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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

My strategy is to keep the software for a desktop computer stable and of it's era forever. If it gets so old that I'm having trouble compiling things because my glib and gcc are so old then I'll build an entirely new desktop with up to date OS and software. Then set it up and use it till it can't do new software again. This happens every 5 to 10 years. I never lose ability. I only gain it.

There are many things my 2010 era Core2Duo running Ubuntu 10.04 can do that my fancy new Ryzen desktop with Debian 11 can't and won't ever be able to do. Things I cannot give up because they're too important for my daily life.

>And when Wayland finally happens? Well. I guess I’ll have no choice but to stop using computers forever ¯\_(ツ)_/

Wayland isn't going to happen. https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-x...

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> Wayland isn't going to happen.

I'd be very disappointed by this because I'm in a mixed DPI environment and I need its support.

Seriously though, I find hostility toward Wayland so weird. I could kind of understand it with systemd, but X seems perpetually stuck in 2005.

> Seriously though, I find hostility toward Wayland so weird.

I think the hostility towards Wayland is pretty justified. It's a backdoor power-grab by the GNOME foundation and Red Hat, much like Flatpak, Libadwaita, and to a limited extent, systemd. I, like many others, am totally exhausted of GNOME trying to be the center of the desktop universe. Every couple years, they decide to redouble their development efforts on some useless, stopgap tool that ultimately ends up being underdeveloped and redundant. Making matters worse, they announce $PROGRAM to be the next big feature of Linux, and anyone who's refusing to embrace it is a luddite. In reality, most people can't switch to these alternatives because they're niche, and don't provide the same degree of functionality as their favorite Window Manager.

Furthermore, people don't hate the idea of something replacing X, people hate the fact that Wayland has been in development for more than a decade and is still considerably worse than Xorg with objectively less features and functionality. Adding insult to injury, a majority of these omissions are deliberately removed by the maintainers because the GNOME desktop doesn't need it, therefore everyone else doesn't. Take AppIndicator support, for example. Everyone has statusbar icons: Mac and Windows users alike deal with them daily. When developing Wayland though, AppIndicators were deliberately removed because GNOME didn't intend to use them. Worse yet, the maintainers refused to even support it in wlroots, their pittance of a cross-platform desktop library.

> I could kind of understand it with systemd, but X seems perpetually stuck in 2005.

X is indeed terrible software, and it's functionality is stuck not just in 2005, but rather the mid-90s. I really hate Xorg, which makes it even more infuriating that Wayland:

a. Doesn't support my hardware

b. Doesn't support my desktop environment

c. Makes it harder for me to stream my display, take screengrabs, and use my webcam

d. Deliberately removed functionality that I use on a daily basis, forcing everyone adopting Wayland to write their own implementation of a basic feature.

If I didn't know any better, I'd accuse Wayland of being a project deliberately designed to sabotage desktop Linux. It's a project with less ambition than Quartz, and less hardware/software support than x11. It has a weaker security model than the compositor in MacOS, and manages to have less features than even the compositor in Windows. How is that closer to "the future" than a feature-complete desktop from 30 years ago?

The only truly excellent thing to come out of Wayland was PipeWire. But PipeWire works just fine on Xorg machines too, so I guess we're at an impasse. Wayland fractured the Linux desktop for good, there is no "way forward" anymore.

Yet... it's still the only way I can use mixed DPI displays. I'm sure all of these concerns are justified in one way or the other, but no one's really given me a lot of other options. A quick environmental scan reveals two serious contenders: Xorg and Wayland. Open source precludes the idea of a grand conspiracy, so I'm not sure why no one's working on an alternative if it's as bad as you say.

It's a bit like complaining about factory conditions in China. I'd sure like to buy a computer from somewhere else, but I'm sort of left without a bunch of options so I shrug my shoulders and hold my nose and hope the market sorts it out. Ironically, this is one of the issues that puts me off upgrading to another HiDPI display, thus necessitating my need for Wayland...

I'm not taking away any options from you, you're welcome to use whatever tools work for you. You shouldn't take it as a personal attack when someone suggests that one of your tools could use improvement, and by reaching consensus that Wayland needs more features and hardware support we can send a message to the community that work is far from done.

Linux display servers need a lot of work. HDR content is right around the corner, and nobody in the Linux video stack is prepared. Wayland spends too much time twiddling their thumbs and making life hard on the rest of the Linux community, and Xorg's maintainers are gone. If you're going to use Linux, then by all means, use what works for you. That's the benefit of modular OSes! But we still need to push for more active development in this space. If Xorg is dead, then a lot of work needs to be done on Wayland to get them up to speed. If Xorg is not dead, then we need to find someone to fix it's longstanding issues.

> It's a bit like complaining about factory conditions in China.

Not really. It's more like complaining about a missing feature, say, thumbnails in the filepicker. At first it seems like such an egregious omission that it had to be a bug. But then people defend it, saying "it's not that big of a deal!" When you try to get people to corroborate your claims, people label it as hate speech. When users contribute code, fixes, patches and solutions, you see them all get turned down.

The goals of commercial interests, Linux software developers and Linux desktop users have never been more at-odds. Without a clear path forwards, we can't expect anything to get done. I think it's okay to beat a drum about this stuff online, because it's completely germane on a subject like this.

I don't think Wayland, or even GNOME is much of a conspiracy. The people who spearhead these kinds of consolidating efforts(udev, systemd were similar stories) are always going to fall more into the empire-builder category than most people. But it's open-source: to win the category you have to make a public good. So at the end of the process, you have working software and a standard. The standard has to be at least somewhat better for most people, or it falls into the bucket of dead standards.

But Wayland's definitely a big one, touching really old assumptions around Linux desktops. There is plenty to start fights over. I still can't quite use it for all my apps because some stylus apps behave poorly. So I think I'll be in the latecomer camp. This is not a bad thing for me: it just means I've organized my life around using the tech to get a good result now, rather than putting my energy into developing the tech. I was on Windows for the longest time for the same reason.

> Yet... it's still the only way I can use mixed DPI displays. I'm sure all of these concerns are justified in one way or the other, but no one's really given me a lot of other options.

I believe you, but personally buying my monitors in matched sets is easier than giving up network transparency, and I don't think that's an outrageous position worthy of the scorn that the Wayland folks seem to have for it.

> A quick environmental scan reveals two serious contenders: Xorg and Wayland. Open source precludes the idea of a grand conspiracy, so I'm not sure why no one's working on an alternative if it's as bad as you say.

There's no money in it and it needs a lot of boring grunt work. RedHat may be half-assing Wayland but that's still 0.5 more asses than anyone else is putting into anything.

This is just a shitty conspiracy theory in your head.

> Seriously though, I find hostility toward Wayland so weird.

I felt the same way until I tried to get Chromium working without turning into a blurry pixelated XWayland mess. I still run Sway, but the hours I've spent pouring over smug "It's working as intended! X is soooo 2005 anyway" posts while troubleshooting my Wayland config has been absolutely infuriating.

I've also had to pause updates from Visual Studio Code, while they have contributed a lot to Wayland support in Electron they sure do break it with regularity.

Did you try

    chromium —enable-features=UseOzonePlatform —ozone-platform=wayland

I’ve seen this work brilliantly on some GPUs and segfault at start with some.

people have been trying to replace X11 since I started using Linux around '96.

The Xorg we use today is miles ahead of the XFree86 days that I find it rather humorous people are still complaining. Sure, I can see from a dev point of view it still sucks to work with. But from a user point of view? It does everything I need it to, and more. I can run remote apps. I can run headless X (how I was doing headless Chrome way before anyone else). I can run multiple X servers on one machine and switch between them (one for multi-monitor productivity, and a second for single-monitor gaming since most games don't work great with multiple monitors). xrandr is a thing today. I can dynamically change just about anything on the fly. I haven't touched the Xorg config and modelines in about a decade now. Getting a GPU to work has never been easier. There is just insane flexibility in what you can actually do with X11 that the warts kind of just fade away.

Most folks don’t use these features any longer. For example, I haven’t run a GUI remotely since the late 90s on a SGI cluster. Everything not very local moved to the web.

Autoconfiguration is table stakes as well.

And, right, this is why Wayland adoption is so low: the thought process is always "I don't use this personally so there's no point supporting it". And, I'll be the first to say: they're doing the work, so they get to decide what the product looks like. But this is why nobody uses it.

It’s default now in many dists. I don’t use it but not because I care.

Yeah it's kind of weird that people want things to work as well as they do in Xorg. While I completely understand that it works very well for you, the "for you" doesn't actually make it so for me.

While I understand that it's probably my fault for not discovering the same combination of software components and configuration that you did through brute force... Xorg no longer makes me do these sorts of things. Probably because it's not in a hurricane of development where every wheel is reimplemented monthly. You want people to switch to Wayland? Restart development on Xorg and introduce lots of breakage until it's just as much of a pain in the ass as Wayland.

I've tried it as recently as this year. The deal breaker? Toolbar popups in LibreOffice would not show. While I could submit bug reports to hundreds of different projects wait for them to be a duplicate of a closed won't-fix-not-our-bug-good-luck-figuring-out-who's-bug-it-is-becasue-they-sent-you-back-here, I just don't have the patience I used to have for that. I got to get something done. So, back to xorg until some update discards my preference and loads Wayland again.

Yeah, why should I be mad? Just be patient another 13 years for the pain points (which simultaneously don't exist) to get worked out.

> Yeah it's kind of weird that people want things to work as well as they do in Xorg. While I completely understand that it works very well for you, the "for you" doesn't actually make it so for me.

But the converse is also true. Just because it doesn't work for you, it doesn't mean that it's in and of itself bad. Why would you be mad at Wayland if Xorg works for you? In that case it seems like there's really nothing at all to comment on.

However, the fact that there is so much discussion around this leads me to believe that X doesn't work for many people and that seems to be the fault of Xorg, not Wayland, so I don't understand why Wayland comes in for so much of the criticism. Wayland devs identified some problems and set out to fix them, this shouldn't really have any impact on Xorg at all, right? Just continue to use X.

EDIT: And to be clear on a point, it's not that I think Wayland should be immune from criticism. It's missing features and there are probably things that are broken. But the tone of the discussion (and of other comments in this thread) is that Wayland is bad for the community. That its very existence is somehow an affront. That's what I don't really get.

lawl - wayland has already happened.

Also, and more seriously - I think I'm not going to take you at your word on this one:

I'd love to see a real example instead of this pithy line. My strong (STRONG) suspicion is that anything you can do on that old machine can be done on the new one just fine - although you might have to adjust a bit or learn a new tool, and that can be painful and annoying.

Wayland is at best a work in progress.

And if you consider that they made Wayland default on GNOME to force adoption and users usually go to Internet seeking for advice on how to switch back to X11 on GNOME, we will probably wait a long time for Wayland happen.

I’ve been using it happily for over a year with no real issues. But I do share your concern. I like the variety and choice of WMs on Linux and the Gnome / Wayland crowd do seem to add friction to the other contenders.

> I like the variety and choice of WMs on Linux and the Gnome / Wayland crowd do seem to add friction to the other contenders.

This is a big problem because this friction they add on purpose hurts users of other wm/desktops that don't get their preferred wm/de working correctly.

And it also hurts other open-source developers because it seems the only ones doing something right are the Gnome devs, when in fact the others devs are having problems only because Gnome devs.

The Gnome dev do not force anyone on anything, especially regarding parts of the linux desktop they don't develop themselves.

This is just conspiracy theory.

The silent majority is just using wayland without complaining because it just works.

>The silent majority is just using wayland without complaining because it just works.

Huh ! That is not a fair argument. The silent majority is by definition impossible (or very hard to find) and confirm if its true. Since you know... they silent and all !

Here are 3 concrete examples of everyday tools with special abilities only feasibly installed natively on old linux distros.

1: I use text to speech a lot. For the last 20 years I've use Festival text to speech on linux. Specifically I've used Festival 1.96 because it has support for the best sounding voices, the enhanced Nitech HTS voices. No other voice set, not CMU arctic or any other, sounds as good. Modern distros don't package 1.96 and I can never get it to compile. Nitech HTS don't work in Festival 2.0. There's no other mature local linux text to speech software that sounds decent.

Every time I build a new computer I both survey the Festival 2.x voice sets and other linux TTS software, including any new weird stuff (like google tachotron, etc). I've never been able to replicate the functionality of my old linux install (or get Festival 1.96 compiled on a newer distro). I really would like the same functionality on a newer distro and I spend a lot of time searching and trying. So if you know an answer to this I'd love to hear about it (anyone).

2: It might be possible for me to get GNU Radio 3.6.5 installed on a newer distro but I laugh at the idea of getting all the out of tree modules from that era to compile on a modern distro. It's the norm for GNU Radio modules to be left behind and abilities lost with every minor version.

3: The Python 2.4 software imgSeek which indexes images and allows me to do MS Paintbrush style colored sketches to search for images.

>I use text to speech a lot.

Honest question: For what - Are you disabled ?

Sorry I'm not sure what the PC way is to ask that question ? I'm purely fact-finding and English and PC is not my first lang.

PS. Not saying you are wrong to use it like that, just out of interest is it possible or worthwhile to just run a VM for that ?

Last question: I'm just damn curious and not trying to be a dick. Apart from the Core2Duo and ancient-linux-setup (no judgement)

Are there any other parts of your life (none computer related) that you also running super-old-tech or versions ?

Lol i'm really really not insulting you, just want to know (learn). There are much to learn from extreme-outliers

>There are many things my 2010 era Core2Duo running Ubuntu 10.04 can do that my fancy new Ryzen desktop with Debian 11 can't and won't ever be able to do. Things I cannot give up because they're too important for my daily life.

This has me curious: What sorts of tasks are you doing that only work on a machine like this? I love finding new things to do with old hardware, so I'm interested in your insights.

i'm going to guess its a Thinkpad, x200? t410? maybe even an x61. People (myself included) still use those, not because they do anything more in particular, but they feel great to use, nicely weighted and a stunning[1] keyboard

[1]ymmv, but personally the keyboard on an x61 is perfection, the screen however is very very very far from perfection

If it's the feeling of the hardware alone then the Thinkpad could be used as a thin client to access a modern, more powerful system. Personally I'm curious about the "many things" the C2D with Ubuntu 10 can do that the new one can't - is it some legacy software that can't run on a newer os, or something else?

Man I loved my x61. It was like the duracell bunny. It was in my apartment in 2011 when the building burned down. The roof collapsed on it and the only thing I had to fix was the screen backlight. I used that laptop until 2020.

I love the point in there that it isn't actually xorg vs wayland, it is xorg vs dbus. Wayland is so deficient that basically everything has to depend on dbus if it doesn't want to use X. This framing clarifies the issue substantially, because whatever people think about wayland, they might have some slightly different opinions about dbus.

> slightly different opinions about dbus

Recently i updated my machine and it would fail to boot because NetworkManager-wait-online.service's invocation of `nm-online -s` would fail even when NM was connected, even when `nm-online` actual liveness check would succeed.

I spent hours reading NM code, wading through auto-generated GObject introspections and their XML bullshit to try to figure out why org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.startup was true, what the magic numbers in org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.Connection.Active.StateFlags meant, why my desktop wouldn't boot and couldn't even find what could could cause the state to change before I finally gave up and patched nm-wait-online to just invoke the codepath which did an actual liveness check rather than bumble through a bunch of dbus interfaces.

Gotta say I was missing the old KDE3 dcop after that... IPC is still such a PITA on linux.

Most of the bigger distros have already switched to wayland. It's pretty much inevitable that the rest follow eventually.

https://www.ubuntubuzz.com/2021/10/distros-which-adopted-way...

Well, most distros also ship X and allow you to choose at login. I'd imagine quite a lot of people are still running X since there's always something that does not play nice with Wayland.

My favorite: drag-and-drop from file-roller into nautilus. [1]

[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4

Drag & Drop is an action I had to consciously work to start using when I switched to macOS, a little over a decade ago. Windows and Linux had trained me never to use it, aside from moving files around in Explorer or whatever, because it so often caused crashes, did the wrong thing, or made programs glitch out in weird ways (that last one was mostly Linux). Sure enough, I found a repeatable drag & drop application crash in KDE in my first few minutes of use, last time I poked my head into the desktop Linux world (Ubuntu, in this case) again, a couple years back.

How did Windows train you not to use drag and drop? It's never not worked. Same with OSX. Yet Linux you have to live without it, asking questions on reddit or discord/irc results in 'use the command line to move the file'... which is a bit absurd.

An example: Drag&Drop from 7-zip or winrar causes an extraction to a temporary folder, then copied from there making it take much longer than doing "extract to folder" directly.

Laughed at pointing out the "switch" in Debian: GNOME lost it's position as a default DE there after the smooth as sandpaper transition to 3rd version, imo very relatable.

Have you considered pulling your Ubuntu desktop into a VM running on the Ryzen? Let it transcend the mortal shell in which it was born.

Your now-immortal VM could run faster while using less power, even with the virtualization overhead.

Wayland doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to an improvement over Xorg, which is hampered by its complexity and reverse compatibility.

I do not think the criticism of Xorg is really correct. At its core, it is actually a nice and well-designed protocol. It is also rock-solid, works without any problem in all my configurations, and supports remote desktop.

> Wayland doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to an improvement over Xorg

Agreed, but it shows no signs of ever achieving that. Yes, it has mixed DPI support, which is not nothing, but that doesn't generally make up for the areas where it doesn't have parity with Xorg and never intends to reach that parity. (Network transparency, screen recording, ...)

> which is hampered by its complexity and reverse compatibility

Users don't care about technical elegance. If and when those things start causing user-visible issues with Xorg then Wayland might get a chance.

Wayland is already here, and swaywm is the number one reason why I’m sticking with Linux instead of falling back to MacOS.

Are you not a little worried about running such an old OS that no longer receives security updates? Is it airgapped/offline/isolated?

My desktop has been Wayland/sway for years and years, and it's incredibly stable (I am using Arch btw)

Unless you have an nvidia graphics card in which case you can't use Wayland, or if you need to do screen sharing, or have multiple monitors and want to do screen sharing.

Or want to run a program on one computer and have its GUI display on another (people still act like VNC/Spice is an answer here but it's parsecs behind). Or want to write a client that can tell if it is in view or not. Or...

People who have been choosing nvidia gfx cards in the last 2 decades to run linux desktop are these kind of people who tend to accumulate shitty life decisions so they can pose as victims and blame the states and the whole world to be against them.

You can't really raise the nvidia flag in an argumentative in a linux desktop discussion unless you want everybody to know you don't really want things to work well.

I learned the hard way. :(

1. Don’t have an nvidia graphics card

2. Screen sharing just works

1. My desktop I had a Radeon 5700XT, no issues in Wayland except screen sharing. On my Laptop I didn't know that wayland+nvidia sucked. Wow opened up firefox and the whole DE froze for like a minute.

2. Na, it doesn't just work. If you use firefox, Google Meet cannot detect the screen. If you use chrome but have multiple monitors it only detects the primary monitor. It's such a pain when Xorg just works.

What do you mean Wayland isn't going to happen, I've been using it without major problems for years.

You and roughly one-fifth of the Linux desktop userbase. And good for you! I'm really glad it works for your use cases. But when people say "Wayland isn't going to happen" they mean that one-fifth is going to asymptotically approach two-fifths, maybe, over time. Until Wayland has the capabilities of X ca. 2008 it's not going to replace X in actual use.

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