> I've seen commentary from people who have worked intimately on both protocols and implementations of both who consider Wayland to have the better architecture.
For those interested in details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ
For those interested in details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ
A few key points:
1) he laughs at how X has a bunch of extensions. https://wayland.app/protocols/ hypocrites much. In 2013, since it was completely unusable, it probably didn't have many. But turns out real world use leads to "useless" features being reimplemented.
2) he complains about how X.org has broad hardware compatibility. As if that's a bad thing. Meanwhile wayland, even now it still doesn't work reliably on half the graphics chips on the market.
3) It complains that certain X features are not fully network transparent. True, but most are and you can detect at runtime and gracefully degrade. Wayland "fixes" this by just dropping the whole feature.
4) it flat-out lies saying the X server does nothing yet it is so much hard to maintain code. The core X protocol provides backward compatibility and is rock solid (and really easy to impelment from scratch btw, someone did it in Javascript for a tutorial for crying out loud). Meanwhile the Wayland compositor keeps accumulating everything because of point 1. Need a screenshot? Add it it the compositor. Need a hotkey? Add it to the compositor. Need drag and drop? Add it to the compositor. Need a notification icon? Add it to the compositor. In X, all those are peer to peer. Graphics are actually a relatively small part of a graphical user interface, something Wayland is still slow to learn.
5) He complains that certain applications are written inefficiently with blocking calls which is inefficient over a network connection. Wayland's calls are ALL blocking and just has no network connection.
6) Complains that X may draw things unnecessarily. Indeed... but there's an extension to disable that. Easy fix. Wayland even uses the same drivers!
2) he talks about obsolete hardware. There's no really a point to support s3 trio, at the expense of support for modern hardware, which works ink wastly different way.
3) That graceful degradation is in practice the same, as just using Wayland. Ever tried to use modern X11 app over network? RDP is vastly better experience, (and RDP support is wip in wayland).
4) This is so wrong so I won't even react to it.
5) Wayland calls do not wait for reply. You rapid fire requests and then collect responses as they come. Heck, you can even get a response you didn't ask for ;)
The thing that I find ridiculous about this attitude is that you have two choices:
1) Remove parts of the core that some (mostly old, unmaintained) applications rely on, which will break them. You'd probably have to call it "X12" now, but that's fine: most X11 applications would continue to work with no (or very few) modifications.
2) Throw out the entire system and build a new one from scratch, that literally no applications will work on until new toolkit backends are written and some applications themselves are rewritten or at least fixed up. Those same old, possibly unmaintained apps that would stop working in #1 are still not working, but now it's along with literally everything else too.
> RDP support is wip in wayland
If I had a dollar for every time I heard "$IMPORTANT_FEATURE is WIP in Wayland", I'd be able to get several pizzas delivered.
> If I had a dollar for every time I heard "$IMPORTANT_FEATURE is WIP in Wayland", I'd be able to get several pizzas delivered.
It's true though there have been features missing. It's good thing that they are being worked on though, no? The X protocol and the Xorg implementation are both abandonware, so your comment comes across as positive, because missing $IMPORTANT_FEATURE in X/Xorg is not WIP.
I do, in fact, use modern X11 apps over the network literally every day. Some are better than others - if the programmer made the effort to actually gracefully degrade it can be a considerably better experience than the ones who just shoot a constant stream of bitmaps down the wire (which do work better on rdp, i remember once upon a time, I'd ssh to my linux box and set up port forwarding to a windows box on my lan so i can remote desktop to it, then run Xming from there... which is absurd that that actually worked better), but if you do it well, remote X is very nice to use.
The seamless integration of windows from multiple computers is a thing to behold. Remote Desktop is great and I like a lot about it, but even the "Seamless" rdp doesn't work as nice as X.
Among the specific applications are my developer tools, image viewers, music editors, the apps I'm actually working on, etc. Of course, some of these also work fine on ssh terminals and I do plenty of that too, but there's just no need to be limited and I'll run whatever I want to.
RDP does support integration of windows from multiple computers, in a way of RemoteApps. Even if you are running GUI apps inside WSL2 locally, you are using it.
This I think is a key insight. I talk about this in another post, but I've been working on "porting" parts of Xfce to Wayland, and there are so many things missing in Wayland that have nothing to do with "graphics" that means that Xfce+Wayland will be missing a lot of useful features until/unless Wayland protocols are invented or extended to make them work.
Because DirectX is more than just Direct3D?
Although all the other Direct services are dead, have they not been replaced with new versions?
They were replaced not by new versions, but by new or even existing libraries/subsystems, that are not marketed as Direct anything anymore. Just like alsa or pulse are not marketed as SDL or Open anything either.
There is an exception, which is the explicitly blockling "roundtrip" function(s), but that is meant for special cases only.
Being asynchronous was an design goal for Wayland from the very beginning.
Since Wayland doesn't support this kind of network remote use anyway, the distinction doesn't matter. Local X vs Wayland are both fast.
Do you mean simply incorrect i.e., that Wayland calls are not all blocking? Or do you mean that in practice there are some important high-level situations that do require a round trip despite the low level purporting to be mostly asynchronous?
> Since Wayland doesn't support this kind of network remote use anyway, the distinction doesn't matter. Local X vs Wayland are both fast.
Wayland can run to remote displays though, right? You could argue it's not complete or well supported or nicely integrated into the core protocol or whatever, but you can literally use it today and probably have a package to do it available in any Linux distro you're using (e.g., waypipe). So it's hard to see what you're getting at. Wayland may not have been made with transparent networking support foremost in the protocol but AFAIK the idea was always that you'd be able to do remoting by forwarding buffer contents with the protocol.
Since this video is coming up on ten years old, it might have been true at the time, and gtk/gedit have since changed the implementation. But regardless, if the video is accurate, they didn't use the non-blocking calls. If the video is not accurate, it is meaningless anyway.
I had a bit of fun a while back trying to get an old X/11 terminal to work with a modern Linux machine and was somewhat surprised I was able to make it work. Sort of at least. Many display managers didn’t implement the proper protocols, but XDM did and I was able to get it to work at least a few times.
Not true.
> Also this guy makes money with a consultant agency that mainly works an Wayland and indirectly profits from shitting on X11.
Maybe his employer works on Wayland because there are no X11 jobs?
> This is not a neutral source.
He has experience with both, and he presents his arguments.
Seems to me that would be an obvious place to look for "why Wayland sucks," given that unfortunately, "paid" sometimes leads one to "exclusivity."