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> Wayland is the new hotness on the Linux graphics stack Use wayland (with gnome) everyday myself but wanted to point out that wayland started almost 10 years

> Wayland is the new hotness on the Linux graphics stack Use wayland (with gnome) everyday myself but wanted to point out that wayland started almost 10 years ago :) The adoption has taken forever though partly because of the infinite legacy of X11 and lack of support from big players like nvidia.

shmerl 9y ago
Not just that. It took major DEs a very long time to get to some level of readiness with Wayland (KDE is just getting to it). And some major applications aren't event close yet. Firefox seems to be in progress for years, and Wine didn't even start moving to Wayland, because of various difficulties.
- bitwize 9y ago
  One of the reasons why Wine worked in the first place is because GDI primitives map nicely to X11 drawing primitives. Wayland developers made the Yao Ming "bitch please" face and told us "no one uses those dusty old primitives anymore! Here, have a bare framebuffer and render everything yourself!"
  - juliangoldsmith 9y ago
    Or they could just use Cairo, which will do that for them.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    Yeah, that's what I've heard, that one of the hard parts was mapping positioning of windows.
    - makomk 9y ago
      I think that's less "hard" and more "impossible by design" - that is, Wayland intentionally doesn't give applications any way to know or control the absolute positions of their windows, and of course Windows applications expect this.
      - shmerl 9y ago
        They can use a virtual desktop sized as screen itself, and position windows that way.
lmm 9y ago
Adoption has taken forever mostly because it's a solution in search of a problem, at least in terms of how it's been sold to users. The main user-visible difference is "lose the ability to run remote programs on your local display" - you can understand why users aren't lining up for that.
- _pmf_ 9y ago
  The classic tragedy of Linux-on-the-Desktop: trying to gain traction by removing perceived "warts", all the while alienating user and developer communities alike. Result: more cluttered landscape that is even less of a target platform for desktop software.
  - pdkl95 9y ago
    > removing perceived "warts" Unfortunately a lot of people look at large projects full of difficult to understand, ugly, inelegant code and see a pile of spaghetti and warts that is hard to maintain. In many cases - especially mature projects that are widely used - the warts and inelegance are bugfixes, the piles of spaghetti are the compromises needed in complex interdependent systems and the workarounds/patches that handle the messy problems of real life. As Joel Spolsky famously explained[1], a lot of those "warts" are the most valuable part of the software. They represent an incredible amount of programmer time and effort. Throwing them out and starting over sounds nice because the clean, elegant replacement is solving a far simpler problem. The replacement is usually missing features and bugfixes. When you finally update the new version to be an actual full-featured, bug tested and fixed replacement, you've probably re-added most of the messy "warts". [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
    - rubber_duck 9y ago
      A lot of warts in software come from legacy constraints - both I'm terms of backcompat, and HW/design constraints that are laughably irrelevant - throwing out warts and starting simpler is how you got ZFS for eg.
orbifold 9y ago
Or maybe X11 is actually useful to many people... I regularly run expensive commercial software remotely on a beefy server and access the GUI locally via X forwarding. I suspect among professional desktop use of Linux (besides software development) this a fairly common scenario.
- josteink 9y ago
  You can still have X-forwarding (by running a Xwayland server) while having all the benefits of Wayland for all the other desktop apps you run.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    And at that point he may as well get a Windows box and use Putty...
    - type0 9y ago
      And at that point better advise would be to use DOS
  - qb45 9y ago
    Only for now, only X applications. If they end up migrated to Wayland this will be gone.
- qb45 9y ago
  Does anybody know what happened to "Wayland Over Wire" which was supposed to solve this?
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    It was never more than one guy's idle experiment.
    - bluejekyll 9y ago
      I think that's how all software starts. Well, replace "one guy" with "someone".
sametmax 9y ago
It's a complicated software in a complicated world. It takes time.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  I have to agreee with you. How many look at the current situation and compare to a realistic best case? If wayland were adopted as fast possible without breaking a bunch of things for people how long would it take? Much longer than it is now, or just slightly longer? Even if every body wanted could we have gotten this done in 5 years without breaking a ton of stuff?

shmerl 9y ago

Not just that. It took major DEs a very long time to get to some level of readiness with Wayland (KDE is just getting to it). And some major applications aren't event close yet. Firefox seems to be in progress for years, and Wine didn't even start moving to Wayland, because of various difficulties.

bitwize 9y ago
One of the reasons why Wine worked in the first place is because GDI primitives map nicely to X11 drawing primitives. Wayland developers made the Yao Ming "bitch please" face and told us "no one uses those dusty old primitives anymore! Here, have a bare framebuffer and render everything yourself!"
- juliangoldsmith 9y ago
  Or they could just use Cairo, which will do that for them.
- shmerl 9y ago
  Yeah, that's what I've heard, that one of the hard parts was mapping positioning of windows.
  - makomk 9y ago
    I think that's less "hard" and more "impossible by design" - that is, Wayland intentionally doesn't give applications any way to know or control the absolute positions of their windows, and of course Windows applications expect this.
    - shmerl 9y ago
      They can use a virtual desktop sized as screen itself, and position windows that way.

lmm 9y ago

Adoption has taken forever mostly because it's a solution in search of a problem, at least in terms of how it's been sold to users. The main user-visible difference is "lose the ability to run remote programs on your local display" - you can understand why users aren't lining up for that.

_pmf_ 9y ago
The classic tragedy of Linux-on-the-Desktop: trying to gain traction by removing perceived "warts", all the while alienating user and developer communities alike. Result: more cluttered landscape that is even less of a target platform for desktop software.
- pdkl95 9y ago
  > removing perceived "warts" Unfortunately a lot of people look at large projects full of difficult to understand, ugly, inelegant code and see a pile of spaghetti and warts that is hard to maintain. In many cases - especially mature projects that are widely used - the warts and inelegance are bugfixes, the piles of spaghetti are the compromises needed in complex interdependent systems and the workarounds/patches that handle the messy problems of real life. As Joel Spolsky famously explained[1], a lot of those "warts" are the most valuable part of the software. They represent an incredible amount of programmer time and effort. Throwing them out and starting over sounds nice because the clean, elegant replacement is solving a far simpler problem. The replacement is usually missing features and bugfixes. When you finally update the new version to be an actual full-featured, bug tested and fixed replacement, you've probably re-added most of the messy "warts". [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
  - rubber_duck 9y ago
    A lot of warts in software come from legacy constraints - both I'm terms of backcompat, and HW/design constraints that are laughably irrelevant - throwing out warts and starting simpler is how you got ZFS for eg.

orbifold 9y ago

Or maybe X11 is actually useful to many people... I regularly run expensive commercial software remotely on a beefy server and access the GUI locally via X forwarding. I suspect among professional desktop use of Linux (besides software development) this a fairly common scenario.

josteink 9y ago
You can still have X-forwarding (by running a Xwayland server) while having all the benefits of Wayland for all the other desktop apps you run.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  And at that point he may as well get a Windows box and use Putty...
  - type0 9y ago
    And at that point better advise would be to use DOS
- qb45 9y ago
  Only for now, only X applications. If they end up migrated to Wayland this will be gone.
qb45 9y ago
Does anybody know what happened to "Wayland Over Wire" which was supposed to solve this?
- digi_owl 9y ago
  It was never more than one guy's idle experiment.
  - bluejekyll 9y ago
    I think that's how all software starts. Well, replace "one guy" with "someone".

sametmax 9y ago

It's a complicated software in a complicated world. It takes time.

sqeaky 9y ago
I have to agreee with you. How many look at the current situation and compare to a realistic best case? If wayland were adopted as fast possible without breaking a bunch of things for people how long would it take? Much longer than it is now, or just slightly longer? Even if every body wanted could we have gotten this done in 5 years without breaking a ton of stuff?