5 ms·

So once again freedesktop.org pushes out the new software with the promise that some day it will meet the capabilities of the current tools, honest, we pinky sw

by jff 10y ago

So once again freedesktop.org pushes out the new software with the promise that some day it will meet the capabilities of the current tools, honest, we pinky swear. They did it with systemd and they'll do it again with Wayland.

coldtea 10y ago
Yeah, ignoring those seldom-used edge cases (multiple mice, keyboards, N people using the same computer at once, etc.) all the while solving several real issues and improving common uses cases in the process... Damn those freedesktop.org people!
- mixedCase 10y ago
  Yes, we know the Gnome team (and by extension, most of Freedesktop) wants to reimplement macOS on Linux. But trust me, Miguel isn't coming back, the best course would be just going to macOS instead (or hell, Windows, he's a happy camper now, isn't he?) or do your work downstream. The rest of us just want our own systems to run as well or better for our own usecases as they currently do. Wayland is a great opportunity to rearchitect the Linux display system rather than organically grow it as X11 has over decades. But if you don't take into consideration those of us who use our Linux workstations as more than a Facebook machine with SSH preinstalled; you're just going to recreate the problem. People will start disregarding freedesktop, Wayland and so on and either stay in X or using a Wayland compositor that couldn't care less for standards and short-circuit every single convention and security protocol you have designed as long as it lets them get shit done, because at the end of the day, as beautiful as we like our code to be and our software to be architected; people want their systems to work for them.
  - copperx 10y ago
    What happened to Miguel? Did he get deported?
    - cwyers 10y ago
      He works for Microsoft, on Xamarin. And seems happy doing it. Hence the statement that he won't be working on GNOME again.
  - AsyncAwait 10y ago
    > Yes, we know the Gnome team (and by extension, most of Freedesktop) wants to reimplement macOS on Linux. Ugh, there actually are people who enjoy the GNOME desktop, so maybe don't present your personal opinion as a collective sentiment. As an owner of a MBP, I can tell you that I prefer GNOME in speed, workflow, look, customizability - you name it. In what way exactly is GNOME like macOS in your opinion?
  - stinkytaco 10y ago
    > The rest of us just want our own systems to run as well or better for our own usecases as they currently do. Well, speak for yourself. Which seems to be the loudest voices in these debates, people speaking for themselves. Wayland solves real, systemic issues in windowing, most notably around security, that need to be solved. It also allows outsourcing of many of X's most unwieldy features to the clients (IPC, rendering, and networking). In many ways, Wayland is closer to the Unix philosophy of one program/one task than X while also being safer to use. And, it's not like you need to drop X, just like you don't need to drop init. The beauty is that you can continue to use and maintain whichever you feel are the best tools. > People will start disregarding freedesktop, Wayland and so on and either stay in X or using a Wayland compositor that couldn't care less for standards... I feel like the same things were said about systemd a few years ago and here we are, every major distribution uses it out of the box. And every windowing system and graphical toolkit supports Wayland, long before Wayland was a default. Though I'm not an expert in graphical compositing and rendering, I can't imagine this is by accident. Numerous projects must feel the technical advantages of Wayland outweigh the disadvantages of change.
    - mixedCase 10y ago
      >Wayland solves real, systemic issues in windowing, most notably around security, that need to be solved. It also allows outsourcing of many of X's most unwieldy features to the clients (IPC, rendering, and networking). In many ways, Wayland is closer to the Unix philosophy of one program/one task than X while also being safer to use. That's exactly my sentiment and I brought it up in the comment. The problem is designing these protocols without regard for how the thing you're replacing is being used. That's only going to result on a pile of hacks. It's just baffling how short-sighted some of the Wayland devs are when the project was born precisely because of these hacks accumulating in X. > And, it's not like you need to drop X, just like you don't need to drop init. The beauty is that you can continue to use and maintain whichever you feel are the best tools. Oh yes, because obviously everyone wants to maintain 10 different code paths so it's not like Red Hat is pushing their software with their influence over the ecosystem oh no no. But enjoy maintaining those shims, we sure as hell don't care about standards! Gotta move fast, break things and compatibility is for losers. >I feel like the same things were said about systemd a few years ago and here we are, every major distribution uses it out of the box. And it's just been dandy isn't it? We still don't have stable interfaces between its parts (yet they still have the gall to say that systemd isn't monolithic), good effin luck debugging it when it shits the bed... list is long, but pick your poison: http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_systemd http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_... Negative points will be awarded on "works for me". > And every windowing system and graphical toolkit supports Wayland, long before Wayland was a default. Though I'm not an expert in graphical compositing and rendering, I can't imagine this is by accident. Numerous projects must feel the technical advantages of Wayland outweigh the disadvantages of change. The premise is great, what's not to love about it. The problem is execution. Because of Wayland's model, a lot of applications relying on X's nature are left out in the dirt. Standards are the way to solve this, and some work is being done about this, but the comment I replied on by coldtea simply shat on all this with a message akin to "Don't stop the momentum, you're a minority FUCK YOU we don't care about you get on board or get ran over". This is what I was criticizing. We need standardization. Ideally we have a single solution that improves on the status quo and we call it a day; but where there's disagreement let's find our middle ground and standardize it. If you don't need 4 mice and 4 keyboards working simultaneously great! But what you find useless and nonsensical can be the greatest fun ever in a 4-player co-op session of Serious Sam 3 for groups of friends around the world; or just as well prove to be one of the most productive formats for groups of people working together in a local application.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  improving common uses cases in the process The whole reason people switch to Linux in the first place is for uncommon use cases.
  - AsyncAwait 10y ago
    Really? So nobody's using Linux as a traditional desktop because they like it better than what Microsoft and Apple have to offer, do they? Well, I beg to differ.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >The whole reason people switch to Linux in the first place is for uncommon use cases. On the server, that's not true. People use Linux for the most commonplace use cases (e.g. the LAMP stack) as well. On the desktop, that's what needs to change, and has been promised to change since 1999 ("next year will be the year of the Linux desktop" which has been endlessly repeated was not about some outliers using it for "uncommon" use cases, but about mass adoption). But the whole critique is wrong too. When I said about "improving common uses cases" to the detriment of "uncommon uses cases" the former wasn't referring to features different people use. The people who use those "uncommon use cases" ALSO suffered from the crappy implementations and shortcomings of the common use cases like everybody else.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      On the server Linux was basically carried in by LAMP, as it allowed people to spin up websites at only the cost of the hardware (or rent on server space). Never mind that this as the dot-com bust, and thus there was a whole lot of cheap capacity to be had (kinda reminds one of the microcomputer getting a boost from excess capacity of CPUs thanks to the moon race). On the desktop Linux have a twofold problem. No prominent presence in stores (observe that Android, being a Linux derivative, have a massive presence, and the rise of ChromeOS) and a lack of commitment to API stability from the major lib devs (again contrast Android, where you have versioned APIs going back to the early days).
- stonogo 10y ago
  We live in a world of touchscreen laptops, and you consider 'multiple mice' to be an edge case? Interesting.
  - the_why_of_y 10y ago
    The edge case isn't multiple mice, it's multiple mice controlling multiple pointers in multiple sessions.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    I'm not sure I following the reasoning process (or lack thereof) used to make this association. First, just because something is common (multitouch laptops), doesn't mean something similar is equally common (multiple mice). Second, those multiple mice weren't used for a person controlling multiple pointers at the same time, but for multiple people using the same computer in different window sessions. So not like multi-touch at all. Third, even if multiple mice used at the same time by the same person was what we were talking about, it doesn't follow at all that it would be as convenient and approachable as multi-touch to have it be something more of an edge case.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
AsyncAwait 10y ago
> So once again freedesktop.org pushes out the new software with the promise that some day it will meet the capabilities of the current tools You can use Xorg as you always did, Wayland is fully optional. > They did it with systemd What part of hacky, inconsistent, non-dynamic and hard to maintain InitV shell scrips do you actually miss in systemd? Or do you just hate it because it's cool, like it was with PulseAudio?
- Shorel 10y ago
  The alternative to systemd was not the old init-v, but upstart.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Not just: http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Init http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Init
    - Shorel 10y ago
      Upstart was being pushed by Ubuntu. Systemd was being pushed by RedHat. The others where just files in some server, used by almost nobody. Ohh, and in some cases even the files have been lost: http://git.einit.org/ http://git.einit.org/
- digi_owl 10y ago
  > You can use Xorg as you always did, Wayland is fully optional. For now...
agumonkey 10y ago
Wayland allows for sane graphical rendering pipeline. It's missing in X. A tiny raspberry pi becomes silk smooth by switching to wayland. I don't dismiss your points at all, just showing wayland is not a subset of X.
- qbrass 10y ago
  Wayland has been around for 4 years, When X was 4 years old, it ran on hardware with 5mhz processors and a few MB RAM.

by jff 10y ago

coldtea 10y ago

Yeah, ignoring those seldom-used edge cases (multiple mice, keyboards, N people using the same computer at once, etc.) all the while solving several real issues and improving common uses cases in the process... Damn those freedesktop.org people!

mixedCase 10y ago
Yes, we know the Gnome team (and by extension, most of Freedesktop) wants to reimplement macOS on Linux. But trust me, Miguel isn't coming back, the best course would be just going to macOS instead (or hell, Windows, he's a happy camper now, isn't he?) or do your work downstream. The rest of us just want our own systems to run as well or better for our own usecases as they currently do. Wayland is a great opportunity to rearchitect the Linux display system rather than organically grow it as X11 has over decades. But if you don't take into consideration those of us who use our Linux workstations as more than a Facebook machine with SSH preinstalled; you're just going to recreate the problem. People will start disregarding freedesktop, Wayland and so on and either stay in X or using a Wayland compositor that couldn't care less for standards and short-circuit every single convention and security protocol you have designed as long as it lets them get shit done, because at the end of the day, as beautiful as we like our code to be and our software to be architected; people want their systems to work for them.
- copperx 10y ago
  What happened to Miguel? Did he get deported?
  - cwyers 10y ago
    He works for Microsoft, on Xamarin. And seems happy doing it. Hence the statement that he won't be working on GNOME again.
- AsyncAwait 10y ago
  > Yes, we know the Gnome team (and by extension, most of Freedesktop) wants to reimplement macOS on Linux. Ugh, there actually are people who enjoy the GNOME desktop, so maybe don't present your personal opinion as a collective sentiment. As an owner of a MBP, I can tell you that I prefer GNOME in speed, workflow, look, customizability - you name it. In what way exactly is GNOME like macOS in your opinion?
- stinkytaco 10y ago
  > The rest of us just want our own systems to run as well or better for our own usecases as they currently do. Well, speak for yourself. Which seems to be the loudest voices in these debates, people speaking for themselves. Wayland solves real, systemic issues in windowing, most notably around security, that need to be solved. It also allows outsourcing of many of X's most unwieldy features to the clients (IPC, rendering, and networking). In many ways, Wayland is closer to the Unix philosophy of one program/one task than X while also being safer to use. And, it's not like you need to drop X, just like you don't need to drop init. The beauty is that you can continue to use and maintain whichever you feel are the best tools. > People will start disregarding freedesktop, Wayland and so on and either stay in X or using a Wayland compositor that couldn't care less for standards... I feel like the same things were said about systemd a few years ago and here we are, every major distribution uses it out of the box. And every windowing system and graphical toolkit supports Wayland, long before Wayland was a default. Though I'm not an expert in graphical compositing and rendering, I can't imagine this is by accident. Numerous projects must feel the technical advantages of Wayland outweigh the disadvantages of change.
  - mixedCase 10y ago
    >Wayland solves real, systemic issues in windowing, most notably around security, that need to be solved. It also allows outsourcing of many of X's most unwieldy features to the clients (IPC, rendering, and networking). In many ways, Wayland is closer to the Unix philosophy of one program/one task than X while also being safer to use. That's exactly my sentiment and I brought it up in the comment. The problem is designing these protocols without regard for how the thing you're replacing is being used. That's only going to result on a pile of hacks. It's just baffling how short-sighted some of the Wayland devs are when the project was born precisely because of these hacks accumulating in X. > And, it's not like you need to drop X, just like you don't need to drop init. The beauty is that you can continue to use and maintain whichever you feel are the best tools. Oh yes, because obviously everyone wants to maintain 10 different code paths so it's not like Red Hat is pushing their software with their influence over the ecosystem oh no no. But enjoy maintaining those shims, we sure as hell don't care about standards! Gotta move fast, break things and compatibility is for losers. >I feel like the same things were said about systemd a few years ago and here we are, every major distribution uses it out of the box. And it's just been dandy isn't it? We still don't have stable interfaces between its parts (yet they still have the gall to say that systemd isn't monolithic), good effin luck debugging it when it shits the bed... list is long, but pick your poison: http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_systemd http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_... Negative points will be awarded on "works for me". > And every windowing system and graphical toolkit supports Wayland, long before Wayland was a default. Though I'm not an expert in graphical compositing and rendering, I can't imagine this is by accident. Numerous projects must feel the technical advantages of Wayland outweigh the disadvantages of change. The premise is great, what's not to love about it. The problem is execution. Because of Wayland's model, a lot of applications relying on X's nature are left out in the dirt. Standards are the way to solve this, and some work is being done about this, but the comment I replied on by coldtea simply shat on all this with a message akin to "Don't stop the momentum, you're a minority FUCK YOU we don't care about you get on board or get ran over". This is what I was criticizing. We need standardization. Ideally we have a single solution that improves on the status quo and we call it a day; but where there's disagreement let's find our middle ground and standardize it. If you don't need 4 mice and 4 keyboards working simultaneously great! But what you find useless and nonsensical can be the greatest fun ever in a 4-player co-op session of Serious Sam 3 for groups of friends around the world; or just as well prove to be one of the most productive formats for groups of people working together in a local application.
nitrogen 10y ago
improving common uses cases in the process The whole reason people switch to Linux in the first place is for uncommon use cases.
- AsyncAwait 10y ago
  Really? So nobody's using Linux as a traditional desktop because they like it better than what Microsoft and Apple have to offer, do they? Well, I beg to differ.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >The whole reason people switch to Linux in the first place is for uncommon use cases. On the server, that's not true. People use Linux for the most commonplace use cases (e.g. the LAMP stack) as well. On the desktop, that's what needs to change, and has been promised to change since 1999 ("next year will be the year of the Linux desktop" which has been endlessly repeated was not about some outliers using it for "uncommon" use cases, but about mass adoption). But the whole critique is wrong too. When I said about "improving common uses cases" to the detriment of "uncommon uses cases" the former wasn't referring to features different people use. The people who use those "uncommon use cases" ALSO suffered from the crappy implementations and shortcomings of the common use cases like everybody else.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    On the server Linux was basically carried in by LAMP, as it allowed people to spin up websites at only the cost of the hardware (or rent on server space). Never mind that this as the dot-com bust, and thus there was a whole lot of cheap capacity to be had (kinda reminds one of the microcomputer getting a boost from excess capacity of CPUs thanks to the moon race). On the desktop Linux have a twofold problem. No prominent presence in stores (observe that Android, being a Linux derivative, have a massive presence, and the rise of ChromeOS) and a lack of commitment to API stability from the major lib devs (again contrast Android, where you have versioned APIs going back to the early days).
stonogo 10y ago
We live in a world of touchscreen laptops, and you consider 'multiple mice' to be an edge case? Interesting.
- the_why_of_y 10y ago
  The edge case isn't multiple mice, it's multiple mice controlling multiple pointers in multiple sessions.
- coldtea 10y ago
  I'm not sure I following the reasoning process (or lack thereof) used to make this association. First, just because something is common (multitouch laptops), doesn't mean something similar is equally common (multiple mice). Second, those multiple mice weren't used for a person controlling multiple pointers at the same time, but for multiple people using the same computer in different window sessions. So not like multi-touch at all. Third, even if multiple mice used at the same time by the same person was what we were talking about, it doesn't follow at all that it would be as convenient and approachable as multi-touch to have it be something more of an edge case.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

AsyncAwait 10y ago

> So once again freedesktop.org pushes out the new software with the promise that some day it will meet the capabilities of the current tools You can use Xorg as you always did, Wayland is fully optional. > They did it with systemd What part of hacky, inconsistent, non-dynamic and hard to maintain InitV shell scrips do you actually miss in systemd? Or do you just hate it because it's cool, like it was with PulseAudio?

Shorel 10y ago
The alternative to systemd was not the old init-v, but upstart.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Not just: http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Init http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Init
  - Shorel 10y ago
    Upstart was being pushed by Ubuntu. Systemd was being pushed by RedHat. The others where just files in some server, used by almost nobody. Ohh, and in some cases even the files have been lost: http://git.einit.org/ http://git.einit.org/
digi_owl 10y ago
> You can use Xorg as you always did, Wayland is fully optional. For now...

agumonkey 10y ago

Wayland allows for sane graphical rendering pipeline. It's missing in X. A tiny raspberry pi becomes silk smooth by switching to wayland. I don't dismiss your points at all, just showing wayland is not a subset of X.

qbrass 10y ago
Wayland has been around for 4 years, When X was 4 years old, it ran on hardware with 5mhz processors and a few MB RAM.