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Comment by gnulinux | Hacker News Reader

Why does this distinction matter? Gnome on X works perfectly fine, Gnome on Wayland does not. Why does it matter it to state that Wayland is a protocol, not the implementation?

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Because if what's bothering you is the implementation and not the protocol, you should be talking about fixing the implementation instead of diverting attention to the protocol? I might not understand your question here.

If every implementation of a protocol seems stuck with deal-breaking bugs or incompatibilities, it's time to start asking whether the protocol itself has some problems that make it impossible to implement consistently - unstated assumptions, for example, in the reference implementation that never made it to the protocol spec.

For a modern example of this in action, see Bluetooth and the madhouse of device 'quirks' you have to settle with day-to-day, since each device has subtly protocol-breaking opinions on how to implement it.

I would agree here, if you could make a reasonable case that the problems trace back the protocol. But my point here is that practically all issues at hand happen outside of what Wayland is used for.

Wayland is a display protocol. Practically all of the pain people are experiencing has nothing to do with how Gnome/KDE/Sway really display things differently. The pain everybody experiences is that the realization that suddenly we need a new input stack too, a new way to screenshare, a new way to do clipboard access, a new way to do a bunch of other things. All stuff that also needs to made, standardized, and achieve maturity outside of the new display protocol.

It's tempting to call that fallout of other stuff that needs to be changed "Wayland" as well, but I'd say that misses the point completely and calling it that won't help anyone get this stuff fixed.

So there's a terminology conflation issue, then: people attacking Wayland proper for issues that are actually about the 'Wayland ecosystem'. I could see that generating increasing problems if there is no observable gameplan for or encouragement to develop those pieces people have come to expect of a full desktop stack.

Mind that I have no formed opinion of Wayland myself, having not used it. Trying to deduce probable causes from hearing people duke it out here and elsewhere.

I would say that's a fair summary.

On Linux, there's X11 based desktops and "post-X11" desktops. "Post-X11" would involve implementations of Wayland and Freedesktop Portals [1], using libinput [2] - and some other things I'm forgetting. All these things don't depend on Wayland and run fine on X11 too (heck you can even run a Wayland compositor in an X11 window), but most of this stuff is pretty new, implementations have lots of QA issues, and application adoption is also not fantastic. On X11 you can just talk to the X11 socket directly for what you want as a workaround, but on post-X11 you have to adopt a new means of doing it. And that hurts.

[1]: https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/portal-docs.htm...

[2]: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/libinput/

It's funny that in the case of systemd both the scenario and hence also the complaints were the complete opposite. Namely that systemd does everything, that in an idealistic world should have been decoupled from the core. (Which was also FUD since the internals actually are decoupled and work alone).

It is like blaming HTTP because of the cookie warnings you get everywhere. Yes, cookies are part of HTTP, but the warnings are not.

That's funny, because for me, it's exactly the opposite. I use Gnome on Wayland/Mutter and it works great - I've never had a linux desktop that had such great UI rendering. Gnome on X doesn't work and is buggy - it's riddled with graphical glitches that other platforms (even smartphones and tablets) don't suffer from. How can that be considered to "work"?

But my requirements are different from yours.

> it's riddled with graphical glitches that other platforms (even smartphones and tablets) don't suffer from. How can that be considered to "work"?

If you've been shooting yourself in the foot all your life, eventually you'll stop noticing that your foot is bleeding.

Both of you could be right, depending on the hardware sometimes GNOME w/ Xorg works better and sometimes it's the other way around.

That would be pretty amazing if Xorg ever rendered in a way that was even equal to other platforms (mutter, Windows, android, MacOS, ...) given how crazy the separation of concerns in X is and how many silly boundary crossings need to be made to process events and render them.

It would have to rely on compositor and driver bugs in those other platforms.

Gnome on Wayland works pretty great for me. (No issues with brightness etc). Occasionally I log into an X11 session because Wayland screen sharing doesn't work that great.

Because Gnome on Wayland might not work, but maybe KDE on Wayland does or "i3 on Wayland" aka sway does. That's like saying "I tried switching to Linux but it doesn't work" because you couldn't make the dropbox client run. The protocol (linux ABI) works, but the implementation (dropbox on linux) doesn't.

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