Boycott Wayland. It breaks everything
gist.github.com
gist.github.com
Also, if your auto-keyboard tool was hooking in using X debug extensions like xdotool did, your tool was broken and wrong in the first place. The correct way to submit synthetic input events is to build a synthetic input device. uinput makes this shockingly straightforward: https://kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/input/uinput.html#keyboard.... There are even high-level bindings (via libevdev) for high-level languages: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libevdev/python-libevdev/-/bl....
I doubt that's real, websites run in the sandboxed javascript vm and can only get what the browser (and often the user) explicitly allows.
I know that regular X applications can have access to all pixels and keystrokes, but i doubt a regular normal website can do that.
This looks more like vague FUD than anything.
Link me a normal website that can grab a screenshot of my desktop without any consent from my or I'll be keeping calling this kind of comments utter BS.
Could you cite something for that?
My last experience of X11 had me fiddling with a text-based config file to disable screen tearing on a fairly common Intel graphics chipset. That was only a few years ago -- despite it being a solved issue for as long as I can remember in other windowing system such as Windows and MacOS.
That fiddling with a config file to solve such a trivial issue is a thing of the past is largely due to Wayland finally bringing Linux graphics into the 21st century. I am much happier with Wayland just performing as expected from a 21st century graphics stack right out of the box with no additional work required. It quite literally just works with no fuss whatsoever.
Thank you Wayland team, your work is much appreciated.
Plus, I have no use for the security model Wayland is based on; I am on a single user desktop and my apps are curated by my distribution. The browser is the only liability, but I have a separate system for my banking; otherwise, if someone pwns my $HOME, there are a billion things they can do with .bashrc and the entire .local/share folder before bothering with X vs. Wayland.
I am beginning to think that the people who say Wayland was created for a corporate environment first and foremost are correct. Sigh...
There is a giant gap between your use-case (no third-party apps, totally separate machine for accessing sensitive websites, etc) and a "corporate environment".
The vast, vast, majority of users (yes, even Linux users) would like to access their bank's web page without worrying that some security flaw somewhere (maybe even in a "curated" app they installed via official repositories) is allowing someone to upload screenshots of their browser window to some nefarious third-party.
I'm not optimistic about Wayland, either, but I'm sure as hell not satisfied with X.
i learned about wayfire here https://youtu.be/s8UbKM9R4p0?si=Y1O8qBdMB1FjpXXA
I think it depends on what you're doing with your machines.
X.org is a small step away from abandonware.
Either the things continue to rot and get worse over time, or we get something modern like Wayland and deal with integration issues.
Fast forward a few years, and the noise will mostly be gone, just like with systemd.
It turns out... most people just don't like change.
I'm certain you didn't, because it's completely different from systemd.
There isn't any, because for wayland, as you said, nobody is providing any alternative, while that's false for systemd; there's no discussion about the capacity of the developers to work in a community, while that's still not clear at all about systemd; the change is being made for this piece of software alone, without interference of widely popular software pushing their dominance around and without redesigning the entire OS, none of what was true for systemd.
The situation is so dissimilar that I can't really understand how you one can honestly claim it's the same. It's either a completely naive observation made from somebody that didn't look at anything, or not honest.
There are alternatives to Wayland and X.org. People just don't use them for whatever the reasons may be. Wayland is not new either - Wikipedia says the initial release was 2008.
The distro maintainers and DE developers know a lot more about this stuff than random internet users that complain about any change... so much like the systemd fiasco, the professionals like it and the users complain for petty reasons.
Oh no, your GUI app has some new bug, what will you do? Tell the developer to update their stuff... pretty simple.
X.org was far from perfect when it was first widely adopted, and it's had 20+ years (well, ~40 years if you want to be pedantic) of patches and work-arounds applied while being "mainstream". Now, Wayland will enjoy the same treatment since all of the major distros are poised to adopt it.
An awful lot of what was relevant when the X spec was being dreamt up (in the 80's) is completely different today.
Even the maintainers of X.org openly talk about it largely being abandoned and full or issues that are un-fixable without major protocol and implementation changes. Which means... a v2 would be just as disruptive as moving to Wayland, but Wayland has decades of a head start.
People enjoy complaining about change. It's pretty simple.
Yeah, after being told that plenty of people were doing something about systemd, that's what you take from it?
I guess being uninformed isn't an option. You seem to have some emotional attachment into not looking at what happened there.
That said, yes, everybody that wants to do something about X11 is doing that by improving wayland. It's a completely different situation.
Or rather, no one can to provide anything "better" because no one agrees on what exactly is better.
It's obvious that sometimes, in order to advance the status quo, you really need to exploit the free manpower that comes from the "chasing change for the sake of trying shiny new things" group. Every developer has been there once or twice: it's well known we prefer to write shiny new things rather than maintain old things, _even_ when the later is frequently the better option.
But it also obviously comes with negative consequences. In a couple weeks there is going to be yet another inevitable rant in HN about how Linux breaks the ABI for desktop applications every other week, which prevents Linux from taking over the desktop, and this type of unbridled shiny new thing chasing _is_ almost 100% to blame.
Certainly, you are not paying for it, so the inevitable cycle of useless rewrites just to keep (volunteer) developer interest is necessary. But at least one ought to also empathize with the people for whom their entire platform keeps moving under their feet for little apparent benefit.
X11 and X.org are ancient, and we certainly seem like we can do better. Maybe Wayland isn't the best, but if it's better than X.org then that is indeed progress - temporary pain or not.
There's a saying military folks use often - "suck it up buttercup". Since nobody seems willing to actually defend the merits of continuing to use X.org/X11, then we do need something better.
People seem to forget X.org is about 20 years old - and wasn't perfect when it was first released either.
Win32/the windows API is practically the same age, has a million more "core issues", it's a clusterfuck of patches at this point (see Wine), and yet it's going to become the de-facto ABI for Linux games in the near future, if it already isn't, just because at least it tries to be minimally stable. See the multiple HN articles about it....
Wayland didn't happen in a vacuum either. There were/are other options, including remaining on X.org.
Wayland isn't even new. It's been around since 2008.
This all means "chasing the shiny" is not what's happening.
I am also forced to support Wayland if I want to make Linux desktop software. Which means (again) the next application or game I would make is likely going to target Win32 only instead of Linux since it changes way too damn frequently for no reason. The argument "if you complain about Wayland, just improve X11!" goes both ways. The "shiny new thing" chasers are forcing me extra work to maintain my own software, and I am also not paid to do it.
You can choose not to support Wayland in your app if you want. As market-share grows, your available reach will shrink. That's the same as with anything...
There's good reasons Wayland is being adopted in major distros - and it's not "the shiny" like you asserted.
> the next application or game I would make is likely going to target Win32 only instead of Linux since it changes way too damn frequently for no reason
That's ridiculous. We're talking about one major change in 20 years and you're acting like it changes every few months. Your game won't even exist in 20 years, so it doesn't matter. Nor do you have to even care about what protocol/compositor/lib is being used unless you're doing something strange - the engine will take care of that for you and probably make it a checkbox.
What is the point of claiming "no one is forcing you to choose X" while at the same claiming "but if you choose Y you will face the consequences"? In this case the consequence is a million frustrated users not being able to say, take a screenshot, spamming my inbox like crazy, me abandoning Linux desktop development and everyone getting frustrated at the state of the Linux desktop yet again.
> There's good reasons Wayland is being adopted in major distros - and it's not "the shiny" like you asserted.
Even in your own messages you are throwing the argument that "at least Wayland is maintained and Xorg isn't", which is basically another way of saying that it has developer interest, and my claim is that it has developer interest because it's new.
> Your game won't even exist in 20 years
The software I am talking about is actually already older than that.
> Nor do you have to even care about what protocol/compositor/lib is being used unless you're doing something strange
As mentioned in TFA, there are several extremely common usecases which are broken by these changes. Certainly Wayland is just part of the problem, as it is pervasive to this world.
ie. it's a non-issue... do the work and update or don't. That's your choice.
Wayland is only slightly newer than X.org - and it's been on the horizon for years and years already. If you haven't updated by now, then you made that choice.
The folks maintaining X.org know there are issues that cannot be overcome without a major re-write and protocol change. The change has to happen even if it was a X.org v2... and you would still be complaining.
Unless, of course, you need functionality that Wayland doesn't support.
I've never seen a complaint that systemd breaks existing setups. Wayland, on the other hand...
[1]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...
A quote from Musk about why he doesn’t work on immortality, but I think the same principle applies here: those who made the noise will continue to be upset while the user group adds new users who are happy with the “way things are” until the noisy ones are replaced entirely.
Is this a surprise? Change almost always comes with some pain and loss. But people will accept it if the benefit of the change outweighs that cost.
The problem is really when change is forced on people, but it brings no benefit to them in excess of the cost of it. That's just a loss to people. And it's something that our industry rarely understands.
Often, in our industry, we just see "oooh, shiny new!" and don't see that the change isn't really improving anything for ordinary people using the software in the big picture.
No, we got systemd because it was better. Both theoretically and in practice. We can quibble about complexity and configuration quirks until the cows come home, but it is objectively better than InitV and the things like Upstart that were bumbling around trying to solve the same problems. It won on merit, not apathy.
And I think the same is true for Wayland. It's far more complex than just starting every system and user service so the teething issues are that much bigger, but when it works and you get a VRR desktop, it's just feels breathtakingly light and responsive.
I don't miss X. It wasn't just rotting, it was objectively worse. And all this is from a Nvidia users who's still battling XWayland sync issues.
I use Zoom, Chrome, Steam, VScode and other things involving programming, working and gaming.
I'm on an AMD GPU/CPU and using a 144hz ultrawide monitor
For a little while Chrome would max out at 60fps and it was quite annoying, but now it runs at 144fps (no vsync) and it's quite pleasant. Despite there not being vsync in Chrome, there is no tearing.
There is no screen tearing using the desktop normally, and no tearing when playing Steam games.
IIRC, mutli-monitor support was actually better under Wayland for me because I previously had 2 27inch monitors, one was 144hz and the other 60hz. Having different refresh rates on each was an issue on X.
In general I have found it to be a smooth, consistent experience and I couldn't really tell it apart from X unless I knew what to look for.
That said, I use Chrome for a large portion of my application roster - Discord, Slack, etc. I, unfortunately, use the native Zoom client because their web client doesn't mirror my webcam and it's too jarring to see myself like that haha.
I don't use OBS or anything like that, and I don't know what support is like on nvidia GPUs - I might move to nvidia next generation so I'm a little anxious that they'll cramp my Linux style.
So the real question is if not Wayland, then what? X11 needs a successor, and it’s not as if there’s a plethora of options.
I am not a GUI programmer but I have watched heaps of talks from the X11/Wayland devs to get a handle on the arguments and it seems to me that while Wayland has some actual architectural issues (screensharing is hard) they pale in comparison to X (the cruft of remote sessions + thin clients, the security issues) and most of the issues people have with Wayland are that it does not provide continuity with X. Like even the post here “Wayland breaks everything and they expect others to fix it”.
Yeah, it sucks having to rebuild everything for a new architecture but we aren’t doing it because it’s easy and we are not doing it because it’s fashionable. We are doing it because X is making it hard to deliver the desktop that needs to be delivered.
Much like systemd, for me, the pros have far outweighed the cons. My computer functions as I hope it to and I believe to be getting the best of modern software.
Not seeing why I should boycott...
Mass adoption of Wayland will compel applications to update, modernize. Pressure should be placed on app developers if something still doesn't work (it's not like Wayland is new or anything...).
Pipewire and desktop portals have solved certain aspects of screen sharing, but not all of them (since apps arent updated to use those portals yet).
I feel like global hotkeys could easily be another portal. Let me flag apps with full global background listening ability, or simply let me say which keys an app can listen to. Then apps don't need a rewrite, they can keep just background listening as they always have, and my DE can decide what even to send to them.
If I don't want discord listening to keypresses, then discord will just think it's weirdly quiet without ever knowing if it has the permission. If I do want discord listening, then nothing has to change from Discord's end and it just starts working.
Two birds and one stone.