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Comment by kaba0 | Hacker News Reader

> I am amazed that people try to force limited and unfinished Wayland

Can we just not do this useless flamewar under every similar topic’s thread? Especially that no, noone wants to force Wayland, they want something that is under active maintenance, which X11 is not anymore, since every maintainer of it left/migrated to Wayland.

> Not to mention that A LOT of stuff is X11 only and not ported (and never will be) to Wayland.

Hmm, only if the goddamn maintainers of X11 who came up with Wayland thought of that. They could have named it something like W11.. no, XWayland!

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Legitimate concerns of people that have a severely degraded user experience are not flamewar. Xorg lost most of its corporate support which moved mostly to Wayland, that is true. Despite this Wayland has very poor adoption rate. The main reason for this is that Wayland has many unfixable flaws at the concept level that have been discussed here many times.

Actually caring a tiny bit about security and not letting everything be a keylogger is not an “unfixable flaw”, there is working screen sharing for basically every mainstream desktop app, what exactly is that flaw then?

Wayland does not care about security. In fact it does not even offer standardized access control protocols. The flaw here (among many others) is that the protocol that is responsible for negotiating display output for multiple processes (which is what Wayland tries to be) should also contain standardized interfaces to exchange that output among processes, but Wayland doesn't.

No. Wayland is a display protocol, not a general-purpose IPC, no matter how allergic to DBus you are.

Yes. Wayland is a display protocol, not a general-purpose IPC. Hence it must contain access control interfaces for buffers.

Only the compositor has access to the composited image therefore is the only program able to make screenshots and full screen sharing. Furthermore, efficient sharing of single application windows is only possible with direct memory access to the buffer which also is something the compositor does/has. The Display protocol is the only sensible place to negotiate access to GPU resources.

>The Display protocol is the only sensible place to negotiate access to GPU resources.

No, GPU resources can come from any number of other places. That's literally the purpose of direct rendering. Any applications using GPU compute can produce them without requiring a connection to the display server. There's no reason to put that in Wayland or restrict it to the compositor. There's already a much better protocol for sharing GPU buffers: Pipewire. Dbus is only there to act as the glue between a Wayland compositor and Pipewire.

How true this is. In the 90's, at least one commercial Unix vendor shipped their systems with X11 open to the world (equivalent of "xhost +", full remote access, no security.) In the days of no firewalls, that was a fun time.

Gripes are unconstructive, though. I'm just as disenchanted as the next person, but in the FOSS world the ethos is rightly, put up or shut up.

Personally, I suspect that if the Wayland developers simply dropped maintenance of Xorg completely--no more patches, no more XWayland or at least completely disassociate XWayland from Xorg--that a community would step up and carry Xorg forward. As it is, that erstwhile community remains largely hidden, maintaining out-of-tree patches. But if that community faced the prospect of 1) being able to take back the reigns of Xorg, and 2) if not, Xorg vanishes today, then it would likely become much more motivated, organized, and proactive. (Whether it would be capable of carrying Xorg forward is a different question.) Alternatively, it might create the environment for projects like Arcan to shine.

Gripes are the reasons why most open source software exists in the first place. First comes the itch, then comes the scratch.

>I suspect that if the Wayland developers simply dropped maintenance of Xorg completely that a community would step up and carry Xorg forward

I don't. That community was sorely needed several years ago, but failed to show up.

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