5 ms·
I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt and say this article is designed to be from the point of view of the user and to imply that you simply shouldn't get
by Latty 10y ago
I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt and say this article is designed to be from the point of view of the user and to imply that you simply shouldn't get carried away with new systems, because they don't provide inherant value.
However, the author doesn't write that clearly (except maybe right at the end), and instead comes across as "I don't get the value of this, so I'm going to claim it has none." PulseAudio gave me a ton - individual volument control for aplications, routing different devices to different applications easily, routing audio over a network, etc... Likewise, most of the examples provide some value. Everyone just has hatred for it because Ubuntu rolled it out too early when it was still not very stable, and people still remember it as this buggy problematic thing, even though it's been rock-solid for years, in my experience.
The Firefox example is the most stupid - they are moving to a shared standard with other browers precicely to get away from the issue of every browser having their own standard.
To me, this just reads as another "Wah, things are changing and I want everything to stay the same". Suck it up. Yes, often developers make or use new things just because we like learning and exploring. That doesn't mean new things can't do something it would be excessively hard to do in the old thing. It's about weighing up the cost/reward.
Again, I'm probably being too hard on the article - it does kind of make this point at the end, but in my opinion ends up making the point of "fear new!" instead of the more nuanced point of "address the cost to your user of using something new before using it" that I think it's actually trying to make.
- pzone 10y agoYou're not being too hard on the article. The hatred for Wayland is especially pointless. The author claims that Wayland "has nothing to do with the vast industry out there" because servers don't run graphically, completely ignorant of the embedded Linux market (where the "monitor + keyboard + mouse" X paradigm is most broken) and other major driving forces behind Wayland. Yes modern software libraries are inconvenient because they change a lot and constantly break. But that's not a new thing, it's been a problem as long as software libraries have existed.
- cyberpunk 10y agoOff topic but I'm really not sure what wayland is supposed to give me that I don't already have? Do you have some insights here? Personally, my Linux laptop is finally rock solid graphically after a decade of pain and the idea of replacing a stack that took so long to mature is unappealing to me in the extreme.
- Latty 10y agoFrom what I gather (and I'm no expert) the value of Wayland is that it is a model that matches what we are actually doing with our systems now. X is a giant system that we abuse a tiny portion of to use in a way no one planned for it to get used - X was designed when the assumption was that you'd be a thin client on the end of a mainframe, which clearly doesn't map well to modern usage. X, for example, allows any window to look at the contents of other windows. Useful for you screenshot program, security flaw for most applications. Backwards compatibility has obvious benefits, but at the same time, there comes a point at which you are dragging around so much cruft no one is really using any more it's better to throw it away. The author seems to think X isn't beyond that line (or, as the article paints it - anything he uses is), but from what I've seen, Wayland seems like a smart idea. Also, there is a compatability layer which means that most things should just work (except, as hinted at above, things like screenshot applications, which is an intentional break as that should require more privilages).
- cyberpunk 10y agoWell, I still don't get it... How I'm using my system now works perfectly, finally, and I'm sure I probably fit into the 'modern usage' bracket (hidpi, multiple monitors, USB-c projectors etc)... That security improvement would be good, surely we can add this to X though? Adding that bit of security isn't enough to sell me on replacing such an entrenched bit of our daily lives -- for me at least.. We are stable and it's pretty and fast enough. Progress is always good, but it has to bring something to the table other than a transparent replacement of what we already have with new code. How many million hours has X run this month? I sound so uncool to myself here, I really like shiny new tech but fucking with something so important for reasons that no one really seems to agree on seems like a bad move to me. Maybe someone else has some justification for is that we're missing and can enlighten us?