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Comment by uecker | Hacker News Reader

See the ssh manpage for an explanation of untrusted/trusted clients. This debate was mainstream. Basically, some people presumable paid to work on Linux graphics decided to implement something new instead of doing their job, and gave talks about why X is fundamentally broken. I believe the driving force might have been the hope to support Linux on mobile or embedded devices, and X seems just unnecessary (although I think network transparency would be super useful on mobile devices). Some gamers certainly believed nonsense such as "all X programs are forced to use ancient drawing primitives and so programs will be much faster with Wayland". Wayland developers certainly did not do anything to stop such misconceptions. Later there was disappointment because obviously it was not faster (the drawing model for modern clients is essentially the same), but other myth such as the "fundamental security issue" prevailed.

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It's like if Wayland is not just a graphical system, but a full business plan.

Control upstream, then companies wanting solutions will go to you first. Because why go to someone else in the FOSS market, when there is no certainty the code or standard (extension, protocol, etc) will get accepted, forcing you to maintain a fork? With IBM-RH and Ubuntu doings eg., it's hard to say FOSS is immune to vendor lock-in.

> It's like if Wayland is not just a graphical system, but a full business plan. Control upstream, then companies wanting solutions will go to you first.

Wayland is open source with a fixed core protocol that's extremely stable, which anyone can build on. New protocols are constantly proposed. The core is minimal and defines how applications interact with the compositor to render and produce the final output. Control by a single entity is virtually impossible. Wayland ensures everyone has a voice because it's an open protocol which means discussion and development are done in the public.

in _reality_ it gives stack owners full proprietary control.

specifically the wslg stack does not enable Linux gui apps to smoothly integrate with the Windows window manager, because some bits are missing in the Windows Wayland stack, clipboard, window decorations, thumbnails, maximize into a part of the monitor? nope. and no patches taken. supposed you figure where to offer them and how.

It's unfair to claim Wayland is inherently different from X11 in this regard. Both are just specifications, and there are also proprietary implementations of the X11 protocol, primarily for Windows and enterprise settings.

The point is: the X11 spec is much more complete.

> Some gamers certainly believed nonsense such as "all X programs are forced to use ancient drawing primitives and so programs will be much faster with Wayland".

This is incorrect. Kristian Høgsberg has explicitly stated that a primary motivation for Wayland is the reduced need for a central X server, as many programs already bypass it.

A Wayland compositor is even more centralized as it combines compositor, Window manager, and server while in X these could be separate components. I also do not know any program that bypasses the X server. Are you talking about programs that you can start from the text console and which then do graphics directly? Those are very rare.

There are reasons for those architecture differences.

Wayland is an evolution of the previous design. X11's architecture had clients sending drawing commands to the X server, a method that became limited and required extensions over time. Wayland's approach is: applications perform their own rendering into their own separate buffers, then tell the compositor when they are ready. The compositor takes those buffers to produce the final image.

Because those buffers are separate, enhanced security is a direct side effect. Wayland is the result of decades of experience and represents the current way of doing things.

Sorry, no modern X clients sends drawing commands. This is the nonsense I am talking about.

Posting from another account.

I'm aware that extensions exist now, like present, which make it possible to send buffers, similar to how Wayland operates, so you don't have to do things the primitive way.

However, to claim to speak the X protocol, you still need to support the older functionality, that's what I mean by a tremendous amount of functionality to support. The moment you get rid of that old functionality, you've essentially created a new protocol, which is what Wayland is.

How is that point nonsense? I don't want to see X go, but I don't think it's reasonable to prevent progress.

You're aware of the guideline about throwaway accounts? This isn't good for community (or discussion).

Thanks for pointing that out. I just learned about the policy, my bad.

If you know these extension exist (for a long time), why spread the misinformation about "drawing commands" in the first place? A client does not need to support old functionality. A server does for backwards compatibility and this is a good thing! In fact, breaking decades of compatibility is the worst blunder of Wayland. The idea that this is a "tremendous amount of functionality" or a huge burden to maintain is also misleading, first because some drawing commands from the 80s are not a lot of functionality to support from a modern point of view, and also because all this is still being maintained anyway, just much worse because the resources redirected to Wayland. And even if one had deprecated some stuff eventually, this would not have broken compatibility and many other features at the same time as Wayland did.

It's not misinformation, that's how X still works. Clients do all kinds of things. New programs aren't like 80s ones but your X server still must support every operation clients expect.

Wayland doesn't break anything, it's a completely new protocol. Claiming Wayland breaks your use case is like saying systemd broke old init scripts. It did because it's a different system.

Wayland isn't trying to be Xorg 2. It's a protocol. At its core it's only a compositor protocol. Everything built on top is up to the implementation developers.

> Everything built on top is up to the implementation developers.

and that's exactly creating the problem: Window management for example is left as an excercise to the reader. thus (my point above) the WSLg interop for graphcial applications _sucks_ compared to where X Servers already were. and if MS doesn't implement what's needed, it won't come. no way to fix it in the Linux or on the Windows side. the MS Wayland thingie in between tightly controls what is possible.

The logical problem with your argument is that as long as we want to support old clients, we now must support the X server in parallel to Wayland. So there is nothing gained. And the moment we can stop supporting them, we could do this also in X. And yes, Wayland being new and incomplete both creates a huge amount of problem which nobody needs.

Wayland gives us a lot. What you don't realize is that Wayland _is_ X12.

So far Wayland gave me only headaches and I do not see what it offers that X does not already provide. And the fact that Wayland make their case by lying, etc. the drawing commands BS, network transparency does not work (I feature we do use every day), etc. and the fact that important use cases such as accessibility are now treated as an afterthought that there are diverging implementations with inconsistent support for important functionality, ... all this does not build confidence that the developers even remotely know what they are doing outside of their narrow view on the Graphics pipeline itself. And this after decades of effort. Maybe it is too late now to save X, but Wayland was a terrible idea, not the idea of developing Wayland itself as an experiment with open result, but to declare X dead and Wayland its successor long before it was ready and before it was clear that it is actually a better replacement (so far, it isn't).

Those are not lies. I don't think you know what you are talking about. If you knew, you would know that waypipe + xwayland-satellite works even for forwarding X11 clients over waypipe. I use it myself every day, but it's pointless to discuss it with someone who isn't interested in listening, only in spreading the same lies as everyone else.

Sorry, how was your comment "Wayland is an evolution of the previous design. X11's architecture had clients sending drawing commands to the X server, a method that became limited and required extensions over time. Wayland's approach is: applications perform their own rendering into their own separate buffers, then tell the compositor when they are ready. The compositor takes those buffers to produce the final image." not highly misleading, if X had the composite extension in 2004 and Wayland project was started in 2008? Last time I tried waypipe it did not work and its design seems flawed as it has to have hard-coded knowledge about each protocol used on the wire.

I apologize for my previous misleading comments. You're right, Wayland causes many problems. As a long time Linux user, I miss how capable X was and don't want to see it go. Wayland compositors feel like toys in comparison, and its advocates sometimes seem to be coping. However, with major DEs and toolkits dropping X11 support, what options do we truly have?

I dropped Gnome a long time ago and I have never used KDE, so I don't this is an immediate problem for me. As long as there are enough people using it, X will live on. I think the main thing one can do is to not accept the argument that whatever the industry wants is inevitable. Free software would not exist if this were the case.

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