I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit
drewdevault.com
drewdevault.com
That does not mean anyone is under an obligation to like it.
> Maybe Wayland doesn’t work for your precious use-case. More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago.
If you insist on disregarding people's use cases, don't be surprised they don't like your software. I've been down this road a lot with FOSS software: "I don't use it because it doesn't do what I need", "sure it does!", "no, it really doesn't", "well you don't need that anyway!"...
On the whole however, I can certainly understand the frustration at having to deal with a community that gets annoyed at anything that changes simply because they're already so used to the garbage pile they have that they now hold the delusion that it's actually not garbage.
In my admittedly somewhat distanced opinion, Wayland's biggest mistakes were not launching with a coherent strategy for replicating functionality like screen sharing, screenshots, and to a lesser extent remote desktop/applications. They just punted and said "that's a compositor problem!" as though that was supposed to make it ok. People have thus harbored some inherent resentment ever since.
Just recently (I was on a Fedora box temporarily) I was trying to figure out how to get Nautilus to stop starting a search whenever I typed something, and instead highlight the nearest match in the current directory, y'know, like pretty much every other file manager in existence. Eventually I found a thread where the core Gnome contributors were saying "it sounds like you don't want this feature, what you really want is a better search function". They probably should never have enabled "reactions" on their bug tracker since it was piled 100's high with negative reactions - yet they still doubled down and said it's not something they're going to support (despite having supported it in the past, and Ubuntu even bundling patches to make it happen up until recently).
It's a frustrating trend in FOSS that contributors feel like "we're doing this for FREE don't you know, so whatever we say is lore and since you're not paying, we don't have to listen to you". Yes, I understand how amazing it is that this software is truly free and created by volunteers, no, I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made.
I don't use Gnome because I don't like the direction they've taken it in. But they have absolutely every right to do with it as they please. And I have every right to insist it's totally not fit for my purposes and refuse to use it.
The same way I have no (current) interest in using Wayland because it'd be too much hassle to try to replicate my workflow with it. But they're free to ignore me the way I ignore them.
GNOME has tens of millions of users.
I do understand your sentiment. I don't like GNOME myself. But there are alternatives. If you don't like it, try using something else, contributing patches with configurable behavior or maintaining a fork.
FLOSS maintainers are a rare breed. We as a community need to find ways to not burn them out. Even if you have millions of happy users, just a couple of really toxic ones can make it feel not worth it.
Those hundreds of user are:
1. A vocal minority, most likely. People happy about it don't go on bug trackers to support devs.
2. Not making the software, not part of the decision making process. Don't like the end result ? Fork it if you have the ability. Give constructive criticism if you want and you think the team is receptive to it (or even cares about it. Sometimes, I just don't want your genius idea).
So, yes. They're doing this for free. Don't like it? Fork it, or don't be an ass. If you can't do either of those, the third option is to fuck off.
It doesn't - you are completely free to roll back those changes, or make different changes of your own.
This doesn't mean you don't have a right to discuss or critique and discuss and if appropriately fork or write you own.
The option always remains to change it yourself or stop using it. It's not as if it's bound to the hardware (Apple) or shipped with the machine (Windows). It's not a SaaS that may vapourise or change underneath you.
There's no way to force consensus in situations like this. The best you can do is force out those maintainers you don't like with a harassment campaign.
To be honest I don’t see how you can understand the first bit but not the second. Yes, they can make changes that you don’t like without consulting you.
It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones). It really makes people angry when things don't work the same anymore, let alone when it doesn't even work anymore for their use case.
> In my admittedly somewhat distanced opinion, Wayland's biggest mistakes were not launching with a coherent strategy for replicating functionality like screen sharing, screenshots, and to a lesser extent remote desktop/applications. They just punted and said "that's a compositor problem!"
My guess is that it wasn't a deliberate strategy, it just that like anything related to the Linux desktop, the project was underfunded so they had to focus on certain issues. In this case it was focusing on improving from xorg and making sure it doesn't break anything on the main use cases of whoever was funding the project (mainly redhat). Apple and Microsoft can afford to pour billions in their display server/protocol/windowing system. Not so much for Linux.
As well it should. Because now things that used to take three seconds will take 15 minutes for a month until you learn the new interface.
The designer will respond that yes, but then once you learn the new thing it will take two seconds. And if you save one second twice a day then you'll have made back that 10 hours you spent learning the new thing in less than 50 years!
Except that they're going to change it again in less than 50 years.
And that's assuming that the new design is actually better and not just different or worse, because also, this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25950351
Rule of thumb: If the new thing isn't better enough to cause people to switch to it voluntarily without any prodding or the removal of the option to use the old thing, it isn't better enough to be worth it.
Most of them are too frequent, automatic, plus they are not actual improvements.
Like you note, this isn't a problem unique to Linux/"free Unixy OSes". In some ways Linux is actually worse than others, consider Gnome/Gtk Updates for example. Or how things like having a library to read a particular image format are quite normal around here; except that library has like half a dozen incompatible but actively used versions and around 1000 released versions. The Linux environment is very volatile and everything constantly changes and breaks. Modern applications bitrot exceptionally fast in Linux, while the community points to "but look this Xchess binary from 1992 still works". That's neat but covers few real use cases. The same community is then bewildered that both people and enterprises opt for distributions which move at a glacial pace and only releases updated software once every five years or so.
This seems to point to the general situation of change fatigue. If you pick up a random Android device, what does the "settings" app icon look like? Individually, these things are small, but the small impedances these changes introduce does take a toll on people, especially when you're trying to just get stuff done.
I don't think there's an easy answer here when the developer needs to make fundamental changes, though.
But this is a real problem: it's not good that the Linux ecosystem has been reduced to "we shall eat whatever dogfood Redhat cooks for us". Wayland didn't even start as a RH project, iirc, and didn't really gain any traction for ages, but now it's a Big Deal because RH pushes it...?
Nice try Google/Microsoft developer! I'm pretty technical, your sh*t change is still sh*t.
I remember a time when updates from gmail, outlook, or excel improved upon the previous version, sadly that was about 15/20 years ago for Google/Microsoft, respectively.
Recent issues:
* The brightness control for my screen doesn't work with it.
* The mouse sometimes lags
* Graphical corruption in Chromium when on webgl sites.
* Blank screen after resume from hibernate.
* Seems to randomly freeze forever sometimes after an OOM killer run.
* Chromecast wouldn't work
What most people mean when they "switch to Wayland" is that they're switching from Gnome on X11 to a "pure Gnome" stack that uses Wayland and a bunch of other Freedesktop standards for interopability. There is absolutely no code from the "Wayland project" running there, because the Wayland implementation is Gnome's own (it's called Mutter). Similarly, KDE's implementation is in KWin itself. The source article is from an author of yet another window manager (Sway) implementing Wayland.
What you're observing is not "Wayland not being there yet", it's Gnome not being there yet. All of these deficiencies have nothing to do with Wayland itself: they're general QA issues that plague an underfunded Linux desktop that's making a slow technology transition.
Overall, my Linux GUI experience has never been as smooth as it is now on Wayland and I tried pretty much all common DEs/WMs in last 8 years.
X11 is not even remotely close to being "there" compared to Wayland and if Gnome implementation sucks, then please first try better implementations first before writing comments like this.
No, Wayland protocol is not perfect and yes, some niche use cases are still not covered, which is why various extensions of the protocol are still being developed. X11 at it's current state is nothing but a collection of hacks glued together. Wayland is, however, a very robust, secure and well-designed modern protocol, which, most importantly and contrary to X11, actually works.
I don't care how much better Wayland is...if it can't do something I'm used to and need, it's going in the trash. I don't have time or interest to read mailing lists and bug trackers to know when it's fixed.
Something similar used to frustrate me no end when asking the Python community for help trying to solve a problem.
Regularly someone would comment, "Why would you want to do that?".
I wouldn't be asking if I didn't have a need to do it!
It's bizarre that some people can't see beyond the end of their own nose and imagine different use cases to their own.
While we can all agree X is a pile of something, I am in the camp that remains unconvinced by Wayland. It does not work on my hardware, it does not solve problems I have. OK, no more screen tearing, which is nice.
Wayland have to understand that if they want to replace X, they'll have to replace X.
It seems impossible that it will be ready for use before it is hopelessly obsolete (e.g. Windows and MacOS will be beaming images straight into your brain or something.)
I am not sure what you mean here. Weston, the original implementation, includes support for screenshots, screensharing and RDP. Other implementations decided to implement those in a different way, for various reasons. The way to not "punt" this would be to use libweston but that has its own set of issues, and it seems strange to blame the Weston hackers for not upstreaming every single other thing that some implementer is working on.
It's not just about replicating this functionality. It's about having an open framework that makes building these tools, and other unforeseen tools, easy. X11 was very accommodating of this.
For example, I like to run xsnow during the holidays. Wayland's answer to xsnow is -- we don't support that, but tell you what, draw up an RFC for a D-Bus API for desktop snow and wait 5-7 years for compositor implementors to consider incorporating it. Or something completely different. You know, whatever. It's like you have to prove your use case is valid to the community before you can even start hacking on it in a way that you can expect it to work with more than one DE.
For Wayland the attitude is "Fuck you. You get a buffer for a desktop window and that's it. [Wayland does not support nested windows.] Oh, that's not enough? You're not writing a desktop app? You want snow on the desktop/a desktop magnifier/a hall of mirrors effect toy/an anime window sitter/pinnable menus/something that responds to global hotkeys/etc.? I'm sorry, did we not anticipate your pwecious widdle use case? Fuck you. No one actually writes applications that way any more, nerd. Go back to the nerd table. We're trying to get the cool popular Mac-using kids to notice us here."
The X11 security issues are mitigatable with some changes to the server implementation. The Wayland approach really never was about security. It's about letting the cool kids define the shape of the Linux desktop to the exclusion of ordinary users/hackers.
agree 1000% - really don't care about X per se, but remote windowing is an awesome and unique feature, and disrespecting it by treating it like some obscure/uneeded thing and qustioning why people are mad about it conveys alot about the attitude that i don't want to get behind
Yesterday I made a casual observation about something quite obvious, and more importantly, completely irrelevant. And without fail, the only response was that it was because of x and y. It isn't.
On facebook, the only way I ever get an answer is to use Cunningham's Law. And I even usually use the words "cunninghams law" in the comments. But it always seems to get me my answer.
He’s not asking anyone to like it; in fact, an informed dislike would be much better than the reaction many people have to Wayland.
A lot of the response the Wayland maintainership receives is instead a reflex-response of uninformed people repeating out-of-date FUD they heard somewhere, without ever having actually looked into the issue themselves. Which is something you just don’t do if you think of the people on the receiving end of it as real human beings.
(That kind of scarlet-lettering does have a place! It’s a perfect tactic to allow newer community members to assist in suppressing a widespread “old evil” which the community long ago chose to excommunicate, for complex reasons that the newer community-members haven’t been around long-enough to absorb. It’s the reason people belittle/make jokes about Multi-Level Marketing schemes, pseudoscience, etc. — or in the FOSS sphere specifically, about bought-out projects like AdBlock Plus. The people who reflexively just laugh at newbs for using $thing, are acting as part of an “insulation layer” of people defending a community from a threat at the margins without really understanding the threat themselves; and they’re acting at the behest/connivance of people closer to the core of the community who do understand the threat.)
But Wayland was never excommunicated from FOSS. There is no old threat; only old arguments. The core people working on Wayland are in fact the same people who work on X. The other core people, those working at the distros who package these components, were never against Wayland; just wary at first, because they didn’t want degraded functionality. (And even then, they’ve always been shipping it on distro spins for e.g. mobile, where using X11 has never worked.)
> They just punted and said "that's a compositor problem!" as though that was supposed to make it ok. People have thus harbored some inherent resentment ever since.
It’s not punting when the same maintainers also write the compositor. (Yes, they do!) They’re effectively doing the same thing StackOverflow does when it tells you “this is best handled on [other StackExchange site X]”: not trying to make you Somebody Else’s Problem, but rather telling you to go to the counter two paces to your left, where they’ll trundle over wearing a different hat, and then help you solve your problem there.
The whole project of Wayland was to take a monolith with mixed responsibilities (Xorg) and refactor it so that the responsibilities were each handled in the correct places, by teams who best understood that layer of the stack. As such, “Wayland” as a project staff covers all the resulting components—they’re all outgrowths of one project. But all those resulting components are all also their own codebases, with their own growing maintainerships, with their own negotiated APIs, so that they can grow separately, be swapped out for competitor projects, etc.
But criticizing Wayland on a pure comparison basis, clinging on to Xorg server – absolutely doesn't benefit anyone, including whoever is posting it.
X window system (the idea) and Xorg server (the project) – is kind of abandonware [1] at this point. The last release was in 2018.
Don't want to get into random philosophy about contributing vs complaining vs criticizing, etc.
But in this situation – there's just a definitive community health benefit in moving on. Not complaining, not contributing, but just moving on. There is no further value left to be added in any comparison.
1: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XServer-...
It does give you a garbage stack that solves problems though.
>That does not mean anyone is under an obligation to like it.
Doesn't seem that was the point of that statement. Rather, it's asserting that it's invalid to claim that the very people who built the thing in the first place are a "vague authority".
How true the accusation it, I dunno, but that's my read of the sentence - not that the volunteer devs are somehow entitled to endearment by virtue of their volunteering. :-)
Why do you feel the need to announce this to anyone, particularly the people who work on it for free and owe you nothing? Is that not his point?
Is it just basically a backdoor going through the hardware?
Is there some way that a compositor works with Linux security so that you need a special privilege or root or something in order to record the screen?
Then why not include an example compositor that solves these issues?
Eventually that use-case in Xorg/X11 will cease to function when it becomes obsolete and unmaintained, but I agree how bad the outright dismissal of someone's use-case can be perceived. There has to be a civil discussion on both ends.
You can still use Xorg on most distros. In Ubuntu it's one checkmark.
>Maybe Wayland doesn’t work for your precious use-case. More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago.
I'm a game developer. None of the software I use works reliably or at all on Wayland. None of it. And I'm completely fine with that, I'll keep using Xorg and you can give me a call when my "precious use-case" is handled.
- if you rely on something that doesn't currently work on wayland and you write about it on (for example) hacker news then you're the asshole and you should be dropping that something and switch to wayland (which of course, most of us cannot do)
- if your current setup works and you'd rater spend your time doing your stuff instead of rebuilding on wayland, you're an asshole
rinse and repeat.
Most wayland advocates can't seem to understand the philosopy of "I don't really care about xorg vs wayland, my current xorg-based setup works well enough for me, i'll switch when I can be equally productive on wayland".
Because usually the part "my current xorg-based setup works well enough for me" is not true. It will be said, when it comes to wayland, and they don't want to switch... but once hidpi or mixed-dpi displays or reliable screen-lock or something other comes on topic, then suddenly "linux" (not xorg, but linux) is behind the times, doesn't work out of the box as other systems do and requires hours and hours of configuring.
That's the "my current xorg-based setup works well enough for me" in the full glory.
Same rehash the same arguments of Linux vs Windows that people have been having for years. It's turtles all the way down :)
It's only less common nowadays around these parts since tux has become far more usable day-to-day in the last decade.
They might care a little bit more when their only interactions are with snarky people going "sO yOu StILl CaN'T tAKe ScReEnShOts oN wAyLaNd haHaHa sHiTtY sOftWare", or legitimate assholes.
Now that may not be true.. but it seemed clear cut. I wanted to try Wayland really bad because i have a multi-DPI monitor setup, and Xorg is awful at that. Yet, it seemed too early.
Nvidia isn't exactly some niche product. Not exactly a "Precious use-case".
Drew wrote a blog entirely devoted to the Nvidia issue: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
Wayland is 10 years old, and extremely stable. If it isn't working properly it's either your driver vendor or your desktop environment that is to blame.
No hate, just a practical problem being solved. No one is forcing you to shift prematurely, although assistance is always welcome to fix your usecase.
Edit: A commenter on this thread mentioned Emacs. I have not tried that as I have recently switched to Emacs but if that is true then that would also be a big one for me.
"at the moment there are several types of applications that not only don't work in wayland, but would be very difficult, or impossible to work natively in all major wayland compositors.
Examples (in order of importance to me):
* Programmatic output configuration (xrandr, arandr, etc.)
* CLI clipboard access (xsel, xclip)
* Third party app launcher/window switcher (rofi, dmenu, albert, docky).
* Clipboard managers (parcellite, klipper, Gpaste, clipman, etc.)
* Third party screen shot/capture/share (shutter, OBS, ffmpeg, import, peek, scrot, VNC, etc.)
* Color picker (gpick, gcolor3, kcolorchooser)
* xdotool
PS: ydotool has been touted as an equivalent of xdotool, but ydotool has only a tiny fraction of the features of xdotool.
And it's unlikely that it'll get much better any time soon, as its README says:
"Since Jun, 2019, I have little time to maintain this project"
wtype is supposed to be another equivalent to xdotool, but it has even less features than ydotool.
If the rest of Wayland's X equivalents as feature poor as these, I don't hold out much hope for Wayland in the near future.
[1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_...
There are also a few forks on GitHub with native wayland patches out there too if `feature/pgtk` doesn't.
Once proper wide color gamut and bitdepth support is added, it’ll be even better, as the monitors are 10-bit Rec.2020 and 8-bit sRGB. Which under X11 isn’t even possible to support, as again, Xorg only sees one single screen it’s drawing on, and it’s up to the lower levels of the stack to split that.
EDIT: Answering the most common question which is asked all the time as my comment is getting some visibility here:
Now why does wayland break screenshot and keyboard tools? Because "every program is a keylogger by default and can see any event, look at the contents of any window" is a major security issue, especially as it means the entire security model of screen lockers or containerized applications is useless.
Under X11, basically every application you run can trivially escalate itself to root. As even your Zoom client can just listen to your key events when you unlock your screen or use sudo in your terminal, save your password, and tada it can elevate itself. Under X11, there is no security whatsoever, and no separation of privileges.
EDIT2: Why is sandboxing applications important? (a) more and more proprietary software is also released for linux, which you probably shouldn’t trust. And (b) if e.g. your XMPP client is compromised, you don’t want the attacker to gain root.
EDIT3: Yes, screenshot tools and screensharing still works. I can use KDE Spectacle under Budgie or Chrome, and Slack, Teams, Discord, Jitsi all work just fine. OBS requires a patch, but also works nicely. It’s not impossible, it just requires software using it to be updated.
The Wayland protocol provides the building blocks for someone to create an Android-like sandboxed environment, but doing so would break every application. Snaps and Flatpak come closer, but still generally miss the mark, since many applications require your entire home directory to be bind mounted in their container.
Running wayland alone gets you very little in terms of sandboxing. It locks the front door, but leaves the backdoor and all your windows open, because that's what every application under the sun expects.
> Under X11, you are basically running every application with root, always.
This is ... not true, either broadly or generally. You're saying this because Xorg runs as root, which means that any security flaw in Xorg yields root access. I think saying that "you are running every application with root" is stretching it a bit, but I'll accept it.
But Xorg doesn't have to run as root. OpenBSD started it years ago with Xenocara, but AFAIK Fedora also does not run Xorg as root. I'm not sure what other OSes are doing, but it's at least not a flaw of X11 in general, just a flaw of Xorg.
In 2021, screen sharing and screenshots are table stakes.
Sounds like a roughly equivalent situation either way? Personally I'd sooner use only Qt applications than have to use Gnome.
OK, so what's the solution here? Give up on screen-shotting tools forever? Or is there a plan to fix this somehow?
That said I would use wayland if nvidia wasn't busy fucking everything up.
Maintainers with attitudes like this are why we can't have nice things:
https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
Sadly, the OSS driver doesn't support the 4k monitors I use for work well enough to actually use day to day. So my option is to use an "evil" but very stable driver and no wayland to do my job and get paid, or not.
All that to say, nvidia doesn't really do the work to play ball in Linux with Wayland. There is no way to improve these drivers, you can only hope Nouveau can solve your woes.
Or, here is a wild idea, we stop looking for some "wisdom" in what people who often express themselves this poorly write. Most of what this "thought leader" writes that I happened to read have the same punchline, and it got old pretty fast.
Sometimes, stuff is just garbage. You don't have to look through 99% of the garbage to find some 1% that is supposedly not as garbage.
Meanwhile we (or at least I) aren't asking any unpaid volunteers to fix anything. We're asking them to stop claiming their new software works for practically every use case when it doesn't, nothing more.
People usually don't get to chose what HW the company buys for them and, anecdotally, "the component X doesn't work with Wayland" rarely makes a difference.
I've tried Wayland many times a year over the past 5 years.
I still only get a black screen.
X11 just works.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-G...
> This work will hopefully land in time for the start of standalone XWayland releases separate from the xorg-server. Those should begin this spring in time for the Fedora 34 release as likely the first distribution shipping standalone XWayland packages.
> With this and other NVIDIA proprietary driver work pending to improve the Wayland support, hopefully by Ubuntu 21.10 we see GNOME on Wayland by the default so that for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is also that shift away from X.Org.
If he wants someone like me to use wayland, that’s the problem. If he doesn’t want me to use it, then there’s no problem. But I think this guy isn’t just maintaining it. He’s evangelizing it too, right? Get rid of the old broken X11 and come to the promised land of wayland where we fixed x11’s woes. And if it doesn’t work for you:
> Maybe Wayland doesn’t work for your precious use-case. More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago.
He seems to be saying it works and you’re dumb if you think it doesn’t. And at the same time saying he won’t support maybe the most common cards out there.
It boggles my mind how people can be complete assholes to people writing FOSS because the sense of entitlement that users have when it comes to FOSS is staggering, and the more technical someone believes themselves to be, oftentimes, the more caustic they tend to be in how they interact with FOSS developers. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone, but having been a silent observer on Github issues for many FOSS projects as well as reading the rants on reddit and HN against FOSS technology <X>, it really pisses me off even though I have no skin in the game.
These are real humans and people devoting their own free time to build something they are passionate about and believe in. It may not work for you, you may even think what they are doing is a terrible idea. Then provide constructive criticism if you wish and move along. That's all too rare though. In reality, what people really want is they want Wayland (or insert Technology <X> here), but they want it the way they would wish it to be, and so they will essentially engage in negging developers and their decisions trying to beat them into submission. It's despicable behavior and no one should be defending this.
Measured criticism is fine, but then move the fuck on. Let people passionate about FOSS they care about, continue working on it. But don't be an asshole and keep trying to tear them down just because you selfishly want what they are building, but you want them to really build it the way you want it and to meet your specific use cases.
> So my new approach is “fuck you”. None of the Wayland detractors have a clue.
Lumping everyone who may not have a rosy view of Wayland together.
There's a good comment by an (alleged) pentester mentioning how Wayland doesn't really buy you that much. He's right. The bigger issue is lack of isolation within a gid. I can still debug your terminal and try to get your root password.
I think it's a lot closer to the author's intent to read the post as "here's what I'm experiencing" rather than "here's a category view of the world that I want you to endorse". Obviously a statement like "no one in [group] understands [thing]" is never going to be 100% true. When people say things like that, they're venting.
If we were in a room of 100 people, and two folks got into a shouting match, everyone would start listening. And then a group decision would get implicitly made. Is it a personal argument, best to stay out of it? Or is someone getting attacked unfairly, and it makes sense to intervene? Everyone in the room starts watching, and everyone starts thinking about what the group is going to do.
Online is nothing like that. If someone behaves like a complete asshole on one thread, most people don't see it. Especially if the asshole is "some random guy" with no standing in the community. Since there's no real drama, the incident doesn't come to the community's attention. The person on the receiving end of the abuse never gets to have that moment that you'd have in a room of 100 people, where you know everyone sees you and supports you, and maybe you get some "points" for keeping your cool. There's no points for that online, just silence. I think it can feel very isolating and frustrating, and I'm not sure how to address it.
See that "and"? Your comment here only addresses the second half of that sentence, which is probably true, and people shouldn't do that. Most of this thread is discussing the first half, which doesn't seem like it's actually correct. You can't say "people are missing the point" when he's making two points in the same rant.
There are pro-wayland people in this thread arguing the former point ("Wayland works for almost everyone"), and mostly they aren't putting up convincing arguments. So far I've seen: "it's really someone else's fault" (ok, in the meantime wayland doesn't work for me") -- "actually no operating system should support this" (ok, back to windows or apple or non-wayland linux it is).
> More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago.
> [Wayland] invented some new, fixable problems in the process — most of which have been fucking fixed already, and years ago!
> Most of the lies you’ve heard about ways that it’s broken are just that: lies.
The author didn't support these statements at all (which is the whole point of the rant, he's tired of doing that. that's fine). Someone else has to do that for this rant to make sense. So people are saying, "here is my common use case. how does it work on wayland now?" If they only thought it was broken due to lies and propaganda, it would be easy to explain how it's since been fixed. But people aren't.
The Wayland world will continue improving and chances are your problems will be sorted out one way or another in the future. But attacking people working to improve the status quo without any obligations on your side is fucked up beyond reason.
Mmmmkay. That's a pretty broad statement, good luck with that attitude!
> I’ve tried appealing to reason and rationally debunking each lie that some Wayland detractor flavor-of-the-week is touting to tow the party line, but it didn’t work.
I guess he's referring to this post? https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-de...
And to numerous comments on HN and elsewhere.
The 'wayland sucks' movement is sooo annoying, even to me and I'm just a happy wayland user and haven't spent any of my free time writing those thousands of lines of code.
"Wayland doesn't X!"
"Actually, it's on purpose or X that is not working on Wayland because [reason]."
Sure but that doesn't make it work.
Luckily, DeVault is an insanely prolific writer of actual code, so there's no need to evaluate his attitude. His code speaks for itself.
Guess what, you're using linux, and these things take time to develop and be adopted. That's the way linux always has been, you trade off less than perfect software for the benefit of endless configuration.
Wayland will be widely adopted one day, but insulting anyone who has issues with it does not help your case.
What I mean is, back in the day with X11, all clients were equal and there were nice little tools that let you switch between virtual desktops graphically (desktop pagers). I myself wrote a little taskbar (with the kind of glow animation that moves with the cursor that Windows 7 made popular), but never published it unfortunately. A lot of people wrote or hacked on window managers. It was never really easy, but at least it was possible.
Now with wayland, you have to write not only the code that draws the titlebars, but the code that puts the pixels on the screen, input handling, clipboard handling and all kinds of stuff.
Of course you can fork an existing window manager, or use something like wlroots, but they are all opinionated. If you just want "GNOME with different titlebars" someone else wants "KDE with different titlebars" - you're out of luck. So this makes the barrier to entry really high.
On the other hand, if somebody would write a "window decorator" interface, you could write a small window decorator process (like we had with Compiz). I don't believe this will happen, because it would have to be adopted by multiple compositors to make sense. If it did, I would have a bunch of ideas I'd like to try out one day.
Wlroots isn’t opinionated at all. In theory, it’s perfectly possible to write a gnome shell alternative using wlroots. Writing a taskbar for nearly all wlroots based compositors is also possible.
You could even write a plugin for wayfire to implement the Kwin protocols, and write another plugin to implement a simple window manager.
As for changing the titlebars, as long as you enable CSD, you could just write a theme.
- decide it's time to make a New Thing which will supersede the Old Thing rather than living beside it
- decide that some features of Old Thing will not be directly supported by New Thing; instead New Thing will be flexible enough that people could implement those features on top of it
- declare that the work done to support those features will have to be done by the people who want to use them
- declare that the time has come for New Thing to supersede Old Thing, before said work has been done
[Edit: this wasn't intended to be a list of things that are individually bad ideas. It's only the last, in combination with the others, that I think is ill-advised.]
"decide it's time to make a New Thing which will supersede the Old Thing rather than living beside it"
A non-substantial argument. Whats the difference between a wayland 'superceding' X and a wayland 'living besides' X? Does implementing Xwayland not constitute trying to 'live beside' it? your argument is vague and you can respond with more ambiguity. Install X and wayland. Nothing stops you.
"decide that some features of Old Thing will not be directly supported by New Thing; instead New Thing will be flexible enough that people could implement those features on top of it"
WHICH features? the 'old thing' can never equal the 'new thing' otherwise they would be the same. Wayland is purposefully LESS flexible (again, how is wayland more flexible? Or is that another vague statement?) in its input handling and screen handling which is why screen recorders needed to be reimplemented in the name of security.
"declare that the work done to support those features will have to be done by the people who want to use them" How is this controversial? You seem to ascribe some kind of motivated reasoning for the statement that certain features aren't being maintained/developed by wayland developers. Dev says 'no' to a feature request, why is this controversial? EGLstreams is the closest thing to a controversy but nothing prevents anyone from forking and implementing support. Open source, no excuses.
"declare that the time has come for New Thing to supersede Old Thing, before said work has been done"
no such declaration has been made.
That doesn't really describe the situation very well, seeing as XWayland works seamlessly. Wayland compositors very much support living beside X programs.
This style of argumentation is as bad (if not worse) than baseless rejection of Wayland because of "vague" criticism.
If I try to read between the lines, the author is worried that if more people don't jump ship and switch to Wayland, suffering through whatever trouble they might face, Wayland won't get better faster. Which although true, is a very selfish argument that does not see beyond the author's own use case.
I'd like to try Wayland sometime, so far I haven't. I don't think there will be a lot of issues that I'll have to get around, but honestly I'm not looking to find out right now. I use Xorg and I'm happy. At some point, I'll try Wayland.
I have been attacked for using irssi, too, instead of weechat. They still hold the view that it is not maintained despite showing them the commit history. Crazy. Make no mistake, I am not complaining, it is the Internet after all.
I recently installed Fedora after my Windows install bombed out after an update. I went to play World of Warcraft with my buddies and found that the mouse handling in Wayland was pretty severely broken, at least for WoW. You move by clicking both of your mouse buttons, which starts moving you forward, and then you turn your mouse to steer. Under X11, your mouse is in the same place after you release your buttons (this is the intended behavior). Under Wayland, only god knows where it's going to pop up; it seems to be following your mouse movement while you turn, but not exactly. I said "whatever, it's a good thing I don't play too much WoW" and made peace with what it was.
Then I went to share my screen. I couldn't. Total showstopper -- I use this functionality every single day, and I can't part with it. Wayland is officially off the table.
I've been using X11 since. Everything has worked perfectly. I'm not going to suffer through some software that I actually need to use under WINE having fucked up mouse handling, or hold out for multiple years before I can share my screen again. I can't imagine even attempting taking Wayland seriously if I had Nvidia hardware. If somebody's take is that I should go fuck myself for expecting things to work while they tell me that my other options are wrong and bad because it works for "most people" (which is pretty stupid -- even Average Joe has a lot of showstoppers, it's why the Year of the Linux Desktop hasn't happened), they can have fun dumping time into software that's inferior in many regards.
EDIT: in response to Drew's flagged and dead comment (which I feel is quite unreasonable, he brings up a point about the compositor having some responsibility here too) -- I am not using Wayland under GNOME -- I switched to KDE and spent a fair amount of time digging through DE, WINE, and software settings trying to get these things working. I'm willing to slog through a lot of shit to get the technically correct solution, but some bridges are too far. I'm not changing my entire DE, GPU, software choices, etc. for the sake of using Wayland, even though it's superior to X11, and I think that's what a lot of proponents of it are missing.
I've gotten curious. I want to try Wayland in the near future. But it would be good to have an idea of what kind of issues I might encounter, so that I can change back to X11 in an emergency.
I know that the process of moving to Wayland has been slow and hard. It is definitely not an easy task. I know it's frustrating when something that used to work does not any more. I know the process is not complete and there are still a few things that might not work well. But for god sake, these people are volunteers. Stop bullying them with angry posts complaining about their work. You likely don't pay a penny for all this great software that you are using. If you think that X is better, just use it, and live with its unfixable issues. If you don't like distros moving to Wayland, contribute the packages to keep using X, maintain X, these guys are offering you the keys! Please stop shitposting about the work of people trying to make things better.
Apple breaks things all the time and they don't get half of the heat. And they charge a lot of money.
Out of curiosity: What are those issues with X? On my day to day use of Xubuntu I don't encounter any problems. What would I gain from switching to Wayland?
There will always be people who'll criticize what you do, especially on the internet. You can't let it get to you.
And since no one company is behind the linux ecosystem, everyone works on what they want to work on, so every change is fundamentally starts with chaos in linux. But it will stabilize on a good enough solution (eg. I don’t see much ill with the current 3-4 implementation of the protocol with one of them being a minimal “lib”, that can be used for small niche window managers to build on)
Ubuntu 20.04 probably had good reasons not to ship Wayland as the default. I think this because I've had the experience of using OBS in Ubuntu 20.04-- which works-- vs OBS under Debian buster (using Wayland by default)-- which, as of two months ago, didn't. And I wasn't even looking for differences here-- just that my workflow got interrupted on Debian because of this problem. I'd wager there are surely other such outstanding issues with Wayland as the default.
The issue I ran into is being fixed-- or perhaps is already fixed-- which is great.
I'm not anti-Wayland. I'm also not a Wayland developer, or Wayland fan. All I know is it's supposed to replace another part of the stack that I don't develop or give a shit about. To the degree that things don't break when that happens, I'm happy. When they do break, I will be temporarily frustrated.
Functionally, though, Wayland is still not fully there yet. It's better now than it ever was, but the authors are still punting on major chunks of missing functionality.
> We’re out here trying to make things better. Wayland fixes unfixable problems with X11, and might have invented some new, fixable problems in the process — most of which have been fucking fixed already, and years ago!
Keyboard remapping has been punted on entirely and is still horrifically broken and undefined in the protocol definitions. Despite this, compositors still to this day, use XKB as the basis for keyboard input mapping because there is no standard way of doing this for a compositor. Even wlroots does this. This is a really bad workaround to the problem because XKB itself was an incomplete rewrite of the existing keyboard mapping code in the original X11 server, and even it doesn't work right, which is why Xorg desktops have awful things like ibus.
Full nvidia support is nonexistant except with nouveau, which often doesn't work correctly for basic 2D graphics. Obviously this is out of the hands of the wayland devs, but for a user it is still major functionality that is lost, and pretending that nouveau is an equivalent replacement is problematic -- I've had generic VGA drivers perform better. And "perform better" in this context means "managed to draw a coherent image to my monitor", not "maintain 60fps".
There are other features/problems that have also been punted on (remoting support, but that arguably doesnt belong in the compositor stack) that users actually need in some cases that wayland devs -- probably because of the rush to get rid of Xorg -- have avoided implementing. I get that it is hard, and major kudos for the progress that has been made, but Wayland is definitely not there yet without some coherent answer to these features. I say this as a user and a dev using wlroots.
It's one of the reasons I love stale closing bots. I don't have to pay attention to people who are dicks. I can just unsubscribe from their issues and let a bot handle it.
PulseAudio did have some growing pains, though. I don't remember them exactly, but I remember having to tinker way too much to get apps to work together/correctly between ALSA and PulseAudio, etc. I still have a finicky laptop that REFUSES to do audio over HDMI unless I boot the machine with the HDMI cable plugged in already.
No real point, here. Just rambling.
This argument is plain and simple abuse behavior. The people criticising Wayland never asked you to make free shit. They have no obligation to like it or to not voice their concerns when they might be impacted by your free shit. If you don't want to hear criticism of your free shit, get off the internet.
> It has a real cost, you know, being a dick to maintainers.
Same goes for being a dick to your users (especially those who didn't choose to be your users) or random people on the internet.
> [...] Most of the lies you’ve heard about ways that it’s broken are just that: lies
Ah yes, shouting "fake news" works so well.
I'm not even anti-Wayland really - it simply does not provide any advantages for me at the moment while breaking some things - but this kind of attitude makes me not want to touch it.
Xorg is Overly Bloated/Done without giving much importance to security.
On the other hand, Wayland is technically superior , might be more secure than Xorg. But, it's feature parity doesn't match with that of Xorg.
Now,i don't think those features must be pushed into Wayland itself. i don't know but something desktop oriented Wayland implementation with those missing pieces filled would be good idea.
But, will security suffer? Maybe. For example, Wayland is said to be secure because window can't see other windows. But, necessity arose due to requirement of Screen Recording so some API was created to access The Screen. So, didn't it make that security claim irrelevant because each window can access the screen? i think it's still not thought out properly.
Mac OS X had a very secure graphics architecture where no program could emit pixels into the window content of another program. As a result? We could barely support OSX. We ended up having to do rendering to pixel buffers and then using mmap through an invisible file shared between the service and client, then dumping the contents of the pixel buffer straight to screen using some code every client ran. Rendering from graphics card to RAM back to video buffer cost us half our frame rate.
On Windows? Client program passed its HWND to the service. Service bound an OpenGL target as a child of the client program's window.
Security is important, but in a graphics service, it creates a solid trade-off between what is possible and what is safe. That HWND trick can definitely be used to fake a login window and steal user passwords. But it also allows some programs to run on Windows that were technically impossible on Mac OSX without a complete rearchitecting.
(Clarification: I've gotten out of the game of writing Mac OSX software, but if I understand correctly that trick is possible under the modern architecture. It turns out Apple needed the ability for one program to write into another program's windows directly because they architected QuickTime as a service and performant video display required a similar trick to the one we were doing. So they added a mechanism for two processes to describe a shared rendering target to Quartz).
No, because these APIs allow the user to audit the requests and allow or deny. You could have a default-allow policy and get back to the X security but most implementations ask you to confirm first.
Using KDE or Sway, if I set my desktop scaling to 2x, all programs that run through XWayland have extremely blurry display (they've been rendered at 1x and then crudely scaled up). This includes firefox, chrome, and emacs. The browsers have ongoing work to support wayland natively, but neither is stable for me.
If I set my desktop scaling to 1x, I can then scale up individual xwayland programs with flags like `--force-device-scale-factor` if they support them. This gets me close to the behavior on X but on X I can just set a global 2x scale.
I totally understand the frustration of OSS maintainers when people demand they fix things with no intention of getting into the code. On the other hand, the marketing behind wayland encourages some unrealistic expectations. I went out and bought a new graphics card and it turns out I can't even run firefox! That was not what I expected to happen.
https://github.com/masm11/emacs
Pretty sure there are builds for the browsers you mentioned that run natively on wayland
Definitely a painful use case combination still but one that should solve itself once things actually start using Wayland rather than XWayland.
Anyway thanks for the tip!
So, end users are not supposed to complain because they don't know the full stack by heart? What kind of crappy piece of opinion is that?
You have been trying to reinvent the wheel for a decade and splitting the whole community on petty shit like this, halving development effort on an already non-popular platform, and yet you wonder why people are angry. Instead of evolving X11 and deprecating old features to drop tech debt over time, you went and created your snowflake project and paraded over how much more secure your project is when it doesn't have features to this day, features which are working perfectly on X11. This blog post is the epitome of the whole wayland development group's selfishness. You did this thing for yourselves, for your own comfort and feel-good bullshit, not for the whole community. The Linux ecosystem has suffered too much for no good reason, to the detriment of user experience and market share.
I do wish tensions about it could be lower. I think there is real damage for all any time they rise.
> Daniel Stone ~ The real story behind Wayland and X'
If you're going to complain, at least be constructive, research solutions yourself and provide feedback that has value.
I'm not sure if the Wayland contributors are overreacting, but I'm guessing people are not being nice when something doesn't work and write posts like "Wayland sucks so bad it doesn't work on XYZ" rather than posting "So I found out that Wayland doesn't work for XYZ, how can I help the project with this?"
And helping in the context might be as simple as writing up the use case and providing logs, or maybe raising the issue with the app developer.
For example - here's a bug report I wrote instead of just complaining that BT doesn't work well on Linux/Ubuntu: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/18...
It's getting solved!
<3 to all the maintainers out there - thanks for your hard work.
The open source ecosystem is all of ours and we should nurture it rather than just wine about it's problems. At least they are our problems and we can have a meaningful impact on them :)
* small grammatical edit
Anyone that has a high DPI display and/or NVIDIA card and uses most of the popular Electron based apps or Chrome will have a bad experience.
Not saying Xorg is any good, or the scaling decisions in Wayland are bad. Just that its not objectively possible to switch away from it yet, for a large number of people
See e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/d2qqtk/yet_another_...
Also it's (ironically) an X11 related issue which shows up do to XWayland backwards compatibility, not something new with Wayland.
Chrome also since supports Wayland natively so the workaround in that PR isn't even needed for it anymore. Electron is still a bit behind but it's looking like Electron 12 should have native Wayland support as well, until then the workaround for X11 app scaling is there.
There are still a few things I'd like to see land (which are closing in) before saying Wayland is a better fit for most users but better DPI scaling certainly isn't one, it was one of the first wins to land to be honest.
.
Regardless sway isn't for most users and will probably never be. I'd look more to issues in KDE or similar where it's more focused on the "normal" use case, supports Nvidia just fine, and is expected to work out of the box.
But it doesn't work for me (aka. important features are buggy in the gnome/wayland/whatever stack I am using if I select wayland in gdm). Am I now a lier or an unimportant victim of the March of technology?
I am using wayland on my laptop anyway, as it comes with better scaling. I actually want to like it and I am very thankful for the developers putting so much work into it.
But the rollout, especially of gnome-wayland, was a disaster. It wasn't ready* when it came to fedora and it wasn't ready when it first came to Ubuntu and it is barely ready today. The developers (and some diehard fans) repeatly insisting it was robbed many of any faith in the project.
People are saying so much about it because they tried and something broke. And yes it may be QT's (still problems with clipboard) or Firefox's or Gnome's or Nvidia's (half of all linux desktops) fault, not the Wayland core teams or the Wayland protocol's. Doesn't matter in the end.
* With ready I mean feature parity with gnome-x11. Working for "almost everyone" (and with a very, very, significant almost at that nvidia) is just not good enough. Not if you want to replace one of the most important components of a user's desktops. At least for my day to day usage it is pros and cons, but all the pros are something we learned to live without, all the cons are fresh wounds.
GNOME doesn't work for you. GNOME uses Wayland, but the bugs you experienced are not the fault of Wayland. They're the fault of GNOME.
GNOME is a dumpster fire and its premature roll-out to Fedora, Ubuntu, etc was very badly done. None of that has any bearing on Wayland, except to fuel the flames for spiteful people who choose to use the botched GNOME roll-out to harass anyone who has anything to do with Wayland.
- Multi-Monitor support (especially with multiple different resolutions)
- HiDPI support (even if some of your programs haven’t been updated for that yet)
Now why does wayland break xclip and vnc? Because "every program is a keylogger by default and can see any event, look at the contents of any window" is a major security issue, especially as it means the entire security model of screen lockers or containerized applications is useless.
Under X11, basically every application you run can trivially escalate itself to root. As even your Zoom client can just listen to your key events when you unlock your screen or use sudo in your terminal, save your password, and tada it can elevate itself. Under X11, there is no security whatsoever, and no separation of privileges.
Wayland still have bugs, but as Drew DeVault writes: They are fixable and importantly there are people willing to work on Wayland.
One of the more pressing issue currently is the Nvidia drivers, but that's not the fault of the Wayland developers. Users need to complain to Nvidia about that.
That said, I feel that Wayland devs (and users) are just now (re)learning the ecosystem catch-22 problem. The ecosystem hasn't caught up with Wayland's new architecture because the layers don't line up the same way. This means entirely new layers (or adapters) need to be created all the way up the stack.
Also, this new design and these interfaces are almost completely undocumented, so it makes it very hard for a non-waylander to step in and contribute. I made a couple attempts to fix bugs, but after wading through Github issues for 4 hours, and getting no help on IRC, I gave up.
Unfortunately the ecosystem is responsible for building the rest of the stack, but it's hard, because there isn't much in the way of documentation or examples in the ecosystem. That's the catch. The ecosystem is expanding very slowly because there isn't much of an ecosystem.
Drew, all of the points that you have made here might have some backing in facts, and it is clear from the tone and overall message that you're frustrated, angry, at your wits' end....but such a rant will accomplish nothing but make you look like an asshole, which hurts everyone in the long run.
I would encourage you to delete this and start over. Even if you are a 100% right, this looks terrible, and nobody wants to see this.
It’s an opinion, not a theory. People should be able to hold the opinion that “Wayland sucks” without being labeled conspiracy theorists.
If someone says that Wayland sucks, and tells why he thinks so, then this is a very legitimate opinion that has nothing to do with 9/11.
On that note, if the developers are so frustrated that all their work doesn't get the resonance they wished for, probably they are in the wrong business. I am very familiar with the fuck-you-all attitude. But if it comes to this on my part it is usually because I messed up really-really big somewhere and got lost, and needed self-reflection.
EDIT: Btw, I was considering to comment on his flaming, but then I read "mailing list etiquette" and figured that flaming like he does actually breaks etiquette, oh well... Let him flame, I don't care.
When exactly on Linux my NVidia 1660 GTX will do fractional scaling at 150% so a 27” 4K monitor is usable, doesn’t crap out every two minutes and actually ships with some distributions and importantly actually stays working every time I update it, I will stop berating it. This has been promised forever and it’s still a pile of random things I have to hack around and then I barely works.
Until then I’m a Mac and Windows desktop user.
This is a perfectly valid argument about why wayland doesn't work, from a user's perspective, not a developer's. This is precisely what users expect from the system, and frankly, Xorg made it work, despite the mess it was of a tech stack.
Wayland is a very beautiful ivory tech stack, but it was created for a much different use casw than what an average user is going to care about, and as such, it suffers greatly in the end-user's eyes vs. the old and busted Xorg.
E.g. screencapture. Does Wayland support screencapture? Yes (kind of), but I can't write a Wayland screencapture app. I need to write a Gnome screencapture app or a wslroot screencapture app, or I can even write one that supports both.
But what if someone using the new Future Desktop Environment wants to use my app? It probably won't work because it probably will use a different extension for the same behaviour. So I need to add the extension for that too...
That tells me pretty much everything I need to know about wayland.
Wayland and modern post-KMS Xorg do not control your hardware, and have no real ability to do anything with 3D acceleration outside of what Mesa/DRI/DRM/KMS grant them the permission to do. Wayland and Xorg both call the same APIs provided by them, and call them effectively the same way.
The side effect of this is fbcon can be ran on modern "all shader/no fixed function" hardware without special hacks and I can run a 3D accelerated program on the console with no X or Wayland running... which also, by extension, makes X and Wayland both just simple normal programs that don't particularly do anything special.
If you can't run Steam games, this either means Proton (or the native Linux binary of that game, for the few that have them) has a bug that has nothing to do with Wayland, or your system isn't setup correctly (this happens most often if you accidentally install an Nvidia GPU and use binary drivers).
The only thing that I can imagine that you are talking about is lack of proprietary driver support but that doesn't really seem related to Steam.
My other machines mostly use KDE or Sway on Wayland though.
Nouveau was pretty good but wouldn't properly handle 144 Hz.
If Ubuntu keeps using X, I think I'll be fine for a while.
I'm one who feels that ranting is a kind of art (or can be profitably interpreted that way), and well-formed rant counts as art.
This is a good rant, not great, but heartfelt and sincere with judicious use of curse words and rhetorical flourish.
(For greatness in ranting see the work of Mickens, perhaps our finest performing ranter of the day. https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens )
- - - -
On a tangent, I've been keeping an eye on the Arcan project https://arcan-fe.com/
> Arcan is a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything between user interfaces for specialised embedded applications all the way to full-blown standalone desktop environments.
> At its heart lies a robust and portable multimedia engine, with a well-tested and well-documented interface, programmable using Lua.
(Nothing against Wayland, I'm just mentioning it to say something potentially useful to someone.)
> We’ve sacrificed our spare time to build this for you for free. [...]
> You’re gonna maintain Xorg yourself, because we’re not going to volunteer our time, sacrifice our weekends and evenings staying up late for your sake [...]
This surprises me - I thought Wayland was developed mostly by people who were being paid full-time to develop it, at the various commercial Linux vendors (Red Hat etc.) or companies like Collabora. (And I thought the same was true of Xorg, and has been true for many years.) Is it really true that Wayland is primarily volunteer-driven?
It's true that most people are nonetheless getting Wayland for free (and, to be absolutely clear, harassment is unacceptable even to people being paid to work on the project), but the dynamics of the situation change a lot based on whether the developers are volunteers or paid by some company.
Developing software is difficult and thankless, even if FOSS. I don't know what else to say other than this article feels like a waste of space.
the crazy conspiracy theory here actually is that we need to replace Xorg/X11 with something that just doesn't work, and nobody actually wants to use.
keep appealing to outrage, though. hypocrite.
With that in mind, can anybody recommend one or more good books / websites / whatever, that represent a moderately comprehensive introduction to all this "desktop stuff"? That is, graphics servers, window managers, compositors, yadda, yadda, yadda. I'd like to dig in and actually start to understand some of the underlying details of what's going on with all of this.
https://magcius.github.io/xplain/article/index.html
That covers the graphics part which is the same for the two windowing systems. See Wayland's FAQ[1] and architecture[2] page for why it was made and how they differ.
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html
Though not primary goal according to their FAQ, Wayland also improves security. For this see:
https://lwn.net/Articles/517375/
http://mupuf.org/blog/2014/02/19/wayland-compositors-why-and...
Wayland feels like some ivy tower academic's ideal of what a display system should be. Everything usable is an 'exercise left to the reader'.
Look, if you're a dev working on an open source project meant to replace a critical piece of infrastructure, don't be surprised when people don't like or adopt it when it breaks a lot of their uses cases.
I'm not sure what you mean. This is actually exactly what is being done in GNOME and KDE's wayland implementations.
Honest question by someone who wants to try out wayland, do steam, gog games, and wine games work on wayland well? What about things like obs?
Caveat: this applies only to compositors based on wlroots, list of them here:
https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-wl...
The most mature compositors from this list are sway, wayfire, hikari, and cage. YMMV with other Wayland compositors, and if you have issues with them, you should speak to them, but not blame Wayland in general. If you have Nvidia hardware, you will also have to use the nouveau driver, and YMMV with that, too. I recommend Intel or AMD GPUs, both companies are much more cooperative with the FOSS community.
Issue tracking: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745032
And other -ve comments on HN.
> […] just to maintain that broken pile of shit.
> […] If you do know what you’re doing, though, you’ll soon realize you want nothing to do with that shitty codebase.
If it is a "broken pile of shit," and a "shitty codebase," wouldn’t the anti-Wayland be right? I do not use Linux on the desktop.
However, proponents probably also shouldn't push 'no yes it does work for you' replies though, particularly on the Nvidia thing, since that statement has to be followed by 'if you make serious performance and capability tradeoffs that you may not want to make.'
This software disclaims support for this and that thing [1] - that's fine, just add those to your constraint set and see if you still want to use that software at the end of the day. If you don't, that's fine, either write some code to lift your constraints or move on, but don't be a dick about it.
[1]: maybe because the guys that build that thing are jerks, and aren't being good citizens. Which, sure, fine, but from a user perspective, this peg doesn't go in that hole.
actually I am victimized by the extra frame of latency. cool rant though
And before you waste time with "Instead of RDP you should..."
Save the effort, I have no interest. RDP works with XFCE exactly the way I want it to. But I understand there is a working GNOME RDP interface now, so maybe I'll give it a shot with Wayland when I bring up a new server.
Really? You are just doing it to provide free software with no returns for you? I find this hard to believe.
You aren’t doing it because you wanted to explore a particular technical area that you are unable to explore at a day job, pad one’s resume, impress your developer friends, or help maintain the software as part of your day job?
But yes, proprietary divers are still slow to update.
> Wayland works for almost everyone...
Oh good. Tell me how to get XFCE running with Wayland then?
I'm not a user of X11 or Wayland, not really. I just picked a DE that I liked. I guess my choice puts me firmly in the anti-Wayland camp though since I won't be running it anytime soon.
As they just released 4.16 last month, we should see an announcement regarding dependencies for 4.18 anytime now.
I don't use or follow XFCE myself, but a quick search suggests the developers are working on it, though they won't get there anytime soon. (most of what I can find seems to be from 4+ years ago, so not anytime soon could be yesterday for all I know)
There were better solutions in the past. Still could be, and possibly better solutions for the future.
I use sway everyday and i freaking love it. Mixing monitors with different resolutions AND different refresh rates all running at their native speeds with no tearing, all while keeping my nice i3 Shortcuts? FREAKING AWESOME!
Does EVERYTHING work? Nope, somethings are broken, some require config changes or workarounds. I have an XFCE desktop installed as a backup for work when i know i need to do a lot of Zoom conferences but for my private stuff i can just avoid non-wayland software and for most things IT.JUST.WORKS. and it's superbly fast and comfy AF to use.
Complain away how wayland doesn't do everything xorg does. Stick to your abandonware for legacy reasons. That's fine. That's your freedom.
I just like the Window Manager :)
Only thing I'm missing is copy and paste isn't working with Chrome Remote Desktop.
Overall it's been great and smooth experience since I switched last year.
i3 is a X11 window manager and has no Wayland support at all.
Sway is a Wayland compositor that closely resembles i3.
The counterpoint is that a lot of great FOSS software that is 80-90% great but with a terrible UI, terrible documentation, or glaring incompatibility that makes the experience entirely unpalatable for a swath of users. And so a lot of people don't use it. Which is also fine.
In my case, ranting didn't help. In fact, it made things much worse.
Also, in my case, I was lucky enough to hand my project over to some really sharp, energetic and positive people that have taken my work to the next level.
Turns out, the absolute best thing that I could do for my project, was to step away from it completely (not even being a "benevolent dictator emeritus"), after ten years of dealing with some really annoying crap. My being associated with the project was actually a boat anchor. I hate to say it, but not everybody loves me, and I'm fairly good at giving as well as I get (see "didn't help," above).
I have no experience or knowledge regarding Wayland, infact this post was the first I have heard of it. That being said, if the author's rant truly reflects the attitude of the community, it's sounds pretty toxic.
I've seen that sometimes here, although it's more frequent on Reddit.
There's been a lot of external hostility and conflict over the years. Which unsurprisingly affects community culture.
And the reverse too. I recall encountering surprising "yikes!" even early on, from excursions from professionalism, tone-deafness, and groupthink. Which didn't help with external harmony.
It might be interesting to explore sometime, what might have been done differently long-term, to perhaps have gotten different dynamics. For instance, if replacing X11 had been envisioned as first a broadening of alternatives, and only then a narrowing to a new standard. Open source often uses forking and competing projects to defuse hostility and keep people engaged and productive. Coping gracefully with "lots of diverse everyone trapped on the same boat" isn't its strength.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/commits/mas...
The strong reaction to Wayland is due to breaking even the few things that used to work.
He was talking about the bullying and abuse that many people think they are entitled to hand out, just because because.
I have no opinion on Wayland - I use what ever is in front of me, but I share the disgust at the bullying.
Times have changed. We are no longer a bunch of young men, tough and full of testosterone, able to give and take all teh shit - and loving it.
Times have changed, now the time is to be nice
I'm dismayed by how much people just categorize everything as 'anti-' or 'hit piece' (when it comes to news) or ... something that implies some sort of extreme bias or conspiracy when it comes to an opinion they don't like these days.
Nobody it seems has a valid point of view, it's so often just some sort of 'propaganda' or something...
why did ubuntu use wayland and then switch back to X?
i think this is a great piece of evidence in the case for all these open source guys to stop wasting their effort on open source projects. the amount of utility that is got per unit time and effort is pathetic. its thankless, hard work that in this case will basically be rejected by the very people it was designed for.
i think a better model is something like system76 where the core developers are paid and people get really good, well integrated hardware as well.
They're switching again to Wayland: [1]
[1]: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/trying-wayland-by-default-aga...
Nowadays I think even Microsoft is more friendly with its users than Linux desktop developers.
Just because something is a 'niche' use case doesn't mean its not important. Yes the average programmer is just fine under Wayland. Every other niche case Linux has been working to accommodate all these years isn't because, even if slight, Wayland causes issues.
I am also even less inclined to use it again after these comments.
Don't compare your detractors to anti-vaxxers!
> It has a real cost, you know, being a dick to maintainers.
Which way is it, chief?
Bro what, are you kidding me?
When systemd got jammed down our throats all I felt was "well, I'm against it by principle, but I guess strictly speaking nothing is getting worse"...
If this half baked Wayland nonsense gets shoved down our throat, I am toast. I need good functioning color management and Wayland seems to say "well, nobody buys displays more than 100 dollars, so sRGB it is"
You should also call them nazis, you know, just to strengthen your argument.
> It has a real cost, you know, being a dick to maintainers. [...] We’re out here trying to make things better [...] We’ve sacrificed our spare time to build this for you for free.
Yes, but who are you addressing? There's a subtext here that discouraging behavior can be such a burden that it takes away resources from the project. Perhaps it takes such a toll that a maintainer just calls it quits on the whole thing. That makes sense when addressing your fans who are consuming your work but nonetheless burdening you. To a detractor, who isn't using Wayland and doesn't want Wayland to succeed, discouragement leading to burnout is not failure condition. This logical slip is probably the result of leaning too heavily on the vaccine metaphor.
Now playing Devil's advocate (contra this piece):
In the real world, anti-vaxxers benefit no matter what they believe. But that's not so in Wayland v. X11 duel, which is not only a genuine a matter of preference, but there are actually shades of a zero-sum relationship here. The idea of Wayland, like a vaccine, being good for you whether you know it or not doesn't hold up. If you're in the X11 camp and oppose Wayland, improvement to the Wayland ecosystem isn't bringing nice things like herd immunity. It's actually a threat if your vision is one where X11 remains entrenched for the foreseeable future. It would also be really easy for a detractor of Wayland to use this post for ammunition, for example labelling this as self-aggrandizement and maybe claiming that there's an attitude where Waylanders see themselves as saviors, rescuing others from a plight they don't even agree exists, and that it's an attitude indicative of the project as a whole.
The author is seriously upset, insists that Wayland works for almost everyone, and if you don't like Wayland - you don't have a clue, and f... you, and you will maintain Xorg yourself, and f... you. And f... you. Did I mention f... you? That's it.