6 ms·

Before I touch on Wayland and X, a brief detour. Let's assume Mozilla finishes servo (their browser in Rust). Let's also assume: - It's faster than Firefox.

by Jeaye 7y ago

Before I touch on Wayland and X, a brief detour. Let's assume Mozilla finishes servo (their browser in Rust). Let's also assume: - It's faster than Firefox. - It's safer than every other browser out there. How do they get people to use it? Those two are not enough. To the user: - It's different. - Firefox feels plenty safe. This is a real problem and Mozilla faces it now. As a result, they're focusing on what they can do with servo which no browser has done before, like superb VR support. In short, they need features to gain users and they recognize that. Marginal gains are not enough to encourage an entire product switch. Back to Wayland. Aside from the lack of screen tearing, what can we all agree are big wins for the user? I haven't tried it yet (for this reason), but everything I've read suggests that it could be safer, it could be faster, it could bring some more new features, but mostly it's the same shit. The masses, and this definitely includes the GNU/Linux using masses, need more than the same shit to change because change is tough. They are going to need something killer from Wayland, or another competitor, before they give up on X.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
war1025 7y ago
I believe Mozilla's strategy is to develop new features in Rust on Servo, and then swap them out into Firefox as they go. That way users don't need to change, since they realized that users never would.
- jdc 7y ago
  For instance, they wrote WebRender for Servo and ported it to Firefox
m45t3r 7y ago
This is kind the objective I think. Wayland in most cases (Gnome and KDE) is simply an implementation detail, and Gnome and KDE runs in both X11 and Wayland. The end result is, hopefully, less bugs, more security and more performance, however most people wouldn't care anyway (and I think most people doesn't care, for example Fedora uses Wayland by default). For us using window managers like i3wm the history is different. However in i3wm I am very close to the X11 so there is almost no abstraction, this is why the transition is more painful.
- zdragnar 7y ago
  Have you tried sway? It's about as close to a drop-in replacement to i3 as we'll get, I think, and my experience with it has been pretty positive. https://swaywm.org/ https://swaywm.org/ it wasn't exactly a drop-in replacement for me, but with a bit of modification I was overall pretty pleased with it, and subjectively it did feel faster.
- colatkinson 7y ago
  Unsure if you've seen it before, but I've been using sway [0] as a Wayland-based replacement for i3. Switching the configs took about 15 minutes (and could probably be replaced by a few sed commands). It's been very nice to use all around--snappy, no major issues even with multiple monitors, etc. [0]: https://github.com/swaywm/sway https://github.com/swaywm/sway
- juped 7y ago
  I realize no one reads TFA, but TFA is very relevant since it's all about i3 and sway...
  - m45t3r 7y ago
    I don't know why people assumed that I never heard or used Sway (or that I didn't read the article). I did all three, and this is why I am saying that the transition from i3wm to Sway is kind painful (ok, my fault for not citing Sway in my phrase, however I did think it was implicit that I used it). I have tons of scripts that does specific things and are heavily coupled on how X11 works. I need to port them to Sway first.
    - juped 7y ago
      I know; I replied to the parent because I couldn't reply to multiple comments about sway at once. Sorry for the confusion
- asveikau 7y ago
  Nobody replying to you seems to catch on that i3 is not the only environment other than KDE and Gnome. i3 users have sway. Good for them. Now what about every other window manager?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
saghm 7y ago
> Let's assume Mozilla finishes servo (their browser in Rust). Let's also assume: > - It's faster than Firefox. > - It's safer than every other browser out there. > How do they get people to use it > Those two are not enough. To the user If Mozilla wanted to take the route of switching people from Firefox to a new browser, they would presumably do it by gradually stopping development of Firefox. This is basically the strategy that Microsoft is taking with Edge, with the obvious difference being that it's a browser that comes pre-installed on a common OS, although I'm not convinced that the strategy would need to be fundamentally different. That being said, as sibling responses have noted, I think the strategy that Mozilla has been taking has been to just move over components into Firefox itself when they're ready. This has already been done with a few important components, and it seems to be working fairly well.
riquito 7y ago
The masses do not use X directly, they use GTK+ and QT. And those moved to Wayland. Window/desktop managers moved (e.g. Gnome) or have been rewritten (e.g. i3 -> sway). Looks like a success to me (marketing side). Frankly, by your writing it looks like Wayland had been proposed today and needs to make a dent.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  Most desktop Linux users aren't using Wayland yet. In fact insofar as sway a good chunk of hardware that is well supported under Linux will never work in sway. For it to take over it must be shipped by default by all major distros and people need to have time to upgrade after it becomes the default. This means switching to Debian 10+, any recent Fedora, Ubuntu 20.04+. Based on this one would expect the majority of users to be using it by 2025 Sway isn't i3 rewritten it's not even the same developers. I3wm is its own active project with their own developers that will continue indefinitely.
  - riquito 7y ago
    I agree with everything you've said. My point was about who needs to be convinced to use Wayland (not the end users). People will naturally get Wayland when they update their distribution and yes, it will take years.
ISL 7y ago
From my narrow perspective, Wayland's key feature/bug is that it may break fluxbox, which I have used for >17 yr. As long as it implements X, I don't mind, but my understanding is that the change is a breaking one.
- htns 7y ago
  Mine are 1) Xmodmap support/migration 2) breaking imagemagick's import (screenshotting) making my shortcut for OCR'ing text on the screen break. It seems Wayland isn't going to be the default in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, but if it wasn't for the risk of Wayland I would be on the non-LTS releases. At least Guix exists now so staying on LTS (released every 2 years) isn't that bothersome in terms of easily avoiding out-of-date software.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    > my shortcut for OCR'ing text on the screen Would you be willing to share that? Pretty please?
    - htns 7y ago
      I don't have the exact command at hand, but it just uses tesseract. Something like "import - | tesseract <whatever options for language and page format> | xclip". The accuracy is not amazing by any means.
OrgNet 7y ago
> How do they get people to use it? call it Firefox v100 and automatically update
andolanra 7y ago
Servo is not a browser, it is a browser engine. To quote the Mozilla Research page about it: "Like WebKit, the Servo project is not a complete browser. It is an experimental project that delivers components that can load, run, and display web sites and applications." Given that, it doesn't make sense to talk about users "…switching from Firefox to Servo." c.f. https://research.mozilla.org/servo-engines/ https://research.mozilla.org/servo-engines/
shaan7 7y ago
> Aside from the lack of screen tearing, what can we all agree are big wins for the user? From what I remember, Wayland makes it easier to mix 4K and HD displays without pain.
ziftface 7y ago
I guess it depends on the user, but Wayland is not the same shit for me. The level of jank and screen tearing in X is unacceptable. I think it’s amusing that that opinion is so common given how bad X is. Mac OS X was developed in the nineties and has a jank-free hardware-accelerated compositor. Windows vista also had one, as well as every windows version after that. I am certain that I’m not the only end user who notices the difference between smooth animations on those other OSs and what you see on X. Wayland may be incomplete but it’s obvious that it solves some of these issues.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Most people don’t care about animation, but getting their work done. Still, I’m rooting for W.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    > Most people don’t care about animation Then why does every popular desktop/mobile OS/app have UI animations?
    - datenwolf 7y ago
      Because those are technical gimmicks and nerds are very susceptible to fall for gimmicks. Users? They care about consistency and predictable interfaces that don't change every week. They couldn't care less if a toolkit looks dated. Motif, CDE, Plastique, XP-Style, Aqua, Quartz, Material, it all looks the same to them. Tearing? Users don't see it, because they don't have the fine tuned sensibilities to what technology should do, and how it actually behaves. Playing a movie produces moving pictures on a monitor? Great! Tearing? Without telling them, they'll hardly ever notice it.
      - whywhywhywhy 7y ago
        Mobile has way more of what you call "Users" than what you call "nerds" and they all absolutely love fluid animated UIs and spend literally hours a day swiping away at them. Users might not consciously call out screen tearing but they absolutely can tell when something runs smoothly. Just look at the reviews for iPhone vs Android devices in the early days when Android felt more like X11 with jank, frame drops and redraw glitches. Then look how much time and money year on year Google spent fighting that jank. Money well spent.
adrianmonk 7y ago
Great question to be asking. I agree users are indifferent, but there are two ways in which this applies: (1) They aren't going to go out of their way to switch from X11 to Wayland. Many users don't even know (or care) what those two things are. Or they do but they don't see the required effort as justified. (2) Users also aren't going to out of their way to change the default that their Linux distribution supplies. Not unless there are issues that are bad enough to warrant expending that effort. If it defaults to X11, they'll use X11. If it defaults to Wayland, they'll use Wayland. The major risk I see to Wayland adoption is if distros play it wrong and default to Wayland before it's ready for prime time. If that happens, then users will get a bad taste in their mouth, and their indifference will get replaced with a preference against Wayland. And it will be hard to erase that preference because even if you fix all the issues, they will still remember that time when they tried it and it caused them problems.
- vetinari 7y ago
  Depends also on the type of distribution audience. Fedora has been defaulting to Wayland for several releases now. RHEL 8 also defaults to Wayland. However, these distributions are probably not used by users, who consider their spacebar heating critical to their workflow.
fulafel 7y ago
I think WebRender (the FF-integrated name of Servo) didn't improve Firefox VR support in any big way. VR was pretty good in Firefox already and WebRender mostly impacts rendering of HTML content like fonts, images, and CSS. The lower level tech that VR depends heavily on is WebGL. The next big jump in that department looks to be WebGPU but that's still in early stages.

by Jeaye 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

war1025 7y ago

I believe Mozilla's strategy is to develop new features in Rust on Servo, and then swap them out into Firefox as they go. That way users don't need to change, since they realized that users never would.

jdc 7y ago
For instance, they wrote WebRender for Servo and ported it to Firefox

m45t3r 7y ago

This is kind the objective I think. Wayland in most cases (Gnome and KDE) is simply an implementation detail, and Gnome and KDE runs in both X11 and Wayland. The end result is, hopefully, less bugs, more security and more performance, however most people wouldn't care anyway (and I think most people doesn't care, for example Fedora uses Wayland by default). For us using window managers like i3wm the history is different. However in i3wm I am very close to the X11 so there is almost no abstraction, this is why the transition is more painful.

zdragnar 7y ago
Have you tried sway? It's about as close to a drop-in replacement to i3 as we'll get, I think, and my experience with it has been pretty positive. https://swaywm.org/ https://swaywm.org/ it wasn't exactly a drop-in replacement for me, but with a bit of modification I was overall pretty pleased with it, and subjectively it did feel faster.
colatkinson 7y ago
Unsure if you've seen it before, but I've been using sway [0] as a Wayland-based replacement for i3. Switching the configs took about 15 minutes (and could probably be replaced by a few sed commands). It's been very nice to use all around--snappy, no major issues even with multiple monitors, etc. [0]: https://github.com/swaywm/sway https://github.com/swaywm/sway
juped 7y ago
I realize no one reads TFA, but TFA is very relevant since it's all about i3 and sway...
- m45t3r 7y ago
  I don't know why people assumed that I never heard or used Sway (or that I didn't read the article). I did all three, and this is why I am saying that the transition from i3wm to Sway is kind painful (ok, my fault for not citing Sway in my phrase, however I did think it was implicit that I used it). I have tons of scripts that does specific things and are heavily coupled on how X11 works. I need to port them to Sway first.
  - juped 7y ago
    I know; I replied to the parent because I couldn't reply to multiple comments about sway at once. Sorry for the confusion
asveikau 7y ago
Nobody replying to you seems to catch on that i3 is not the only environment other than KDE and Gnome. i3 users have sway. Good for them. Now what about every other window manager?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

saghm 7y ago

> Let's assume Mozilla finishes servo (their browser in Rust). Let's also assume: > - It's faster than Firefox. > - It's safer than every other browser out there. > How do they get people to use it > Those two are not enough. To the user If Mozilla wanted to take the route of switching people from Firefox to a new browser, they would presumably do it by gradually stopping development of Firefox. This is basically the strategy that Microsoft is taking with Edge, with the obvious difference being that it's a browser that comes pre-installed on a common OS, although I'm not convinced that the strategy would need to be fundamentally different. That being said, as sibling responses have noted, I think the strategy that Mozilla has been taking has been to just move over components into Firefox itself when they're ready. This has already been done with a few important components, and it seems to be working fairly well.

riquito 7y ago

The masses do not use X directly, they use GTK+ and QT. And those moved to Wayland. Window/desktop managers moved (e.g. Gnome) or have been rewritten (e.g. i3 -> sway). Looks like a success to me (marketing side). Frankly, by your writing it looks like Wayland had been proposed today and needs to make a dent.

michaelmrose 7y ago
Most desktop Linux users aren't using Wayland yet. In fact insofar as sway a good chunk of hardware that is well supported under Linux will never work in sway. For it to take over it must be shipped by default by all major distros and people need to have time to upgrade after it becomes the default. This means switching to Debian 10+, any recent Fedora, Ubuntu 20.04+. Based on this one would expect the majority of users to be using it by 2025 Sway isn't i3 rewritten it's not even the same developers. I3wm is its own active project with their own developers that will continue indefinitely.
- riquito 7y ago
  I agree with everything you've said. My point was about who needs to be convinced to use Wayland (not the end users). People will naturally get Wayland when they update their distribution and yes, it will take years.

ISL 7y ago

From my narrow perspective, Wayland's key feature/bug is that it may break fluxbox, which I have used for >17 yr. As long as it implements X, I don't mind, but my understanding is that the change is a breaking one.

htns 7y ago
Mine are 1) Xmodmap support/migration 2) breaking imagemagick's import (screenshotting) making my shortcut for OCR'ing text on the screen break. It seems Wayland isn't going to be the default in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, but if it wasn't for the risk of Wayland I would be on the non-LTS releases. At least Guix exists now so staying on LTS (released every 2 years) isn't that bothersome in terms of easily avoiding out-of-date software.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  > my shortcut for OCR'ing text on the screen Would you be willing to share that? Pretty please?
  - htns 7y ago
    I don't have the exact command at hand, but it just uses tesseract. Something like "import - | tesseract <whatever options for language and page format> | xclip". The accuracy is not amazing by any means.

OrgNet 7y ago

> How do they get people to use it? call it Firefox v100 and automatically update

andolanra 7y ago

Servo is not a browser, it is a browser engine. To quote the Mozilla Research page about it: "Like WebKit, the Servo project is not a complete browser. It is an experimental project that delivers components that can load, run, and display web sites and applications." Given that, it doesn't make sense to talk about users "…switching from Firefox to Servo." c.f. https://research.mozilla.org/servo-engines/ https://research.mozilla.org/servo-engines/

shaan7 7y ago

> Aside from the lack of screen tearing, what can we all agree are big wins for the user? From what I remember, Wayland makes it easier to mix 4K and HD displays without pain.

ziftface 7y ago

I guess it depends on the user, but Wayland is not the same shit for me. The level of jank and screen tearing in X is unacceptable. I think it’s amusing that that opinion is so common given how bad X is. Mac OS X was developed in the nineties and has a jank-free hardware-accelerated compositor. Windows vista also had one, as well as every windows version after that. I am certain that I’m not the only end user who notices the difference between smooth animations on those other OSs and what you see on X. Wayland may be incomplete but it’s obvious that it solves some of these issues.

mixmastamyk 7y ago
Most people don’t care about animation, but getting their work done. Still, I’m rooting for W.
- majewsky 7y ago
  > Most people don’t care about animation Then why does every popular desktop/mobile OS/app have UI animations?
  - datenwolf 7y ago
    Because those are technical gimmicks and nerds are very susceptible to fall for gimmicks. Users? They care about consistency and predictable interfaces that don't change every week. They couldn't care less if a toolkit looks dated. Motif, CDE, Plastique, XP-Style, Aqua, Quartz, Material, it all looks the same to them. Tearing? Users don't see it, because they don't have the fine tuned sensibilities to what technology should do, and how it actually behaves. Playing a movie produces moving pictures on a monitor? Great! Tearing? Without telling them, they'll hardly ever notice it.
    - whywhywhywhy 7y ago
      Mobile has way more of what you call "Users" than what you call "nerds" and they all absolutely love fluid animated UIs and spend literally hours a day swiping away at them. Users might not consciously call out screen tearing but they absolutely can tell when something runs smoothly. Just look at the reviews for iPhone vs Android devices in the early days when Android felt more like X11 with jank, frame drops and redraw glitches. Then look how much time and money year on year Google spent fighting that jank. Money well spent.

adrianmonk 7y ago

Great question to be asking. I agree users are indifferent, but there are two ways in which this applies: (1) They aren't going to go out of their way to switch from X11 to Wayland. Many users don't even know (or care) what those two things are. Or they do but they don't see the required effort as justified. (2) Users also aren't going to out of their way to change the default that their Linux distribution supplies. Not unless there are issues that are bad enough to warrant expending that effort. If it defaults to X11, they'll use X11. If it defaults to Wayland, they'll use Wayland. The major risk I see to Wayland adoption is if distros play it wrong and default to Wayland before it's ready for prime time. If that happens, then users will get a bad taste in their mouth, and their indifference will get replaced with a preference against Wayland. And it will be hard to erase that preference because even if you fix all the issues, they will still remember that time when they tried it and it caused them problems.

vetinari 7y ago
Depends also on the type of distribution audience. Fedora has been defaulting to Wayland for several releases now. RHEL 8 also defaults to Wayland. However, these distributions are probably not used by users, who consider their spacebar heating critical to their workflow.

fulafel 7y ago

I think WebRender (the FF-integrated name of Servo) didn't improve Firefox VR support in any big way. VR was pretty good in Firefox already and WebRender mostly impacts rendering of HTML content like fonts, images, and CSS. The lower level tech that VR depends heavily on is WebGL. The next big jump in that department looks to be WebGPU but that's still in early stages.