Wayland Isn't Going to Save the Linux Desktop

Once you realize that Wayland is essentially a GNOME project, it will all make sense. Take for example how windows have to draw their own decorations. That's a GNOME-ism.

If Wayland is the future of the Linux desktop, it would seem that there will be one true reference compositor (GNOME's Mutter) with a number of other projects struggling to adapt to the various gaps left by Wayland's incompleteness.

For example, screen sharing on Zoom works with GNOME Wayland but not the other compositors because it targets a GNOME API. If the Linux desktop starts to fracture, what's the incentive to bring support to your less common WM/compositor?

There's two schools of thought regarding high DPI displays, the Apple way, and the Windows way.

The Apple way tries to make the DPI change transparent to the application, resizing behind the hood when necessary, and only using integer scales, requiring increased-size assets that are used on-demand.

Windows allows the program to opt into handling the high DPI by itself, obviously producing precise behavior in that case. For compatibility, it will either scale smaller windows up framebuffer-wise, or increase the font size, using the limited resolution independence it has had from the beginning.

In the end, Windows' behavior turned out to be less error-prone. For a little while it seemed like it would be a disaster, pushing the onus onto the developers, but it turned out fine in the end. Personally, I didn't think just making a clean separation like that was the right idea, but I was proven wrong.

Wayland uses the MacOS approach. It allows the program to provide increased resolution buffers at integral scales. This forces fractional scales into framebuffer scaling. The application can't output at a pixel-precise level.

In X11, both of the popular toolkits, Gtk and Qt, simply take the DPI provided and draw widgets bigger, kind of like Windows. It isn't perfect. For example, Gtk only really "supports" integral scales, but themes have been doing dynamic resizing forever, so tweaking the DPI can get perfect fractional sizing aside from some line widths. Older theme engines on Qt might also have a few glitches. But I'm convinced this is definitely the way to go. You're not hiding the fractional DPI from the program. It can be as sharp as it wants.

The main problem with Wayland is not technical but political.

It follows the same forced adoption tactics than systemd.

People don't use it because it lacks many features compared to X and other implemented features do not work as good as on X.

So what do they do? They make Wayland, which is incomplete and beta quality, the default graphic engine of GNOME, which is the default desktop environment of 90% of Linux distributions.

And when people complain about this, the only thing they say is X is dead, Wayland is the future.

I really like this article, particularly this point:

> Wayland's lack of feature parity with Xorg cripples it.

This is something I've bible-thumped Wayland advocates over for years. wlroots is dead-on-arrival in the eyes of smaller DE/WM devs. Nobody wants to update their entire system's display server, and then be forced to rewrite entire portions of userland and the OS just to get their desktop working similarly as it was on Xorg, with less hardware support.

That's a problem. It's something that Wayland advocates will defend as "a work in progress", but when is that work due? Wayland has been in development for nearly 10 years now, and with each passing year it increasingly feels like this is a scam designed to bootstrap the Mutter shell. Face it: Sway works but it's hardly a DE, and KDE is functional on specific hardware and lacks several features. Wayland is a failure for everyone but the GNOME foundation, who I think intended this as a power-grab. In reality, we're left with an XKCD-worthy "two competing standards" situation.

People often cite a fractured desktop as the reason why Linux never takes off. Well, it's projects like Wayland that cause the worst fractures. We were promised a better Display Server, and what we got doesn't even compete with what we had in MacOS Sierra. I hate to be vitriolic towards software, but it's really pathetic.

To be honest as a mere user Wayland just works. But I had experienced some odd situations that received no attention whatsoever. While with X there was plenty of attention over these details, I do think it was honed over years of inefficiency on the Linux desktop.

I don't see any alternative in sight and can't seem to see a way back to X at all.

I use Wayland, but I sometimes feel that the main Wayland developers lack pragmatism, and this lack of pragmatism causes confusion and fragmentation.

I still find myself reflexively mistrustful of Wayland because there's no real multi-OS implementation. Apart from some Steam games, there's nothing tying me to Linux as opposed to e.g. OpenBSD.

IMO application sandboxing is very important, something that everyone should be able to take for granted in 2022. But the right approach is usually virtualization. If you omit functionality that people want, they come up with an (insecure) workaround and the workaround becomes required for common applications to work. If you deny requests by a program when policy does not permit them, by laziness or malice applications will require excessive permissions to function, and users will comply to get their apps working. Instead, every API must appear to be working to the greater extent possible, but sandbox all important effects and coeffects by default. So eg attempting to screen share from a program not authorized to do so either (a) prompts the user what to share or (b) shows an empty desktop with just that program.

We'll the blog isn't even willing to make this readable on mobile. Why should one read the ramblings of such a backwards person

I have a ThinkPad T60 that I still use for a most of my personal tasks. X works fine. Wayland doesn't. Nobody involved with Wayland development seems to care. That's fair enough, but I see no reason to throw out a working device that runs fine with Slackware 15 just because the only display server that supports it is X.

The Linux desktop is unpopular because people don't like the responsibility that comes with freedom. People like ChromeOS just like they like candy.