Basically people complaining about needing to do work to modernize.
All the things will eventually be just fine. X11 is a walking zombie.
Yes, users are very understandably miffed that things which were working are suddenly broken and somebody now has to fix it in order to return to the status quo.
> things will eventually be just fine
Wayland is 15 years old. At this rate it will be due for replacement before it's feature complete.
You are misunderstanding. You can continue to keep using applications in X11-mode for as long as those applications maintain that code path. But many of the niceties Wayland provides, X11 won't get because it is virtually unmaintained.
Or said another way, X11 is already broken and getting slightly more broken every day.
And before you get angry at X11 going unmaintained, would you have expected Apple to support Carbon ad-infinitum?
Look at the backwards-compatibility and new-framework-adoption-rate woes Windows has to deal with because Win32 exists and devs are lazy / expensive.
X11 is a complete dead end. All applications need to eventually update. Put pressure on app developers to get to it...
btw, I already said something wrong, because, which wayland? It's not a thing.
Like, you can complain about missing deep accessibility support in something like Bpswm or Ratpoison, but is that really fair?
I'm guessing accessibility support is/will be pretty good on both Mutter (Gnome) and Kwin (KDE). Wlroots-based probably will be too with the community attention it is getting. Stray beyond that and you'll be on your own.
If X11 was going to be some permanent fixture at least people who rely on it for apps that are abandoned or proprietary or can't/won't be updated would have an alternative they could keep using. But while X11 isn't going away any time soon, it's also very clearly not what we want to be building on or encouraging people to use. When I criticize the state of Wayland, I'm not saying X11 is great. I don't want to be on X11, I want to use Wayland. I want the features that Wayland has.
Where accessibility is concerned, we're at risk of losing a bunch of users if they lose the ability to use applications they rely on during the transition or if there aren't alternatives to help control the applications that don't get updated. This is not something where we can just say, "oh the developers are lazy."
If the stuff doesn't get supported, regardless of whether it's the developers' fault or Wayland's fault, the users can't just deal with it until the ecosystem catches up. Instead, they go to Windows (or more realistically to Mac, my understanding is that Apple is kind of the gold standard if you need accessibility controls).
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Also add to this that "developers need to modernize" minimizes just how unapproachable a lot of this stuff actually is. I don't have a good grasp of how accessibility works in X11 because the development philosophy there has been for years "let the toolkit handle it" or "don't worry about it, controllers will just do something weird to handle window placement or font sizes on their own."
What are the standards for handling those problems in the future? There probably are standards, and they're probably better than what X11 was doing, but I don't feel confident that I know what they are. And there are X11 apps that are written by developers who aren't professionals and that have even less knowledge than I do about how the Linux desktop actually works. I would challenge anyone to find a good tutorial online written at a level that novice developers can understand that walks through how to make sure that a Wayland app is accessible, what changes need to be made from X11, and what the common problems or pitfalls are that developers might face.
Again, wouldn't necessarily be the biggest problem in the world -- except for the fact that X11 is a dead end and Wayland is the future. And because it's the future, we really, really need to make this stuff work.
The wayland/x11 compatibility shims work and will continue to do so for a long time, for the reasons you are mentioning. Basically both will work on a Wayland system for the foreseeable future - the big change was making Wayland the default which puts the focus there instead of allowing people to mentally push that work off into the future.
Wayland is prime-time, it's shipping as the default for all the big distros. It's here - time to get with it and update your codebase. Like has already been pointed out, Wayland isn't new, and this day has been coming for years. Now app developers will be compelled to finally put in the work.
It's not fair to complain about Wayland when it's some app developers that are not modernizing.
How do they modernize?
Like you point out, Wayland isn't new. So, I would repeat:
> I would challenge anyone to find a good tutorial online written at a level that novice developers can understand that walks through how to make sure that a Wayland app is accessible, what changes need to be made from X11, and what the common problems or pitfalls are that developers might face.
"Need to modernize" is worthless advice without follow-up advice about what needs to be done to modernize. How many developers building apps for Linux even know what the at-spi protocol is?
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But more to the point:
> It's not fair
I'm not blaming Wayland devs. I like a lot of Wayland's approach to controls and structure, I agree with a lot of the development philosophy. This isn't about what's fair, I'm telling you that because Wayland is the future and because X11 is a dead end, if users with accessibility concerns can't use Wayland and they can't stick with X11 (which will become increasingly difficult for them to do as X11 decays more and more), they will leave the Linux ecosystem entirely because they will not be physically able to use it. It does not matter who's fault that is.
Is it fair? Who cares, it's going to happen regardless if the accessibility situation doesn't improve.
This is just kicking the can back and forth, blaming application developers changes nothing about the situation that people are in. If application developers need to modernize, then the question becomes "how do we make that easier for them to do and how do we encourage more of them to do it?" Because clearly the current approach of calling them lazy doesn't seem to be working.
I don't use accessibility features, but I do daily drive a Wayland system (Fedora 39 and 38) and have experienced zero issues. I honestly don't even know what system any given app is trying to use - it all "just works". That is to say I don't believe the sky is falling like some people make it sound.
With that said - the more pressure that is placed on app developers to figure it out, the better. Kicking the can down the road just because XWayland works today is foolish. If you have an app that you rely on that uses X11 exclusively - you should complain to the app developers today so that tomorrow it doesn't stop working.
The entire Linux conversation on accessibility summed up in one sentence.
> If you have an app that you rely on that uses X11 exclusively - you should complain to the app developers today so that tomorrow it doesn't stop working.
And when they say, "we agree, what specifically do we need to do to be accessible under Wayland", what do I tell them?
What cannot be accomplished with ATK/AT-SPI?
It's literally all there... but alas, we love to complain.
Documentation and tutorials. I see X11 devs who aren't even looking at Wayland struggling with this stuff. It is very, very clearly not as easy as you are making it sound.
Nor are you in a position to say that everything works if you don't use accessibility controls. You're very confident that the at-spi protocol is fine for everything given that you are someone who does not rely on the at-spi protocol to use a computer and who does not use it as a daily driver.
I am inclined to say that if users who do rely on accessibility controls on a daily basis are complaining, probably they're not making up their complaints.
Who's fault it is that they're running into issues? Again, it doesn't really matter, the issues persist.
This entire thread started off by someone saying untrue rumors about Wayland and DE's regarding accessibility - so excuse everyone who thinks the complaints are likely misguided.
Again - if something is lacking in Wayland compatibility - now - is the time to ask app developers to update. If for some reason it cannot be done in Wayland, it should be reported to the Wayland project! This is not rocket science...
Right now XWayland works as it should. So provide some specifics or get off the pot...
I'm going to tentatively push back on this, my (very limited) understanding of the at-spi protocol is that it exposes application-specific controls and that it's not relevant to conversations about how to control a DE, and that current DEs do not in fact expose a common shared protocol across all of them for the kinds of controls that Talon needs.
I'm not an expert on this stuff by any means, but from what I can tell, OP is correct and is not spouting untrue rumors. I'd welcome correction in the form of some kind of accessible documentation for integrating with those window managers that uses a universal common protocol for all of them, but getting back to something I've pointed out multiple times above:
> so excuse everyone who thinks the complaints are likely misguided. [...] This is not rocket science...
This kind of response isn't particularly convincing given that I note you still haven't linked over some novice-accessible documentation about how to work with this stuff or test it, likely because that novice-accessible documentation is difficult to find if it exists at all.
I would love some easy ways to verify what at-spi controls, how to integrate with it in different languages, and how different DEs handle exposing it for their own interfaces. The absence of approachable documentation is a big reason why people are confused about Wayland (and about other good projects like Flatpak that get commonly maligned on HN, but that's a longer conversation). The absence of easy, clear information about how all of this stuff works might at least partially explain why application developers aren't quickly modernizing.
If you think that Talon developers are lying about how DEs work, then education efforts using clear, user-and-developer facing documentation about the protocols involved would be a pretty good way of combating FUD.
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> Right now XWayland works as it should. So provide some specifics or get off the pot...
First, as others have mentioned, XWayland is insufficient for the kinds of needs that Talon has; operations like enumerating windows or handling focus can not (and should not) be handled via XWayland unless you plan to run your entire desktop environment in XWayland.
Secondly, XWayland is not the future. It is also a dead end. I'm glad that it exists for now, it is absolutely critical for early adoption of Wayland and is critical for supporting some apps. But XWayland is not a permanent solution to accessibility problems and it's wild to hear people simultaneously say that X11 is a walking zombie and to tell people that accessibility is fine because if there are any problems with Wayland you can always just tie your applications to a walking zombie.
The goal here is to get rid of X11, or at least that's what I think the goal should be, because I do think that X11 is a walking zombie and I resent the fact that I'm still using it.
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My concern is not that Wayland can't be accessible or that there aren't ways to make it accessible. My concern is that regardless of whether or not universal protocols exist right now, it doesn't look like they're being used and it doesn't look like Wayland is going to be accessible for a lot of people in reality. And I don't care who's fault that is; it's still the case that calling developers lazy and accusing people who are sharing real accessibility problems that they have right now of spreading "untrue rumors" does not seem to be helping to improve the situation.
This isn't a situation like NVIDIA where there's one specific company we can all shame; if a bunch of disparate developers aren't taking the necessary steps to update their applications, then something is going wrong in the communication process or the steps aren't clear enough, or the incentives aren't aligned.
Again, I would welcome clear and accessible documentation that average developers could use that demonstrates how Talon could be made to work with Wayland and how the concerns its developers have (https://github.com/splondike/wayland-accessibility-notes/blo...) could be handled.
Accessibility is the one thing that xwayland isn't useful for; if my input system can't interact with wayland windows, what's the point?
Honestly, yes.
The iPhone is light years ahead of Android on the accessibility side, and it is the device you are most likely to always carry with you.
If you are using an iPhone, it already makes more sense to purchase a Mac, and from that point on going knee-deep into the Apple ecosystem makes sense in a lot of ways.
Like, you can hook up your smart doorbell to your Apple TV (for HomeKit), and when someone rings the door / motion is detected, Apple's image recognition can tell you on your iPhone who is at the door.
Notice that I never said applications. I'm aware that xwayland is actually quite good these days; the problem is accessibility and automation tools that it can't support.
> would you have expected Apple to support Carbon ad-infinitum?
> Look at the backwards-compatibility and new-framework-adoption-rate woes Windows has to deal with because Win32 exists and devs are lazy / expensive.
Yeah, devs are expensive, which is why backward compatibility is so important. Microsoft, for its many faults, seems to understand that breaking applications every few years and demanding that developers put in time in order to keep things working is poor form, leading to people making comments like
> I’ll also give a shout-out to our friends in the Operating Systems business: Windows, Linux, NOT APPLE FUCK YOU APPLE, FreeBSD, and so on, for doing such a great job of backwards compatibility on their successful platforms.
- https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/dear-google-cloud-your-depre...
In fact, the rest of that essay is a great commentary on exactly why this kind of thing is bad and why Apple should be derided exactly for this kind of thing.
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> Wayland is 15 years old.
So, it's not very sudden, then, is it?
So much of what people see as wrong in Wayland is about slow-moving applications and driver vendors refusing to adapt; waiting until their software is actually broken before they do anything. We've had more than a decade knowing full well what is coming. I sympathize that an application you rely on is caught up in that. Nobody wanted that situation. But X11 has had a pretty good life. And unless Talon on Linux is suddenly abandoned, I really doubt those developers are going to keep hitching their wagon to X11. At some point, (probably soon now that distributors are getting serious about it), they will take a look at what's new and they will make it work with Wayland.
With that said, I don't think you have to worry for a while. I doubt apps are ever going to stop working in X11 altogether. You might end up with a different desktop at some point if you're using GNOME or KDE, but that's all.
> And unless Talon on Linux is suddenly abandoned, I really doubt those developers are going to keep hitching their wagon to X11. At some point, (probably soon now that distributors are getting serious about it), they will take a look at what's new and they will make it work with Wayland.
That's assuming that they can make it work with Wayland, which appears rather unlikely since the API surface doesn't exist. As you say, Wayland has had more than a decade but most of that time was spent loudly proclaiming that such functionality was a security problem and had no legitimate usecases so here we are.
> With that said, I don't think you have to worry for a while. I doubt apps are ever going to stop working in X11 altogether.
I certainly hope I can keep using X until Wayland actually reaches feature parity, but I'm already seeing pressure on both sides; waydroid is the first[0] application to outright refuse to support X, while Asahi Linux was loudest about not wanting to support Xorg but they're hardly the only ones. I suspect I'm going to end up with a 3-layer system comprised of cage[1] running xwayland running my real graphical environment with some applications in their own little cage windows. It's a little annoying but as a break-glass option it seems to function with only slightly more papercuts than X11 programs on Xorg:\
[0] Well, first that I've noticed at least.