TIL Wayland is 16 years old already; in a few years (I can't math) it'll be as old as X was when Wayland came out, but it seems it's still considered mediocre or not as good as X was.
Approximately 99.999% of those complaints are uttered by people who 1) are not doing the work, 2) are not interested or capable of doing the work, and 3) do not understand or refuse to acknowledge that the Wayland and X developers are _mostly the same folks_ and they _do not want to work on X11 anymore_.
I don't really have a stake in this argument, except I'm bone-tired of seeing people whine about Wayland when they're using software somebody else gave them for free. There are enough Wayland whiners that, by now, they could've banded together and started maintaining / improving X and (if their complaints and theories were correct) left Wayland behind.
Strangely -- even though X is open source and eminently forkable (we know this, because XFree86 -> X.org) it gathers dust and none of its proponents are doing anything towards its upkeep.
When someone shows up with "Wayland isn't as good as X, so here is my modernized fork of X anyone can use" -- I'll be quite interested.
This is a fair point, but the quality of Wayland isn't really at issue for this -- Wayland could be much better than X by all accounts and it would still require you to rewrite software for it. (Assuming XWayland doesn't suit your needs, anyway.)
You're far more likely to get people to expend the requisite time and effort if it's indisputable that the end result will be worth it.
> it would still require you to rewrite software for it
Does Wayland support the entire Xcompose system or an equally powerful alternative?
Wayland does genuinely sound interesting, if flaky and half-baked (it reminds me of systemd in that way). Certainly, the world doesn’t owe me a port of my window manager. But if the Wayland transition forces me to use GNOME then my life will be worse.
> if flaky and half-baked (it reminds me of systemd in that way)
They already have. X is already more full-featured and stable than Wayland (yes it is missing certain niche features that Wayland has). Sometimes the most important thing you can do with a piece of software is not screw around with it.
Eh maybe. Ultimately you can never be sure something is possible without doing it.
I'm pragmatic here, if and when Wayland offers me a better experience than X then I'll use it. I just resent distros etc. pushing me towards it when it's currently a downgrade.
...Yes? Wayland being a regression in terms of features and bugginess is kinda a sticking point.
> Approximately 99.999% of those complaints are uttered by people who 1) are not doing the work, 2) are not interested or capable of doing the work, and 3) do not understand or refuse to acknowledge that the Wayland and X developers are _mostly the same folks_ and they _do not want to work on X11 anymore_.
If X works for someone and Wayland doesn't, none of that matters. It doesn't matter how much you insult X users, it won't make their usecases invalid or make Wayland good enough.
> I don't really have a stake in this argument, except I'm bone-tired of seeing people whine about Wayland when they're using software somebody else gave them for free.
It cuts both ways: Users aren't entitled to free work, and developers aren't entitled to their work being well-regarded. Giving software away for free has never meant that people can't point out its problems.
I agree that X11 has some faults, and I really want Wayland to work, but everytime I try it, something ends up being broken.
It's fine for you to not care about that usecase, but other people do care and that's also valid. There even exist devices that mostly exist to watch video and we'd really like Linux and some standard graphics stack to work on them.
My datapoint was just in reply to someone writing that tearing under X has not occurred for 5 years.
Honestly Wim did this right on the audio side. If it was so important to bring what Wayland has brought someone should have written a display server that talked to display clients just like the old server did and upgraded gracefully if the client had the new capabilities. You didn't even have to recompile software to use pipewire, let alone rewrite it.
True, but sandboxing can fix your browser being able to read your spreadsheets without asking, or your spreadsheet having network access. Just because you have to work with programs and data doesn't mean they're all in the same security domain.
Now, you might not notice the tearing if you've got V-sync properly configured. But V-Sync doesn't stop screen tearing, it just drops torn frames and decreases your refresh rate until your system can keep up with demand. It's an ugly hack on laptop hardware and an even uglier one on the desktop.
I don’t believe that I’ve ever noticed or been bothered by static tearing, but maybe I’m just used to it because I’m old and displays have always had it?
While true, this statement is also useless. On a meta level, what you're essentially saying is that users' rights to feel resentful, is more valuable than achieving an outcome.
The only relevant problem with X11 to me is that all of its developers are stopping to work on it and it won't run on any new hardware soon (and probably on old hardware too.)
The only way to achieve the outcome you want, is for someone to do the work. They're not going to do it. If you'd rather keep being resentful rather than do the work towards your own claimed desired outcome, then apparently you don't really value the outcome you so claim to desire; you value being resentful more.
It's more useful than calling X users "whiners" while ignoring their complaints. And no, I'm pointing out that the users are resentful because they're being pushed to an outcome that's worse and therefore not desirable to achieve.
Not talking about the technical points of the whole X/Wayland considerations here, but a group of people in such debate is always as vocal as they'll do nothing and put unreasonably high expectations on other people to listen to them and have no choice but to agree. The fact that X.org's core team initiated Wayland and stopped X.org development is disregarded: these people Will Be Right against literally everything, they can't be reasoned.
My previous coworker was fired for gross incompetence in the end yet he never acknowledged anything wrong. He always knew better than literally the whole world that bash scripts run manually where superior to Terraform for the whole company's infrastructure. Yes, he was that stupid. I guess this is why he ended lying like hell on his LinkedIn profile, concealing he had had four employers in four years.
Seeing technical debates with such poor quality is worrying. If people with quantitative minds fail to entertain a fact-based discussion, how can we expect our political life to acknowledge there is only one reality and stop lying?
Before you voice your outrage, here are some facts that won't dis-exist just because you disagree with them:
- https://www.phoronix.com/review/x_wayland_situation
- https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server...
Are you saying that Wayland is only for developers? Are people not allowed to complain when The New Thing turns out to be less good than the supposedly Obsolete Thing?
> 3) do not understand or refuse to acknowledge that the Wayland and X developers are _mostly the same folks_ and they _do not want to work on X11 anymore_.
I'm fully aware of that. I understand X11 has its limitations, and some of the goals of Wayland sound very appropriate for the modern PC environment, but if after 16 years, there are still many situations where Wayland does worse than X, that's not a great sign, and it will make people continue to use X.
My primary complaint with Wayland is that it is a textbook example of Brooks’s second-system effect. It forsook backwards compatibility (yes, there’s an X11 server but to my knowledge there is no way to just run Wayland and one’s X11 desktop environment).
> Strangely -- even though X is open source and eminently forkable (we know this, because XFree86 -> X.org) it gathers dust and none of its proponents are doing anything towards its upkeep.
I suspect that is because the X/Wayland guys have sucked all the oxygen out of that particular room. A newbie shows up and is told that X.org is legacy and he shouldn’t work on it, so … he doesn’t.
And of course X.org really is a bit of a disaster due to being written in C.
Wayland made some huge design changes, and those changes all have pros and cons. How do we tend to communicate about pros and cons? By complaining.
It sucks that Xorg's accessibility features are so baked-in that you must be compatible with them; because that demand can become a wall of assumptions. It sucks that Wayland leaves 100% of accessibility to the compositor; because that creates a lot of redundant work, and the best implementations get siloed into plasma or gnome, creating multiple smaller instances of the tight integration that made UX less flexible to begin with.
Using Xorg, you can run an incredibly lightweight window manager that never even thought about managing keymaps, adjusting mouse acceleration, setting the display resolution, etc., because that's not it's job. I can get absolutely everything I want from i3wm on Xorg... except fractional scaling. So far, it looks like plasma is the only one that has really figured that one out, and I still get a tiny pointer sometimes.
The best thing about free software is that we can choose how it works. The more tightly integrated the pieces are, the fewer choices are available. Fewer choices results in more complaining. Wayland may be the most significant instance of this pattern in Linux history. The second most significant instance was already present: Desktop Environments.
The biggest source of complaints I have is that the best aspects of plasma are trapped inside KDE. If you want the best Wayland compositor out there, you have to have it wrapped in an entire full-featured Desktop Environment.
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Complaining is the best thing about Linux, so long as it's able to drive real change. The more stubborn and inflexible a system (and whoever designs it) is, the more disconnected complaints become. That's the real problem that deserves our attention.
It's clarifying if you simply say "users."
Lol no. X is from 1984: https://www.talisman.org/x-debut.shtml
That means Wayland is only 66% the age of X when Wayland came out, or you'd need 50% more of Wayland's life before its as old as X was.
Because there was a big fracture and doubt in the community support for Wayland, not to mention alternatives like mir popping up and diverting resources.
Do you see how some might think it wasn't the best strategy?
That's literally it.