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Comment by xearl | Hacker News Reader

(2017)

In 2017, a typo was fixed. The content is from 2013: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/wiki/xorg/log/Development/X12.m...

Yet I'm still running X11, with Wayland still struggling and no X12 in sight.

Not sure it's fair to call it struggling when it's the default in just about every distro and has been smooth and stable for years.

I think it's fair, since every one of those distros ships an X11 fallback. I desperately want Wayland to succeed but exaggerating its current wins won't get us there.

I don't want this post to focus on the negative, though, so I'll suggest a more positive argument: the people who would have been responsible for a hypothetical X12 instead decided to make Wayland. I can't think of a body of experts more likely to make a correct decision, so I have confidence in Wayland as the path forward.

Shipping a fallback doesn’t mean the alternative is not in daily use.

Fair. I'll admit there are a few rough edges, mainly caused by some apps (Slack) having older versions of certain libraries that makes some functionality (like screen sharing) break.

I mean, before Wayland every distro shipped with a text console as a fallback to X11

I've been running Wayland for years. It does everything X11 does at this point and is better in some ways.

I'm not up to date on the Linux desktop ecosystem. In what sense is Wayland struggling?

It doesn't work reliably on any GPU I own, for any stable version of a linux distro I use. One GPU is too old, the other is too nvidia.

To be fair, I'm on an five-year old laptop with NVIDIA and since last year it almost works well enough to be a daily driver. For some weird reason Chromium doesn't render at all, even though Chrome does. That's the only remaining bug of significance.

Whereas when I tried a year before I had to bail after an hour because many applications would just have a black screen.

It kind of feels like it will take only one more year for this to work well enough (except then the laptop might be so old hardware support ends up lacking)

Wayland uses linux’s gpu abstraction (drm) to work and that’s it. If it fails to work than linux also does, so your setup has some issues.

I have to disable hardware compositing on X11 to get a reliable desktop (and HW rendering in individual apps like firefox). I'm not sure if something similar is possible on Wayland.

It doesn't sound like X11 is running reliably for you either

I restart X11 only when either there's a power failure longer than the battery on my UPS, or I upgrade my kernel, so it's reliable enough.

Having to disable compositing doesn't sound very reliable.

If it works, it works. And some of us never bothered installing a compositor in the first place, so it's hardly a high bar.

Obviously it doesn't work if your workaround is disabling it. It is either bad hardware, or buggy driver. For the latter, it has to be some obscure hardware; popular hardware would have it fixed.

Okay, let's enumerate.

Option 1: Wants to used hardware acceleration, fails, allows you to disable it and actually use your computer.

Option 2: Wants to use hardware acceleration, fails, refuses to allow you to disable anything, literally cannot display graphics.

One of these works, even degraded. The other does not.

I don't dispute that. My claim was, that both options you mention are broken, and for that one "working", "limping" would be a better term.

Certainly not something you would architect a display system around.

I have been using linux for over 20 years and reliable hardware acceleration has always been more "miss" than "hit." This goes all the way back to having to disable hardware cursors on my very first linux setup. I hear the amdgpu driver is pretty solid, and the i915 driver I use on my laptop is great. Nvidia is just a mess (nouveau and the nvidia binary drivers are differently buggy) and the radeon driver is complete garbage.

My first linux machine was 386 with Trident 9000, running Slackware, so I'm pretty aware how linux hardware support developed over time. Maybe I was lucky in picking my hardware, but buggy basic functionality was a big exception (minor bugs were there, like in amdgpu cursor not picking the same LUT as the framebuffer, and being jarring white compared to redshifted desktop; incidentally, windows driver had the same issue at the same time).

Not implemented functionality - sure. I've never got TV out running on Radeon 7500 (RV200) during early 2000s, for example. But basic functionality (today), like freezing texture mapping on a hardware, that has 3d driver implemented and that driver comes with distro, no. But then again, maybe I was lucky in my picks.

Not obscure, just old. ATI Radeon HD 5000 series.

That doesn’t depend on the protocol, I think most implementations can simply choose a so-called “dumb” backend instead of hardware composition.

Dudemanguy wrote about its deficiencies 2022-06-11 [0], ex lack of feature parity with X11 and self imposed limitations like only allowing integer scaling (ie to get 1.5 scaling, it uses x3/x2 scaling). For some perspective, consider checking other hn reader reactions to this post [1].

[0] https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-x...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31752760

Fractional scaling was recently merged.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

Wayland is X12.

2013 is when the format was converted to markdown. No idea when the content is from.

Looks like it started in 2007 [0], though the content was pretty different, there were some updates over the years, and the current version is indeed from 2013 [1]

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20071123130628/https://www.x.org...

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20131222002042/https://www.x.org...

wanted to see if it was committed on april 1st

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