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Comment by user3939382 | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye to any trace of freedom left on Linux when you combine this with proprietary graphics drivers.

I don't think I understand what you mean. Do you mean wayland is not usable with nvidia proprietary driver? I remember that being annoying but possible many year ago (with sway --my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia thingy).

But if you use really old nvidia gpu you can have a mixed experience with wayland. Which is a fair problem to complain, but you can't blame that on wayland and call that lack of freedom. That problem was caused by the lack of freedom coming from nvidia gpus and how locked down they are and how nvidia for many year has been hostile towards linux desktop.

The “what’s the harm” here is the systemd conversation all over again basically. If you pipe everything through a single point of failure black box users have already lost, when you combine it binary blob drivers that shouldn’t exist it’s worse. Linux is doomed in achieving its most important goals which are user freedom, not someone’s idea of pretty UI imposed at the expense of that. If that’s what users want they should buy a Mac. If you want to get locked out of your OS for eye candy we have that.

Where is this Wayland black box then? If anything, Wayland made this situation significantly better: the X11 server was exactly this 'single point of failure black box' you are describing. Wayland replaces this with a much simpler protocol with multiple independent implementations (notably Mutter/gnome-shell, KWin, wlroots-based ones such as sway, and Smithay-based ones such as niri).

Open source has never achieved user freedom.

It’s achieved developer and very tech savvy IT pro freedom. If you can deal with command lines and debugging systems you are not a user. You’re a computer professional.

If OSS wanted to bring freedom to users its primary focus would be radical simplification and UI/UX.

What nonsense, especially if framed in a such an absolutist way leaving no room for nuance. Millions of people are storing their data on self hosted or 3rd party run managed OSS services on multiple platforms. Sure, it is not all perfect, UX might be an issue here and there but compared to having to relearn using some proprietary app redesign every other year because some Product Manager needed a promotion, a lot of OSS stuff is perfectly usable, stable and secure.

> Millions of people are storing their data on self hosted or 3rd party run managed OSS services on multiple platforms.

That's open source being used by developers to provide a closed service to users. Users experience it as an opaque closed service.

SaaS backed by open source is actually the most closed model of software, more closed than closed-source software run locally.

That’s because of extractive economics from tech not because of any failure or weakness of open source. If tech economy was in equilibrium open source would be massively popular. Polished alternatives are subsidies by extraction economics.

I don't understand how proprietary drivers with Wayland are supposed to be a bigger problem than proprietary drivers with X11, could you explain?

Personally, I've never used a proprietary driver with either.

What's the substance behind this claim? It keeps on being repeated but I don't get what it's actually about. Is there anything proprietary about Wayland that I'm not aware of? What's the difference between proprietary drivers using X11 and Wayland?

Freedom is dead when a single implementation is replaced with several competing implementations implementing an open standard.

Just so it’s clear:

The X Window System (X11) is a protocol with multiple implementations. Sure, the X.Org Server (Xorg) was the most popular by a huge margin, but there were quite a few others (e.g. XFree86, Xming, XWayland), though over time most were discontinued for one reason or another.

X11 and Wayland do differ in an important way: in X11 window managers (GNOME, KDE, i3, whatever) all sat atop the Xorg server; whereas in Wayland there’s only the compositor, so GNOME, KDE, Sway, whatever, all essentially include their own equivalent of Xorg (which could be fully integrated, or factored into a library, such as Mutter, KWin, wlroots).

Every single X server you list is a fork of XFree86, and every X server I'm aware of is a fork of the original X11R1 (or later) release from MIT.

Please cite a single independent implementation of an X11 protocol server.

There were plenty of those, including commercial ones.

It's pretty hard to find but ~25 years ago I was using Xi Graphics Accelerated-X which had 3D acceleration long before Xfree86.

Update: but yes I imagine it had some code from original MIT release.

For completely independent one you can have a look at WeirdX/WiredX, which was written in Java and even supported antialiasing and transparency for core protocol (something that Xfree86 people claimed to be impossible to implement).

It's surprisingly hard to find this stuff today: https://web.archive.org/web/20250220140358/http://www.jcraft...

Oh, WeirdX, that's one I hadn't heard of.

The commercial ones (Xsun, Xsgi, Hummingbird, DESQView/X etc.) were all based on MIT code.

Only Nvidia use proprietary graphics drivers?

vmxgfx has similar issues.

If you are using VMWare then the proprietary video driver is probably the least of your issues.

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