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Hell, I'd be happy if there was just fewer bugs. Case in point: Gnome + Wayland + guake. If you configure guake to use anything less than 100% of the width o

Hell, I'd be happy if there was just fewer bugs. Case in point: Gnome + Wayland + guake. If you configure guake to use anything less than 100% of the width of the screen, then it suddenly appears in the wrong position. But wait, maybe that's a guake bug, right? Wrong. I tried a couple of other options for similar functionality and they demonstrated the same issue. So odds are it's actually a bug in the compositor. And that's ignoring that basic things like global keybinding don't work (edit: ya ya, the Wayland proponents will tell you that's by design, but it's a) user hateful b) totally different than literally any other desktop OS out there today, and c) breaks apps, right now, in ways that will require major code changes to fix) so I have to put a hack in place to allow F12 to open guake up in the first place. Meanwhile, we only just got the "official" solution for screensharing (what Zoom does is an incredible hack: they just take lots of screenshots! No, I'm not kidding, that's actually how it works, which is why the framerate is so bad) and it involves yet more new stuff (pipewire, et al) that I'm sure will be a source of its own raft of bugs. I'd say "maybe in a year or two", but we've been saying that for a long time, now...

djsumdog 6y ago
The trouble with your guake bug is it might be Gnome + Wayland specific. With the separation between the server and composer, bugs might need to be fixed in multiple places. Some window managers use wlroots, so maybe some bugs can be fixed there, but others have their own forks and implementations. The hotkey thing is big and it's annoying because it's another thing that might need to be implemented/fixed in each and every composer and environment (and it could be different in every environment). I've seen the X11/Wayland talks and I agree Xorg has tons of old crufty garbage in it, and screen locking in Xorg is not very secure. But the Wayland team seems to have made little effort in addressing even the most basic things like hotkeys, screenshots, etc. I'm not sure if "user hateful" is the right term, but they don't seem to be prioritizing the most basic things people are asking for.
- Spivak 6y ago
  It's not that they're user-hateful it's just that they're (I think rightfully) being aggressive about scoping Wayland to things related to drawing surfaces and handling input events. If people started treating as one domain specific protocol that display servers use for drawing stuff on the screen and not "everything a desktop app might want to do" protocol there would be less conflict. I'm glad they're leaving all the "desktop" stuff out and letting desktops agree on dbus interfaces. I doubt people writing little CLI utilities want to have to create dummy Wayland surfaces to do interact with the display server which is how wl-clipboard works.
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    So what does a Wayland-only future look like? Your clipboard, keyboard hotkey daemon, app runner, etc. all communicating happily over D-bus?
    - majewsky 6y ago
      Clipboard is handled by Wayland. Global hotkeys also needs to be handled by the Wayland compositor in some way since only the compositor has access to the full stream of input events. The compositor might choose to offload input events for known global hotkeys to some helper application, like kglobalacceld on Plasma.
  - CountSessine 6y ago
    Exactly. What we’re really seeing here is technical debt from the fact that we have so many different desktop environments. Much of the cost of having Gnome and KDE was hidden by the fact that a lot of the job of putting pixels on the screen and handling keyboard and mouse events was done (very badly) by X in one way or another. Now the compositor/screen manager isn’t doing that anymore because it never should have and it was a terrible division or responsibility in the first place. But we have devs pushing forward on multiple different fronts with different DEs and development is painfully slow.
- horsawlarway 6y ago
  I mean, from my perspective, they're literally prioritizing the things that I want my display manager to do well - Handle rendering things to screen - Handle user input My issue is that while X has a LOT of other things it also happens to do, it just doesn't do those two primary things very well on modern hardware. As an aside - This reminds me of the systemd arguments all over again, but the same crowd that was ready to crucify systemd for all the things it does are now bemoaning all the things Wayland doesn't do. But really, I think there are just a lot of folks who aren't willing to try something new, or to re-evaluate some of the toolchains they've made for themselves. Now - I'm not going to blame them for that, having a working system change under you isn't fun, and it eats up time and resources some people don't have. But it also doesn't stop the new thing from replacing the old thing. Particularly if the new things happens to be genuinely better in many respects. And while I can certainly understand the pain point of missing features in Wayland, The way it gets user input and display output right are just delightful. So delightful that I actually prefer it to my work macbook, which is not something I could ever say about X.
  - oconnor663 6y ago
    > the same crowd It might not be the same crowd. There are many crowds on Hacker News, and the voting mechanism tends to select for whichever crowd is angry at any given time. Which is, like, super frustrating. I want to feel like I have a relationship with the people I'm talking to, but I don't really. It's always different people, and they're not consistent with each other.
    - horsawlarway 6y ago
      Entirely fair. I almost wrote out an aside in the above comment, because the person I was replying to certainly didn't mention systemd. I do think there are some interesting echoes between the two conversations, though. Namely that the "angry" that happens to be getting selected for has nothing to do with the merits of either piece of software, and a lot more to do with the fear of having to learn something new to replace something familiar.
      - 6y ago
- stuaxo 6y ago
  A few years ago I had a bug like this under X + Noveau + GNOME, where Windows were reporting the wrong coordinates. It was fairly easy to find an example on stackoverflow that created a Window using Gtk, and reported it's position. Once something like that is on the bug report things tend to get fixed pretty quickly. Report the bug on the outer-most thing first, e.g. GNOME shell in this case.
d4rti 6y ago
I think pipewire broke my audio when I upgraded to Kubuntu 20.10. Removing it fixed it and seems to have had no ill effects.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Pulseaudio used to break everything, and I used to delete it to fix them. Gstreamer used to crash a lot. Now they work all the time. Pipewire appears to be a better architecture than Pulseaudio. We have to hope it un-bugs faster than PA did.
  - curlypaul924 6y ago
    Pulseaudio doesn't crash any more, true. But it still uses gobs of cpu to play audio and has other idiosyncracies that I have no idea how to work around. For example, I have no volume control in the GUI for the headphone port on the front of my computer, but I can control it just fine using alsamixer. After hours of trying various suggestions I've just decided to control my volume from the terminal and move on with my life.
roenxi 6y ago
> Hell, I'd be happy if there was just fewer bugs. There are strategic and tactical issues here. Tactical issues are obvious. Wayland's problem with screenshots and all the bugs from not having a decades long lineage. Strategic issues are less obvious. As this blog pos alludes to the standard X server is reaching a maintainability crisis where long term devs don't think the project is a good idea. I think Wayland is a tactical mis-step myself for reasons you and GP mention, but I think now that the bad has been covered someone needs to mention the good: The reference X server cannot practically be replaced. The reference Wayland compositor quite possibly isn't ever going to get established before being replaced. This is an excellent thing - it beings evolutionary pressure to the display system. Wayland has problems, but unlike the current X ecosystem the problems can be fixed by replacing bits of software. The Wayland protocol seems light enough that Wayland+1 can implement it as a compatibility layer. When the dust settles, leaving X will have been a good idea.
Asooka 6y ago
Yeah, I'm not sure why the entire X protocol had to be thrown away. I suspect for a while the shiny new desktop stack will just be X on Wayland until someone writes a Wayland compositor that is also an X server just without the bits that can't work. One of the reasons for Wayland was fast compositor updates, but I still don't see why the compositor and window manager have to be one and the same, you could delegate management to a wm and present the full window. Heck, you could also replace Xlib and xcb with versions that know when they're running locally and skip the network protocol for most operations. Sadly I don't have time to work on that, which really sounds like a full time job for a team of at least 3 developers, and from the looks of it, the people in charge don't share my vision for integrated coexistence of old and new.

djsumdog 6y ago

The trouble with your guake bug is it might be Gnome + Wayland specific. With the separation between the server and composer, bugs might need to be fixed in multiple places. Some window managers use wlroots, so maybe some bugs can be fixed there, but others have their own forks and implementations. The hotkey thing is big and it's annoying because it's another thing that might need to be implemented/fixed in each and every composer and environment (and it could be different in every environment). I've seen the X11/Wayland talks and I agree Xorg has tons of old crufty garbage in it, and screen locking in Xorg is not very secure. But the Wayland team seems to have made little effort in addressing even the most basic things like hotkeys, screenshots, etc. I'm not sure if "user hateful" is the right term, but they don't seem to be prioritizing the most basic things people are asking for.

Spivak 6y ago
It's not that they're user-hateful it's just that they're (I think rightfully) being aggressive about scoping Wayland to things related to drawing surfaces and handling input events. If people started treating as one domain specific protocol that display servers use for drawing stuff on the screen and not "everything a desktop app might want to do" protocol there would be less conflict. I'm glad they're leaving all the "desktop" stuff out and letting desktops agree on dbus interfaces. I doubt people writing little CLI utilities want to have to create dummy Wayland surfaces to do interact with the display server which is how wl-clipboard works.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  So what does a Wayland-only future look like? Your clipboard, keyboard hotkey daemon, app runner, etc. all communicating happily over D-bus?
  - majewsky 6y ago
    Clipboard is handled by Wayland. Global hotkeys also needs to be handled by the Wayland compositor in some way since only the compositor has access to the full stream of input events. The compositor might choose to offload input events for known global hotkeys to some helper application, like kglobalacceld on Plasma.
- CountSessine 6y ago
  Exactly. What we’re really seeing here is technical debt from the fact that we have so many different desktop environments. Much of the cost of having Gnome and KDE was hidden by the fact that a lot of the job of putting pixels on the screen and handling keyboard and mouse events was done (very badly) by X in one way or another. Now the compositor/screen manager isn’t doing that anymore because it never should have and it was a terrible division or responsibility in the first place. But we have devs pushing forward on multiple different fronts with different DEs and development is painfully slow.
horsawlarway 6y ago
I mean, from my perspective, they're literally prioritizing the things that I want my display manager to do well - Handle rendering things to screen - Handle user input My issue is that while X has a LOT of other things it also happens to do, it just doesn't do those two primary things very well on modern hardware. As an aside - This reminds me of the systemd arguments all over again, but the same crowd that was ready to crucify systemd for all the things it does are now bemoaning all the things Wayland doesn't do. But really, I think there are just a lot of folks who aren't willing to try something new, or to re-evaluate some of the toolchains they've made for themselves. Now - I'm not going to blame them for that, having a working system change under you isn't fun, and it eats up time and resources some people don't have. But it also doesn't stop the new thing from replacing the old thing. Particularly if the new things happens to be genuinely better in many respects. And while I can certainly understand the pain point of missing features in Wayland, The way it gets user input and display output right are just delightful. So delightful that I actually prefer it to my work macbook, which is not something I could ever say about X.
- oconnor663 6y ago
  > the same crowd It might not be the same crowd. There are many crowds on Hacker News, and the voting mechanism tends to select for whichever crowd is angry at any given time. Which is, like, super frustrating. I want to feel like I have a relationship with the people I'm talking to, but I don't really. It's always different people, and they're not consistent with each other.
  - horsawlarway 6y ago
    Entirely fair. I almost wrote out an aside in the above comment, because the person I was replying to certainly didn't mention systemd. I do think there are some interesting echoes between the two conversations, though. Namely that the "angry" that happens to be getting selected for has nothing to do with the merits of either piece of software, and a lot more to do with the fear of having to learn something new to replace something familiar.
    - 6y ago
stuaxo 6y ago
A few years ago I had a bug like this under X + Noveau + GNOME, where Windows were reporting the wrong coordinates. It was fairly easy to find an example on stackoverflow that created a Window using Gtk, and reported it's position. Once something like that is on the bug report things tend to get fixed pretty quickly. Report the bug on the outer-most thing first, e.g. GNOME shell in this case.

d4rti 6y ago

I think pipewire broke my audio when I upgraded to Kubuntu 20.10. Removing it fixed it and seems to have had no ill effects.

ncmncm 6y ago
Pulseaudio used to break everything, and I used to delete it to fix them. Gstreamer used to crash a lot. Now they work all the time. Pipewire appears to be a better architecture than Pulseaudio. We have to hope it un-bugs faster than PA did.
- curlypaul924 6y ago
  Pulseaudio doesn't crash any more, true. But it still uses gobs of cpu to play audio and has other idiosyncracies that I have no idea how to work around. For example, I have no volume control in the GUI for the headphone port on the front of my computer, but I can control it just fine using alsamixer. After hours of trying various suggestions I've just decided to control my volume from the terminal and move on with my life.

roenxi 6y ago

> Hell, I'd be happy if there was just fewer bugs. There are strategic and tactical issues here. Tactical issues are obvious. Wayland's problem with screenshots and all the bugs from not having a decades long lineage. Strategic issues are less obvious. As this blog pos alludes to the standard X server is reaching a maintainability crisis where long term devs don't think the project is a good idea. I think Wayland is a tactical mis-step myself for reasons you and GP mention, but I think now that the bad has been covered someone needs to mention the good: The reference X server cannot practically be replaced. The reference Wayland compositor quite possibly isn't ever going to get established before being replaced. This is an excellent thing - it beings evolutionary pressure to the display system. Wayland has problems, but unlike the current X ecosystem the problems can be fixed by replacing bits of software. The Wayland protocol seems light enough that Wayland+1 can implement it as a compatibility layer. When the dust settles, leaving X will have been a good idea.

Asooka 6y ago

Yeah, I'm not sure why the entire X protocol had to be thrown away. I suspect for a while the shiny new desktop stack will just be X on Wayland until someone writes a Wayland compositor that is also an X server just without the bits that can't work. One of the reasons for Wayland was fast compositor updates, but I still don't see why the compositor and window manager have to be one and the same, you could delegate management to a wm and present the full window. Heck, you could also replace Xlib and xcb with versions that know when they're running locally and skip the network protocol for most operations. Sadly I don't have time to work on that, which really sounds like a full time job for a team of at least 3 developers, and from the looks of it, the people in charge don't share my vision for integrated coexistence of old and new.