34 ms·

Red Hat Expecting X.org to “Go into Hard Maintenance Mode Fairly Quickly”

302 points by qalmakka 7y ago

hamilyon2 7y ago
This is big news, no?
- Jasper_ 7y ago
  It's more an admission of the current state of things. Adam Jackson, the previous release manager, stepped down, decided to switch gears to doing other graphics-related stuff, and nobody has volunteered to make a new X server release. xorg-devel has always been a relatively slow mailing list, and very little new R&D has been done on the X server for the past 5 years or so. Latest I can think of is the DRM lease work, which is still ongoing.
  - klodolph 7y ago
    Just to add some context: DRM = direct rendering manager, not digital rights management.
  - ddalex 7y ago
    If it's working, why break it by adding new stuff? I'm very fond of old software that has been battle tested, rather than jumping on the bandwagon of the newest thing which is invariably rough around the edges. Just look at the terminal latency of Wayland default compositor vs X, or 3D performance with NVIDIA, or weird configuration - it doesn't work as good as the old thing
    - floatboth 7y ago
      Because if "working" was the only thing people ever wanted, we would be using Windows 95 or something. People want "not crap", and everything related to X11/Xorg is a gigantic pile of crap. > terminal latency of Wayland default compositor vs X I'm not sure what you mean by "default compositor" — Weston? — and what's "X" — Xorg without any compositor, with the Windows 95-esque situation of everything drawing into one buffer? Yeah, you can decrease latency by a tiny bit by not compositing at all, but the result is totally unacceptable visually. People generally don't want to look at Windows 95 anymore.
      - sprash 7y ago
        Your priorities are wrong. Latency is the most important metric for doing actual work. This means that the windowing system should allow clients to blurt out pixels whenever they want no matter where the current scanline is positioned. Apparently there are patches on the way [1] that try to mitigate the severe design flaws of wayland in that regard. If wayland will ever reach X11-like performance remains to be seen. Right now this is not the case. [1]: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/commit/?id=df2095fa35fe84e4ebc30754dd9f25e50bd1aa47 https://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/commit/?id=df209...
        Jasper_ 7y ago
        Partial update is not an improvement for latency in the way you're thinking about it. It's mostly an optimization for tillers so they don't have to rerender some parts. You seem to broadly misunderstand several parts of the modern display architecture -- the goal you insist any sane window system should provide hasn't been provided by any, including the X Window System.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - Crinus 7y ago
        > but the result is totally unacceptable visually It is perfectly acceptable to me. And this is the issue with Wayland vs X11 when it comes to compositing: Wayland forces it down your throat, either you like it or not, whereas X11 enables it but doesn't mandate it so if you dislike it you just don't use it. (though this isn't the only problem Wayland has... and FWIW Windows 95 is in many fronts superior to any desktop you can find on Linux)
        bitwize 7y ago
        > It is perfectly acceptable to me. Most users want a UI from $CURRENT_YEAR, not one that makes them think of Spice Girls songs and AOL Instant Messenger. > Wayland forces it down your throat, either you like it or not, whereas X11 enables it but doesn't mandate it so if you dislike it you just don't use it. X11 is architecturally ill suited to a compositing environment. Inasmuch as compositing solutions exist, they are janky hacks that introduce more processes, more context switches on the hot path, and more latency than Wayland, which was based on $CURRENT_DECADE graphical principles from the ground up. Sometimes you can't square the circle and engineer a general solution. Sometimes you have to engineer for the common case only. For desktop usage, the common case is "user who is used to Windows or macOS and does not want to regress backward in terms of UI". For such users, a noncomposited Windows 9x-like desktop is unacceptable. A broken, laggy, hard-to-maintain pile of hacks is also unacceptable. Wayland solves both those problems, which is why virtually ALL of the hackers working on the Linux graphics stack have jumped ship from X to Wayland. Like it or not, you will eventually be using Wayland too.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    x.org has always been that way. Slow, hard to get started developing, and not really "sexy". it is critical infrastructure, but nobody wants to maintain it. Wayland was at least started by people frustrated with the real problems in X. (unlike most other replace X projects I've seen over the last 20 years where were someone who had no idea what is really wrong proposing a solution that didn't solve the real problems.
    - dralley 7y ago
      >Wayland was at least started by people frustrated with the real problems in X Many of whom, it's worth pointing out, are themselves the core Xorg developers who don't want to be stuck maintaining Xorg forever.
  - flomo 7y ago
    I think its been a long, long time coming. X11 was effectively left in "hard maintenance mode" in the early 1990s when the Unix vendors abandoned the workstation market. Since then every new system based on *nix has used some other display manager, while Linux desktops used X11 mainly for legacy reasons. At some point 10-15 years ago, Linux vendors (Redhat) revived X.org. But something better has wanted for a long time. "X11 is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces" as the old unix hater book said decades ago.
- kgwxd 7y ago
  It feels like it to me, but my understanding of how things work in this area is pretty limited. I've been using Xubuntu for a long time now, does it currently depend heavily on X.org? I'm having a hard time figuring that out searching the past 20 minutes.
  - miloignis 7y ago
    I believe so - Xubuntu is based on XFCE, which is an X based environment. I've seen some mutterings that they may eventually write a Wayland backend, but I don't think that it's in the near future
  - hjek 7y ago
    Once XFCE is ported to GTK3, it should be Wayland-compatible, but for now Xubuntu still depends on X.
  - gnode 7y ago
    Yes, but an effort to port XFCE to GTK 3 is underway. My understanding is that this will bring Wayland support.
    - gnomewascool 7y ago
      Porting XFCE applications (Thunar etc.) to GTK3 indeed gives automatic (or near-automatic) Wayland support. This means that XFCE applications will run natively (without XWayland) in Wayland compositors (such as sway, GNOME or KDE). However, xfwm (the window manager) will also need to be ported to Wayland — i.e. become a Wayland compositor — which will probably be a more complicated undertaking, as "xfwm-wayland will need to fulfil the role of both X and the window manager. (Yes, using libraries like wlroots or libmir, will make this not completely impossible, but it will still be non-trivial.) Plausibly, XFCE might join forces and use the same Wayland compositor as, say, LXQt or Mate.
    - maggotbrain 7y ago
      The Xfce port to GTK 3 is almost complete. Xfce 4.14 should be released sometime in August this year if all goes well. https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap#roadmapplanned_features https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap#roadmapplanned_fea...
nisa 7y ago
Sad. It's probably unpopular but wayland is not ready yet IMHO and lacking on a conceptual level. Yet another few years/months until most bugs are fixed and more broken functionality...
- jchw 7y ago
  Wayland is literally never going to be ready unless it’s forced to be. How long has Nvidia promised to support it now, and still unless you’re using Nouveau it’s basically not usable on Nvidia cards.
  - eropple 7y ago
    Is that still the case? I'm running FC29 with the nVidia closed-source drivers and I haven't had issues. (I have had issues on a laptop with switchable graphics, though, and Nouveau was the solution there.)
    - jchw 7y ago
      Is this new? Last time I tried, Nvidia on Wayland had performance issues and did not support Optimus at all (Edit: after rereading what you said I am guessing that is still an issue.) If it is working though I retract what I said, though it’s absurd how long it took to happen.
      - saltcured 7y ago
        Even without wayland, in recent Fedora releases (I forget if it started with 28 or 29), I've found optimus switchable graphics to be impossible or at least impractical to configure. What's become easier is having the entire X display use the nvidia gpu, with the intel gpu transparently slaved to relay pixels to its connected laptop display. But, it does return the annoying, periodic driver breakage, where a dnf update replaces the xorg-x11-drv-nvidia RPMs and suddenly the userspace is incompatible with the still-running kernel module's slightly older API, so new processes cannot use opengl until I reboot. This was one benefit of optimus via the optirun infrastructure. The main desktop was on the intel gpu and I could actually unload and upgrade the nvidia module if desired, without forcing a disruptive reboot.
frabbit 7y ago
So Raspbian will be the only viable option on the new Raspberry Pi 4 due to the lack of Wayland for the VideoCore 6?
- hamilyon2 7y ago
  I would like to know what is the plan for raspberry pi.
- floatboth 7y ago
  > lack of Wayland for the VideoCore 6 What? Even VideoCore 4 with the Mesa vc4 driver supports Wayland — since it's Mesa, of course it implements GBM and whatnot. I've used Weston on an RPi3 with Arch Linux ARM. For VideoCore 5/6, IIUC the only driver is Mesa v3d, even better situation, of course everything should work, and it will always work since no proprietary crap driver would ever get into people's hands.
afitnerd 7y ago
Nvidia's lack of support for Wayland really hurts linux desktop adoption. It's especially bad new if there's no more x.org support
- mspnp 7y ago
  Linux on the desktop would be a reality already if Linux had a stable driver API.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Linux on the desktop would be a reality already if Linux had a stable driver API. Linux on the desktop (and other consumer devices) is a reality, via Android and ChromeOS. What's not a reality is consumer use of the userspace tools and desktop environments lots of people mentally associate with Linux, but I doubt very much that's about driver APIs.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Ah the typical pat in the back. ChromeOS and Android could be running on top of Windows kernel and userspace would hardly notice.
      - cwyers 7y ago
        And "Android's adoption shows that Linux doesn't need a stable driver ABI" is a funny position to take, given how many problems that's caused Android, to the point where Google is adding a way for vendor drivers to work across versions of Android. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes-treble-modular-base-for.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes...
      - kevingadd 7y ago
        Incidentally, the Windows Subsystem for Linux was reportedly the result of an effort to run Android userspace on top of the Windows Kernel that was at least somewhat successful, so your assertion is completely true. (https://venturebeat.com/2016/02/25/microsoft-kills-project-astoria-its-tool-for-porting-android-apps-to-windows-10/ https://venturebeat.com/2016/02/25/microsoft-kills-project-a...)
Epskampie 7y ago
I want to switch to wayland, but it’s impossible until Nvidia get their shit together on linux. I hear AMD has awesome open source drivers now, time to give them a shot!
- jammygit 7y ago
  I read that OpenCL has some compatibility issues with various libraries still, or else it would be an easier choice
  - atemerev 7y ago
    Not only that, OpenCL is a lower-level alternative to CUDA, somewhat comparable to Vulkan/OpenGL relationship. Trying to actually write something useful with OpenCL is... rough.
mspnp 7y ago
Can you even disable desktop composition in Wayland? One of the reasons I hate Windows is that I'm forced to use composition, which provides nothing to me.
- sprash 7y ago
  Wayland developers specifically prioritize the "every frame is perfect" paradigm over performance and latency. This means there will never be an option to disable things like composition or vsync. Also, even though it is always claimed that "X11 a is messy conglomerate of tacked on technologies and extensions" the Wayland protocol is extremely complex despite severely lacking features. And because of the strange priorities it has worse performance than X11 even for native apps. The self proclaimed "minimalist" wlroots library has more than 50000 LOC, all for moving around a bunch of overlapping windows? A bit much.
  - ddevault 7y ago
    The Wayland protocol is actually very simple, much simpler than X. And consider that wlroots+sway is around 100,000 LOC, but it's at least as capable as i3+xorg - which is a million lines of code.
    - ubercow13 7y ago
      Really claiming that it's at least as capable as xorg seems like a complete misrepresentation. Aren't some of the most common and enduring complaints about Wayland about missing features compared to X?
      - ddevault 7y ago
        Uninformed and mostly outdated complaints, generally. What features are left unturned are in progress and have most of the pieces in place, and their realization will not add enough lines of code to come close to Xorg.
  - floatboth 7y ago
IceWreck 7y ago
* Nvidia drivers suck on Wayland * KDE and most non-gnome based DEs don't work with Wayland Wayland is not ready for mass usage
- trax 7y ago
  Nvidia drivers suck on Linux and it's their fault. https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
- floatboth 7y ago
  huh? KDE Plasma 5 works well, GNOME and KDE are considering/merging nvidia proprietary support (fuck nvidia, btw)
  - bscphil 7y ago
    >KDE Plasma 5 works well I use Plasma, and test the Wayland compositor every couple of months. Last time I checked, many features were still missing, performance was bad, and I still got crashes occasionally. If it's really gotten into a usable state since then, that's great.
    - nwah1 7y ago
      Resume from sleep causes a black screen. Crashes do happen occassionally, where the plasma desktop will die and restart itself... this happens more frequently with the latest releases. In recent releases, with multiple panels, sometimes the kicker menu doesn't open on one of them. On multi-monitor setups, it doesn't remember the monitor positions after reboot. On the plus side, I think the copy-paste situation with XWayland is finally improved.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    Serious bugs like this make it far from working well: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387313 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387313
hedora 7y ago
Uggh. RedHat has a long history now of replacing working stuff with half baked, regressed-by-design replacements. I’d really like to have a working Unix environment, and Linux stopped being that for me years ago. More conservative alternative distros keep bit rotting due to upstream (usually RedHat induced) breakage. (SystemD, Wayland, DBUS, PulseAudio, Gnome 3, kernel API brain damage, etc) Does anyone know of any alternatives? Is there a distro/foundation that will actually support open source Unix moving forward (BSD, maybe?)
- cyphax 7y ago
  If you want the most BSD-like distro, it's probably gotta be Slackware. It changes little between releases (just newer versions of the software it ships with mostly).
  - hedora 7y ago
    I’m worried that, with core dependencies like X11 being abandoned, the writing is on the wall for the hold-out distributions (I run Devuan and OpenBSD mostly). I get that it doesn’t make business sense for RedHat to maintain parts of the open source ecosystem that will never drive consulting or support revenue, but that doesn’t change the fact that I want a computing environment that just works (including software that’s been stable for a decade, and isn’t constantly ported to the new shiny).
    - wmf 7y ago
      You want it, but you aren't willing to pay what it costs to maintain it.
      - yarrel 7y ago
        I'm willing to pay for it, but nobody is willing to sell it to me.
        toyg 7y ago
archy_ 7y ago
The Unix philosophy has been abandoned at this point. What advantages have we really gained from it? More gaping security flaws? Unnecessary centralization is pushing the old Unix admins who laid the groundwork for Linuxs success into BSDs and other alternatives, and the Linux kernel will likely rot as a result. Could we consider this moment the peak of Linux development?
- jamespo 7y ago
  Not everyone likes writing shell scripts to start services
  - nisa 7y ago
    Not everyone wants to talk dbus to configure the firewall :P
    - pas 7y ago
      I just put iptables shit into /etc/rc.local and it works, no dbus needed :)
      - nisa 7y ago
        this was just a stupid comment on firewalld
  - hedora 7y ago
    I haven’t written an init script in ten years. It is like coming home one day, and the house has been demolished. There’s a joker in a bulldozer proudly proclaiming there was some dog crap on the sidewalk, and that he took care of it for me.
    - Scramblejams 7y ago
      Solid analogy. In the case of Systemd, it was fixing problems for me that I never had, and creating problems that I'd also never had: It broke laptop sleep. It broke /etc/rc.local. It broke domainless local DNS lookups. It broke boot on one of my servers (fstab's new nofail argument? really?) And it (soft) broke a keyboard of mine. A keyboard! Astonishing. I really wish Debian had not drunk that particular kool-aid. :'( I'd go somewhere else but Debian (and by extension Ubuntu) have been doing binary package management the longest, and for me it really shows. I want these boxes to just sit there for years, be extremely low maintenance and only pick up security updates, and I've never gotten a better experience anywhere else.
OliverJones 7y ago
The X Window System has had a great run; a whole generation. And it's still going, even if it's trailing edge tech now. Thanks Bob Scheifler, Jim Gettys, and the whole crew.
pinewurst 7y ago
With the coming IBM transition, I'm expecting Red Hat itself to go into "Hard Maintenance Mode" fairly quickly. Another comment here estimates 10 years of RH support, but I'm confident that X.org will outlast RH.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  And Wayland might get completely abandoned in the process.
  - Iolaum 7y ago
    If wayland gets abandoned it will have to be re-invented. It solves real problems with X11. That doesn't mean Wayland itself doesn't have problems though. Over time they will get solved. If people or companies need them to get solved sooner I m sure Wayland devs will welcome any contributions.
    - ubercow13 7y ago
      It's not implausible, there's ready Arcan https://arcan-fe.com/ https://arcan-fe.com/
      - dmix 7y ago
        > At every step of the way, the underlying development emphasises security, performance and debugability guided by a principle of least surprise in terms of API design. I'm very happy they started that list with security, which links to a nice security overview: https://github.com/letoram/arcan/wiki/Engine-Security https://github.com/letoram/arcan/wiki/Engine-Security One of the things no one mentions is how awful security is on X.
  - SahAssar 7y ago
    Wayland is not a RH-only initiative. IIRC basically every commercially supported linux distro uses wayland by default now.
- 7y ago
tannhaeuser 7y ago
I really hope they consider that Linux' graphic stack isn't an end in itself, but a driver for running the relative wealth of graphic apps (GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, Blender, Firefox, and more) many people spent the last 30 years or so developing. Those aren't going to be rewritten from scratch into Electron-based apps or whatever, and loosing them, as well as BSD and Mac OS compat, is no option IMHO.
- _ph_ 7y ago
  Why do you think those apps would need to be rewritten and what has electron to do with that? Most of these apps already run natively on top of Wayland, as they are written using a toolkit like GTK or QT and those toolkits support Wayland. Also, there is XWayland, which implements the X protocol on top of Wayland, so any X application should continue to run. The only thing they talked about stopping development on is the standalone X server X.org. I have been using Wayland on my desktop for a while and am quite happy about it.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    Electron needs to be pushed down the stack to the bare metal, to become the window system itself. Then there will only be one instance of it running, that every other application can share, and the window manager and user interface and networking can all use standard web technologies, that everything else uses.
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      If you disagree, then tell me what X-Windows or Wayland can do that a modern web browser with bare metal drivers couldn't do much better? You've got JavaScript and WebAssembly for programming, WebGL and <canvas> and <video> and DHTML and CSS for drawing (including low latency rendering with desynchronized canvases), JSON and XML and ArrayBuffer for data representation, HTTP and WebSockets and WebRTC for networking. What is it missing? https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/05/desynchronized https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/05/desynchron... There's really no need for X-Windows or Wayland any more.
pnutjam 7y ago
Is there an NX type solution for Wayland?
- hedora 7y ago
  If there is something like NX, it was added as an afterthought (last time a Remote Desktop protocol for wayland came up, it was explicitly outside the scope of what wayland was designed to support).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ronjouch 7y ago
I wish I could move to Wayland, but I make heavy use of X-only automation tools ( https://github.com/autokey/autokey https://github.com/autokey/autokey for keyword expansion and cross-app macros, and wmctrl/xdotool for window switching using https://github.com/ronjouch/marathon https://github.com/ronjouch/marathon ) and nothing similar exists under Wayland. So far, it doesn't look like similar tools are planned, and neither GNOME nor Sway offer these features I'm looking for :-/ .
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Oh, I was going to mention Sway too, since of all the compositors I've seen it is the only one that seems to care about replicating such functionality. Is it really still that lacking on the automation front?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ndarwincorn 7y ago
  I thought Gnome shell supported wmctrl/EWMH?
  - ronjouch 7y ago
    Gnome Shell under X is totally fine with wmctrl. But not under Wayland. And I didn't know about EWMH, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Window_Manager_Hints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Window_Manager_Hints reads: "Extended Window Manager Hints, a.k.a. NetWM or Net WM,[1] is an X Window System standard for window managers. It defines various interactions between window managers, utilities, and applications, all part of an entire desktop environment. It builds on the functionality of the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual (ICCCM)." , well we come to the same conclusion: it's Xorg-only and won't fly under Wayland. Or am I missing something?
- nsajko 7y ago
  The Wayland people do not want such features. See my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011
robrtsql 7y ago
Let's hope it doesn't go into maintenance mode before this feature is released: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GLXVND-Offload-Improve-1.21 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GLXVND-O... Not sure if I understand correctly, but the absence of this is what has prevented Nvidia's proprietary drivers from supporting GPU switching without having to restart the X server session.
shmerl 7y ago
Still waiting for KWin to become functional on Wayland. Some serious bugs prevent it. And where is RedHat rushing exactly? Something like adaptive sync doesn't even work with Wayland compositors yet. So good luck using your fancy adaptive sync high refresh monitor with games in Wayland session.
peterwwillis 7y ago
After 18 years struggling with the Linux desktop, I switched to Windows for my GUI needs. Everything just works, if somewhat slowly. My "working environment" is a Linux VM. If I need to run a graphical app from the VM, there are plenty of rootless X servers for Windows, plus Windows 10 has workspaces. I get the best of both worlds: real vendor support for hardware, and the best software for getting work done (windows business software, Linux coding software). Honestly, this feels like the future to me, and I hope M$ is working towards this being a normalized hybrid platform.
- pkulak 7y ago
  The new Windows Subsystem for Linux looks legit. Is that what you're using, or are you spinning up your own VM?
  - peterwwillis 7y ago
    Some things don't work well with WSL right now (stares at Docker intensely) so it's a Vagrant VM w/Ubuntu.
    - nailer 7y ago
      Doesn't Docker use WSL2 now officially?
      - joaobeno 7y ago
        I tried it on the weekend, and it indeed work...
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        I wouldn't use "now" for preview builds, but more or less yes.
quotemstr 7y ago
RIP, X11. You had the correct architecture. I still believe that the goals of Wayland would have been better achieved as a collection of X extensions than as an entirely new system that's lost many of the capabilities of X, including network transparency, input configuration, and window manager decoupling. Wayland is great if you want to build a Windows clone that works exactly the way Red Hat wants it to work --- but it represents a decline from the Unix ideal of configurability, experimentation, and simplicity.
- frou_dh 7y ago
  Ken Thompson himself is on record bashing X Windows, so that's a strike against its ideal Unix status
  - nsajko 7y ago
    Everybody who knows it hates X Windows, but that does not mean Wayland is better, or even that it is a possible replacement for X Windows.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      The sad reality is that as bad as X is, Wayland is too much of a half-baked replacement to say that it is definitely better. Case in point: it's about 10 years old now and people still say it isn't ready yet!
quotemstr 7y ago
Meanwhile, Windows has become an acceptable Unix. (I'm not trolling.) I don't want to admit this, but I've been wondering whether, over the long term, FOSS stuff really can't match the quality of a sustained commercial endeavor.
- rbanffy 7y ago
  Working on updates 30% complete Don't turn off your computer
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    I just saw our Macs on the office do the same thing.
    - bad_user 7y ago
      Does it do that automatically, closing apps doing stuff? (I have a Mac, it never did) One trick sysadmins did on Windows was to keep Notepad with an unsaved file running, because it was able to interrupt the forced system restart.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        I am mostly on Windows, but in both cases those updates get actually forced on all machines by IT remote management tooling.
        bad_user 7y ago
        We don't have "IT remote management tooling". I would be surprised if it happened for Macs, since it's one of those things that can lead to work being lost and it's incredibly stupid. Also the situation I described happens for personal computers outside of remote corporate control. When Windows updates, you get a dialog saying that the computer will restart soon and if you're not there to stop it from doing that, it will force close all apps. One side effect is that you can't leave it alone to process something and heavens forbid leaving it on as a personal server for you to connect remotely to it because it will shut down. And to make matters worse, Microsoft is pushing those updates frequently and depending on whether you got the shitty version or the expensive version, you can't disable this behavior.
kevinherron 7y ago
The biggest thing preventing me from using Wayland right now is that XWayland applications don't scale correctly on high DPI screens. I don't even own any screens that aren't high DPI at this point.
- carwyn 7y ago
  This is especially bad with anything based on Chromium/Electron and fractional scaling at the moment. The Ozone/Wayland back end is still a way off it seems.
  - mmplxx 7y ago
    Why do you believe that? Apparently it's possible to build a somewhat functional version from their git branch. Anyway, chromium is just the first step. Then electron has to work with the wayland version of chromium.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  FWIW I've similar headaches with Xorg.
markstos 7y ago
It's about time. A 10+ year transition from X.org to Wayland is long enough. X.org is open source, it is does not belong to Red Hat. It's a truly desirable technology, anyone else is welcome to contribute to the maintenance of it or fork it. When no one else wants to maintain it favor of newer technologies, that's a good sign it's ready for retirement.
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
  In those ten years, clusters in remote datacenters went mainstream, but Wayland has never delivered network transparency except by embedding X. Where are these users who are still running everything on one computer under their desk?
  - danarmak 7y ago
    I think the demand for remote GUI apps went down, for several reasons: - Web apps got better and more common - Windows (and MS SQL Server etc), which are some of the big OS-level reason for using remote GUI management tools, has improved its command-line management story and added UI-less server editions - Network improvements (more bandwidth, more clouds and POPs) made existing 'remote desktop' protocols more tolerable on the Internet, all the way back to the venerable VNC and RDP What kind of remote UI app/workload do you see as common today?
  - SahAssar 7y ago
    Do you commonly encounter people who use networked X for scenarios that would not be better solved by other protocols? Cause I have basically never seen that in the last decade.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  it has hardly been a 10 year transition, because almost nobody is using wayland.
  - markstos 7y ago
    Not true. Chrome OS uses Wayland and has 40% of the Linux desktop market. (Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha... 1.1% Chrome OS vs 1.6% Linux ). Given trends, Chrome OS alone could make Wayland the dominant Linux display server in a couple years.
doubleunplussed 7y ago
Here's hoping that the wlroots protocols become more widespread so that one can actually make cross-DE tools like taskbars. I'm using tint2 on Xorg at the moment and there just isn't any alternative on wayland - you have to use what your DE gives you or suck it. That means a plethora of taskbar extensions on GNOME, all of which suck (poor multi monitor support, poor workspace support). Having to have a separate software project for each DE is the way to get bit rotting projects nobody cares about.
technofiend 7y ago
What irritates me with regard to Wayland is the assumption that all rendering is local. The great thing about X was on a LAN you could bang up an ssh session somewhere, carry across your $DISPLAY and have the exact same application running somewhere else but rendered to your screen. It doesn't sound like much but there were times when it was incredibly useful. Thin terminals brought this to the logical conclusion of not needing a desktop at all, but unfortunately X's protocol is too chatty and sensitive to latency to really shine across a WAN. These days you can work around all of that by opening a session via Guacamole or the like but that's still one tab in a browser per graphical session. There's no just using SSH in a for loop and opening up a raft of xterms to a bunch of machines in Wayland, AFAIK. From the Wayland FAQ Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering? No, that is outside the scope of Wayland. To support remote rendering you need to define a rendering API, which is something I've been very careful to avoid doing. The reason Wayland is so simple and feasible at all is that I'm sidestepping this big task and pushing it to the clients. It's an interesting challenge, a very big task and it's hard to get right, but essentially orthogonal to what Wayland tries to achieve.
- saltcured 7y ago
  To be honest, I think remote rendering is unnecessary and is mismatched for actualy application workloads. The amount of data and IO needed by the renderer in many applications outstrips that needed to send the rendered result to a display. I.e. the textures, models, or font curves loaded into GPU-local RAM and then resampled or reinterpreted to draw frames. This stuff is the heart of a graphical application, and doesn't really make sense to split across a network. When the application host is really resource-starved and does not need to supply much content to a renderer, we are better off using more abstract network interfaces. On one hand, HTML+CSS+js are the remote rendering protocol to the browser which becomes the remote renderer. On the other hand, sensor/data interfaces become the remote data source for a GUI application that can be hosted somewhere more appropriate than on the resource-starved embedded device. What I will miss from SSH X-forwarding is not remote rendering. It is per-window remote display. I would be perfectly happy with remote applications doing their rendering within their own host, and just sending their window contents to my display server, where my local compositor puts the window content onto my screen. Protocols more like VNC or RDP could be used for each of these windows, adaptively switching between damage-based blitting, lossless and lossy image codecs, or even streaming video codecs. What is needed is the remote window-manager and display protocol to securely negotiate and multiplex multiple windows opening and closing rather than one whole desktop. What I won't miss from SSH X-forwarding is window and application lifecycle tied to the network connection. Let me disconnect and reconnect to my remote application and its windows. Let me share such a connection to have the same windows displayed on my desktop and my laptop, or to window-share with a coworker down the hall...
bryanlarsen 7y ago
Everybody's blaming Red Hat. Why should they maintain something they're no longer using? If a credible new maintainer would step up, I'm sure Red Hat would be happy to hand over the reigns.
- jordigh 7y ago
  Reign -- what a regnant such as a king reigns over. Rein -- what you use to guide a horse Rain -- water that falls from the sky Free reign -- a kingdom where people have freedom, but are still under monarchical rule Free rein -- letting go of that which you control a horse with (preferred idiom) Free rain -- rain's default state
- rvp-x 7y ago
  They shouldn't call it maintenance mode just because they stopped using it. There's a lot of non-Red Hat contributors to X.org.
  - dralley 7y ago
    >There's a lot of non-Red Hat contributors to X.org. There's maybe 5 people that really "know" Xorg top to bottom and none of them want to work on it any more. The ones that were working on it anyway were being paid to do so and many of them are also working on Wayland on the side. A lot of people have made small contributions, but that's not the same thing as being able to design and develop large new changes. The people with the knowledge to do that, don't have the will to do so any longer.
    - rvp-x 7y ago
      You should try living less in a bubble.
      - dang 7y ago
        Please don't do personal attacks on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
bananaoomarang 7y ago
Have been using Sway on Wayland since 1.0 came out six months or so ago and the only awkward part has been HiDPI (I have an Intel card so not effected by the nVidia support). Otherwise good riddance to X, honestly. It felt old 10 years ago! Here's hoping the major desktops etc can finally sort out the remaining instability/rough edges over the next year or two.
- shmerl 7y ago
  There is still no adaptive sync support.
- ndarwincorn 7y ago
  > HiDPI Hasn't HiDPI support been one of the main drivers of the renewed interest in Wayland the last few years?
- jpeg_hero 7y ago
  > It felt old 10 years ago! And it felt old 20 years ago when I started first using it! And I was on a college campus with networked Unix workstations in computer labs and departments. The model environment for this vaunted “network transparency” that never quite worked right, was never quite dependable enough to really put it into your collaboration workflow. Hell, I think only the CS department was able to get home directories fully implemented and useful. Good riddance!
sandGorgon 7y ago
Fedora 31 is looking to be the most advanced OS yet. If you haven't tried it yet..I strongly recommend trying it out (for those who don't know, Linux can be tried out using a usb drive without affecting your hard disk called "liveboot"). Fedora is a much more polished experience than Ubuntu and other than the lack of Sketch and Photoshop, I daresay at par with OSX.
- Iolaum 7y ago
  Maybe you meant Fedora 30? 31 hasn't been released yet.
  - viraptor 7y ago
    You can use fedora rawhide to get an almost-31 experience. (then move to 31 beta in September)
- chacha2 7y ago
  From a normal users perspective it didn't seem any more advanced than Ubuntu. Exactly the same but installing software on the command line takes 2 minutes longer.
  - sandGorgon 7y ago
    that's incorrect. the dependency resolver in dnf is far faster and accurate than ubuntu. Its pretty good computer science reading as well - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Formal_methods_tool_suite#Boolean_Satisfiability_.28SAT.29_Solvers https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Formal_methods_tool_suite#Boo... https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/08/30/why-red-hats-new-dnf-package-manager-is-not-just-another-yum-2/ https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/08/30/why-red-hats-n... I have done system upgrades since fedora 22 to fedora 30 without breakage. I have never had that happen with Ubuntu. In general, Wayland/Systemd/Xorg etc are maintained by Fedora . If you look at the blog post - https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/06/24/on-the-road-to-fedora-workstation-31/ https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/06/24/on-the-road-to-fed... >>he reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is.
nsajko 7y ago
Wayland is broken by design (or, as another commenter says, "lacking on a conceptual level") and NOT A REPLACEMENT for X Windows. Wayland has a bonkers security (theatre) model based around protecting from untrusted processes (graphical applications) connected to the compositor. (If you must give untrusted code a process on your machine, the correct solution is to give it its own Unix user and run an X Windows server owned by the same user.) One consequence is that screenshots/screencasts do not exist on Wayland, applications can only see their own windows. Also, quoting Red Hat: "Furthermore, there isn’t a standard API for getting screen shots from Wayland. It’s dependent on what compositor (window manager/shell) the user is running, and if they implemented a proprietary API to do so." EDIT: Other stuff that you can not do with Wayland and is justified by their "security" model is injection of input events and reading other applications input (think xdotool, autohotkey; this is great when you want more control of your graphical user interface system).
- qcowhwcugwcgoiu 7y ago
  What you describe as broken by design in terms of security is in fact its primary advantage from my perspective: With the security nightmare that is modern web browsers I do not want any of them which runs on my machine to be able to access a single bit of more data than which is necessary. Firejail helps a lot for this purpose, but fixing the browser to not be able to spy on other X applications requires sticking them into a Xpra sandbox, which greatly intereferes with performance and is a hell of an ugly hack (it's like running a local VNC server and connecting locally to it). Putting software into different user accounts isn't a solution either because the usability of that is well, unusable.
  - nsajko 7y ago
    Use different users and/or virtual machines if you want security. BTW, Firejail is also shit, it had some stupid design decisions and security bugs. And it basically relies on Userspace namespaces which are or were an experimental/unsecure feature in Linux. Wayland's security model is bonkers because the attack surface it implies is just too great. BTW, Is useradd not usable for you?
atemerev 7y ago
Wayland doesn't work with Nvidia (and no improvements in last 3 years). Nvidia is the most popular GPU option out there. The end.
dpacmittal 7y ago
I currently use x11vnc to use a third monitor (via raspberry pi connected to a monitor). Is something like this possible with Wayland?
- kbumsik 7y ago
  Nope. It is impossible by design. They believes not allowing it would bring a better security. Huh.
mrighele 7y ago
I'm wondering if all the resources that went to Wayland for the past TEN years were directed to slowly evolve X11 to the same direction we would be in a worse or better situation. It seems to me very similar to the Python2/Python3 debacle. What pisses me off more than anything else is having to replace a lot of tools there are working perfectly with xorg but are not compatible with wayland. A few example * Window manager (of course) * taking screenshots * setting desktop background * Intercepting multimedia key (e.g. volume handling) * using redshift to set the screen temperature * ... Yes, I know that I'm using an unconventional setup, but the freedom to do that was one of the reasons that attracted me to a unix environment. Redhat is working very hard to change all of that for a "year of the linux Desktop" that (in my opinion) will never come.
- dralley 7y ago
  >I'm wondering if all the resources that went to Wayland for the past TEN years were directed to slowly evolve X11 to the same direction we would be in a worse or better situation. It seems to me very similar to the Python2/Python3 debacle. Are you arguing that a decade of constant breaking changes to a huge number, if not the majority, of desktop linux programs, and the accompanying maintenance challenges (as versions of window managers, Gtk and the like would all be tightly coupled to specific Xorg versions) would have been a better approach than a rewrite + compatibility shim (XWayland) that allows for a fair amount of backwards compatibility? Needless to say, I disagree.
- vmchale 7y ago
  Might be time for me to stop using XMonad, unfortunately. Pretty annoying IMO. XMonad works exactly how I want it to.
  - meruru 7y ago
    https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad
nsajko 7y ago
The Wayland developers have a security model [-1] that is hostile to "power-users" (those who like to use the Unix (or other OS) programming environment to its full potential) and the visually impaired (eg., blind). See [0] [1] [2] to see what features I am talking about. It is possible to implement some of those features on a per-compositor basis, but the result of that will be graphical API fragmentation, as programs that interact with GUIs will need to have separate code for each compositor. And the work is not done even for Gnome (more precisely Gnome's Wayland compositor and the Gnome applications that use it) yet. On the other hand one could say, eg. "Why not make a compositor accessibility protocol on top of Wayland?". End result of that, it is easy to guess, would be something worse than X Windows (because of even more layers of abstraction, and possibly even more incompatible standards/APIs/protocols), which the Wayland people were supposedly trying to escape from. Edit: Another thing that makes Wayland (at least without an extension ...) unsuitable to replace X Windows is forced compositing. This means unavoidable double buffering and thus worse video performance (especially noticeable for interactive stuff like video games). [-1] I prefer calling it security theater, because it does not bring any real security improvement in practice. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011 [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/Wayland https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/Wayland [2] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/
iso-8859-1 7y ago
Interestingly, the old maintainer (Keith Packard) has a fairly recent (2018) list of improvement ideas for Xorg: https://keithp.com/x-ideas/ https://keithp.com/x-ideas/
dimitar 7y ago
One thing I'm reminded of is the huge role of Red Hat in maintaining loads of open-source software. They get to choose what direction "linux" is taking by simply having paid developers put in a lot of time writing and maintaining software that everyone then adopts. So Wayland will get adopted by most distributions, just like SystemD because Red Hat will invest in it.

302 points by qalmakka 7y ago

hamilyon2 7y ago

This is big news, no?

Jasper_ 7y ago
It's more an admission of the current state of things. Adam Jackson, the previous release manager, stepped down, decided to switch gears to doing other graphics-related stuff, and nobody has volunteered to make a new X server release. xorg-devel has always been a relatively slow mailing list, and very little new R&D has been done on the X server for the past 5 years or so. Latest I can think of is the DRM lease work, which is still ongoing.
- klodolph 7y ago
  Just to add some context: DRM = direct rendering manager, not digital rights management.
- ddalex 7y ago
  If it's working, why break it by adding new stuff? I'm very fond of old software that has been battle tested, rather than jumping on the bandwagon of the newest thing which is invariably rough around the edges. Just look at the terminal latency of Wayland default compositor vs X, or 3D performance with NVIDIA, or weird configuration - it doesn't work as good as the old thing
  - floatboth 7y ago
    Because if "working" was the only thing people ever wanted, we would be using Windows 95 or something. People want "not crap", and everything related to X11/Xorg is a gigantic pile of crap. > terminal latency of Wayland default compositor vs X I'm not sure what you mean by "default compositor" — Weston? — and what's "X" — Xorg without any compositor, with the Windows 95-esque situation of everything drawing into one buffer? Yeah, you can decrease latency by a tiny bit by not compositing at all, but the result is totally unacceptable visually. People generally don't want to look at Windows 95 anymore.
    - sprash 7y ago
      Your priorities are wrong. Latency is the most important metric for doing actual work. This means that the windowing system should allow clients to blurt out pixels whenever they want no matter where the current scanline is positioned. Apparently there are patches on the way [1] that try to mitigate the severe design flaws of wayland in that regard. If wayland will ever reach X11-like performance remains to be seen. Right now this is not the case. [1]: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/commit/?id=df2095fa35fe84e4ebc30754dd9f25e50bd1aa47 https://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/commit/?id=df209...
      - Jasper_ 7y ago
        Partial update is not an improvement for latency in the way you're thinking about it. It's mostly an optimization for tillers so they don't have to rerender some parts. You seem to broadly misunderstand several parts of the modern display architecture -- the goal you insist any sane window system should provide hasn't been provided by any, including the X Window System.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - Crinus 7y ago
      > but the result is totally unacceptable visually It is perfectly acceptable to me. And this is the issue with Wayland vs X11 when it comes to compositing: Wayland forces it down your throat, either you like it or not, whereas X11 enables it but doesn't mandate it so if you dislike it you just don't use it. (though this isn't the only problem Wayland has... and FWIW Windows 95 is in many fronts superior to any desktop you can find on Linux)
      - bitwize 7y ago
        > It is perfectly acceptable to me. Most users want a UI from $CURRENT_YEAR, not one that makes them think of Spice Girls songs and AOL Instant Messenger. > Wayland forces it down your throat, either you like it or not, whereas X11 enables it but doesn't mandate it so if you dislike it you just don't use it. X11 is architecturally ill suited to a compositing environment. Inasmuch as compositing solutions exist, they are janky hacks that introduce more processes, more context switches on the hot path, and more latency than Wayland, which was based on $CURRENT_DECADE graphical principles from the ground up. Sometimes you can't square the circle and engineer a general solution. Sometimes you have to engineer for the common case only. For desktop usage, the common case is "user who is used to Windows or macOS and does not want to regress backward in terms of UI". For such users, a noncomposited Windows 9x-like desktop is unacceptable. A broken, laggy, hard-to-maintain pile of hacks is also unacceptable. Wayland solves both those problems, which is why virtually ALL of the hackers working on the Linux graphics stack have jumped ship from X to Wayland. Like it or not, you will eventually be using Wayland too.
- bluGill 7y ago
  x.org has always been that way. Slow, hard to get started developing, and not really "sexy". it is critical infrastructure, but nobody wants to maintain it. Wayland was at least started by people frustrated with the real problems in X. (unlike most other replace X projects I've seen over the last 20 years where were someone who had no idea what is really wrong proposing a solution that didn't solve the real problems.
  - dralley 7y ago
    >Wayland was at least started by people frustrated with the real problems in X Many of whom, it's worth pointing out, are themselves the core Xorg developers who don't want to be stuck maintaining Xorg forever.
- flomo 7y ago
  I think its been a long, long time coming. X11 was effectively left in "hard maintenance mode" in the early 1990s when the Unix vendors abandoned the workstation market. Since then every new system based on *nix has used some other display manager, while Linux desktops used X11 mainly for legacy reasons. At some point 10-15 years ago, Linux vendors (Redhat) revived X.org. But something better has wanted for a long time. "X11 is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces" as the old unix hater book said decades ago.
kgwxd 7y ago
It feels like it to me, but my understanding of how things work in this area is pretty limited. I've been using Xubuntu for a long time now, does it currently depend heavily on X.org? I'm having a hard time figuring that out searching the past 20 minutes.
- miloignis 7y ago
  I believe so - Xubuntu is based on XFCE, which is an X based environment. I've seen some mutterings that they may eventually write a Wayland backend, but I don't think that it's in the near future
- hjek 7y ago
  Once XFCE is ported to GTK3, it should be Wayland-compatible, but for now Xubuntu still depends on X.
- gnode 7y ago
  Yes, but an effort to port XFCE to GTK 3 is underway. My understanding is that this will bring Wayland support.
  - gnomewascool 7y ago
    Porting XFCE applications (Thunar etc.) to GTK3 indeed gives automatic (or near-automatic) Wayland support. This means that XFCE applications will run natively (without XWayland) in Wayland compositors (such as sway, GNOME or KDE). However, xfwm (the window manager) will also need to be ported to Wayland — i.e. become a Wayland compositor — which will probably be a more complicated undertaking, as "xfwm-wayland will need to fulfil the role of both X and the window manager. (Yes, using libraries like wlroots or libmir, will make this not completely impossible, but it will still be non-trivial.) Plausibly, XFCE might join forces and use the same Wayland compositor as, say, LXQt or Mate.
  - maggotbrain 7y ago
    The Xfce port to GTK 3 is almost complete. Xfce 4.14 should be released sometime in August this year if all goes well. https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap#roadmapplanned_features https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap#roadmapplanned_fea...

nisa 7y ago

Sad. It's probably unpopular but wayland is not ready yet IMHO and lacking on a conceptual level. Yet another few years/months until most bugs are fixed and more broken functionality...

jchw 7y ago
Wayland is literally never going to be ready unless it’s forced to be. How long has Nvidia promised to support it now, and still unless you’re using Nouveau it’s basically not usable on Nvidia cards.
- eropple 7y ago
  Is that still the case? I'm running FC29 with the nVidia closed-source drivers and I haven't had issues. (I have had issues on a laptop with switchable graphics, though, and Nouveau was the solution there.)
  - jchw 7y ago
    Is this new? Last time I tried, Nvidia on Wayland had performance issues and did not support Optimus at all (Edit: after rereading what you said I am guessing that is still an issue.) If it is working though I retract what I said, though it’s absurd how long it took to happen.
    - saltcured 7y ago
      Even without wayland, in recent Fedora releases (I forget if it started with 28 or 29), I've found optimus switchable graphics to be impossible or at least impractical to configure. What's become easier is having the entire X display use the nvidia gpu, with the intel gpu transparently slaved to relay pixels to its connected laptop display. But, it does return the annoying, periodic driver breakage, where a dnf update replaces the xorg-x11-drv-nvidia RPMs and suddenly the userspace is incompatible with the still-running kernel module's slightly older API, so new processes cannot use opengl until I reboot. This was one benefit of optimus via the optirun infrastructure. The main desktop was on the intel gpu and I could actually unload and upgrade the nvidia module if desired, without forcing a disruptive reboot.

frabbit 7y ago

So Raspbian will be the only viable option on the new Raspberry Pi 4 due to the lack of Wayland for the VideoCore 6?

hamilyon2 7y ago
I would like to know what is the plan for raspberry pi.
floatboth 7y ago
> lack of Wayland for the VideoCore 6 What? Even VideoCore 4 with the Mesa vc4 driver supports Wayland — since it's Mesa, of course it implements GBM and whatnot. I've used Weston on an RPi3 with Arch Linux ARM. For VideoCore 5/6, IIUC the only driver is Mesa v3d, even better situation, of course everything should work, and it will always work since no proprietary crap driver would ever get into people's hands.

afitnerd 7y ago

Nvidia's lack of support for Wayland really hurts linux desktop adoption. It's especially bad new if there's no more x.org support

mspnp 7y ago
Linux on the desktop would be a reality already if Linux had a stable driver API.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Linux on the desktop would be a reality already if Linux had a stable driver API. Linux on the desktop (and other consumer devices) is a reality, via Android and ChromeOS. What's not a reality is consumer use of the userspace tools and desktop environments lots of people mentally associate with Linux, but I doubt very much that's about driver APIs.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Ah the typical pat in the back. ChromeOS and Android could be running on top of Windows kernel and userspace would hardly notice.
    - cwyers 7y ago
      And "Android's adoption shows that Linux doesn't need a stable driver ABI" is a funny position to take, given how many problems that's caused Android, to the point where Google is adding a way for vendor drivers to work across versions of Android. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes-treble-modular-base-for.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes...
    - kevingadd 7y ago
      Incidentally, the Windows Subsystem for Linux was reportedly the result of an effort to run Android userspace on top of the Windows Kernel that was at least somewhat successful, so your assertion is completely true. (https://venturebeat.com/2016/02/25/microsoft-kills-project-astoria-its-tool-for-porting-android-apps-to-windows-10/ https://venturebeat.com/2016/02/25/microsoft-kills-project-a...)

Epskampie 7y ago

I want to switch to wayland, but it’s impossible until Nvidia get their shit together on linux. I hear AMD has awesome open source drivers now, time to give them a shot!

jammygit 7y ago
I read that OpenCL has some compatibility issues with various libraries still, or else it would be an easier choice
- atemerev 7y ago
  Not only that, OpenCL is a lower-level alternative to CUDA, somewhat comparable to Vulkan/OpenGL relationship. Trying to actually write something useful with OpenCL is... rough.

mspnp 7y ago

Can you even disable desktop composition in Wayland? One of the reasons I hate Windows is that I'm forced to use composition, which provides nothing to me.

sprash 7y ago
Wayland developers specifically prioritize the "every frame is perfect" paradigm over performance and latency. This means there will never be an option to disable things like composition or vsync. Also, even though it is always claimed that "X11 a is messy conglomerate of tacked on technologies and extensions" the Wayland protocol is extremely complex despite severely lacking features. And because of the strange priorities it has worse performance than X11 even for native apps. The self proclaimed "minimalist" wlroots library has more than 50000 LOC, all for moving around a bunch of overlapping windows? A bit much.
- ddevault 7y ago
  The Wayland protocol is actually very simple, much simpler than X. And consider that wlroots+sway is around 100,000 LOC, but it's at least as capable as i3+xorg - which is a million lines of code.
  - ubercow13 7y ago
    Really claiming that it's at least as capable as xorg seems like a complete misrepresentation. Aren't some of the most common and enduring complaints about Wayland about missing features compared to X?
    - ddevault 7y ago
      Uninformed and mostly outdated complaints, generally. What features are left unturned are in progress and have most of the pieces in place, and their realization will not add enough lines of code to come close to Xorg.
- floatboth 7y ago

IceWreck 7y ago

* Nvidia drivers suck on Wayland * KDE and most non-gnome based DEs don't work with Wayland Wayland is not ready for mass usage

trax 7y ago
Nvidia drivers suck on Linux and it's their fault. https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
floatboth 7y ago
huh? KDE Plasma 5 works well, GNOME and KDE are considering/merging nvidia proprietary support (fuck nvidia, btw)
- bscphil 7y ago
  >KDE Plasma 5 works well I use Plasma, and test the Wayland compositor every couple of months. Last time I checked, many features were still missing, performance was bad, and I still got crashes occasionally. If it's really gotten into a usable state since then, that's great.
  - nwah1 7y ago
    Resume from sleep causes a black screen. Crashes do happen occassionally, where the plasma desktop will die and restart itself... this happens more frequently with the latest releases. In recent releases, with multiple panels, sometimes the kicker menu doesn't open on one of them. On multi-monitor setups, it doesn't remember the monitor positions after reboot. On the plus side, I think the copy-paste situation with XWayland is finally improved.
- shmerl 7y ago
  Serious bugs like this make it far from working well: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387313 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387313

hedora 7y ago

Uggh. RedHat has a long history now of replacing working stuff with half baked, regressed-by-design replacements. I’d really like to have a working Unix environment, and Linux stopped being that for me years ago. More conservative alternative distros keep bit rotting due to upstream (usually RedHat induced) breakage. (SystemD, Wayland, DBUS, PulseAudio, Gnome 3, kernel API brain damage, etc) Does anyone know of any alternatives? Is there a distro/foundation that will actually support open source Unix moving forward (BSD, maybe?)

cyphax 7y ago
If you want the most BSD-like distro, it's probably gotta be Slackware. It changes little between releases (just newer versions of the software it ships with mostly).
- hedora 7y ago
  I’m worried that, with core dependencies like X11 being abandoned, the writing is on the wall for the hold-out distributions (I run Devuan and OpenBSD mostly). I get that it doesn’t make business sense for RedHat to maintain parts of the open source ecosystem that will never drive consulting or support revenue, but that doesn’t change the fact that I want a computing environment that just works (including software that’s been stable for a decade, and isn’t constantly ported to the new shiny).
  - wmf 7y ago
    You want it, but you aren't willing to pay what it costs to maintain it.
    - yarrel 7y ago
      I'm willing to pay for it, but nobody is willing to sell it to me.
      - toyg 7y ago

archy_ 7y ago

The Unix philosophy has been abandoned at this point. What advantages have we really gained from it? More gaping security flaws? Unnecessary centralization is pushing the old Unix admins who laid the groundwork for Linuxs success into BSDs and other alternatives, and the Linux kernel will likely rot as a result. Could we consider this moment the peak of Linux development?

jamespo 7y ago
Not everyone likes writing shell scripts to start services
- nisa 7y ago
  Not everyone wants to talk dbus to configure the firewall :P
  - pas 7y ago
    I just put iptables shit into /etc/rc.local and it works, no dbus needed :)
    - nisa 7y ago
      this was just a stupid comment on firewalld
- hedora 7y ago
  I haven’t written an init script in ten years. It is like coming home one day, and the house has been demolished. There’s a joker in a bulldozer proudly proclaiming there was some dog crap on the sidewalk, and that he took care of it for me.
  - Scramblejams 7y ago
    Solid analogy. In the case of Systemd, it was fixing problems for me that I never had, and creating problems that I'd also never had: It broke laptop sleep. It broke /etc/rc.local. It broke domainless local DNS lookups. It broke boot on one of my servers (fstab's new nofail argument? really?) And it (soft) broke a keyboard of mine. A keyboard! Astonishing. I really wish Debian had not drunk that particular kool-aid. :'( I'd go somewhere else but Debian (and by extension Ubuntu) have been doing binary package management the longest, and for me it really shows. I want these boxes to just sit there for years, be extremely low maintenance and only pick up security updates, and I've never gotten a better experience anywhere else.

OliverJones 7y ago

The X Window System has had a great run; a whole generation. And it's still going, even if it's trailing edge tech now. Thanks Bob Scheifler, Jim Gettys, and the whole crew.

pinewurst 7y ago

With the coming IBM transition, I'm expecting Red Hat itself to go into "Hard Maintenance Mode" fairly quickly. Another comment here estimates 10 years of RH support, but I'm confident that X.org will outlast RH.

zzzcpan 7y ago
And Wayland might get completely abandoned in the process.
- Iolaum 7y ago
  If wayland gets abandoned it will have to be re-invented. It solves real problems with X11. That doesn't mean Wayland itself doesn't have problems though. Over time they will get solved. If people or companies need them to get solved sooner I m sure Wayland devs will welcome any contributions.
  - ubercow13 7y ago
    It's not implausible, there's ready Arcan https://arcan-fe.com/ https://arcan-fe.com/
    - dmix 7y ago
      > At every step of the way, the underlying development emphasises security, performance and debugability guided by a principle of least surprise in terms of API design. I'm very happy they started that list with security, which links to a nice security overview: https://github.com/letoram/arcan/wiki/Engine-Security https://github.com/letoram/arcan/wiki/Engine-Security One of the things no one mentions is how awful security is on X.
- SahAssar 7y ago
  Wayland is not a RH-only initiative. IIRC basically every commercially supported linux distro uses wayland by default now.
7y ago

tannhaeuser 7y ago

I really hope they consider that Linux' graphic stack isn't an end in itself, but a driver for running the relative wealth of graphic apps (GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, Blender, Firefox, and more) many people spent the last 30 years or so developing. Those aren't going to be rewritten from scratch into Electron-based apps or whatever, and loosing them, as well as BSD and Mac OS compat, is no option IMHO.

_ph_ 7y ago
Why do you think those apps would need to be rewritten and what has electron to do with that? Most of these apps already run natively on top of Wayland, as they are written using a toolkit like GTK or QT and those toolkits support Wayland. Also, there is XWayland, which implements the X protocol on top of Wayland, so any X application should continue to run. The only thing they talked about stopping development on is the standalone X server X.org. I have been using Wayland on my desktop for a while and am quite happy about it.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Electron needs to be pushed down the stack to the bare metal, to become the window system itself. Then there will only be one instance of it running, that every other application can share, and the window manager and user interface and networking can all use standard web technologies, that everything else uses.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    If you disagree, then tell me what X-Windows or Wayland can do that a modern web browser with bare metal drivers couldn't do much better? You've got JavaScript and WebAssembly for programming, WebGL and <canvas> and <video> and DHTML and CSS for drawing (including low latency rendering with desynchronized canvases), JSON and XML and ArrayBuffer for data representation, HTTP and WebSockets and WebRTC for networking. What is it missing? https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/05/desynchronized https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/05/desynchron... There's really no need for X-Windows or Wayland any more.

pnutjam 7y ago

Is there an NX type solution for Wayland?

hedora 7y ago
If there is something like NX, it was added as an afterthought (last time a Remote Desktop protocol for wayland came up, it was explicitly outside the scope of what wayland was designed to support).

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ronjouch 7y ago

I wish I could move to Wayland, but I make heavy use of X-only automation tools ( https://github.com/autokey/autokey https://github.com/autokey/autokey for keyword expansion and cross-app macros, and wmctrl/xdotool for window switching using https://github.com/ronjouch/marathon https://github.com/ronjouch/marathon ) and nothing similar exists under Wayland. So far, it doesn't look like similar tools are planned, and neither GNOME nor Sway offer these features I'm looking for :-/ .

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Oh, I was going to mention Sway too, since of all the compositors I've seen it is the only one that seems to care about replicating such functionality. Is it really still that lacking on the automation front?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ndarwincorn 7y ago
I thought Gnome shell supported wmctrl/EWMH?
- ronjouch 7y ago
  Gnome Shell under X is totally fine with wmctrl. But not under Wayland. And I didn't know about EWMH, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Window_Manager_Hints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Window_Manager_Hints reads: "Extended Window Manager Hints, a.k.a. NetWM or Net WM,[1] is an X Window System standard for window managers. It defines various interactions between window managers, utilities, and applications, all part of an entire desktop environment. It builds on the functionality of the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual (ICCCM)." , well we come to the same conclusion: it's Xorg-only and won't fly under Wayland. Or am I missing something?
nsajko 7y ago
The Wayland people do not want such features. See my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011

robrtsql 7y ago

Let's hope it doesn't go into maintenance mode before this feature is released: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GLXVND-Offload-Improve-1.21 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GLXVND-O... Not sure if I understand correctly, but the absence of this is what has prevented Nvidia's proprietary drivers from supporting GPU switching without having to restart the X server session.

shmerl 7y ago

Still waiting for KWin to become functional on Wayland. Some serious bugs prevent it. And where is RedHat rushing exactly? Something like adaptive sync doesn't even work with Wayland compositors yet. So good luck using your fancy adaptive sync high refresh monitor with games in Wayland session.

peterwwillis 7y ago

After 18 years struggling with the Linux desktop, I switched to Windows for my GUI needs. Everything just works, if somewhat slowly. My "working environment" is a Linux VM. If I need to run a graphical app from the VM, there are plenty of rootless X servers for Windows, plus Windows 10 has workspaces. I get the best of both worlds: real vendor support for hardware, and the best software for getting work done (windows business software, Linux coding software). Honestly, this feels like the future to me, and I hope M$ is working towards this being a normalized hybrid platform.

pkulak 7y ago
The new Windows Subsystem for Linux looks legit. Is that what you're using, or are you spinning up your own VM?
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  Some things don't work well with WSL right now (stares at Docker intensely) so it's a Vagrant VM w/Ubuntu.
  - nailer 7y ago
    Doesn't Docker use WSL2 now officially?
    - joaobeno 7y ago
      I tried it on the weekend, and it indeed work...
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      I wouldn't use "now" for preview builds, but more or less yes.

quotemstr 7y ago

RIP, X11. You had the correct architecture. I still believe that the goals of Wayland would have been better achieved as a collection of X extensions than as an entirely new system that's lost many of the capabilities of X, including network transparency, input configuration, and window manager decoupling. Wayland is great if you want to build a Windows clone that works exactly the way Red Hat wants it to work --- but it represents a decline from the Unix ideal of configurability, experimentation, and simplicity.

frou_dh 7y ago
Ken Thompson himself is on record bashing X Windows, so that's a strike against its ideal Unix status
- nsajko 7y ago
  Everybody who knows it hates X Windows, but that does not mean Wayland is better, or even that it is a possible replacement for X Windows.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    The sad reality is that as bad as X is, Wayland is too much of a half-baked replacement to say that it is definitely better. Case in point: it's about 10 years old now and people still say it isn't ready yet!

quotemstr 7y ago

Meanwhile, Windows has become an acceptable Unix. (I'm not trolling.) I don't want to admit this, but I've been wondering whether, over the long term, FOSS stuff really can't match the quality of a sustained commercial endeavor.

rbanffy 7y ago
Working on updates 30% complete Don't turn off your computer
- pjmlp 7y ago
  I just saw our Macs on the office do the same thing.
  - bad_user 7y ago
    Does it do that automatically, closing apps doing stuff? (I have a Mac, it never did) One trick sysadmins did on Windows was to keep Notepad with an unsaved file running, because it was able to interrupt the forced system restart.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      I am mostly on Windows, but in both cases those updates get actually forced on all machines by IT remote management tooling.
      - bad_user 7y ago
        We don't have "IT remote management tooling". I would be surprised if it happened for Macs, since it's one of those things that can lead to work being lost and it's incredibly stupid. Also the situation I described happens for personal computers outside of remote corporate control. When Windows updates, you get a dialog saying that the computer will restart soon and if you're not there to stop it from doing that, it will force close all apps. One side effect is that you can't leave it alone to process something and heavens forbid leaving it on as a personal server for you to connect remotely to it because it will shut down. And to make matters worse, Microsoft is pushing those updates frequently and depending on whether you got the shitty version or the expensive version, you can't disable this behavior.

kevinherron 7y ago

The biggest thing preventing me from using Wayland right now is that XWayland applications don't scale correctly on high DPI screens. I don't even own any screens that aren't high DPI at this point.

carwyn 7y ago
This is especially bad with anything based on Chromium/Electron and fractional scaling at the moment. The Ozone/Wayland back end is still a way off it seems.
- mmplxx 7y ago
  Why do you believe that? Apparently it's possible to build a somewhat functional version from their git branch. Anyway, chromium is just the first step. Then electron has to work with the wayland version of chromium.
dredmorbius 7y ago
FWIW I've similar headaches with Xorg.

markstos 7y ago

It's about time. A 10+ year transition from X.org to Wayland is long enough. X.org is open source, it is does not belong to Red Hat. It's a truly desirable technology, anyone else is welcome to contribute to the maintenance of it or fork it. When no one else wants to maintain it favor of newer technologies, that's a good sign it's ready for retirement.

erik_seaberg 7y ago
In those ten years, clusters in remote datacenters went mainstream, but Wayland has never delivered network transparency except by embedding X. Where are these users who are still running everything on one computer under their desk?
- danarmak 7y ago
  I think the demand for remote GUI apps went down, for several reasons: - Web apps got better and more common - Windows (and MS SQL Server etc), which are some of the big OS-level reason for using remote GUI management tools, has improved its command-line management story and added UI-less server editions - Network improvements (more bandwidth, more clouds and POPs) made existing 'remote desktop' protocols more tolerable on the Internet, all the way back to the venerable VNC and RDP What kind of remote UI app/workload do you see as common today?
- SahAssar 7y ago
  Do you commonly encounter people who use networked X for scenarios that would not be better solved by other protocols? Cause I have basically never seen that in the last decade.
throwaway2048 7y ago
it has hardly been a 10 year transition, because almost nobody is using wayland.
- markstos 7y ago
  Not true. Chrome OS uses Wayland and has 40% of the Linux desktop market. (Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha... 1.1% Chrome OS vs 1.6% Linux ). Given trends, Chrome OS alone could make Wayland the dominant Linux display server in a couple years.

doubleunplussed 7y ago

Here's hoping that the wlroots protocols become more widespread so that one can actually make cross-DE tools like taskbars. I'm using tint2 on Xorg at the moment and there just isn't any alternative on wayland - you have to use what your DE gives you or suck it. That means a plethora of taskbar extensions on GNOME, all of which suck (poor multi monitor support, poor workspace support). Having to have a separate software project for each DE is the way to get bit rotting projects nobody cares about.

technofiend 7y ago

What irritates me with regard to Wayland is the assumption that all rendering is local. The great thing about X was on a LAN you could bang up an ssh session somewhere, carry across your $DISPLAY and have the exact same application running somewhere else but rendered to your screen. It doesn't sound like much but there were times when it was incredibly useful. Thin terminals brought this to the logical conclusion of not needing a desktop at all, but unfortunately X's protocol is too chatty and sensitive to latency to really shine across a WAN. These days you can work around all of that by opening a session via Guacamole or the like but that's still one tab in a browser per graphical session. There's no just using SSH in a for loop and opening up a raft of xterms to a bunch of machines in Wayland, AFAIK. From the Wayland FAQ Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering? No, that is outside the scope of Wayland. To support remote rendering you need to define a rendering API, which is something I've been very careful to avoid doing. The reason Wayland is so simple and feasible at all is that I'm sidestepping this big task and pushing it to the clients. It's an interesting challenge, a very big task and it's hard to get right, but essentially orthogonal to what Wayland tries to achieve.

saltcured 7y ago
To be honest, I think remote rendering is unnecessary and is mismatched for actualy application workloads. The amount of data and IO needed by the renderer in many applications outstrips that needed to send the rendered result to a display. I.e. the textures, models, or font curves loaded into GPU-local RAM and then resampled or reinterpreted to draw frames. This stuff is the heart of a graphical application, and doesn't really make sense to split across a network. When the application host is really resource-starved and does not need to supply much content to a renderer, we are better off using more abstract network interfaces. On one hand, HTML+CSS+js are the remote rendering protocol to the browser which becomes the remote renderer. On the other hand, sensor/data interfaces become the remote data source for a GUI application that can be hosted somewhere more appropriate than on the resource-starved embedded device. What I will miss from SSH X-forwarding is not remote rendering. It is per-window remote display. I would be perfectly happy with remote applications doing their rendering within their own host, and just sending their window contents to my display server, where my local compositor puts the window content onto my screen. Protocols more like VNC or RDP could be used for each of these windows, adaptively switching between damage-based blitting, lossless and lossy image codecs, or even streaming video codecs. What is needed is the remote window-manager and display protocol to securely negotiate and multiplex multiple windows opening and closing rather than one whole desktop. What I won't miss from SSH X-forwarding is window and application lifecycle tied to the network connection. Let me disconnect and reconnect to my remote application and its windows. Let me share such a connection to have the same windows displayed on my desktop and my laptop, or to window-share with a coworker down the hall...

bryanlarsen 7y ago

Everybody's blaming Red Hat. Why should they maintain something they're no longer using? If a credible new maintainer would step up, I'm sure Red Hat would be happy to hand over the reigns.

jordigh 7y ago
Reign -- what a regnant such as a king reigns over. Rein -- what you use to guide a horse Rain -- water that falls from the sky Free reign -- a kingdom where people have freedom, but are still under monarchical rule Free rein -- letting go of that which you control a horse with (preferred idiom) Free rain -- rain's default state
rvp-x 7y ago
They shouldn't call it maintenance mode just because they stopped using it. There's a lot of non-Red Hat contributors to X.org.
- dralley 7y ago
  >There's a lot of non-Red Hat contributors to X.org. There's maybe 5 people that really "know" Xorg top to bottom and none of them want to work on it any more. The ones that were working on it anyway were being paid to do so and many of them are also working on Wayland on the side. A lot of people have made small contributions, but that's not the same thing as being able to design and develop large new changes. The people with the knowledge to do that, don't have the will to do so any longer.
  - rvp-x 7y ago
    You should try living less in a bubble.
    - dang 7y ago
      Please don't do personal attacks on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

bananaoomarang 7y ago

Have been using Sway on Wayland since 1.0 came out six months or so ago and the only awkward part has been HiDPI (I have an Intel card so not effected by the nVidia support). Otherwise good riddance to X, honestly. It felt old 10 years ago! Here's hoping the major desktops etc can finally sort out the remaining instability/rough edges over the next year or two.

shmerl 7y ago
There is still no adaptive sync support.
ndarwincorn 7y ago
> HiDPI Hasn't HiDPI support been one of the main drivers of the renewed interest in Wayland the last few years?
jpeg_hero 7y ago
> It felt old 10 years ago! And it felt old 20 years ago when I started first using it! And I was on a college campus with networked Unix workstations in computer labs and departments. The model environment for this vaunted “network transparency” that never quite worked right, was never quite dependable enough to really put it into your collaboration workflow. Hell, I think only the CS department was able to get home directories fully implemented and useful. Good riddance!

sandGorgon 7y ago

Fedora 31 is looking to be the most advanced OS yet. If you haven't tried it yet..I strongly recommend trying it out (for those who don't know, Linux can be tried out using a usb drive without affecting your hard disk called "liveboot"). Fedora is a much more polished experience than Ubuntu and other than the lack of Sketch and Photoshop, I daresay at par with OSX.

Iolaum 7y ago
Maybe you meant Fedora 30? 31 hasn't been released yet.
- viraptor 7y ago
  You can use fedora rawhide to get an almost-31 experience. (then move to 31 beta in September)
chacha2 7y ago
From a normal users perspective it didn't seem any more advanced than Ubuntu. Exactly the same but installing software on the command line takes 2 minutes longer.
- sandGorgon 7y ago
  that's incorrect. the dependency resolver in dnf is far faster and accurate than ubuntu. Its pretty good computer science reading as well - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Formal_methods_tool_suite#Boolean_Satisfiability_.28SAT.29_Solvers https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Formal_methods_tool_suite#Boo... https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/08/30/why-red-hats-new-dnf-package-manager-is-not-just-another-yum-2/ https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/08/30/why-red-hats-n... I have done system upgrades since fedora 22 to fedora 30 without breakage. I have never had that happen with Ubuntu. In general, Wayland/Systemd/Xorg etc are maintained by Fedora . If you look at the blog post - https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/06/24/on-the-road-to-fedora-workstation-31/ https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/06/24/on-the-road-to-fed... >>he reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is.

nsajko 7y ago

Wayland is broken by design (or, as another commenter says, "lacking on a conceptual level") and NOT A REPLACEMENT for X Windows. Wayland has a bonkers security (theatre) model based around protecting from untrusted processes (graphical applications) connected to the compositor. (If you must give untrusted code a process on your machine, the correct solution is to give it its own Unix user and run an X Windows server owned by the same user.) One consequence is that screenshots/screencasts do not exist on Wayland, applications can only see their own windows. Also, quoting Red Hat: "Furthermore, there isn’t a standard API for getting screen shots from Wayland. It’s dependent on what compositor (window manager/shell) the user is running, and if they implemented a proprietary API to do so." EDIT: Other stuff that you can not do with Wayland and is justified by their "security" model is injection of input events and reading other applications input (think xdotool, autohotkey; this is great when you want more control of your graphical user interface system).

qcowhwcugwcgoiu 7y ago
What you describe as broken by design in terms of security is in fact its primary advantage from my perspective: With the security nightmare that is modern web browsers I do not want any of them which runs on my machine to be able to access a single bit of more data than which is necessary. Firejail helps a lot for this purpose, but fixing the browser to not be able to spy on other X applications requires sticking them into a Xpra sandbox, which greatly intereferes with performance and is a hell of an ugly hack (it's like running a local VNC server and connecting locally to it). Putting software into different user accounts isn't a solution either because the usability of that is well, unusable.
- nsajko 7y ago
  Use different users and/or virtual machines if you want security. BTW, Firejail is also shit, it had some stupid design decisions and security bugs. And it basically relies on Userspace namespaces which are or were an experimental/unsecure feature in Linux. Wayland's security model is bonkers because the attack surface it implies is just too great. BTW, Is useradd not usable for you?

atemerev 7y ago

Wayland doesn't work with Nvidia (and no improvements in last 3 years). Nvidia is the most popular GPU option out there. The end.

dpacmittal 7y ago

I currently use x11vnc to use a third monitor (via raspberry pi connected to a monitor). Is something like this possible with Wayland?

kbumsik 7y ago
Nope. It is impossible by design. They believes not allowing it would bring a better security. Huh.

mrighele 7y ago

I'm wondering if all the resources that went to Wayland for the past TEN years were directed to slowly evolve X11 to the same direction we would be in a worse or better situation. It seems to me very similar to the Python2/Python3 debacle. What pisses me off more than anything else is having to replace a lot of tools there are working perfectly with xorg but are not compatible with wayland. A few example * Window manager (of course) * taking screenshots * setting desktop background * Intercepting multimedia key (e.g. volume handling) * using redshift to set the screen temperature * ... Yes, I know that I'm using an unconventional setup, but the freedom to do that was one of the reasons that attracted me to a unix environment. Redhat is working very hard to change all of that for a "year of the linux Desktop" that (in my opinion) will never come.

dralley 7y ago
>I'm wondering if all the resources that went to Wayland for the past TEN years were directed to slowly evolve X11 to the same direction we would be in a worse or better situation. It seems to me very similar to the Python2/Python3 debacle. Are you arguing that a decade of constant breaking changes to a huge number, if not the majority, of desktop linux programs, and the accompanying maintenance challenges (as versions of window managers, Gtk and the like would all be tightly coupled to specific Xorg versions) would have been a better approach than a rewrite + compatibility shim (XWayland) that allows for a fair amount of backwards compatibility? Needless to say, I disagree.
vmchale 7y ago
Might be time for me to stop using XMonad, unfortunately. Pretty annoying IMO. XMonad works exactly how I want it to.
- meruru 7y ago
  https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad

nsajko 7y ago

The Wayland developers have a security model [-1] that is hostile to "power-users" (those who like to use the Unix (or other OS) programming environment to its full potential) and the visually impaired (eg., blind). See [0] [1] [2] to see what features I am talking about. It is possible to implement some of those features on a per-compositor basis, but the result of that will be graphical API fragmentation, as programs that interact with GUIs will need to have separate code for each compositor. And the work is not done even for Gnome (more precisely Gnome's Wayland compositor and the Gnome applications that use it) yet. On the other hand one could say, eg. "Why not make a compositor accessibility protocol on top of Wayland?". End result of that, it is easy to guess, would be something worse than X Windows (because of even more layers of abstraction, and possibly even more incompatible standards/APIs/protocols), which the Wayland people were supposedly trying to escape from. Edit: Another thing that makes Wayland (at least without an extension ...) unsuitable to replace X Windows is forced compositing. This means unavoidable double buffering and thus worse video performance (especially noticeable for interactive stuff like video games). [-1] I prefer calling it security theater, because it does not bring any real security improvement in practice. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011 [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/Wayland https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/Wayland [2] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/

iso-8859-1 7y ago

Interestingly, the old maintainer (Keith Packard) has a fairly recent (2018) list of improvement ideas for Xorg: https://keithp.com/x-ideas/ https://keithp.com/x-ideas/

dimitar 7y ago

One thing I'm reminded of is the huge role of Red Hat in maintaining loads of open-source software. They get to choose what direction "linux" is taking by simply having paid developers put in a lot of time writing and maintaining software that everyone then adopts. So Wayland will get adopted by most distributions, just like SystemD because Red Hat will invest in it.