5 ms·

> I've made a personal decision to leave the Linux, X11, and Wayland worlds mostly behind. I understand X11 has a lot of unfixable problems, but what's wrong w

by shmerl 7y ago

> I've made a personal decision to leave the Linux, X11, and Wayland worlds mostly behind. I understand X11 has a lot of unfixable problems, but what's wrong with Wayland world?

jchw 7y ago
I'm running Sway WM right now, a Wayland compositor that implements an i3-compatible window manager, and in fact working on the code (hopefully merging my first contribution soon.) I'd say the biggest issue is really maturity. I actually find Wayland to be a surprisingly nice piece of software engineering. I don't know if I like the architecture really, but it comes together fairly nicely in the end. For example, there's unanswered security questions. It would be good if applications couldn't just go and manipulate and spy on other apps like they can with X11. Wayland indeed solves this issue, but it leaves other problems. How do I capture the desktop? wl_roots offers some extensions that help alleviate the problem, but they don't solve the full problem; for example, you can capture the screen, for which programs and an OBS plugin exists, but there's no upstream Wayland extension that can make WebRTC desktop capture work. I think what we really need is the ability to integrate policy and consent requests, but I'm not sure whether there's progress on that front, or how long it will take. Once the problem is solved, upstreamed to WebRTC, and that upstream version trickles down to Electron apps, Firefox and Chrome stable versions... well, things will be in a better place. Speaking of web browsers, today Firefox still has some issues to go before it is fully working in Wayland natively. You can do it today, but it is not perfect; there are sometimes places in the code where it assumes it is running on X11, and things simply break. The screenshot tool is just flat out not present when running under Wayland due to the above issue. Applications are slow on the uptake too. XWayland covers most of them, but it is not perfect. Like anything that captures the screen, of course, is not going to work under XWayland, but also, XWayland apps may behave a little off. In Sway WM, one bug is that when the mouse travels from an X window to a Wayland window, sometimes it behaves as though the mouse is still hovering over the X window at the last position it touched, which leads to tooltips showing up where they shouldn't. There's still a decent amount of GTK2 apps, and even Qt apps aren't all Wayland yet; Krita plans to start working on support I believe next year. In my case, here's the itch I'm currently scratching: Sway WM also does not have support for drawing tablets. I found this out, by, well, loading up a drawing program and noticing the lack of pressure sensitivity. So, that's what I'm currently working on. Needless to say, this is a non-starter for anyone that relies on a graphics tablet, although if you are just using GNOME 3 it is unlikely to be an issue since I'm sure GNOME 3 supports graphics tablets just fine. NVIDIA drivers are still a pain in the neck. I gave up and bought an AMD graphics card, and frankly I can't recommend it enough. Basically everything works better on Linux, but certainly Wayland works better. It's worth giving up some raw power. Still, for many people the proprietary NVIDIA drivers are going to need to work, and today support varies from lackluster to poor depending on what compositor you use.
- shmerl 7y ago
  I think capturing desktop and screenshots should be addressed by standard Wayland extensions with integration with something like Pipewire as far as I know. I didn't follow the progress of that though. Some details here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PipeWire https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PipeWire Some features though are surely missing. Such as support for adaptive sync. No one really is pushing that forward. See: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/issues/1406 https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/issues/1406 As for Nvidia - don't waste your time on their proprietary drivers on Linux. They don't to play by the rules (refuse to upstream), so no need to spend time supporting their blobs.
  - jchw 7y ago
    Like I said... I gave up and bought an AMD card. Not everyone is going to do this. It's a step down from my NVIDIA card. I think there is still hope. Obviously today's reality is still bleak with signed blobs and plenty of question marks, but I think open-gpu-doc is a sign that NVIDIA does actually want to square away this problem, maybe they're just not sure how. I do believe NVIDIA is mostly responsible for Wayland's poor adoption, and I firmly believe that this also lead to Wayland not getting as much developer attention as it could've gotten. The fact that one company wields this much power is a serious problem. I kind of understand the hostility Linux kernel developers seem to have towards proprietary drivers under Linux now.
    - shmerl 7y ago
      Kernel developers are right to push back against blobs. Nvidia is the bad player here. AMD is doing fine though. I have RX 5700 XT, and besides for some rough edges due to it being very new and drivers still fixing bugs, it's a very good card. I expect Nvidia usage on Linux to plummet, due to their refusal to provide open drivers. It's already happening, just will take some time for it to drop to the point where they have little influence. See: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&view=trends https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi... So in the long term it's not a problem.
    - 7y ago
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
From my perspective, Wayland "fixes" things that could allow bad things but were also useful. For instance, screenshots/recording took a long time to be implemented, and is still constrained, because of the security risk of arbitrary programs recording the screen. Because that is a risk... but users still want it. As another example, I use xdotool to inject input to programs in X; in Wayland, that would need to be explicitly supported per-compositer.
- shmerl 7y ago
  Instead of xdotool, you can use this: https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool
  - dyanaraps 7y ago
    Not exactly a 1:1 replacement though: > This program requires access to /dev/uinput. This usually requires root permissions. Source: https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool#runtime https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool#runtime Edit: I'll also add that only 5~ commands have been implemented so far in ydotool.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  Well, removing or not implementing such features because of security is always a big fat sign of something sneaky or even worse, outright incompetent going on. As such security risks of features can always be addressed through some sort of authorization mechanism.
roenxi 7y ago
The basic problem with X11 is it wraps a whole bunch of things into one software package. So in theory you have to know about fonts, OpenGL, graphics drivers & memory management, the window model and networking simultaneously to configure and run the thing. Wayland is a protocol for a well designed future where all that functionality is broken up into separate pieces of software. Wayland handles the window model and most of the other parts already live in their own software projects. The problem is that Wayland makes some changes to the basic window model on the way through that are a big deal and so far there is no great software written that uses it. Adoption is very slow because the best case scenario is there a Wayland compositor that has feature parity with an X11 window manage and a bunch of weird problems cropping up because screen recording is a to-be-solved problem. My position from the armchair is that Wayland really needed a complimentary official protocol for how to request another application's graphical output. Not coordinating that means that anything that supports Wayland is going to be practically inferior to an X11 solution. It'll get fixed sooner or later I expect, it isn't a technically hard problem.
- shmerl 7y ago
  I think this is intended for screen capturing with Wayland: * https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PipeWire https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PipeWire * https://pipewire.org https://pipewire.org
  - roenxi 7y ago
    Quoth the wiki 'PipeWire is a rather new multimedia framework by GNOME'. There will be people who don't want to use GNOME frameworks and don't want to use the GNOME window manager. Wayland is enforcing a policy ('don't access other devices graphics output') where it should be providing capability ('an applications graphics output is private by default but that can be configured'). However it looks like the design of Wayland purposefully omitted that sort of configuration from the protocol. So instead of having a security model that is sufficiently complicated to allow screen recording, the security model is 'No'. To get a framework independent solution all the compositors would need to implement an identical API for accessing graphics output. That needs to be coordinated in the same fashion as the Wayland spec. As the spec stands, it is just asking for every framework, compositor or application to go implement its own different solution. The Wayland designers may even have tried to avoid explicitly creating a security model, but in practice it comes with an implicit security model that is inflexible, unconfigurable and difficult to coordinate around.
sly010 7y ago
In one word, nvidia.
- shmerl 7y ago
  Easy to fix - don't use it. Linux users today stay away from it for good reasons.
  - mnd999 7y ago
    That’s fine if you’re already a Linux user and purchased hardware with Linux in mind.
    - shmerl 7y ago
      For Windows users coming to Linux with Nvidia, this usually simply involves one extra cycle of GPU upgrades. By the next one, it's AMD for them. So in the long run - still not an issue.
  - iikoolpp 7y ago
    I specifically bought only NVIDIA GPUs because they were faster under Linux when I got them.
    - shmerl 7y ago
      In the past that was a common reason. Today it's not relevant anymore. And downsides of the blob make buying Nvidia a non starter. You can clearly observe this trend today among Linux users.
krychu 7y ago
Does he mean he's no longer working/interested in writing about these topics, and moved to other things? Or does he mean he abandoned these techs and moved to something other alternatives? If the latter, I wonder what these other alternatives are?
Jasper_ 7y ago
Author here. I had been working on Linux professionally for about 6 years at that point, and got burned out on it. I have a lot of thoughts on the success of Linux as a general-use platform but mostly keep them to myself these days. I still have a deep love for graphics, and have since moved onto working in the games industry, where I am much happier. I also still have a passion for explaining graphics topics. Current efforts: https://noclip.website/ https://noclip.website/ https://blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-effect-in-super-mario-sunshine/ https://blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-ef... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rCRsOLiO7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rCRsOLiO7k
- shmerl 7y ago
  What's your view on the recent progress of Linux gaming?

by shmerl 7y ago

> I've made a personal decision to leave the Linux, X11, and Wayland worlds mostly behind. I understand X11 has a lot of unfixable problems, but what's wrong with Wayland world?

jchw 7y ago

I'm running Sway WM right now, a Wayland compositor that implements an i3-compatible window manager, and in fact working on the code (hopefully merging my first contribution soon.) I'd say the biggest issue is really maturity. I actually find Wayland to be a surprisingly nice piece of software engineering. I don't know if I like the architecture really, but it comes together fairly nicely in the end. For example, there's unanswered security questions. It would be good if applications couldn't just go and manipulate and spy on other apps like they can with X11. Wayland indeed solves this issue, but it leaves other problems. How do I capture the desktop? wl_roots offers some extensions that help alleviate the problem, but they don't solve the full problem; for example, you can capture the screen, for which programs and an OBS plugin exists, but there's no upstream Wayland extension that can make WebRTC desktop capture work. I think what we really need is the ability to integrate policy and consent requests, but I'm not sure whether there's progress on that front, or how long it will take. Once the problem is solved, upstreamed to WebRTC, and that upstream version trickles down to Electron apps, Firefox and Chrome stable versions... well, things will be in a better place. Speaking of web browsers, today Firefox still has some issues to go before it is fully working in Wayland natively. You can do it today, but it is not perfect; there are sometimes places in the code where it assumes it is running on X11, and things simply break. The screenshot tool is just flat out not present when running under Wayland due to the above issue. Applications are slow on the uptake too. XWayland covers most of them, but it is not perfect. Like anything that captures the screen, of course, is not going to work under XWayland, but also, XWayland apps may behave a little off. In Sway WM, one bug is that when the mouse travels from an X window to a Wayland window, sometimes it behaves as though the mouse is still hovering over the X window at the last position it touched, which leads to tooltips showing up where they shouldn't. There's still a decent amount of GTK2 apps, and even Qt apps aren't all Wayland yet; Krita plans to start working on support I believe next year. In my case, here's the itch I'm currently scratching: Sway WM also does not have support for drawing tablets. I found this out, by, well, loading up a drawing program and noticing the lack of pressure sensitivity. So, that's what I'm currently working on. Needless to say, this is a non-starter for anyone that relies on a graphics tablet, although if you are just using GNOME 3 it is unlikely to be an issue since I'm sure GNOME 3 supports graphics tablets just fine. NVIDIA drivers are still a pain in the neck. I gave up and bought an AMD graphics card, and frankly I can't recommend it enough. Basically everything works better on Linux, but certainly Wayland works better. It's worth giving up some raw power. Still, for many people the proprietary NVIDIA drivers are going to need to work, and today support varies from lackluster to poor depending on what compositor you use.

shmerl 7y ago
I think capturing desktop and screenshots should be addressed by standard Wayland extensions with integration with something like Pipewire as far as I know. I didn't follow the progress of that though. Some details here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PipeWire https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PipeWire Some features though are surely missing. Such as support for adaptive sync. No one really is pushing that forward. See: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/issues/1406 https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/issues/1406 As for Nvidia - don't waste your time on their proprietary drivers on Linux. They don't to play by the rules (refuse to upstream), so no need to spend time supporting their blobs.
- jchw 7y ago
  Like I said... I gave up and bought an AMD card. Not everyone is going to do this. It's a step down from my NVIDIA card. I think there is still hope. Obviously today's reality is still bleak with signed blobs and plenty of question marks, but I think open-gpu-doc is a sign that NVIDIA does actually want to square away this problem, maybe they're just not sure how. I do believe NVIDIA is mostly responsible for Wayland's poor adoption, and I firmly believe that this also lead to Wayland not getting as much developer attention as it could've gotten. The fact that one company wields this much power is a serious problem. I kind of understand the hostility Linux kernel developers seem to have towards proprietary drivers under Linux now.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    Kernel developers are right to push back against blobs. Nvidia is the bad player here. AMD is doing fine though. I have RX 5700 XT, and besides for some rough edges due to it being very new and drivers still fixing bugs, it's a very good card. I expect Nvidia usage on Linux to plummet, due to their refusal to provide open drivers. It's already happening, just will take some time for it to drop to the point where they have little influence. See: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&view=trends https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi... So in the long term it's not a problem.
  - 7y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago

From my perspective, Wayland "fixes" things that could allow bad things but were also useful. For instance, screenshots/recording took a long time to be implemented, and is still constrained, because of the security risk of arbitrary programs recording the screen. Because that is a risk... but users still want it. As another example, I use xdotool to inject input to programs in X; in Wayland, that would need to be explicitly supported per-compositer.

shmerl 7y ago
Instead of xdotool, you can use this: https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool
- dyanaraps 7y ago
  Not exactly a 1:1 replacement though: > This program requires access to /dev/uinput. This usually requires root permissions. Source: https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool#runtime https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool#runtime Edit: I'll also add that only 5~ commands have been implemented so far in ydotool.
zzzcpan 7y ago
Well, removing or not implementing such features because of security is always a big fat sign of something sneaky or even worse, outright incompetent going on. As such security risks of features can always be addressed through some sort of authorization mechanism.

roenxi 7y ago

The basic problem with X11 is it wraps a whole bunch of things into one software package. So in theory you have to know about fonts, OpenGL, graphics drivers & memory management, the window model and networking simultaneously to configure and run the thing. Wayland is a protocol for a well designed future where all that functionality is broken up into separate pieces of software. Wayland handles the window model and most of the other parts already live in their own software projects. The problem is that Wayland makes some changes to the basic window model on the way through that are a big deal and so far there is no great software written that uses it. Adoption is very slow because the best case scenario is there a Wayland compositor that has feature parity with an X11 window manage and a bunch of weird problems cropping up because screen recording is a to-be-solved problem. My position from the armchair is that Wayland really needed a complimentary official protocol for how to request another application's graphical output. Not coordinating that means that anything that supports Wayland is going to be practically inferior to an X11 solution. It'll get fixed sooner or later I expect, it isn't a technically hard problem.

shmerl 7y ago
I think this is intended for screen capturing with Wayland: * https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PipeWire https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PipeWire * https://pipewire.org https://pipewire.org
- roenxi 7y ago
  Quoth the wiki 'PipeWire is a rather new multimedia framework by GNOME'. There will be people who don't want to use GNOME frameworks and don't want to use the GNOME window manager. Wayland is enforcing a policy ('don't access other devices graphics output') where it should be providing capability ('an applications graphics output is private by default but that can be configured'). However it looks like the design of Wayland purposefully omitted that sort of configuration from the protocol. So instead of having a security model that is sufficiently complicated to allow screen recording, the security model is 'No'. To get a framework independent solution all the compositors would need to implement an identical API for accessing graphics output. That needs to be coordinated in the same fashion as the Wayland spec. As the spec stands, it is just asking for every framework, compositor or application to go implement its own different solution. The Wayland designers may even have tried to avoid explicitly creating a security model, but in practice it comes with an implicit security model that is inflexible, unconfigurable and difficult to coordinate around.

sly010 7y ago

In one word, nvidia.

shmerl 7y ago
Easy to fix - don't use it. Linux users today stay away from it for good reasons.
- mnd999 7y ago
  That’s fine if you’re already a Linux user and purchased hardware with Linux in mind.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    For Windows users coming to Linux with Nvidia, this usually simply involves one extra cycle of GPU upgrades. By the next one, it's AMD for them. So in the long run - still not an issue.
- iikoolpp 7y ago
  I specifically bought only NVIDIA GPUs because they were faster under Linux when I got them.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    In the past that was a common reason. Today it's not relevant anymore. And downsides of the blob make buying Nvidia a non starter. You can clearly observe this trend today among Linux users.

krychu 7y ago

Does he mean he's no longer working/interested in writing about these topics, and moved to other things? Or does he mean he abandoned these techs and moved to something other alternatives? If the latter, I wonder what these other alternatives are?

Jasper_ 7y ago

Author here. I had been working on Linux professionally for about 6 years at that point, and got burned out on it. I have a lot of thoughts on the success of Linux as a general-use platform but mostly keep them to myself these days. I still have a deep love for graphics, and have since moved onto working in the games industry, where I am much happier. I also still have a passion for explaining graphics topics. Current efforts: https://noclip.website/ https://noclip.website/ https://blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-effect-in-super-mario-sunshine/ https://blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-ef... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rCRsOLiO7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rCRsOLiO7k

shmerl 7y ago
What's your view on the recent progress of Linux gaming?