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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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

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