
    b"" # or from __past__ import binary_literals

Facts speak for itself, change was to big for users to overcome it, price was too high. I've lived through Ruby string changes, not a big deal.

Wayland transition is nothing like Python 2/3. It is big but mostly invisible, XWayland runs X11 applications, toolkits hide implementation details, no X.Org deprecation.

Just like you said, for majority of people, migration from python 2 to 3 is mostly painless. Some code don't even have to be rewritten and might work on python 3 without any modification. However, some applications requires major migration because their core functionality depends on some feature in python 2 that now changed python 3, and they won't do major refactoring effort until the benefit of migrating to python 3 outweighs staying on python 2. They were essentially waiting until the ecosystem migrated to python 3, but as they're also part of the ecosystem (and often the essential part in their niche), this created a chicken and egg problem that needs a decade to be resolved.

The situation with wayland migration seem to be somewhat similar with the python 3 migration. Many gui apps that uses gui toolkit probably don't need major modification, or no modification at all. But some apps that requires platform-specific access are heavily affected and might require some major refactor, and they probably won't do it until the benefit of migrating to wayland outweigh staying on xorg.

Also, unlike python 3 migration where most of the community agree that the move is justifiable will have to happen eventually, in the case of wayland migration, the community opinion seem to be split which certainly harm wayland migration progress.

I've built Python 3.2 just to show the problem introduced by language designer

    $ python3.2
    Python 3.2.6 (default, Oct 26 2020, 15:29:09) 
    [GCC 10.2.0] on linux2
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> u"foo"
      File "<stdin>", line 1
        u"foo"
             ^
    SyntaxError: invalid syntax

This is hostile behavior. It took four years to solve (python 3.3), still supported:

    $ python3
    Python 3.8.6 (default, Sep 30 2020, 04:00:38) 
    [GCC 10.2.0] on linux
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> u"foo"
    'foo'

Python got better in supporting old versions over the years. Take a look at Django, it got Python 3 support in February 26, 2013 [1].

> Django 1.5 introduces support for Python 3 - specifically, Python 3.2 and above.

Notice version gap — no support for 3.0, 3.1. It was quite common.

> python 3 migration where most of the community agree that the move is justifiable

If people believed breaking change was justified they would move to 3.0, it did not happen.

I've seen both Python and Ruby community, Ruby made two breaking changes (1.9 and 2.0) while Python got its PEP 414. There was a huge split among developers.

---

Essentially you are describing how switch happened while I'm describing which lessons should have been learned. It is sad if Python community learned nothing.

> the community opinion seem to be split which certainly harm wayland migration progress.

Developers done great job, you can't run 2.7 code in 3.*, you can run X11 applications in XWayland. Is there a split in developers community? All I see is FUD among users.

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/releases/1.5/#python-3...

Doesn’t wayland run x11 server as well?

Yes, removed for test

    $ sudo pacman -Rs xorg-server-xwayland

Otherwise X11 applications work fine. GTK+ supports Wayland since 2015

https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/GTK%2B

> 1. The old, mostly working thing waits your commit

From what i understand there are commits, just not releases. What is the point of committing if the maintainers do not bother to make a proper release that your work can be distributed to the users?

Do you imply X.Org sabotaged? Issues fixed, system is stable and only maintainer stops it? You should notify disillusioned people who still commit to the repo [1].

[1] https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver/graphs/commit-ac...

I do not imply anything. The fact is that there haven't been any release for two years yet there is work apparently being done.

So why aren't release being made?

I would expect issues are not fixed, system is not stable.

> The primary development code repository can be found at:

> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver

Quite a lot of issues.

Ah yes, such classic X11 issues as Google Sign in not working [0]. Everyone knows that only Wayland is webscale enough for Google.

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1092

Quick glance shows real issues

> Xorg xserver above 1.20.8-3 crashes when using displaylink/evdi

> Applications do not repaint in a timely fashion, resulting in screen corruption