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Parent is kinda right. Wayland was supposed to be this great next-gen display protocol for Linux, finally doing away with the cruft of X and thereby making deve

Parent is kinda right. Wayland was supposed to be this great next-gen display protocol for Linux, finally doing away with the cruft of X and thereby making development faster and easier while bringing modern features and yadda yadda. Instead it has taken 10 years to kinda-sorta catch up to X and is still behind its equivalents on Win/Mac.

DCKing 7y ago
Wayland has a lot of problems, but they're adoption problems. 1) Wayland isn't a replacement for all of X.org. It's a replacement for much of X11, the protocol. "Wayland is just a protocol" - there's no wayland binary on your computer like there is an xorg binary. All the problems/limitations people commonly perceive with Wayland are actually problems/limitations within Wayland implementations like Mutter (Gnome) or KWin (KDE) and lacking application support. There's really not that much that "Wayland" as a project could deliver as it's just a protocol [1]! 2) Replacing something like your entire graphics stack requires a widespread, coordinated effort to unify the various Linux distro's under it. That widespread coordinated effort is not actually possible in the (by "design") extremely fragmented Linux market. The only approach is to slowly let Wayland implementations evolve, and there we have it. Hot take: Wayland will not fully replace X11 the coming 10 years. There is no fundamental solution to the two problems above. Many popular desktops (Xfce, Cinnamon) have no plan to support Wayland at all. Some don't even want to. In the future, there will be choices for graphics stacks on Linux leading to further fragmentation. [1]: The projects that should deliver here are: Gnome, KDE, other open source desktops. Although I think using Gnome with Wayland is superior in many ways to X11, it still has certain quite major shortcomings. It's also application toolkits: Qt and Gtk work luckily, but Electron is waiting for some Chrome renovations before supporting Wayland, and then there's stuff like Wine and Java where the refactor/reward balance simply doesn't favor them. And sometimes applications have to be updated to stop relying on using hardcoded X11 stuff, and use agnostic Gtk/Qt/Freedesktop functionality. There's a lot of history with X11 that we have to move away from, and the incentives and coordination only allow for slow movement.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sprash 7y ago
  > Wayland has a lot of problems, but they're adoption problems. No they are deep philosophical problems. The lack of necessary protocols that allow a unified implementation for things like screen sharing, hotkey daemons, window managers, xdotools or clipboard managers are the problem. As long as there is no standardized way to do essential tasks that are typical for a desktop use case Wayland will eternally cause problems.
  - DCKing 7y ago
    You're not describing a philosophical problem of "what's possible", as all of these things are perfectly possible on a desktop with Wayland and broader Freedesktop standards, and many have working examples currently. Wayland being as small as it is, is not supposed to be a restriction on features of your entire desktop. But there's no standard interopability with a standard X11 socket anymore. There's interopability with KWin and Mutter and wlroots and a bunch of other things through FreeDesktop standards (Wayland being among them). You might consider it a philosophical problem that Wayland is not trying to solve all the problems that X11 tried to solve. You might attach a lot of philosophical value to that architecture. But Windows, macOS, ChromeOS and Android seem to be doing extremely well on an architecture that is a lot less like X11 and a lot more like Wayland.
  - zlynx 7y ago
    > things like: > screen sharing: - Security problem, untrusted access to display, explicitly denied by design. > hotkey daemons - Security problem, untrusted input, denied by design. > window managers - Messing about with windows without authorization, denied by design. > xdotools - Untrusted input. > clipboard managers - Untrusted access to clipboard. Either the compositor application has to do it, or it has to delegate it to a trusted application. So yeah, deep philosophical problems. If you wanted Wayland to work exactly like X11 it won't because that is explicitly against its security design.
danieldk 7y ago
Wayland has been the default on Fedora since Fedora 25, released in 2016. I think replacing X.org in 8 years is pretty impressive, given that many desktop environments and too some extend toolkits have been tightly coupled to X11 in the past.

DCKing 7y ago

Wayland has a lot of problems, but they're adoption problems. 1) Wayland isn't a replacement for all of X.org. It's a replacement for much of X11, the protocol. "Wayland is just a protocol" - there's no wayland binary on your computer like there is an xorg binary. All the problems/limitations people commonly perceive with Wayland are actually problems/limitations within Wayland implementations like Mutter (Gnome) or KWin (KDE) and lacking application support. There's really not that much that "Wayland" as a project could deliver as it's just a protocol [1]! 2) Replacing something like your entire graphics stack requires a widespread, coordinated effort to unify the various Linux distro's under it. That widespread coordinated effort is not actually possible in the (by "design") extremely fragmented Linux market. The only approach is to slowly let Wayland implementations evolve, and there we have it. Hot take: Wayland will not fully replace X11 the coming 10 years. There is no fundamental solution to the two problems above. Many popular desktops (Xfce, Cinnamon) have no plan to support Wayland at all. Some don't even want to. In the future, there will be choices for graphics stacks on Linux leading to further fragmentation. [1]: The projects that should deliver here are: Gnome, KDE, other open source desktops. Although I think using Gnome with Wayland is superior in many ways to X11, it still has certain quite major shortcomings. It's also application toolkits: Qt and Gtk work luckily, but Electron is waiting for some Chrome renovations before supporting Wayland, and then there's stuff like Wine and Java where the refactor/reward balance simply doesn't favor them. And sometimes applications have to be updated to stop relying on using hardcoded X11 stuff, and use agnostic Gtk/Qt/Freedesktop functionality. There's a lot of history with X11 that we have to move away from, and the incentives and coordination only allow for slow movement.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sprash 7y ago
> Wayland has a lot of problems, but they're adoption problems. No they are deep philosophical problems. The lack of necessary protocols that allow a unified implementation for things like screen sharing, hotkey daemons, window managers, xdotools or clipboard managers are the problem. As long as there is no standardized way to do essential tasks that are typical for a desktop use case Wayland will eternally cause problems.
- DCKing 7y ago
  You're not describing a philosophical problem of "what's possible", as all of these things are perfectly possible on a desktop with Wayland and broader Freedesktop standards, and many have working examples currently. Wayland being as small as it is, is not supposed to be a restriction on features of your entire desktop. But there's no standard interopability with a standard X11 socket anymore. There's interopability with KWin and Mutter and wlroots and a bunch of other things through FreeDesktop standards (Wayland being among them). You might consider it a philosophical problem that Wayland is not trying to solve all the problems that X11 tried to solve. You might attach a lot of philosophical value to that architecture. But Windows, macOS, ChromeOS and Android seem to be doing extremely well on an architecture that is a lot less like X11 and a lot more like Wayland.
- zlynx 7y ago
  > things like: > screen sharing: - Security problem, untrusted access to display, explicitly denied by design. > hotkey daemons - Security problem, untrusted input, denied by design. > window managers - Messing about with windows without authorization, denied by design. > xdotools - Untrusted input. > clipboard managers - Untrusted access to clipboard. Either the compositor application has to do it, or it has to delegate it to a trusted application. So yeah, deep philosophical problems. If you wanted Wayland to work exactly like X11 it won't because that is explicitly against its security design.

danieldk 7y ago

Wayland has been the default on Fedora since Fedora 25, released in 2016. I think replacing X.org in 8 years is pretty impressive, given that many desktop environments and too some extend toolkits have been tightly coupled to X11 in the past.