Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

I'm so happy that Xorg is still being maintained, the more I read about Wayland, the happier I become to stay on Xorg. If you really want to erode your faith in open-source software, open up the bug tracker for Wayland and click through the closed issues, some of them[0] are fairly reasonable requests that are met with hostility and disinterest by the developers.

I'm starting to understand what people mean when they say that Wayland is a self-serving project by the GNOME developers, too. Do we need a status tray API? Nah, GNOME doesn't use it. Should we add stable screenshot interfaces? Nope, GNOME already made one. And here we are, 10 years later, and there's only 3 desktop environments that use Wayland (GNOME, Plasma and Sway), two of which aren't even complete.

I understand the "we aren't remaking x11" argument, but that's not an excuse to design a worse window server and give a middle finger to the rest of the desktop environments and window managers that people want to use. GNOME's continued attempts to divide the Linux community with pointless middleware and poorly designed software is starting to bite them in the ass. Most people I know these days have no intention of switching to Wayland any time soon, which is a shame since x11 really sucks; it shouldn't be this hard to design a successor to software that's as bad as Xorg.

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/233

I think the problem is Freedesktop. It is a shill for RedHat and GNOME (actually created by somebody who works for both) so every project gets railroaded by whatever those two want, rather than what users want or what is simpler design. The result is a lot of garbage that just makes users' lives worse.

What really scares me is that in Wayland programs must do their own window management. I realy hate when a program decides that it shall change position or shape on the screen or when it decides to draw on the titlebar making window operations like maximizing a pain.

Have you heard about GNOME's Client-Side Decorations Initiative? The gist is that GNOME does not want to implement/maintain window decorations (title bars, minimize/maximize buttons) in their Wayland compositor, so instead (in typical GNOME fashion) they want every other Linux desktop app to add code to draw decorations themselves (in whichever style they want).

https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/CSD

Then why do they want clients to use Gnome (indtead of other libraries) ? When every program does what he wants why do we need a "Desktop environment " ?

Despite being one of the most powerful, well-funded projects in the desktop Linux space, the GNOME devs runs a notorious "my way or the highway" policy that consistently makes it increasingly difficult for smaller teams to develop their own desktops. Components like libadwaita, Flatpak, Wayland, and GTK4 only further contribute to this initiative. Don't just take my word for it though, ask anyone on Linux developing desktop apps: GNOME has been driving a wedge between developers for a while now.

Now you're starting to understand why some of us don't want to have Gnome anywhere near our Linux desktops when every bit of functionality that we actively use gets deprecated and removed. I loved my Linux desktop back in the early '00s when Gnome and Enlightenment provided configurable window decorations and transparent terminals, but all that configurability in Gnome has been hidden and then ripped out over the past 20 years of "progress".

Three cheers for ostracizing your userbase and shrinking your development team down to an authoritarian handful of members that doesn't care about your opinions!

This intrigued me:

> (GNOME, Plasma and Sway), two of which aren't even complete

Which ones are you referring to as non complete? I think it's pretty obvious for Plasma, but the other...?

I tried Sway a few months ago and it's still missing rudimentary features like screenshotting and tray icons. I'm not sure if the situation has improved yet, but if Sway is trying to be a drop-in replacement for i3 then they've still got work to do.

Screenshots works in Sway, it has been there for years. Tray icons as well (it depends of the bar you use though, but it works with the included bar swaybar and waybar).

you can use grim + slurp for screenshots https://github.com/emersion/grim but Flameshot works as well (for example).

Edit: you should have a look at the wiki: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Useful-add-ons-for-sway

I seem to have missed that, thank you. The distro I was using didn't come with any of that stuff, and me being on an Nvidia card I didn't stick around long enough to read the wiki.

Sway has had support for both of those for years.

Tray: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/releases/tag/0.14.0

Screenshot: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/releases/tag/0.10

Gnome 3 is so bad that it drove my family members, who I had managed to switch to Linux painlessly over ten years ago, back to using Windows.

It's just an awful, painfully dim UX. The Tyranny of the Designer is on full display.

With HiDPI finally getting mature in MATE I may be able to convince them to return. But I suspect the nightmare that is Snap will keep them away.

With extensions it was possible to get a functional desktop up and running, but nothing short of a hassle. GNOME 40 is just a desolate wasteland of poor design decisions by comparison, if your family thought GNOME 3 was bad, they'd be flabbergasted by the newer releases.

Guess what happens when you reimplement everything from scratch again every few years? Functionality is lost and never regained. Just one more rewrite and it'll all be awesome, right?

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