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What looks like "typical Linux geeks being geeks" with this situation: 1) the old, mostly working thing is being abandoned in favor of 2) that new thing which

What looks like "typical Linux geeks being geeks" with this situation: 1) the old, mostly working thing is being abandoned in favor of 2) that new thing which doesn't work in so many cases it's laughable, even after 11 years. How many years was it between the concept of X and a working release at Palo Alto? Note that the new situation is so perfect for passing the buck from the windowing system to the compositors, and compositor folks are busy fighting feuds over which one another's private protocols or even public ones they are not going to support. Oh, and the browsers. Chromium is making its first shy bumbling steps towards actually working on Wayland! A mere decade after! I've heard it was so much easier to write Wayland clients, what could have happened? Upd: This toxic development culture in a nutshell is exactly what this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24165445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24165445 is about. Well, we know it's not limited to Google.

wegs 6y ago
Newer isn't better-designed. Unix was really well-designed, compared to so much of the modern stuff, and it does everything I need. Nineties Linux was a nice Unix. I wish we hadn't spent the past quarter-century turning it into nineties Windows, with layers upon layers upon layers of cruft. I don't get why Wayland is slow, when Enlightenment was fast on machines with 32MB of RAM, a 3dfx Voodoo, a spinning HDD, and a 66MHz CPU...
- WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
  I've heard enlightenment can be a Wayland compositor now, could you try it? Also I think 3dfx Voodoo was the magic pixie dust, once you ever go OpenGL, you're not going back.
  - modified001 6y ago
    https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
  - modified001 6y ago
    A developer sharing is experience working with EFL: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
    - badsectoracula 6y ago
      It sounds like the guy is way overexaggerating and basically didn't understand the library he was working with. What he describes isn't anything special - the "Evas_Object" (aside of the weird name) sounds like a HWND in Windows or Window in X. The part about layouts sounds like similar to sizers in wxWidgets which are used so that you can avoid using heavyweight native widgets just for layout that some other toolkits do. The event callback sounds like it uses a generic messaging system - again not much different than something like WndProc in Windows. EFL is written in C so it does have to work within the limitations of C but -non-toy- GUIs are inherently object oriented so things will be a bit more complicated than Qt that can lean on C++'s support for object oriented programming. Especially since apparently EFL also supports bindings to other languages which may also make things a bit more complicated.
      - modified001 6y ago
        It definitely struck a cord when I had have to use it in a project around five years ago. Luckily I got an opportunity to a new project. And the company in question (Samsung) ultimately dropped it IIRC.
  - wegs 6y ago
    I ran Enlightement for maybe a month or two to try it. I mostly ran twm, fvwm, and similar at the time. Those are obviously not satisfactory for a typical user. I gave it as an example of something which ran rather sophisticated theming/compositing/effects on hardware at least 2 orders of magnitude slower than today, and something which modern Ubuntu/Fedora struggle with. I'd encourage you to compare the specs of the 3dfx Voodoo (the "magic dust") to even bottom-barrel integrated graphics of 2020.
- moomin 6y ago
  One of these days you should read the X section of the Unix Haters Handbook. Wayland is being built for the world as it is, X was built for a world that never was. In this case, it’s quite hard to not be better designed.
  - WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
    And yet it suffices to have two GPU in your system (both driven by OSS drivers) that the option of running Wayland disappears from GDM on Fedoras up to 32 at least. The laptop in question is from the late 2016. So much for "the world that is". My machine must be very, very otherworldly.
  - msla 6y ago
    > X was built for a world that never was. No. This is the thinking of people who can't see the utility of a use case they never personally use. It's the thinking of people who believe that "ssh -X" is "obsolete" because RDP exists, or that window managers can become obsolete because the fashion has moved on. X works, it's worked for decades, and saying that it's never worked doesn't negate that.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    "One of these days you should read the X section of the Unix Haters Handbook." I have. It was written by someone who doesn't know the difference between a "client" and a "server".
    - mcguire 6y ago
      No, really. The author, whose name I can't remember at the moment, complains that X has the server/client roles reversed; that xcalc is a server and the display is a client. The usual defense is that it's "tongue in cheek", but from a networking standpoint it is simply wrong.
      - sergeykish 6y ago
        You login to the server and run application, that application connects to the X Server on your client. +----------------+ +----------------+ | Client +---->+ Server | | | | | | +-----------+ | | +-----------+ | | |X Server +<---------+Application| | | +-----------+ | | +-----------+ | | | | | +----------------+ +----------------+ I can see how confusion may arise.
- nialv7 6y ago
  I find it really arrogant to claim "this software does everything I need, so it should never change", while in reality you are but an infinitesimally small part of the user base said software has to support. Sure, all the software can stay where they are if all the developers had to serve is you. But that is just not the reality.
  - 1_player 6y ago
    Especially in the Linux world where not asking too much of their own PC is seen as a virtue, so people are running tiling WMs from the nineties, spend their time in Emacs and say everything is fine. Meanwhile I want my Linux system to run VR, multiple 4K displays, very demanding games and bluetooth headphones. And Linux is the worst for it, because everything feels laggy and half polished there and on the proprietary OS my setup feels MUCH faster. Sure, it's not Linux's fault, but let's stop saying everything is fine and dandy because Emacs is still running.
    - wegs 6y ago
      No one is saying everything is fine. It's not. What we're arguing is why everything is not fine. SGIs ran VR, multiple displays, and very demanding apps in the nineties too. They did all sorts of wonky, complex, 3d input devices too. So did DEC Alphas. This is the stuff Unix was built for. My claim is that nineties Linux was much closer to having the right architecture for it than 2020 Linux for this sort of stuff. The reinventions and onion layers didn't help; they hurt. I think the only piece nineties Linux didn't anticipate was the level of hot-swapping hardware (USB, Bluetooth, displays, etc.), and the level of power management. Modern Linux never got that architected or integrated quite right, because it was built with hack upon hack upon kludge. It's split up in bizarre ways between kernel and user space which would be really tough to clean up right now.
      - anthk 6y ago
        > think the only piece nineties Linux didn't anticipate was the level of hot-swapping hardware They did, modular kernels date back as 2.2 at least. And USB was born in that era.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  I don't know that Wayland is slow, but Gnome was. They fixed several big performance problems recently.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  > Unix was really well-designed, Not really, it is just a pile of hacks on top of hacks, starting by everything is a file until one needs to use sockets.
  - akvadrako 6y ago
    Unix is what you get by usually applying the "worse is better" philosophy.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      And having free source code available on tapes for universities, without which would never taken off.
  - utxaa 6y ago
    what isn't a pile of hacks?
  - jacob019 6y ago
    unix sockets are files
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Try to open() a socket.
- utxaa 6y ago
  the buck is passed onto the compositor. so sway is fast, kde might be slow (or janky). it's not as uniform as with X/window manager.
bitwize 6y ago
> What looks like "typical Linux geeks being geeks" with this situation: I call systems like this CADT-compliant after Jamie Zawinski's Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers idea. Wayland is a system for which CADT-compliance (and maybe security) trumps nearly all other concerns. No surprise, the primary use case for Wayland is and was always GNOME -- the very system for which Zawinski coined CADT.
- WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
  I mean, could it help if we mercilessly threw away all the code from Xorg that is there to support all the Unixes from the 80s and 90s, all the code paths for kernel-bypassing direct hardware access, and reimplemented the protocol on the same stack Wayland compositors live? Wouldn't it have solved the problems that were not about the protocol design? Sure if someone wrote it in Rust it would be also safe and secure /s
- horsawlarway 6y ago
  I mean... having used both X and Wayland as daily drivers, you're fucking insane if you think you can EVER get me back on X. On Wayland I get excellent multi-monitor support (mixed scaling ratios, much better automatic detection and configuration, much better plug-and-play). I also have a touchpad on my XPS that feels just as good as a Mac. To boot, I haven't had to touch a config file related to input devices or output devices a single time using Arch/GDE/Wayland. Honestly, I'd probably still be running linux in a VM on my laptop if it weren't for Wayland. If X is your opinion of "stable and working" then I don't want any part of your systems.
  - WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
    Cannot say Wayland works smoothly on my triple-monitor setup. One of the monitors sometimes stops working randomly, and wakes up to display Plymouth screen when I reboot the thing. Dell Precision 7520 with an AMD GPU. The degree of flakiness is different depending on whether you're on Plasma or GNOME, but it's there nonetheless.
    - 6y ago
sergeykish 6y ago
This criticism looks like "free as beer and I know better". 1. The old, mostly working thing waits your commit 2. That new thing can have some help too I recommend developers story about this "mostly working thing" (2014) [1]. It is quite fun and eye opening, he clearly knows his subject better than most of the comments. Wayland demo worked almost from day one. I've run it in 2010 [2]. But we need applications, that is migrating toolkits and this took 10 years. It is very toxic development culture, cancel culture, mob. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ [2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=858020#p858020 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=858020#p858020
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  It took python community 10 years to migrate to python 3, and the migration process from python 2 to python 3, while tedious, is certainly a lot easier than porting a gui app from xorg to wayland. It could take some time until most app developers finally migrated their apps from xorg to wayland.
  - znpy 6y ago
    worth noting that in the python 2 to 3 story, a migration path was mostly provided along with tools that tried to automatically refactor your code, the latest 2.x release was supported for nearly a decade, and there have been directions on how to temporarily write code to work on both python2 and python3.
    - sergeykish 6y ago
      Python 3 is only unusual in its failure. Perl6 Apocalypses [1] is wonderful. Python 3000 is pointless [2]. I've been Python developer at that time, the writing was on the wall. They have not provided migration path. PEP 414 "Complaint: This PEP may harm adoption of Python 3.2" [3], this is insane. Community voted with feet — they've stayed with Python 2 until clean migration path arrived. I've switched to Ruby and been happy since. Ruby 1.8.7 was supported for five years. You had to write Python 2 code and run 2to3, you had to live in the past or abandon it. [1] https://raku.org/archive/doc/apocalypse.html https://raku.org/archive/doc/apocalypse.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Features [3] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0414/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0414/
phkahler 6y ago
>> that new thing which doesn't work in so many cases it's laughable, even after 11 years. I've been using Wayland for years now and it works great. The one and only thing I use X for is OBS studio because they're still working out the window capture stuff, which BTW mean poking the right hole through security that X doesnt even have. Most the things that don't work well on Wayland are old junk.
- majewsky 6y ago
  Another problematic area is input method editors, mostly because IMEs and applications using them have not implemented the respective protocols on Wayland yet.
- umanwizard 6y ago
  Do you use Chrome? Scrolling with a touchpad still doesn’t work on Wayland (it emulates discrete mouse wheel scrolling, rather than going pixel-by-pixel). There is IIRC some chrome setting that fixes this, but it doesn’t help with chrome-based electron apps that don’t expose the internal settings (like Slack).
nialv7 6y ago
The standard for X was very low in the past. It's unfair to compare wayland with X, when you compare X to alternatives we had back in the 90s. It took the X window system 30-ish years to get where it is today. Wayland only had 11 years, yet it is already better than X in many aspects.
bsder 6y ago
> 1) the old, mostly working thing is being abandoned in favor of Except that X11 is NOT "mostly working" for a significant amount of modern usages. Yes, if you happen to want to run your Terminal, Emacs, etc. remotely over a network connection, X11 is your huckleberry--but only because anything more complicated than a bitmap makes that a very difficult problem. If you want HiDPI, subpixel anti-aliasing, color calibration, multiple resolutions on multiple displays, smooth video, no tearing, etc. X11 only works to a certain degree, some days, for some people, for some video cards. And it's not even clear how those should work over a network connection. This is not new. After all, X11 critiques came in for a full chapter in the Unix Haters Handbook and that's 25 years old. Wayland is simply revisiting the same problems as X Server Extensions 30 years later (they aren't ubiquitous so nobody uses them so they aren't ubiquitous). The problem is that people who use obscure features are VERY vocal about it while people who simply abandon your operating system because accelerated video doesn't work reliably are very quiet. Maybe Wayland isn't the way forward, but X11 certainly hasn't been the way forward for decades. The only advantage I can see is that if Wayland manages to tear out the X11-isms in everybody, what comes after Wayland will have a lot easier time of it.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  None of that require throwing away the entirety of Xorg/X11, breaking every existing application while expecting everyone to rewrite their code in a completely different way, breaking a ton of existing workflows (often without alternatives) and splitting the already tiny Linux desktop in half. Every single thing you've mentioned can be fixed with Xorg/X11. (except subpixel antialiasing because that already existed for a long time, i'm not sure what you refer to)
  - bsder 6y ago
    > Every single thing you've mentioned can be fixed with Xorg/X11. Then why hasn't it been fixed? In open source, those who make the code get to make the decisions--for better or for worse. My personal opinion as to why X11 gets so few contributors--the build system is so terrible that nobody wants to touch it anymore. I suspect they would get a lot more contributors if they changed to something like meson/ninja which doesn't need to recompile the universe to be correct.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
I think you might look at it with this perspective. It will take them deserting X11 in order to get stuff for Wayland working because everyone is just like "well X11 will work well enough". Now people won't have much of a choice other than not supporting linux Desktop at all.
RedShift1 6y ago
Imagine if all the work that has gone into Wayland went into Xorg... We'd have a pretty sweet graphical server.
- wagamama010 6y ago
  > We'd have a pretty sweet graphical server. Don't you mean "They"?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Sure, but that's not how hobbies work. You can't take someone's volunteer work and turn that into work on a thing that is not the thing they volunteered their work on and expect to get the same productivity. It's like saying "Imagine if all the time you, a software engineer, spent on taking care of your child was spent on making a graphical server". Sure, but I don't want to make a graphical server, I want to turn people into dinosaurs.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - account42 6y ago
    > Sure, but that's not how hobbies work. We aren't talking about hobby work here.
utxaa 6y ago
yes. but to be fair is more like typical humans being typical humans.
account42 6y ago
Nah, it's not Linux geeks pushing this but Red Hat, Canonical, etc. - each trying to grab as much control over the stack as they can.
- FandangoRanger 6y ago
  This is the true answer. Nobody benefits from replacing x.org except large companies. I for one have already switched my day to day operations over to OpenBSD, as I've seen too much strange corporate agitation propaganda trying to get us to relinquish the things that make Linux great - C, X11, native non-containerized applications, and so on. I refuse.

wegs 6y ago

Newer isn't better-designed. Unix was really well-designed, compared to so much of the modern stuff, and it does everything I need. Nineties Linux was a nice Unix. I wish we hadn't spent the past quarter-century turning it into nineties Windows, with layers upon layers upon layers of cruft. I don't get why Wayland is slow, when Enlightenment was fast on machines with 32MB of RAM, a 3dfx Voodoo, a spinning HDD, and a 66MHz CPU...

WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
I've heard enlightenment can be a Wayland compositor now, could you try it? Also I think 3dfx Voodoo was the magic pixie dust, once you ever go OpenGL, you're not going back.
- modified001 6y ago
  https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
- modified001 6y ago
  A developer sharing is experience working with EFL: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    It sounds like the guy is way overexaggerating and basically didn't understand the library he was working with. What he describes isn't anything special - the "Evas_Object" (aside of the weird name) sounds like a HWND in Windows or Window in X. The part about layouts sounds like similar to sizers in wxWidgets which are used so that you can avoid using heavyweight native widgets just for layout that some other toolkits do. The event callback sounds like it uses a generic messaging system - again not much different than something like WndProc in Windows. EFL is written in C so it does have to work within the limitations of C but -non-toy- GUIs are inherently object oriented so things will be a bit more complicated than Qt that can lean on C++'s support for object oriented programming. Especially since apparently EFL also supports bindings to other languages which may also make things a bit more complicated.
    - modified001 6y ago
      It definitely struck a cord when I had have to use it in a project around five years ago. Luckily I got an opportunity to a new project. And the company in question (Samsung) ultimately dropped it IIRC.
- wegs 6y ago
  I ran Enlightement for maybe a month or two to try it. I mostly ran twm, fvwm, and similar at the time. Those are obviously not satisfactory for a typical user. I gave it as an example of something which ran rather sophisticated theming/compositing/effects on hardware at least 2 orders of magnitude slower than today, and something which modern Ubuntu/Fedora struggle with. I'd encourage you to compare the specs of the 3dfx Voodoo (the "magic dust") to even bottom-barrel integrated graphics of 2020.
moomin 6y ago
One of these days you should read the X section of the Unix Haters Handbook. Wayland is being built for the world as it is, X was built for a world that never was. In this case, it’s quite hard to not be better designed.
- WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
  And yet it suffices to have two GPU in your system (both driven by OSS drivers) that the option of running Wayland disappears from GDM on Fedoras up to 32 at least. The laptop in question is from the late 2016. So much for "the world that is". My machine must be very, very otherworldly.
- msla 6y ago
  > X was built for a world that never was. No. This is the thinking of people who can't see the utility of a use case they never personally use. It's the thinking of people who believe that "ssh -X" is "obsolete" because RDP exists, or that window managers can become obsolete because the fashion has moved on. X works, it's worked for decades, and saying that it's never worked doesn't negate that.
- mcguire 6y ago
  "One of these days you should read the X section of the Unix Haters Handbook." I have. It was written by someone who doesn't know the difference between a "client" and a "server".
  - mcguire 6y ago
    No, really. The author, whose name I can't remember at the moment, complains that X has the server/client roles reversed; that xcalc is a server and the display is a client. The usual defense is that it's "tongue in cheek", but from a networking standpoint it is simply wrong.
    - sergeykish 6y ago
      You login to the server and run application, that application connects to the X Server on your client. +----------------+ +----------------+ | Client +---->+ Server | | | | | | +-----------+ | | +-----------+ | | |X Server +<---------+Application| | | +-----------+ | | +-----------+ | | | | | +----------------+ +----------------+ I can see how confusion may arise.
nialv7 6y ago
I find it really arrogant to claim "this software does everything I need, so it should never change", while in reality you are but an infinitesimally small part of the user base said software has to support. Sure, all the software can stay where they are if all the developers had to serve is you. But that is just not the reality.
- 1_player 6y ago
  Especially in the Linux world where not asking too much of their own PC is seen as a virtue, so people are running tiling WMs from the nineties, spend their time in Emacs and say everything is fine. Meanwhile I want my Linux system to run VR, multiple 4K displays, very demanding games and bluetooth headphones. And Linux is the worst for it, because everything feels laggy and half polished there and on the proprietary OS my setup feels MUCH faster. Sure, it's not Linux's fault, but let's stop saying everything is fine and dandy because Emacs is still running.
  - wegs 6y ago
    No one is saying everything is fine. It's not. What we're arguing is why everything is not fine. SGIs ran VR, multiple displays, and very demanding apps in the nineties too. They did all sorts of wonky, complex, 3d input devices too. So did DEC Alphas. This is the stuff Unix was built for. My claim is that nineties Linux was much closer to having the right architecture for it than 2020 Linux for this sort of stuff. The reinventions and onion layers didn't help; they hurt. I think the only piece nineties Linux didn't anticipate was the level of hot-swapping hardware (USB, Bluetooth, displays, etc.), and the level of power management. Modern Linux never got that architected or integrated quite right, because it was built with hack upon hack upon kludge. It's split up in bizarre ways between kernel and user space which would be really tough to clean up right now.
    - anthk 6y ago
      > think the only piece nineties Linux didn't anticipate was the level of hot-swapping hardware They did, modular kernels date back as 2.2 at least. And USB was born in that era.
mixmastamyk 6y ago
I don't know that Wayland is slow, but Gnome was. They fixed several big performance problems recently.
pjmlp 6y ago
> Unix was really well-designed, Not really, it is just a pile of hacks on top of hacks, starting by everything is a file until one needs to use sockets.
- akvadrako 6y ago
  Unix is what you get by usually applying the "worse is better" philosophy.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    And having free source code available on tapes for universities, without which would never taken off.
- utxaa 6y ago
  what isn't a pile of hacks?
- jacob019 6y ago
  unix sockets are files
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Try to open() a socket.
utxaa 6y ago
the buck is passed onto the compositor. so sway is fast, kde might be slow (or janky). it's not as uniform as with X/window manager.

bitwize 6y ago

> What looks like "typical Linux geeks being geeks" with this situation: I call systems like this CADT-compliant after Jamie Zawinski's Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers idea. Wayland is a system for which CADT-compliance (and maybe security) trumps nearly all other concerns. No surprise, the primary use case for Wayland is and was always GNOME -- the very system for which Zawinski coined CADT.

WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
I mean, could it help if we mercilessly threw away all the code from Xorg that is there to support all the Unixes from the 80s and 90s, all the code paths for kernel-bypassing direct hardware access, and reimplemented the protocol on the same stack Wayland compositors live? Wouldn't it have solved the problems that were not about the protocol design? Sure if someone wrote it in Rust it would be also safe and secure /s
horsawlarway 6y ago
I mean... having used both X and Wayland as daily drivers, you're fucking insane if you think you can EVER get me back on X. On Wayland I get excellent multi-monitor support (mixed scaling ratios, much better automatic detection and configuration, much better plug-and-play). I also have a touchpad on my XPS that feels just as good as a Mac. To boot, I haven't had to touch a config file related to input devices or output devices a single time using Arch/GDE/Wayland. Honestly, I'd probably still be running linux in a VM on my laptop if it weren't for Wayland. If X is your opinion of "stable and working" then I don't want any part of your systems.
- WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
  Cannot say Wayland works smoothly on my triple-monitor setup. One of the monitors sometimes stops working randomly, and wakes up to display Plymouth screen when I reboot the thing. Dell Precision 7520 with an AMD GPU. The degree of flakiness is different depending on whether you're on Plasma or GNOME, but it's there nonetheless.
  - 6y ago

sergeykish 6y ago

This criticism looks like "free as beer and I know better". 1. The old, mostly working thing waits your commit 2. That new thing can have some help too I recommend developers story about this "mostly working thing" (2014) [1]. It is quite fun and eye opening, he clearly knows his subject better than most of the comments. Wayland demo worked almost from day one. I've run it in 2010 [2]. But we need applications, that is migrating toolkits and this took 10 years. It is very toxic development culture, cancel culture, mob. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ [2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=858020#p858020 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=858020#p858020

neurostimulant 6y ago
It took python community 10 years to migrate to python 3, and the migration process from python 2 to python 3, while tedious, is certainly a lot easier than porting a gui app from xorg to wayland. It could take some time until most app developers finally migrated their apps from xorg to wayland.
- znpy 6y ago
  worth noting that in the python 2 to 3 story, a migration path was mostly provided along with tools that tried to automatically refactor your code, the latest 2.x release was supported for nearly a decade, and there have been directions on how to temporarily write code to work on both python2 and python3.
  - sergeykish 6y ago
    Python 3 is only unusual in its failure. Perl6 Apocalypses [1] is wonderful. Python 3000 is pointless [2]. I've been Python developer at that time, the writing was on the wall. They have not provided migration path. PEP 414 "Complaint: This PEP may harm adoption of Python 3.2" [3], this is insane. Community voted with feet — they've stayed with Python 2 until clean migration path arrived. I've switched to Ruby and been happy since. Ruby 1.8.7 was supported for five years. You had to write Python 2 code and run 2to3, you had to live in the past or abandon it. [1] https://raku.org/archive/doc/apocalypse.html https://raku.org/archive/doc/apocalypse.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Features [3] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0414/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0414/

phkahler 6y ago

>> that new thing which doesn't work in so many cases it's laughable, even after 11 years. I've been using Wayland for years now and it works great. The one and only thing I use X for is OBS studio because they're still working out the window capture stuff, which BTW mean poking the right hole through security that X doesnt even have. Most the things that don't work well on Wayland are old junk.

majewsky 6y ago
Another problematic area is input method editors, mostly because IMEs and applications using them have not implemented the respective protocols on Wayland yet.
umanwizard 6y ago
Do you use Chrome? Scrolling with a touchpad still doesn’t work on Wayland (it emulates discrete mouse wheel scrolling, rather than going pixel-by-pixel). There is IIRC some chrome setting that fixes this, but it doesn’t help with chrome-based electron apps that don’t expose the internal settings (like Slack).

nialv7 6y ago

The standard for X was very low in the past. It's unfair to compare wayland with X, when you compare X to alternatives we had back in the 90s. It took the X window system 30-ish years to get where it is today. Wayland only had 11 years, yet it is already better than X in many aspects.

bsder 6y ago

> 1) the old, mostly working thing is being abandoned in favor of Except that X11 is NOT "mostly working" for a significant amount of modern usages. Yes, if you happen to want to run your Terminal, Emacs, etc. remotely over a network connection, X11 is your huckleberry--but only because anything more complicated than a bitmap makes that a very difficult problem. If you want HiDPI, subpixel anti-aliasing, color calibration, multiple resolutions on multiple displays, smooth video, no tearing, etc. X11 only works to a certain degree, some days, for some people, for some video cards. And it's not even clear how those should work over a network connection. This is not new. After all, X11 critiques came in for a full chapter in the Unix Haters Handbook and that's 25 years old. Wayland is simply revisiting the same problems as X Server Extensions 30 years later (they aren't ubiquitous so nobody uses them so they aren't ubiquitous). The problem is that people who use obscure features are VERY vocal about it while people who simply abandon your operating system because accelerated video doesn't work reliably are very quiet. Maybe Wayland isn't the way forward, but X11 certainly hasn't been the way forward for decades. The only advantage I can see is that if Wayland manages to tear out the X11-isms in everybody, what comes after Wayland will have a lot easier time of it.

badsectoracula 6y ago
None of that require throwing away the entirety of Xorg/X11, breaking every existing application while expecting everyone to rewrite their code in a completely different way, breaking a ton of existing workflows (often without alternatives) and splitting the already tiny Linux desktop in half. Every single thing you've mentioned can be fixed with Xorg/X11. (except subpixel antialiasing because that already existed for a long time, i'm not sure what you refer to)
- bsder 6y ago
  > Every single thing you've mentioned can be fixed with Xorg/X11. Then why hasn't it been fixed? In open source, those who make the code get to make the decisions--for better or for worse. My personal opinion as to why X11 gets so few contributors--the build system is so terrible that nobody wants to touch it anymore. I suspect they would get a lot more contributors if they changed to something like meson/ninja which doesn't need to recompile the universe to be correct.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

I think you might look at it with this perspective. It will take them deserting X11 in order to get stuff for Wayland working because everyone is just like "well X11 will work well enough". Now people won't have much of a choice other than not supporting linux Desktop at all.

RedShift1 6y ago

Imagine if all the work that has gone into Wayland went into Xorg... We'd have a pretty sweet graphical server.

wagamama010 6y ago
> We'd have a pretty sweet graphical server. Don't you mean "They"?
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renewiltord 6y ago
Sure, but that's not how hobbies work. You can't take someone's volunteer work and turn that into work on a thing that is not the thing they volunteered their work on and expect to get the same productivity. It's like saying "Imagine if all the time you, a software engineer, spent on taking care of your child was spent on making a graphical server". Sure, but I don't want to make a graphical server, I want to turn people into dinosaurs.
- deleted 6y ago
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- account42 6y ago
  > Sure, but that's not how hobbies work. We aren't talking about hobby work here.

utxaa 6y ago

yes. but to be fair is more like typical humans being typical humans.

account42 6y ago

Nah, it's not Linux geeks pushing this but Red Hat, Canonical, etc. - each trying to grab as much control over the stack as they can.

FandangoRanger 6y ago
This is the true answer. Nobody benefits from replacing x.org except large companies. I for one have already switched my day to day operations over to OpenBSD, as I've seen too much strange corporate agitation propaganda trying to get us to relinquish the things that make Linux great - C, X11, native non-containerized applications, and so on. I refuse.