Hacker News Reader

Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else get the same feel from Wayland as from WebExtensions? That is, being forced into a new system with less functionality while these shortcomings are swept under the rug with "we'll fix it later" and "nobody uses that" excuses?

View on HN

Yes, especially since X11 code isn't badly written. It gives me the feeling X devs were fed up with a huge codebase and wanted to write something new and shiny, albeit with 10% of features, pushing the maintenance burden downstream. The Wayland evangelists touting it as desktop-ready and no-true-scottsman'ing any critique also smells fishy. What Wayland did bring was more fragmentation.

And yes, their attitude toward missing features is the same as GNOME's: WONTFIX parade 24/7.

I'm a Wayland evangelist and super sad about the fragmentation - it's the main thing holding it back right now. KDE and GNOME are both doing their own thing, with the wlroots (Sway) community being the main driver for standardization: Wlroots protocols are slowly being integrated into Wayland proper and implemented by KDE (layer-shell is coming up).

I would hope the Freedesktop group to get active here, as they have been incredibly successful promoting standards in the past and probably could do it again - but it seems like they're closely associated with the Gnome-Project, which has apparently decided to go the "fuck everyone else" route.

I think you have a misconception of what freedesktop is, it is not much more than a hosting service for desktop-related projects. If someone wants to submit an RFC there the process is the same as it's always been, other people working on that can choose to accept or reject anyone else's proposals. I wouldn't say GNOME or KDE or wlroots or any of those are being a main driver, the point with that is that they have to come together. None of them can just say "I am working more on standardization than you are," that doesn't make any sense when the participation is voluntary.

(And just IMO, things like layer-shell are not really a solution that fits with Wayland, that just puts us back in X territory where clients can position themselves arbitrarily, steal input and take over the screen)

I have to say, your mention stolen input (and I'm assuming focus) got my attention. Is this something that Wayland can somehow remedy?

Input focus is already controlled by the window manager on X11 so you can implement whatever policy you want there.

> Does anyone else get the same feel from Wayland as from WebExtensions?

Yes, in that it’s another much-needed security and architectural improvement. (Bootstrapped Firefox extensions were a huge pain to build.)

Any thoughts on WebExtensions not providing even a small fraction of the functionality of XUL?

I have yet to experience this. Granted XWayland makes any utilities not running in Wayland work perfectly for me. The only issues that I have ran into were because of screen-sharing not being supported by Electron. OBS works perfectly though. However, keep in mind that I use sway. I've heard horror stories from KDE and Gnome running on Wayland, but, as far as I know, this is because they apparently have terrible implementations. The benefits for me are the lack of screen tearing and Wayland just feels smoother.

I'm not affiliated with any projects targeting wayland, but I must ask: who is forcing you, and what exactly are they forcing you into? I think the consensus is that X will be kept alive indefinitely (or at least for many more years to come).

Well, it's mainly all these articles about "moving away from X":

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22moving+away+from+x%22+way...

... combined with all the claims that X is abandonware:

https://www.google.com/search?q=x+abandoned+wayland

Granted the number of alarmist cries from the peanut gallery could be scary, but probably you should look into it for more than just a couple of cursory google searches before starting to spread them yourself.

I only did the google searches to illustrate what I'm talking about, because I haven't been saving all the links I've come across here on HN and in other places without looking for it.

Yes and no. I get a bit of that from wayland overall, but I use sway, and wlroots is actually really good about making protocols for missing functionality (and proposing them as standards).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com