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Comment by wing-_-nuts | Hacker News Reader

My biggest problem with wayland was how it was basically forced on the community. It broke innumerable things for years, put all the responsibility for implementing things down on the DEs and WMs themselves.

All of this hassle, forcing so much more work on DE/WM devs, for the sake of 'better security' in scenarios that don't really apply to 99% of linux users, with the promise of 'better latency' which this very article proves is false.

I tried to be an early adopter of wayland ~ 5 years ago. Found all sorts of things broken, and I'm now using linux mint xfce edition, as hopefully by the time xfce drags itself to wayland, all the bugs and tooling will be a solved problem.

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I don't know enough about this to have a favorite, just know the transition was rough. Like one day at work our DE had to get changed because of whatever reasons they couldn't use X anymore, and that affected more things like Chrome Remote Desktop. Years after I tried setting up Linux on an old PC and learned that Wayland is de facto default now, but not in Mint, even though Mint is supposed to be the easy one... and CRD was still finicky in either one.

Linux is about choice, but unless you're ready to write a lot of things yourself, it's outside your control how well parts of the ecosystem are supported. For an average user it's unacceptable for your entire GUI to suddenly change in a way that requires relearning, something that Mac and Windows have avoided doing at least since 2000. Even Win8 or Mac26 wasn't so disruptive. It's possibly worse for an average Linux user because they aren't just concerned with how it looks but also compatibility with advanced things like X forwarding or VNC or CRD.

I think Linux is about choice some folks opinions notwithstanding. It's an ecosystem where many different devs have chosen to go about the same thing many different ways. You the user then get to pick from amongst those varied and interesting choices.

It however isn't about all or indeed any of those devs being obligated to support any particular choice. You can only buy a place at the table with money or sweat and merely using something isn't contributing and doesn't get you a vote.

Arguably the problem isn't the display server its the fact that general linux usage tends to require a little understanding of what's going on under the hood than is strictly speaking desirable for joe average user especially when something doesn't work. EG needing to understand that your choice of display server is making your zoom calls not work and then having to open that whole can of worms.

The fix is honestly more labor. The trivial way to acquire more labor is with money which is hampered by the fact that so little is paid. If you want more polished stuff pay more.

>Arguably the problem isn't the display server

No. If you tell users they should switch to a new display server, you shouldn't be surprised if no one takes you up on it if you don't provide basic feature parity.

If you tell DE/WM devs they should use your new protocol, but say it's now their responsibility to do all these things that the old display server did for them, don't be surprised if it doesn't get much traction.

I don't for the life of me understand why wayland took off. It's provided no benefit to the average user, or DE/WM dev, and a whole lot of hassle.

Was there some other reason distros switched to Wayland? I've always heard X11 was just not maintained well and had too much tech debt, not so much about the security.

From what I remember, Wayland is a thinner layer than X11, basically handing clients pointers to shared buffers for them to write into, which seems better than X11's server approach. Thought maybe people were eager to switch for latency reasons, but this benchmark is showing otherwise. And would think Wayland is more efficient too, but I haven't noticed or heard of a difference.

And the attitude of just refusing to make things work because haha fuck you that's why. I think it was Kicad or Gimp or Blender where you can drag windows onto other windows to merge them and they had to add a warning saying this will never work on Wayland because Wayland doesn't want it to work.

By the time wayland becomes the default in xfce, maybe the wayland team will have added window positioning to the protocol...

Never going to happen but maybe we'll get a couple incompatible DE-specific extensions.

Forced on who, by who? It is the DE/WM people that is driving the thing.

It is absolutely not the DE/WM devs driving this, it's the wayland folks saying that xorg would no longer be maintained. They literally just dumped an Ikea box of protocols on the table without even bothering to provide a decent sample implementation and said 'good luck!'

the Wayland folks are the X11 folks though

Yeah but the display server people are different from the WM/DE people. And the former kinda just said "coding is hard" and made it all the responsibility of the WM/DE people.

1. There is/was a sample implementation.

2. There are currently many high-quality implementations, Kwin being the best IMO.

3. X11 devs didn't want to maintain it, nobody "made them" stop. You or I could maintain it, but I also don't want to, so, here we are.

4. Yeah the wayland transition was rough but I think there's basically no universe where that transition would be perfect. They're architecturally different things. The Apple Intel to M series transition wasn't perfect either and there were A LOT of bugs. These things just happen.

1. Their sample implementation was bad, I think it was just a demo app for car displays or some such. They should have ported over a simple wm.

2. Yeah, the major projects like gnome and kde had enough developers to dedicate to porting over to wayland. Most existing DEs and WMs found the porting process to be very difficult and didn't even bother. This would have been solved had they released an implementation with feature parity. See #1.

3/4. I don't care. I consider xorg to be 'feature complete'. There are few benefits to the end user switching to wayland beyond some niche use cases like multi-display scaling, and HDR. The small benefit of those is nowhere near worth the headache they forced on users when the major DEs started going wayland only.

Overall, I am happy sticking with xfce since it's taking the slow road on moving from xorg to wayland.

And all the gaslighting. Using X forward basically every day but being told it is useless and broken and nobody needs it...

And don't forget the “this isn't a wayland problem” whenever a major missing feature provided by the X11 ecosystem is mentioned. Guess what: if you're going to replace the whole ecosystem, you're responsible for all the missing things regardless of your opinions of the matter.

Yeah I used x forwarding to access matlab from my uni lab from the comfort of my own home, while all the other students had to slog to the lab lol

There is a wayland equivalent. It's called waypipe. In my experiences it often works better than x11 forwarding.

Unfortunately, there's no wayland server for windows, so you can't use waypipe there without pulling in a linux vm or similar.

Also waypipe is inferior by design as it is a proxy added after the fact.

But it does not matter that they now have some kind of a solution for a use case for which they denied that it even exists for a long time. I will avoid Wayland because I do not like the direction and the interests that drive it.

> I tried to be an early adopter of wayland ~ 5 years ago. Found all sorts of things broken

Yeah, because it wasn't ready. Pretty much no one recommended using it back them, if you thought it was ready you were either misguided or misled. It's time to put your skepticism aside and give it another try, there is a pretty good chance it's going to work great now.

Even Valve Steam OS is now adopting it. It's a pretty good sign wayland is a viable replacement for X11, while bringing it own things.

People were declaring it ready in 2016 10 years ago and talking about how people needed to switch off the working "obsolete" X and switch ASAP to the broken wayland.

It is completely counterfactual that "pretty much no one" was recommending it in 2021

Let's ignore this point of the discussion. For how long do you think users stayed on wayland back in 2016? The vast majority of users experience was... nothing because it wasn't even being shipped by 99% of distros yet, and if they cared to sought it they used it for 5 minutes until it crashed or even 0 minutes because it couldn't even display anything on their graphics card. Very few people actually experienced and tried to use wayland for real back then. Most of them were either devs or enthusiasts.

Fast forward to 2021 and most users experience with wayland was that GDM (on some distros) would try to start on wayland mode but couldn't for some reason and would fallback to X11. Note: I do think that the distros that were pushing for this were being reckless with their users. Introducing it as an opt-in would be much better and would still lower the barrier for testing. Also, KDE didn't even offer a wayland mode, taking until 2024 for it to start defaulting to it and any other wayland desktop had to be sought after by the user.

So really, I think people only started to "suffer" wayland's wonky-ness for the last three to five years depending how you view it. And honestly the last year or two has been pretty usable.

Yeah, people were definitely recommending Wayland in 2021. That's when Ubuntu made it default.

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