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Comment by temp0826 | Hacker News Reader

Wayland has been around for 15+ years now and I've been using it daily for probably 10. At this point I have to assume comments like this are unserious.

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Good for you. Meanwhile, many other people have been encountering _serious_ issues for much of those 10 years. This is well documented. Downplaying the issues of other users is a great way to make people dislike the product.

What are this issues beside VNC or ssh -X does not work? Or my Software Y (still) does not support Wayland?

> ssh -X

waypipe

Actually I don't think any of those are problems?

* VNC is covered by wayvnc (unless you're on GNOME or maybe? KDE, but those have their own implementations)

* ssh -X should be covered by waypipe

* application software should generally work in XWayland (which okay is a little cheaty but if it works it works)

The two pain points I'm currently aware of are:

* Unified vs fractured ecosystem: In practice, everyone on X11 used Xorg and every window manager and desktop environment had the same basic features because of it. You could always control the keyboard layout via setxkbmap, every screenshot tool worked everywhere, xrandr/arandr were always available to configure displays, etc. In Wayland there is never one answer to anything; not every compositor lets you configure the keyboard and if they do each one has their own way to do it, there are 3 different screenshot protocols (supposedly KDE and wlroots are converging so only GNOME will be doing their own thing but I'm not holding my breath), display configuration is completely up to compositor choice, etc.

* The accessibility story isn't there. There's work on it, so eventually the outcome will probably be "just throw out the a11y tools you're used to and switch to these new ones", but for now the current status is "they're working on it but it isn't there yet".

Link to any open issue you are encountering so we can discuss it then.

I said "most" of those 10 years, since it has become much better now, especially on AMD. Nvidia is still a disaster on Wayland though, basic screen sharing apps like Zoom are broken for many users, even with PipeWire.

The response to this is usually "that program is bad, it has problems and that isn't the fault of Wayland, don't use it". But Wayland broke userspace. If these programs all work well on X, that is a Wayland problem.

And I encounter _serious_ issues when I use X. Neither is perfect, but this insistence that Wayland is "not ready" because it doesn't have certain people's pet features ignores the silent majority for whom it just works and works better than X ever did.

This is not me downplaying those issues some people encounter in Wayland. But I think you're sort of doing the opposite.

(And, Wayland is not a "product".)

Because wayland is 'ready' when X can be properly killed, i.e. wayland is working for essentially all users. As it stands a huge fraction of users have issues with it, because most users have at least one 'pet feature' which they are not willing to give up.

As far as I'm concerned, a technology being "ready" (for mainstream adoption or whatever) means that it works better than or equally well as what it's replacing for most people and at least "well enough" for a significant majority. As far as I can tell, we've been there for a while with Wayland. The vast majority of people don't have to care that they're on Wayland.

X doesn't work for essentially all users. It works for substantially fewer users than Wayland does. There are several features that X is missing, and you might call them "pet features" but they are features that the vast majority of graphical desktop users expect these days.

That's quite the claim; maybe you operate in different circles than I do, but most power users I know still avoid Wayland like the plague. X doesn't have support most of the modern fancy features, yes. But on older hardware, which people with less money usually have, X works.

People with less money don't have old computers. They have Chromebooks, which use Wayland.

X still works great for me. I figure I'll give Wayland a try after another decade or so.

Protocol, maybe, and there was no "Wayland"; there was Gnome and KDE. I was only recently able to try Labwc with LxQt, and I occasionally try to see if there are some improvements because it is not usable currently. The biggest issue is that every implementation is different; there is not even a shared common library. If Xorg developers are now working exclusively on Wayland, when are they going to start programming?

You have to understand that I don't really care about the internals of my DE. The same of true for 95% of Linux users and 99.999% of general computer users, so when I see a huge amount of effort goes into basically seemingly pointless refactoring, instead of tackling issues that are actually important to users, it is disappointing to me. I just installed KDE Manjaro and guess what? It stills uses X, and no one has an answer to what benefit Wayland has for me.

Security.

You said you did your research so I have to believe that you don't care about security.

But most people care.

Thankfully you no longer have to be root to start X.

That particular scenario (listening in on other apps) is very theoretical, can you recall any attack ever using it? IIRC Windows still has the same 'ability' - and nobody cares.

The threats models I have seen are easy enough to deal with inside the X ecosystem. And investing all your resources into a new system that is not backward compatible is something no serious security person would do as it leaves your existing users vulnerable

Well, do you also second guess your surgeon? Why do you think you have enough domain and technical knowledge to consider your "seemingly pointless" to be relevant?

You should definitely second guess your doctor, or get a second opinion[1]. I mean everyone knows you should NEVER abruptly stop benzodiazepines due to lethal/fatal withdrawal symptoms, right? Guess what? Most of the psychiatrists I have encountered do not give a damn. It is coming from both first-hand and second-hand experiences. So yeah, you are right to second guess. Were it up to my doctors, I would have been long dead. And because I was not in the right state to second guess my doctor, I am forever left with immobility issues. I should have gotten a week long corticosteroid therapy for MS relapse. I did not, because the doctor did not give a fuck, and I was too stupid to NOT second guess. Unfortunately they do not give a damn about you here, but you should. FWIW everything I have said do not require me to have a PhD or Dr. next to my name. It is on Wikipedia, books on psychiatry, pharmacology, and so forth. It is "common knowledge" in the field that you are supposed to taper off these medications gradually, never abruptly.

[1] You would never guess the amount of times I have encountered doctors questioning the practices of another doctor. :P It happened so many times...

Software bitrots. Sometimes it's compiler stuff, sometimes the very usecase changes (few used the network design of X, or server-side fonts, etc. etc.). The way X got no 'attention' (so to speak) made the new technical design (passing away responsibilities) inevitable. It would have just happened slower had Wayland not existed.

> seemingly pointless refactoring, instead of tackling issues that are actually important to users

its not a dichotomy. Xorg was built on X11R6, a platform that was written circa 1993. You cannot "tackle issues important to users" based on an outdated stack. They were painted into numerous corners that only a rewrite would fix.

It's probably a distro thing. I'm on a rolling release distro (arch) and I've been using wayland on arch and it's worked great. There are still some things I struggle with, but for ~7 years I've been using wayland without major issue. Things iron themselves out pretty quickly these days when you're using a rolling release distro. This is not so for popos/ubuntu/debian etc.

I don't want to be rude, but "it's worked great" and "still some things I struggle with" need some clarification.

The things I struggle with are very niche, like remote desktop via pipewire over ssh.

Day to day stuff is way better than x11. Remember how much fiddling used to be necessary to configure x11 for your specific devices? I've never once done that and I don't miss it at all.

By the way, pipewire is amazing.

> Remember how much fiddling used to be necessary to configure x11 for your specific devices?

Er. No, I don't remember that. Are you talking about needing to make a xorg.conf once upon a time? Because that hasn't been generally needed for... over a decade? Maybe two at this point?

Me neither, and I had my first Linux machine in 2008. That was true maybe in 1995. Of course anecdotal evidence.

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