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Comment by not_your_vase | Hacker News Reader

Wayland protocol will celebrate its 15th birthday later this month. TFA is great news, but something isn't right here.

I really start to think that the X11->Wayland migration is a bigger clusterfuck than Python2->3 was - even if we consider that a compositor migration is much bigger task than Python migration.

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Wayland is more than a compositor protocol. It's a whole suite of replacement protocols for all the functionality that X used to offer.

And it takes time to replace an established protocol. Especially when you need to provide a feature-complete fallback for all the applications that are never going to do the switch.

For me that transition has been pain free. First I heard that X is going to be retired, then I saw some development note popping up here and there and then one day I was offered to log in to a Wayland session instead of a X session. I never experienced any problems I could directly attribute to Wayland.

I don't know why Wayland gets so much hate. To me it feels very much like the systemd hate: I don't know why this needs to change; I was happy after all. I don't want to learn about a new thing, so I'm angry.

> I don't know why Wayland gets so much hate. To me it feels very much like the systemd hate: I don't know why this needs to change; I was happy after all. I don't want to learn about a new thing, so I'm angry.

Yes, it's a very similar situation; in both cases people are really fond of pretending that the only reason you could possibly object is that you hate change just because, while ignoring the actual regressions that it's causing. For instance, Wayland does not support (and probably never will support) some accessibility tools that make my life much easier (because the desktop must be secured against programmatic manipulation).

I use X remoting every day. Being told that I do not need it and it would not work anyway, is what makes me angry. Then I hate that decades of protocol compatibility are broken, which i think is sad and stupid. Finally, I saw people had issues with Wayland (screen sharing etc). Then - after 15 years of development - being somewhat usable also does not convince me that it is so much simpler because of an superior design. Regarding design, I think the monolithic design is inferior. Finally, I never found the technical arguments terrible convincing (such as that an unused old line drawing API in X somehow holds modern clients back - obviously this is BS.).

Thanks for providing some context. I still don't get one point though;

Nobody is taking X away. You can still run any DE and any application on X if you want to. You're not being restricted in your ability to run applications, quite the contrary; your are being given more options. So even if your use-case is not yet fully supported on Wayland, why hat on it? No one is taking anything away.

But yeah; ever since Sun stopped founding it, the accessibility situation on Linux has been dire.

> You can still run any DE and any application on X if you want to.

That's unfortunately incorrect; so far Waydroid is the only program I've hit that explicitly requires Wayland, but I expect the list to grow with time.

> So even if your use-case is not yet fully supported on Wayland, why hat on it? No one is taking anything away.

Because it's abundantly clear that a noticeable set of devs and maintainers would really like to take it away, or at least refuse to support it (if there's a difference); see ex. https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110354541574112092 where the lead dev on Asahi Linux seems ready to drop Xorg completely until someone points out a11y problems with Wayland, or https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-40-KDE-Plasma-6-Plan for Fedora looking to drop KDE+X11.

Perhaps you haven't experienced it yourself, but systemd and Wayland have both caused a lot of unjustifiable problems for a lot of people.

That's where the widespread displeasure with them comes from.

It has nothing to do with dealing with change itself or learning something new.

If systemd and Wayland had brought me some tangible benefits, without also bringing me significant pain, then I'd be perfectly happy adopting them like I frequently do for other new-to-me software that makes my life better.

Unfortunately, that's not reality. For example, I've had to deal with far too many Linux installations that no longer boot thanks to systemd (or one of its many components) unexpectedly breaking in one way or another, often after what should be routine updates.

I've never had any success with the Wayland implementations I've tried, either. They've performed horribly on the computers of mine that I've tried them on, to the point of being pretty much unusable. A default installation of X on the same Linux installations works much better and is completely usable, however.

Based on all of the mailing list emails, forum postings, chat logs, bug reports, articles, and other online material that I've seen while trying to sort out such problems with systemd or Wayland, it's clear to me that I'm not the only one experiencing such troubles.

Even if I hadn't experienced such problems, neither systemd nor Wayland would benefit me in any meaningful way. At best, they're merely replacing what I've already been using for years or even decades, rather than improving upon them.

systemd brought me a lot of benefits (both as a power user and as a sysadmin), I'm not that much in the know with regards to X vs Wayland, but nowadays stock Ubuntu with Gnome on AMD uses Wayland and dual 4K monitors with hi-dpi scaling and 60Hz and 120Hz works.

the more important thing is ... not a lot of people stepped up to maintain the old ways. if they are so superior, why isn't there a big group doing it?

...

that said, yes, systemd is crap, it's an endless pile of C instead of the previous [ba]sh bonanza, but it works, and it does a lot of things, and the maintainers are active and doing a lot of good things. plus it's finally standardized across distros.

and any talk about Wayland or X is completely irrelevant as the bugs that frustrate users are not in the protocols, all of them are in the implementations. I, like many starry eyed nix users, motivated to grow the bazaar [had many attempts at contributing] by opening issues, reporting bugs, trying to debug stuff, using beta/dev/nightly/canary/RC stuff ... but it did not make much of a difference. there's just not enough dev bandwidth to deal with even trivial stuff.

I mean it's sometimes* after wake up it's impossible to interact with the Gnome lockscreen with the keyboard unless first clicking on it with the mouse, on Xfce sometimes after opening the lid the screen is visible, and on KDE ... well, on KDE I don't even know what bug I tried to report, but no, fuck Bugzilla.

    https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/3135
    https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/4858 [something solved]

    https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=251935 [on xfce just uninstall "light locker"]

    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingScreenLocking#Known_bugs [it's just madness]

... and of course I could go on.

And why these problems happen? Because the stack is ossified as fuck, because complexity is through the roof (due to hardware frontrunning the whole show by a (?) decade), and because OS developers being, well, folks who in their infinite wisdom stick to C and C++ and even introducing JS to the stack. (And many people remember when Ballmer-peak Microsoft tried to move to something memory safe, but couldn't... because "it was too hard". Yeah, just hacking everything together somehow is always the smart solution.)

Python 3 at least worked immediately. Wayland still has tons of issues.

For GNOME user, it is starting to become usable recently

Not so luck for non-GNOME user

Wayland on sway has been a smooth sailing for me, the only thing that made be go back was barriers KVM not working and not finding an open source alternative that works for both Linux and windows.

I’ve been using it with KDE on my laptop and desktop (which has an Nvidia GPU).

The laptop is flawless, and the desktop only has minor issues with display configuration (order and/or resolution) getting messed up sometimes when waking from sleep. I’m pretty sure that’s an Nvidia driver bug.

Anyways, it is 100% usable. To say otherwise suggests you haven’t actually tried using it within the past 2 years (at least)

> Anyways, it is 100% usable. To say otherwise suggests you haven’t actually tried using it within the past 2 years (at least)

IDK why, but the way you say it really annoys me. Like disregarding people's experiences because you have not faced the same issues.

Anyway, I try to shift to plasma wayland atleast every month. But there's always these weird graphical issues on nvidia (desktop) that ruin my experience, so i switch back to my x11 session. Even KDE has a page detailing the various problems in wayland https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers

Lots of libraries were missing or broken for Python 3 for many years. If anything, it was far less usable than Wayland.

My experience was that Python3 became a meaningful upgrade over Python2 around the 3.5 release. That was less than seven years of transition!

I've been happy with Wayland for most of my Linux desktopping since 2018, so that was a ten year transition from first release to full adoption on my part.

It depends on your constraints. I remember still not being able to transition some projects well after 3.7 was released.

Of course, there is a long tail of things that can't/won't migrate. I still see Python2.7 production code on a semi-regular basis (not network exposed, but very much at the core of critical business processes of major enterprises).

And I'm sure we'll have X11 desktops around for various purposes ten years from now.

Wayland has a pretty deep issue that loss of the compositor socket is treated as fatal and kills the client application. And when the IPC socket buffer is full that's leads to a close (so it is one of those fatal errors). So any latency spike in the event loop of the client process can lead to a process kill. The GTK implementation even calls _exit() which means atexit handlers won't trigger and save-on-exit or crash reporters won't run. So with wayland lag gets "upgraded" to hard process kills. That's a pretty crazy design choice. X11 handles momentarily unresponsive processes far more gracefully.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/159 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144

This is not a wayland (the protocol) issue. It's a client issue. In fact Qt6 was recently in the news here for having fixed it in their client code, by simply reconnecting when the wayland socket closes instead of crashing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37480331

(Their main justification is to be resilient to server restarts, but from the client's perspective the two are the same.)

You're welcome to try and convince GTK devs to do the same.

Wayland is like systemd all over again. We had something ancient and crufty which just about worked, but was a genuine obstacle to progress. A group of crazy people got together and designed a replacement. Everyone else pointed out that the design was crazy. The designers carried on anyway. And now the crazy project is the only game in town.

Well perceived as ancient and crufty. I do not think there is any genuine obstacle to progress. But the thing is not just that some crazy people got together and implemented something we could all use or not, the problem with both systemd and Wayland is that it comes with all the propaganda that this is the future and nothing else, that everything else is "ancient and crufty", "unfixable", and "broken". This is clearly meant to demoralize everybody interested in alternatives. For example, there was no really good reason for Debian to force the systemd decision. That an entire distribution spawned from frustration about this decision clearly shows that there is enough interest and man power to maintain alternatives. Let's hope some people step up for X as well.

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