20 ms·

I am not necessarily against Wayland or new things in general. But it bothers me when no clear upgrade path is defined ("drop your stuff" is not acceptable) an

by znpy 6y ago

I am not necessarily against Wayland or new things in general. But it bothers me when no clear upgrade path is defined ("drop your stuff" is not acceptable) and a half-hassed incomplete solution is proposed instead, and backwards compatibility is pretty much disregarded. For what concerns my personal computing, I'll stay on Xorg until XFCE supports Wayland. Then I'll update.

hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
Who are you expecting to provide this for you?
- cpach 6y ago
  Let me fill in with my perspective as a Mac user: I expect the vendor (i.e Apple) to supply a decent desktop environment. The did a quite good job at it. I didn’t need to pay extra, it was included in the sale of the computer.
  - freehunter 6y ago
    But X.org isn’t a hardware vendor. It’s not owned by any hardware vendor. It’s not even owned by an OS vendor, or by an OS at all. Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company. Microsoft and Google are close behind. Of course they can give away their desktop environment away for free. System76 (et al) can’t compete with that. X.org can’t compete with that. I mean, this is exactly the reason I use Mac, because it ships with a good DE out of the box supported by a trillion dollar vendor. But that doesn’t help people who prefer Linux.
    - danaris 6y ago
      It's worth noting that when Apple first developed the (early versions of the) current desktop environment, they were not just not a trillion-dollar company, they were still considered to be "doomed" and on their way out by a large percentage of those who paid any attention to them.
- NeutronStar 6y ago
  Who is he to expect non half assed solution? That's your answer?
mrob 6y ago
I'm against Wayland because it forces compositing on all windowed applications. I'll stay on Xorg as long as possible because I'm not willing to sacrifice latency for no tearing.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  yep, compositor latency is infuriating when you're used to non-composited UI
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    Can you really tell the difference? What's the latency? Are your eyes that sensitive?
    - cannedslime 6y ago
      I think our sight is all a little different. I can clearly see 50/60hz strobing in light when others can't. Back in the old CRT days I would get strained eye sight and nausea if I worked at monitors running below 85hz, unless it had long lasting phosphors like the old monochrome CRTs.
      - WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
        Good LCDs are static unless you're running a dvi-vga-displayport-vga-hdmi dongle monster where the pixels are inevitably shifting a bit every instant. What you're more likely to be seeing is PWM backlight flickering at you. If it's indeed the LCD and not the backlight, pray tell us the model so we don't end up buying it.
        ubercow13 6y ago
        They didn’t say anything about LCDs.
        deleted 6y ago
diegocg 6y ago
>backwards compatibility is pretty much disregarded. Wayland compositors provide backwards compatibility with most X11 apps via XWayland, I don't think it's fair to say that they completely disregard compatibility
- znpy 6y ago
  last time i checked remote desktop (ala vnc) was not really a thing and opening remote apps on the local display (ala ssh -X) wasn't a thing either. That's disregard for backwards compatibility to me. edit: which is not to shit on wayland itself, it's to complain about the general attitude which is like "just don't do that" or "oh that's old, we don't support that"
  - chousuke 6y ago
    wayvnc and waypipe work just fine nowadays. I've actually used waypipe more often in the last year than I ever used ssh -X, thanks to a shift towards WFH :P It's sometimes useful to be able to run Firefox remotely from my workstation at the office.
- p_l 6y ago
  Due to how XWayland works, a lot of applications (sometimes critical ones) won't work under XWayland ever (pretty much everything that works on interaction between X clients fails hard).
  - phkahler 6y ago
    >> pretty much everything that works on interaction between X clients fails hard It's supposed to fail hard. That isnt just a security hole in X, it's a total lack of security. The notion that any app should be able to monitor or manipulate any other app is archaic and wrong from a security perspective.
    - enriquto 6y ago
      There they go htop, netcat, kill, and the whole unix pipe system. No, thanks. Programs monitoring other programs is the very essence of computing for us greybeards, and you will take this from our cold, dead hands!
rjzzleep 6y ago
I keep trying to use Wayland, but it never fully works. Everyone keeps saying how well the highdpi stuff works, but then it really only works for a subset of things. For the rest it's actually worse than Xorg. Multiscreen is Xorg is kinda mushy so I thought maybe Wayland fixes it, but no it doesn't. Wayland is now 12 years old and everything is still half-baked. It quotes an intel developer saying they don't want to do any more stuff on Xorg. But the reality is that as much as I admire intels open source contributions. I don't remember a time where all the features in the Intel driver actually fully worked. But sure, maybe it's an Xorg issue, or they don't know how to do release management. Either way, Wayland doesn't seem to solve the problems it promised to fix.
- p_l 6y ago
  Having used Intel open source drivers for 12 years, I've never lost the opinion I gained back with X3100 gpu that Intel is the darling because technically open sourcing the driver papered over the many, many faults of their code. Whenever I had a chance to run on nvidia binary drivers, the only things I occasionally missed were some new features, or having to wait a bit longer to update the kernel. Stability was better, drivers more performant, and I don't remember daily fighting with memory leaks. And X.Org's driver architecture could be replaced completely (in fact, it could be made to run on the same stack as Wayland) - it wouldn't be the first compositing Xserver around, and could use methods that would deal with noticeable to many lag involved in compositor-based UI.
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    > Whenever I had a chance to run on nvidia binary drivers, the only things I occasionally missed were some new features, or having to wait a bit longer to update the kernel. Stability was better, drivers more performant, and I don't remember daily fighting with memory leaks. I had a Nvidia Riva TNT2 and later on an Nvidia GeForce. I ran Linux on it. I had stability issues with the driver, but I solved it the following way: ran one X server with a DE, and another X server with Nvidia's proprietary driver (mostly for games). This way, if I had to kill the X server using Nvidia's driver I didn't lose any work. If that wasn't enough, all the bloody time there were massive security problems found in Nvidia's proprietary driver. I don't know if that is still the case, cause I switched away to ATi in the 00s, and Intel graphics cards + ThinkPad as laptop. ATi/AMD has come a long way ever since. Their FOSS drivers are stable, and they deliver (see various Phoronix benchmarks).
darthrupert 6y ago
Wayland was the last straw for me. It made me switch to Macs after 20 years of almost exclusive Linux on the desktop and a few dev stints. It was cool when my time was less expensive. I check the state of the linux world about once a year still. And obviously keep using it on the servers. Best of luck to everyone using it for desktop. I totally get why you do it, but it's just not for me right now.
- gtirloni 6y ago
  Nobody is forcing you to use Wayland. Or are they? On Fedora it's a single line change em /etc to disable it (which I do because of Nvidia).
  - grandinj 6y ago
    Except that, in the name of progress, various things are broken in the x11 world too on fedora, as a direct consequence of the wayland updates. Which is unfortunate
    - wayneftw 6y ago
      Sounds like a Fedora problem then. Pick a different distro - problem solved. There is nothing so special going on in Fedora that can’t be done in other distros. Try an Arch based Linux desktop. You’ll get newer packages and better package management. Manjaro has worked well for me.
    - sergeykish 6y ago
      Fedora switched to Wayland, that is unfortunate for X.Org users but basically it means someone stopped fixing issues. You either fix them yourself and contribute back if possible. Or switch to distribution where someone still fixes these issues. I've investigated X.Org caused bug just for two days and since then totally support Wayland development. What we have today is not healthy.
      - grandinj 6y ago
kllrnohj 6y ago
I think the problem with Wayland is it isn't half-assed. The insistence on being a generic protocol instead of a product fragments an already small dev community. And being a protocol so incredibly slows down velocity.
noobermin 6y ago
May be it's time for people to be against new things. Open source I know is often a work of love, but it's a bit painful that everyone is chasing after new things instead of keeping things that already work working. It's like how there are dozens of js frameworks that have thousands of contributors whereas openssl had one which lead to the infamous heartbleed bug. We need to talk about how the culture of open source is broken in this regard and figure out how to fix it.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  Trying out something new and fun is what you do in your free time. Working with decade-old legacy code is what you get paid huge amounts for and the reason you want to start from scratch in your free time. I agree that this is not good overall, but it's going to be very hard to convince people to work on not-fun things for free. Some might see it more akin to volunteer work, but the amount of people willing to do this are far outnumbered by the people simply doing things for fun. Too be fair, it is at least pretty great in so far as that they're doing open-source work :)
- ernst_klim 6y ago
  >May be it's time for people to be against new things. Maybe it's time for people to stop whining in the internet and start writing code? X.org code is there, support it, contribute to it, improve it if you want to. > infamous heartbleed bug Yeah. Because real open source is like that: millions are arguing in forums, few write code. And that's the problem Wayland is trying to solve BTW, by removing quite a lot of obscure legacy which only a few properly understand. Writing things from scratch is usually good, it allows: 1) To follow modern practices so modern devs can understand the code and contribute 2) To use modern languages and technologies which are inherently more safe and secure (due to better type systems, linters, language design) 3) To get rid of technical debt
  - IvyMike 6y ago
    > Writing things from scratch is usually good, Joel Spolsky wrote a good argument to the contrary: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... Any good examples of large projects where a rewrite from scratch has been good?
weare138 6y ago
This. I'm not necessarily against moving to Wayland but the display server and compositor is a really important component and Wayland has been a long time coming, 12 years now to be exact. Either we need a clear path to Wayland or just keep maintaining Xorg.
nialv7 6y ago
> when no clear upgrade path is defined This is not true. Developers have been working actively on Xwayland, and I believe it can run most of the applications now, even with hardware acceleration. Is that not a clear upgrade path for you?

by znpy 6y ago

hobby-coder-guy 6y ago

Who are you expecting to provide this for you?

cpach 6y ago
Let me fill in with my perspective as a Mac user: I expect the vendor (i.e Apple) to supply a decent desktop environment. The did a quite good job at it. I didn’t need to pay extra, it was included in the sale of the computer.
- freehunter 6y ago
  But X.org isn’t a hardware vendor. It’s not owned by any hardware vendor. It’s not even owned by an OS vendor, or by an OS at all. Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company. Microsoft and Google are close behind. Of course they can give away their desktop environment away for free. System76 (et al) can’t compete with that. X.org can’t compete with that. I mean, this is exactly the reason I use Mac, because it ships with a good DE out of the box supported by a trillion dollar vendor. But that doesn’t help people who prefer Linux.
  - danaris 6y ago
    It's worth noting that when Apple first developed the (early versions of the) current desktop environment, they were not just not a trillion-dollar company, they were still considered to be "doomed" and on their way out by a large percentage of those who paid any attention to them.
NeutronStar 6y ago
Who is he to expect non half assed solution? That's your answer?

mrob 6y ago

I'm against Wayland because it forces compositing on all windowed applications. I'll stay on Xorg as long as possible because I'm not willing to sacrifice latency for no tearing.

jcelerier 6y ago
yep, compositor latency is infuriating when you're used to non-composited UI
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  Can you really tell the difference? What's the latency? Are your eyes that sensitive?
  - cannedslime 6y ago
    I think our sight is all a little different. I can clearly see 50/60hz strobing in light when others can't. Back in the old CRT days I would get strained eye sight and nausea if I worked at monitors running below 85hz, unless it had long lasting phosphors like the old monochrome CRTs.
    - WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
      Good LCDs are static unless you're running a dvi-vga-displayport-vga-hdmi dongle monster where the pixels are inevitably shifting a bit every instant. What you're more likely to be seeing is PWM backlight flickering at you. If it's indeed the LCD and not the backlight, pray tell us the model so we don't end up buying it.
      - ubercow13 6y ago
        They didn’t say anything about LCDs.
        deleted 6y ago

diegocg 6y ago

>backwards compatibility is pretty much disregarded. Wayland compositors provide backwards compatibility with most X11 apps via XWayland, I don't think it's fair to say that they completely disregard compatibility

znpy 6y ago
last time i checked remote desktop (ala vnc) was not really a thing and opening remote apps on the local display (ala ssh -X) wasn't a thing either. That's disregard for backwards compatibility to me. edit: which is not to shit on wayland itself, it's to complain about the general attitude which is like "just don't do that" or "oh that's old, we don't support that"
- chousuke 6y ago
  wayvnc and waypipe work just fine nowadays. I've actually used waypipe more often in the last year than I ever used ssh -X, thanks to a shift towards WFH :P It's sometimes useful to be able to run Firefox remotely from my workstation at the office.
p_l 6y ago
Due to how XWayland works, a lot of applications (sometimes critical ones) won't work under XWayland ever (pretty much everything that works on interaction between X clients fails hard).
- phkahler 6y ago
  >> pretty much everything that works on interaction between X clients fails hard It's supposed to fail hard. That isnt just a security hole in X, it's a total lack of security. The notion that any app should be able to monitor or manipulate any other app is archaic and wrong from a security perspective.
  - enriquto 6y ago
    There they go htop, netcat, kill, and the whole unix pipe system. No, thanks. Programs monitoring other programs is the very essence of computing for us greybeards, and you will take this from our cold, dead hands!

rjzzleep 6y ago

I keep trying to use Wayland, but it never fully works. Everyone keeps saying how well the highdpi stuff works, but then it really only works for a subset of things. For the rest it's actually worse than Xorg. Multiscreen is Xorg is kinda mushy so I thought maybe Wayland fixes it, but no it doesn't. Wayland is now 12 years old and everything is still half-baked. It quotes an intel developer saying they don't want to do any more stuff on Xorg. But the reality is that as much as I admire intels open source contributions. I don't remember a time where all the features in the Intel driver actually fully worked. But sure, maybe it's an Xorg issue, or they don't know how to do release management. Either way, Wayland doesn't seem to solve the problems it promised to fix.

p_l 6y ago
Having used Intel open source drivers for 12 years, I've never lost the opinion I gained back with X3100 gpu that Intel is the darling because technically open sourcing the driver papered over the many, many faults of their code. Whenever I had a chance to run on nvidia binary drivers, the only things I occasionally missed were some new features, or having to wait a bit longer to update the kernel. Stability was better, drivers more performant, and I don't remember daily fighting with memory leaks. And X.Org's driver architecture could be replaced completely (in fact, it could be made to run on the same stack as Wayland) - it wouldn't be the first compositing Xserver around, and could use methods that would deal with noticeable to many lag involved in compositor-based UI.
- Fnoord 6y ago
  > Whenever I had a chance to run on nvidia binary drivers, the only things I occasionally missed were some new features, or having to wait a bit longer to update the kernel. Stability was better, drivers more performant, and I don't remember daily fighting with memory leaks. I had a Nvidia Riva TNT2 and later on an Nvidia GeForce. I ran Linux on it. I had stability issues with the driver, but I solved it the following way: ran one X server with a DE, and another X server with Nvidia's proprietary driver (mostly for games). This way, if I had to kill the X server using Nvidia's driver I didn't lose any work. If that wasn't enough, all the bloody time there were massive security problems found in Nvidia's proprietary driver. I don't know if that is still the case, cause I switched away to ATi in the 00s, and Intel graphics cards + ThinkPad as laptop. ATi/AMD has come a long way ever since. Their FOSS drivers are stable, and they deliver (see various Phoronix benchmarks).

darthrupert 6y ago

Wayland was the last straw for me. It made me switch to Macs after 20 years of almost exclusive Linux on the desktop and a few dev stints. It was cool when my time was less expensive. I check the state of the linux world about once a year still. And obviously keep using it on the servers. Best of luck to everyone using it for desktop. I totally get why you do it, but it's just not for me right now.

gtirloni 6y ago
Nobody is forcing you to use Wayland. Or are they? On Fedora it's a single line change em /etc to disable it (which I do because of Nvidia).
- grandinj 6y ago
  Except that, in the name of progress, various things are broken in the x11 world too on fedora, as a direct consequence of the wayland updates. Which is unfortunate
  - wayneftw 6y ago
    Sounds like a Fedora problem then. Pick a different distro - problem solved. There is nothing so special going on in Fedora that can’t be done in other distros. Try an Arch based Linux desktop. You’ll get newer packages and better package management. Manjaro has worked well for me.
  - sergeykish 6y ago
    Fedora switched to Wayland, that is unfortunate for X.Org users but basically it means someone stopped fixing issues. You either fix them yourself and contribute back if possible. Or switch to distribution where someone still fixes these issues. I've investigated X.Org caused bug just for two days and since then totally support Wayland development. What we have today is not healthy.
    - grandinj 6y ago

kllrnohj 6y ago

I think the problem with Wayland is it isn't half-assed. The insistence on being a generic protocol instead of a product fragments an already small dev community. And being a protocol so incredibly slows down velocity.

noobermin 6y ago

May be it's time for people to be against new things. Open source I know is often a work of love, but it's a bit painful that everyone is chasing after new things instead of keeping things that already work working. It's like how there are dozens of js frameworks that have thousands of contributors whereas openssl had one which lead to the infamous heartbleed bug. We need to talk about how the culture of open source is broken in this regard and figure out how to fix it.

Sebb767 6y ago
Trying out something new and fun is what you do in your free time. Working with decade-old legacy code is what you get paid huge amounts for and the reason you want to start from scratch in your free time. I agree that this is not good overall, but it's going to be very hard to convince people to work on not-fun things for free. Some might see it more akin to volunteer work, but the amount of people willing to do this are far outnumbered by the people simply doing things for fun. Too be fair, it is at least pretty great in so far as that they're doing open-source work :)
ernst_klim 6y ago
>May be it's time for people to be against new things. Maybe it's time for people to stop whining in the internet and start writing code? X.org code is there, support it, contribute to it, improve it if you want to. > infamous heartbleed bug Yeah. Because real open source is like that: millions are arguing in forums, few write code. And that's the problem Wayland is trying to solve BTW, by removing quite a lot of obscure legacy which only a few properly understand. Writing things from scratch is usually good, it allows: 1) To follow modern practices so modern devs can understand the code and contribute 2) To use modern languages and technologies which are inherently more safe and secure (due to better type systems, linters, language design) 3) To get rid of technical debt
- IvyMike 6y ago
  > Writing things from scratch is usually good, Joel Spolsky wrote a good argument to the contrary: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... Any good examples of large projects where a rewrite from scratch has been good?

weare138 6y ago

This. I'm not necessarily against moving to Wayland but the display server and compositor is a really important component and Wayland has been a long time coming, 12 years now to be exact. Either we need a clear path to Wayland or just keep maintaining Xorg.

nialv7 6y ago

> when no clear upgrade path is defined This is not true. Developers have been working actively on Xwayland, and I believe it can run most of the applications now, even with hardware acceleration. Is that not a clear upgrade path for you?