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I wonder, why use Wayland at all? What are the benefits? Because drawbacks are huge (large number of apps would need to be customized and tiling managers would

by krzyk 7y ago

I wonder, why use Wayland at all? What are the benefits? Because drawbacks are huge (large number of apps would need to be customized and tiling managers would probably need to rewritten completely) I don't use it and I don't have any issues with my current Linux desktop (using xmonad).

dngray 7y ago
> I don't use it and I don't have any issues with my current Linux desktop (using xmonad). It looks like there's an effort to port it to Wayland https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad The fact is X11 is being supported mostly by Fedora and they're going to stop using it too. It is already in maintenance mode with no new releases scheduled. Eventually it will be completely unmaintained, probably around 2029 when RHEL8 support is dropped. 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...
bitwize 7y ago
> I wonder, why use Wayland at all? What are the benefits? Muh security and muh pixel perfect frames. But mainly, Red Hat is going all in on Wayland and has decided that X11 is deprecated. So if you want to develop applications for Linux that will be compatible going forward you will target Wayland and not X. (Realistically, the toolkits will use Wayland and not X and you will target those. Eventually GTK and Qt will drop X support altogether.)
- krzyk 7y ago
  What do you mean by "pixel perfect frames"? I watch movies in VLC and I don't complain about pixels :) (BTW. I don't care much about security of my desktop behind 2 routers and a NAT - yeah I know I'm still a target, but there are easier ones).
  - bitwize 7y ago
    > What do you mean by "pixel perfect frames"? Wayland enthusiasts usually use "pixel-perfect frames" to mean lack of tearing -- what happens when the framebuffer is changed in the middle of the "electron beam's" scan down the display and you get half of one image and half of another. Eliminating tearing generally means forcing vsync, which means your framerate is capped at 60fps, and a few milliseconds of input latency are introduced -- meaning there's a bit of a tradeoff between the fastest desktop and the smoothest. (This is true regardless of display stack, whether Windows, Quartz, X or Wayland). Xorg drivers can often run in a "tear-free" mode, but Wayland blah blah modern architecture blah blah designed from the ground up blah blah. Plus, Nobody Ever Uses the X protocol anymore. (Basically, you don't have a choice -- Wayland compositors are required to force vsync and operate in tear-free mode.) Security is, largely, a non-issue unless you run untrusted binaries all the time and/or open ports on your X server to random places that can then run random programs on your display. However, for the paranoid (and a little healthy paranoia is a good thing), it would be more involved but still not a whole lot of work[0] to modify the X server architecture to support a more Wayland-like security model by default, while still allowing trusted apps to do things like take screenshots and respond to global hotkeys. The advantages of Wayland thus boil down to "it's what the community wants". And by "the community" I largely mean Red Hat and the GNOME Foundation. Basically, younger programmers who were weaned on Macs or Windows want a more Mac- or Windows-like experience than X, which offers a more Unix-workstation experience, provides. So they decided that the graphics stack needs to optimize for local applications running on a composited desktop with fancy effects -- not local and remote clients all drawing to one display. Plus it gives them the opportunity to do what every programmer longs to do -- a Great Rewrite From Scratch, using Modern Frameworks and Modern Techniques because the end result will be so much better and this never turns out badly. But you're going to have to deal with Wayland regardless of whether it offers advantages to you, personally, again, because our benevolent lords at Red Hat have spoken on the matter and they say X is dead. [0] https://keithp.com/x-ideas/x-security/ https://keithp.com/x-ideas/x-security/
bandrami 7y ago
> I wonder, why use Wayland at all? What are the benefits? The question is "why write Wayland at all", and the answer is that re-inventing wheels is more fun than maintaining them and This Time We'll Get It Right™. And then, after another decade or so, when enough corner cases have been dealt with that Wayland finally offers the usability of X circa 2009, a new bunch of kids will look at it and say "what's all the cruft in this codebase? Why all these messy corner cases? Let's start from scratch!" And the Circle of Free Software will begin again.

by krzyk 7y ago

dngray 7y ago

> I don't use it and I don't have any issues with my current Linux desktop (using xmonad). It looks like there's an effort to port it to Wayland https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad The fact is X11 is being supported mostly by Fedora and they're going to stop using it too. It is already in maintenance mode with no new releases scheduled. Eventually it will be completely unmaintained, probably around 2029 when RHEL8 support is dropped. 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...

bitwize 7y ago

> I wonder, why use Wayland at all? What are the benefits? Muh security and muh pixel perfect frames. But mainly, Red Hat is going all in on Wayland and has decided that X11 is deprecated. So if you want to develop applications for Linux that will be compatible going forward you will target Wayland and not X. (Realistically, the toolkits will use Wayland and not X and you will target those. Eventually GTK and Qt will drop X support altogether.)

krzyk 7y ago
What do you mean by "pixel perfect frames"? I watch movies in VLC and I don't complain about pixels :) (BTW. I don't care much about security of my desktop behind 2 routers and a NAT - yeah I know I'm still a target, but there are easier ones).
- bitwize 7y ago
  > What do you mean by "pixel perfect frames"? Wayland enthusiasts usually use "pixel-perfect frames" to mean lack of tearing -- what happens when the framebuffer is changed in the middle of the "electron beam's" scan down the display and you get half of one image and half of another. Eliminating tearing generally means forcing vsync, which means your framerate is capped at 60fps, and a few milliseconds of input latency are introduced -- meaning there's a bit of a tradeoff between the fastest desktop and the smoothest. (This is true regardless of display stack, whether Windows, Quartz, X or Wayland). Xorg drivers can often run in a "tear-free" mode, but Wayland blah blah modern architecture blah blah designed from the ground up blah blah. Plus, Nobody Ever Uses the X protocol anymore. (Basically, you don't have a choice -- Wayland compositors are required to force vsync and operate in tear-free mode.) Security is, largely, a non-issue unless you run untrusted binaries all the time and/or open ports on your X server to random places that can then run random programs on your display. However, for the paranoid (and a little healthy paranoia is a good thing), it would be more involved but still not a whole lot of work[0] to modify the X server architecture to support a more Wayland-like security model by default, while still allowing trusted apps to do things like take screenshots and respond to global hotkeys. The advantages of Wayland thus boil down to "it's what the community wants". And by "the community" I largely mean Red Hat and the GNOME Foundation. Basically, younger programmers who were weaned on Macs or Windows want a more Mac- or Windows-like experience than X, which offers a more Unix-workstation experience, provides. So they decided that the graphics stack needs to optimize for local applications running on a composited desktop with fancy effects -- not local and remote clients all drawing to one display. Plus it gives them the opportunity to do what every programmer longs to do -- a Great Rewrite From Scratch, using Modern Frameworks and Modern Techniques because the end result will be so much better and this never turns out badly. But you're going to have to deal with Wayland regardless of whether it offers advantages to you, personally, again, because our benevolent lords at Red Hat have spoken on the matter and they say X is dead. [0] https://keithp.com/x-ideas/x-security/ https://keithp.com/x-ideas/x-security/

bandrami 7y ago

> I wonder, why use Wayland at all? What are the benefits? The question is "why write Wayland at all", and the answer is that re-inventing wheels is more fun than maintaining them and This Time We'll Get It Right™. And then, after another decade or so, when enough corner cases have been dealt with that Wayland finally offers the usability of X circa 2009, a new bunch of kids will look at it and say "what's all the cruft in this codebase? Why all these messy corner cases? Let's start from scratch!" And the Circle of Free Software will begin again.