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Comment by Laaas | Hacker News Reader

FWIW all the reasons seem like an aversion to complying with how Wayland works.

Yes, you can't position windows absolutely, but that's because you're not supposed to do that.

In any case I don't see how being able to position windows is relevant at all to PCXS2's functioning on Wayland? Just don't position windows if you can't?

It's an incredibly dumb reason not to support the protocol. Xorg is mostly unmaintained AFAIK.

See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m... for the discussion on this

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> FWIW all the reasons seem like an aversion to complying with how Wayland works.

The absolute last thing you should want from a platform is to have to "comply" with its weird decisions and assumptions on what people will or won't want to do (especially when people clearly do want and already are doing said things).

> In any case I don't see how being able to position windows is relevant at all to PCXS2's functioning on Wayland? Just don't position windows if you can't?

Cause users expect it to happen and complain when it doesn't anyway: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/9064, https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/10065

From a user point-of-view Wayland is perhaps at a level of nitpicks of problems to some extent (haven't used it myself), but from a developer point-of-view it's, plain and simply, incomplete, with its refusal to support trivial things possible on X11 & Windows & macOS (i.e. everything else).

(not a PCSX2 user/dev, just searched for the issues; for reference, I've had the displeasure of writing code directly interfacing with X11 and so wish death to X11 as soon as possible, but wayland's still a horribly-opinionated mess)

> Yes, you can't position windows absolutely, but that's because you're not supposed to do that.

I think about 40 years of GUI APIs disagree with this.

40 years ago people did not care about malicous applications, nor did they care about jank, nor did they have the hindsights that we do know. Those API only still exist because of backwards compatibility.

I also don't care about malicious applications. I don't need to be protected from myself and didn't ask anyone to try.

Yeah, I find the creep of web app security mentality into the desktop to be a disaster. I want to be able to easily snoop on and control my GUI and I absolutely don’t want some display system to decide it knows better than me about this sort of thing.

>web app security mentality

Having good security is essential to having a good app platform. You can see a real disaster in how malware operated on Windows a couple decades ago.

>I want to be able to easily snoop on and control my GUI

That don't mean that every random program needs to be able to. If a program is to be able to snoop, it needs to explicitly given the ability to do so.

> That don't mean that every random program needs to be able to. If a program is to be able to snoop, it needs to explicitly given the ability to do so.

I strongly disagree with this, this is how you get inconsistent, annoying computing experiences

I'd perhaps say that security can be a good idea, but it needs to be done well for it to be so. And not at all implementing a potentially-abusable feature, while counting as "secure", is absolutely not doing it well.

I think it's coming from developers with proprietary backgrounds who want to normalize the running of untrusted proprietary software on the Linux desktop, probably from some appstore with abysmal quality standards like Android and iOS. Contrast this mentality with sticking to Free software you downloaded from the official Debian repos.. why do I need to be protected against that software? I don't. These mobile-like desktop protection schemes are designed to facilitate mobile-like software consumption habits. Fuck all of that!

Even if you are someone who wrote their whole user space from scratch and don't use the internet or open any files made by others, you are not representative of the larger userbase. A lot of people download random software or libraries that could be malware or even just buggy (eg. The time Steam unintentionally deleted user files). These people want to gain utility from all of this software without having to worry about the software being able to do bad things.

In other words you want to facilitate the bad user habits of Windows, iOS, Android, etc on the Linux desktop. Why do you even want to use the Linux desktop in the first place if you prefer those systems? Stick to what suits you instead of trying to assimilate the niche holdout systems like some sort desktop borg.

>you want to facilitate the bad user habits of Windows, iOS, Android, etc on the Linux desktop

They are not bad user habits. They are only bad if the system is poorly designed. Unfortunately, the Linux desktop was poorly designed and the community is taking their sweet time to fix it.

>Why do you even want to use the Linux desktop in the first place if you prefer those systems?

It's just what I am used to using. I ackowledge the security of my computer sucks and I could be easily pwned at any time.

>trying to assimilate the niche holdout systems like some sort desktop borg.

I want the Linux desktop to be viable to use. Having competitive security compared to other operating systems is important. People shouldn't have to worry that using a Linux desktop will mean that a bad program can steal all of their accounts or delete all the files they have been working on. These type of things are preventable by the system and just blaming people that they should have known that what they downloaded was malware even if it is not at all obvious.

That all sounds like a better case for sandboxing our data rather than sandboxing our applications. The application-centrism is an iOS-ism (and now a Mac-ism, but I repeat myself) designed to facilitate Apple’s economic model where they are the sole gatekeeper of what a computer is allowed to do. People blindly copy that model into the Free Software world because Apple are Very Rich and so everything they do is automatically a good idea.

You can't effectively sandbox your data if every application can fully control your display & input.

Maliciousness like wanting to open a window at a given location? That's seriously bad behavior and I hope the offenders will be stopped promptly and prosecuted. I didn't think evil like this existed in the world.

No, maliciousness like having a window move itself high enough that the close button is off screen or malicousness like the window dancing around, potentially causing other windows to also be noted around as the window manager responds. Yes, these can be somewhat mitigated by the window manager but the fact that every window manager will need to think carefully about the security of this hints that the design of the protocol is exposing a bad abstraction or interface.

If you're running malicious applications, you're already fucked, and your compositor pretending to protect you is the last thing you need.

> Yes, you can't position windows absolutely, but that's because you're not supposed to do that.

Why not? This seems like a pretty opinionated policy from something that's supposed to be a platform to enable applications. Why should some other developer dictate how an application should work? I'd expect "My way or the highway" from Apple, but not from a linux API.

It's more nuanced than "should be able to do it" and "shouldn't be able to do it". The problem is covered in the wayland-protocols MR that the PCSX2 PR author also linked to (and failed to appreciate): https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

I don’t think anyone “failed to appreciate” that thread. The core reasoning on the part of the Wayland devs was absurd beyond belief.

“Applications and users decide what's actually optional - if 10 applications work on all the popular compositors but don't work in one with a novel approach to window management, then that compositor is considered broken, not the applications.”

So, the obvious solution to the problem is, apparently, to have no solution and have everything broken. Genius.

Thanks for the extra context. I don't have a dog in this particular race, but I think, as a developer, I'd look at that list of excuses and just say "Why bother, I'll just target X and get on with my life." The great thing about Linux is there's usually at least one other alternative for basically anything you want to do!

One person’s unmaintained is another’s stable

That thread is a fantastic reason to never run wayland.

That thread increases my trust in the Wayland developers significantly.

Even if X11 goes away XWayland will be around.

Users who need this will disagree.

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