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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand all of the hate around Wayland. X is fine for what it is, but Wayland enables the flicker-free, nicely-animated experience most users want from their desktops, and also better reflects how modern hardware works. GTK4 on Wayland is actually a pretty nice API to program with, which remedies a lot of warts in GTK/X11. Even Emacs runs X11-free these days: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/rj8k32/the_pgtk_pure.... What's so wrong with declaring that X11 support will be dropped years from now?

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I don’t have an emotional response over Wayland.

My practical engineering analysis says that people will be forced to choose between abandoning working X software and foregoing new Wayland packages.

For example when one workflow critical app adopts GTK 5 (assuming it does not support X) and another workflow critical app remains X based.

And apps will remain X based because all the effort of porting to Wayland is chores not features.

Wayland doesn’t add import functionality to applications.

Indeed breaking the client-server idiom is a functional regression.

As is breaking Linux and Wayland is a breaking change because backward compatibility and/or reliable automated tooling to port complex applications is too much work for Wayland’s developers.

Who like most of those affected, are not getting paid Faang wages to work on deep pocketed well resourced teams.

Breaking applications makes it Python3 on steroids in terms of generating tidal waves of compatibility efforts.

Wayland has in-built backwards compatibility in the form of XWayland, so you can continue to run every X program you want.

But frankly, we can’t just put our heads in the sand and use 30 years old technology when it doesn’t map well to the underlying hardware. How else could such a transition ever happen otherwise?

My head isn't in the sand.

I saw Wayland was inevitable.

I worried about dealing with the complexity it added to my existing workflows.

I thought "fuck this" and switched back to Windows after almost a decade of Linux.

Now I don't think about Wayland v X unless I want to.

That's not the way everyone can solve their problems.

And certainly not the way everyone should.

It's just what works on my machine.

Bonus, Windows has a more robust security model than X, so hence solves the same issues as Wayland.

YMMV.

The security model on Linux is "don't fling binaries from strangers around." That's why you can get away with the lazes fair security model X uses and still have less malware than Windows. Heck half the garbage Microsoft themselves ship with the OS could be called malware.

Ubuntu connected the web browser to Amazon by default.

And sent my desktop searches to Google.

Or maybe it was Duck Duck Go.

Which is Bing.

Same as Microsoft does.

My decision was practical.

Linux was a local minimum for me.

For my creative pursuits, Windows simply has less friction.

For example, my photography workflow used a Linux program called rapidphotodownloader.

One day toward the end, it stopped working.

I spent a non-trivial but not extreme amount of time figuring out why.

Turns out, the developer had hard coded window managers into the configuration file with the latest update (and the software nags every time there is an update and because it is Python with access with substantial file system privileges security is a concern).

Anyway, my Linux workflow used Xmonad which wasn't in the list of popular window managers the developer considered.

And because the software wasn't generous in what it accepted, it just broke.

I value stable tooling.

And after nearly a decade with Linux, I debugged the problem, changed the configuration file and felt a sense of accomplishment.

But what I really wanted to do was get my pictures off an SD card so I could do photography...editing, printing, and maybe sharing on social media.

If I was into filing bug reports, I would have let the developer know.

But I'm not.

Not that I am a selfish prick - at least I don't think I am - who doesn't "give back to the community."

It's that there is no community there that I am a part of...at least there's no more community there for me than there is a hammer community to which I ought to give feedback about hammers.

For many many things, digital tools are a mostly solved problem. Downloading files from and SD card and renaming them is a long solved problem...Windows Xcopy has been around since the NT days.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrati...

So I wrote a .bat file to store the configuration I wanted...just as I did in the old days.

Because a general purpose computer is a general purpose computer and operating systems are mostly fungible.

There just isn't enough time in my day to have strong emotional bonds to one and hate for another.

YMMV.

> I don't understand all of the hate around Wayland.

The Wayland thread a few days ago[1] made me want to try Wayland again. I've tried once a year or so for ages, but it had been a while. So I logged out, switched to Wayland and logged back in.

To my surprise, things looked like they worked. No rendering artifacts like last time, YouTube even played fairly smooth. Sure it wasn't as snappy as Xorg, but hey.

A day later I tried to play some video files from my Samba share on my NAS. I use SMPlayer since it can handle smb:// links. However this time it didn't start playing. I checked the logs, and I could see it complained about not having the correct credentials to the share, NT_SOMETHING_SOMETHING.

So I messed around trying to re-authenticate the share, different users etc. Nothing worked. I could view images just fine, but the videos just wouldn't play.

Looking at the SMPlayer logs I noticed something that struck me as odd. After the NT_SOMETHIG_SOMETHING error, there was mention of a Wayland authentication error...

So I logged back out, selected Xorg, logged back in and boom, video played like nothing had happened.

I'm just a user. I don't wanna dig into why the hell Wayland has anything to do with Samba share authentication. I just want my computer to work.

This October it's the 10 year anniversary of Wayland 1.0... maybe in another 10 it'll actually work for a mere mortal like me.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31940765

There is no reason why Wayland would cause Samba authentication errors, now come on.

Blame SMPlayer being buggy, I play videos from smb shares in Wayland and nothing breaks because it's a bloody desktop compositor, not your network stack.

The misinformation surrounding Wayland is just astounding.

I agree that it seems very weird, but as a user all I know is that the exact same steps that works using Xorg does not work using Wayland.

And as a user, that's all I care about.

edit: This time might be SMPlayer, last time was perhaps Firefox, and so on. I've tried Wayland at least once a year for ages, and every single time I have to go back because something is broken.

That issue really could be anything, it could be something you did like putting some credentials in X-specific config files, or it could be SMPlayer looking for some X configuration that isn't there...

As I mentioned, I did reconnect to the share while in Wayland, and I did it as I have in Xorg, using the file explorer. So if that's the issue, it's the file explorer and not SMPlayer. Though SMPlayer logs did mention Wayland and authentication error on the same line... so clearly SMPlayer is doing something different in Wayland.

But sure, it could be anything. All I know is if I select Xorg on the login screen things just work, and when I select Wayland things don't.

To make any further investigation, you would have to share the error message.

>So I messed around trying to re-authenticate the share, different users etc. Nothing worked. I could view images just fine, but the videos just wouldn't play.

>Looking at the SMPlayer logs I noticed something that struck me as odd. After the NT_SOMETHIG_SOMETHING error, there was mention of a Wayland authentication error...

>So I logged back out, selected Xorg, logged back in and boom, video played like nothing had happened.

>I'm just a user. I don't wanna dig into why the hell Wayland has anything to do with Samba share authentication. I just want my computer to work.

A recent upstream Linux kernel update broke certain SMB shares, if you are using Arch (or something else that closely follows upstream), its probably that.

What flicker? Maybe I'm just ignorant of it, but I haven't seen flicker on X11 in years and years and years and years. I've been on Intel graphics for the past 7+ years, so maybe that has something to do with it? And if it does, then that means it's not X11's fault that there's flicker, it's the people who write bad video drivers.

Flickering, tearing and frame drops happen with any hardware combination, just like they did on Windows before Vista.

Not everyone can necessarily notice it. Some of us are unlucky enough to get headaches from it.

also anecdotal but I had screen tearing issues on virtually every machine until I used Wayland. I don't know whose to blame because I don't understand the specifics of the stacks well enough, but Wayland just straight up solved it. And you can really find pages of complaints about flickering or tearing issue on every linux forum.

I like Wayland, but I avoid using it because (last I checked) a crashing or killed compositor takes the whole desktop down with it. Meanwhile, under X I can restart Gnome Shell (or equivalent) if it's having trouble due to a memory leak or the like. Crashes and memory leaks have been common enough that I don't want to risk losing work to them just for some minor benefits.

This isn't an intrinsic problem with Wayland—I'm just not aware of anyone making a compositor that can recover or restart yet. I'll be excited to try out any that people write.

> GTK4 on Wayland is actually a pretty nice API to program with, which remedies a lot of warts in GTK/X11

Gtk on X11 does not expose any X11 to the programmer, so I really don't know what this is supposed to mean.

It means that GTK itself (internally, not necessarily its API) has warts.

Very doubtful to me.

The design of gtk is to separate the rendering in the GDK layer. Prior versions ran on Win32 without application changes.

That's how you can get it on X11 or Wayland without changing applications. Wayland didn't exist when this design choice was made, but has benefited from that choice. Imo rather than a liability, this is what good design looks like for such a library.

No doubt. But isn't that unrelated to what I said? I was just explaining my grandparent's comment.

To provide the same API for such a broad set of underlying technology, you necessarily have to shoehorn a few things to make them fit. That doesn't make the API bad. It's awesome that applications don't have to do this on their own!

Yes. I've seen it too often be the case that an appropriate layering or abstraction is derided as too much complexity, and that you should replace it with straight calls into the dependency. The former is often a strength, not a weakness!

I'm not even sure how to do anything with Wayland. I have kubuntu and at no point has it suggested Wayland to me.

The stuff from comments about screen capture not working reliably does not inspire much confidence. I remember X11 taking decades to fix rough edges and surely don't want to go over it again.

Much like IPv6, it seems to be real old now, still not adopted and not really working, definitely not hip anymore.

> capture not working properly

This has changed.

As a daily Wayland user, the only thing that Wayland can't do is networked sessions, and I have never needed that.

> suggested Wayland

Ubuntu slated it for default in 22.04, but reverted due to a bug. I expect them to try again during the next release. If you want to try it then it's typically selected in the login manager.

> don't want to go over it again

Or don't try it, the grandparent comment was talking about "hate" not "disinterest".

I know I get flicker and tearing with X11 sometimes, I notice it. Not every month though. I don't care much about it. I just want that the programs I use work and that I can make my desktop look more or less like I want. (That was a reason for I never used Unity, the fixed and bar at the top of the screen.) If Wayland gives that to me it's OK, if it doesn't I can keep using X11 forever and I don't have incentives to make a test. Maybe when a future upgrade of Ubuntu will give me a simple way to do it. I still have to install 22.04 and I think it's got both Wayland and X11.

>Wayland enables the flicker-free, nicely-animated experience

Of all the things I care about this might be at the very bottom of the list. If that's the best reason people can come up with to give up my DE and decent performance for all the X11 apps I use than I'm sorry but I won't ever be using Wayland.

>Wayland enables the flicker-free, nicely-animated

Did you start using Linux last month? Because I have flicker-free, nicely-animated experience on X for years. Granted it's not experience that everyone has, but it's not fault of X, it's bad drivers or low power hardware. Wayland only brought forced vsync.

GTK4 is actually trash that ruined font rendering because GNOME developers felt so.

I don’t know if any of my code is still in Kwin but I helped with the standardization effort for X11 window managers to support synchronized window resizing: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-1.3.h...

That was a reasonable hack 18 years ago but a fully composited desktop is table stakes in 2022.

I don’t know why you think it is not the fault of X. X doesn’t care about when will a given program render to the screen. Sure, there are hardware solutions to the problem, as well as compositors, but in the latter case X will have no use other than being a bad IPC.

X isn't to blame for screen flicker. That's all Nvidia's fault. Every other video driver on Xorg works correctly. Every other X server works correctly. X is just a collection of protocols and data structures. It can run on top of anything. It isn't to blame for low level hardware issues from poorly implemented drivers.

I'm not sure what constitutes "flickering" on X11, but it's really not hard to find examples of it happening to people that aren't using Nvidia.

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