4 ms·

Its funny how people shit all over systemd for doing everything and then people shit all over wayland for just doing enough for the task it was made for. I thi

Its funny how people shit all over systemd for doing everything and then people shit all over wayland for just doing enough for the task it was made for. I think the complaining is 10% real concerns and 90% people upset that it is different than it used to be.

sprash 7y ago
Wayland is indeed similar to systemd. It requires a monolithic implementation of all features traditionally done by separate programs (e.g. window managers, hotkey deamons, screen recorders, streamers, ...) because it lacks the appropriate protocols. X11 on the other hand provides a platform (thanks the "process not policy" design mantra) for all those separate programs by implementing those appropriate protocols. Also, people love change if you have actual improvement. I was very happy to switch from sysvinit to runit.
- MayeulC 7y ago
  X11 not being a monolithical piece of software sounds like a cognitive dissonance issue. The codebase is huge, even though they tried to get rid of some stuff recently, such as the printer drivers. But it contains a lot, from networking to graphical widgets, to GPU drivers. All of which is implemented monolithically in one program. Wayland does specify only two thing: how to exchange buffers between applications, and agree on protocol extensions. Then, you can make the inner workings as many pieces as you want. The "no window manager" is a fallacy. You could decide to write a compositor that offers a protocol to manage the windows. I'm pretty sure you can more or less do that today if you use sway. The one thing Wayland doesn't do is specify the 1000s of things X11 was doing, most of which are hacks upon hacks on interfaces that were not designed for the stuff people are doing with.
  - sprash 7y ago
    > X11 not being a monolithical piece of software sounds like a cognitive dissonance issue. But it isn't. Have you ever tried to use X11 without any window manager? You can't! In the best case you can type inside a terminal that is not moveable or resizable. X11 can not function on its own, hence it can't be monolithic. Just because it is bloated doesn't mean it is monolithic. And most of the bloat is old graphics drivers which are not installed on your system anyways. I'm not really liking X11 either. Just like I switched from sysvinit to runit I would be happy to switch from X11 to the next best thing. But Wayland is not it. The protocol is flawed on so many levels but most importantly because it does not provide the necessary interfaces required for normal, functional desktop and degrades them to "implementation details" (or in your words "1000s of things"). Just blitting bitmaps is not sufficient for a working desktop system. The biggest pain point is access control policy, which Wayland completely ignores.
lukeschlather 7y ago
Systemd and Wayland are very different pieces of software. It's easy to imagine (in fact I think it's very common) that end-users of Systemd just use it to launch a service which replaces all the logical features of Systemd. (E.g. for an extreme example, a kubernetes cluster.) If systemd doesn't support some feature, it's really fine. Maybe even preferable. You can get it working by some other means. Wayland on the other hand, it really does need to do everything well. If Zoom won't run in Wayland, needing to launch X11 to run Zoom means Wayland is broken.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  Zoom is an awful piece of malware. Wayland doesn't need to support zoom, zoom needs to support wayland. With that logic literally every change to an OS is broken because it doesn't run my cli accounting program from 1985.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    You're being sarcastic, but I actually agree with the notion that changes to an OS that cause previously-working code to break are in fact bad.

sprash 7y ago

Wayland is indeed similar to systemd. It requires a monolithic implementation of all features traditionally done by separate programs (e.g. window managers, hotkey deamons, screen recorders, streamers, ...) because it lacks the appropriate protocols. X11 on the other hand provides a platform (thanks the "process not policy" design mantra) for all those separate programs by implementing those appropriate protocols. Also, people love change if you have actual improvement. I was very happy to switch from sysvinit to runit.

MayeulC 7y ago
X11 not being a monolithical piece of software sounds like a cognitive dissonance issue. The codebase is huge, even though they tried to get rid of some stuff recently, such as the printer drivers. But it contains a lot, from networking to graphical widgets, to GPU drivers. All of which is implemented monolithically in one program. Wayland does specify only two thing: how to exchange buffers between applications, and agree on protocol extensions. Then, you can make the inner workings as many pieces as you want. The "no window manager" is a fallacy. You could decide to write a compositor that offers a protocol to manage the windows. I'm pretty sure you can more or less do that today if you use sway. The one thing Wayland doesn't do is specify the 1000s of things X11 was doing, most of which are hacks upon hacks on interfaces that were not designed for the stuff people are doing with.
- sprash 7y ago
  > X11 not being a monolithical piece of software sounds like a cognitive dissonance issue. But it isn't. Have you ever tried to use X11 without any window manager? You can't! In the best case you can type inside a terminal that is not moveable or resizable. X11 can not function on its own, hence it can't be monolithic. Just because it is bloated doesn't mean it is monolithic. And most of the bloat is old graphics drivers which are not installed on your system anyways. I'm not really liking X11 either. Just like I switched from sysvinit to runit I would be happy to switch from X11 to the next best thing. But Wayland is not it. The protocol is flawed on so many levels but most importantly because it does not provide the necessary interfaces required for normal, functional desktop and degrades them to "implementation details" (or in your words "1000s of things"). Just blitting bitmaps is not sufficient for a working desktop system. The biggest pain point is access control policy, which Wayland completely ignores.

lukeschlather 7y ago

Systemd and Wayland are very different pieces of software. It's easy to imagine (in fact I think it's very common) that end-users of Systemd just use it to launch a service which replaces all the logical features of Systemd. (E.g. for an extreme example, a kubernetes cluster.) If systemd doesn't support some feature, it's really fine. Maybe even preferable. You can get it working by some other means. Wayland on the other hand, it really does need to do everything well. If Zoom won't run in Wayland, needing to launch X11 to run Zoom means Wayland is broken.

baroffoos 7y ago
Zoom is an awful piece of malware. Wayland doesn't need to support zoom, zoom needs to support wayland. With that logic literally every change to an OS is broken because it doesn't run my cli accounting program from 1985.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  You're being sarcastic, but I actually agree with the notion that changes to an OS that cause previously-working code to break are in fact bad.