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> Stuff like switch to Wayland takes decades because of this split. My understanding is the switch to Wayland has taken ages because basically everyone who tho

• fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  Yeah, Wayland is mostly a regression for my use cases: client-side decorations, breaking screen recording/sharing etc. I know there are theoretical issues with the X security mode, but this replacement is a classic case of “security” producing something that’s basically useless for what people use the software for. Also, because X works over a socket, it’s language-agnostic in a way that a library just can’t be: libraries like CLX allow Common Lisp graphical applications with no dependency on a C library.
  • eitland 6y ago
    > I know there are theoretical issues with the X security mode, but this replacement is a classic case of “security” producing something that’s basically useless for what people use the software for. I keep reminding people that one of the most known models for security is "confidentiality, integrity and availability". If it isn't available your security is still somehow broken however well one scores on confidentiality.
    • canofbars 6y ago
      Wayland security is not broken. Its just a single piece in a much longer term goal that spans many components. Linux was not designed for the current era where users run untrusted and borderline malicious programs regularly. While wayland may secure the desktop, there are 20 other places where programs can scoop up your data. It looks useless now but without every part being fixed individually it will be impossible to create a secure linux desktop that runs proprietary applications.
      • smichel17 6y ago
        Tbh I'd much rather fight this on the front of "let's not need to run untrusted and borderline malicious programs regularly" than breaking the free world in order to make it possible.
        • canofbars 6y ago
          That fight was long long lost. We will never ever make things like video games open source. But we can sandbox them. Even open source tools could do with being sandboxed. I don't see why this is an issue. The user still has full power to do anything and its is only programs which are restricted. Under the new model, instead of a tool just grabbing your screen, it must now make a request to the OS which will show a popup asking if you want to allow access and if you accept the program can continue as it would have before.
          • fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
            The issue I have with wayland is that it just continues to fragment the Linux desktop ecosystem, and it moved things to the toolkit that just don’t make sense there: I don’t want my window decorations to depend on whether the app is built with Qt or Gtk. I don’t want projects like McClim ( https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/ https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/ ) to depend on C code to communicate with the windowing system, etc.
            • cycloptic 6y ago
              So for window decorations, it's up to the app developer if they want to implement special behavior for client side decorations or not. If they do, there's nothing your toolkit or window manager can really do about it, you have to show the client's window decorations or you will lose functionality. Wayland has little to do with that. About depending on C code, Wayland is pretty much the same as X11 there. If you don't want to use libwayland, you can write your own implementation of the wire protocol.
              • 6y ago
  • jancsika 6y ago
    > breaking screen recording/sharing etc That's a scary one IMO. I mean, if you are a dev who has devoted an enormous amount of your efforts into making a replacement for the stuff that displays all the stuff from all the other GUIs, seems like the identity function would be recording the shit you're displaying. The fact that OBS doesn't yet work under Wayland makes me wonder if sufficient (or any) dogfooding is going on. It'd be like if in the 90s you still couldn't easily compile code from inside Emacs. It's a smell.
    • cycloptic 6y ago
      If you're noticing something that seems strange like that I would say do a thorough check to make sure you don't have some misinformation, there's a lot of bunk that goes around on social media. OBS is working but is not fully tested yet: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484/ https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484/ (Disclaimer: I did some of the work on this port)
      • jancsika 6y ago
        What's the relevance of the open bug report to what I wrote? For the record: * I'm running Debian bullseye * I'm running Gnome version 3.38.2 * I'm running OBS installed from apt: version 26.0.2+dfsg1-1+b1 (64 bit) Given a poster on this thread boldly claims that "Wayland is already done and ready," I'd say my setup is more than recent enough to test whether that claim is indeed usable in practice. Lo and behold, when I run OBS I get a blank screen staring back at me. If I log back in with Gnome running under X11, OBS works just fine. It's wonderful that the issue is being addressed, and I thank you for your work on it. But my point is that Wayland+OBS working together is a litmus test. The fact that the two are just beginning to play well is a big red light to me switching away from X11 any time soon. Anyway, that "done and ready" quote is really the source of my frustration. If I have to set an arbitrary timeout after a "loaded" event to get it to work properly, "loaded" is a probably misnomer.
        • cycloptic 6y ago
          You need to use that PR (and the right capture plugins) if you want native Wayland support, it's not merged yet. If you'd like to help move things along, please help test from git. I can give you more info on how to do this if you'd like. Even if this is merged it may be a while before it lands in debian testing.
  • shrubble 6y ago
    Solaris 10 with Trusted Extensions which I believe includes extensive security for X11, shipped in May 2009.
  • kaba0 6y ago
    There is theoretical issues with the X way of handling graphics hardware. Also, wayland also uses sockets..
• shmerl 6y ago
  It's not just stakeholders, it's because instead of one Xorg doing everything, each compositor now has to implement similar things. So efforts are spread across all existing compositors instead of being concentrated. That slowed down progress tremendously. I'm all for Wayland transition, but things could benefit from concentrated efforts for sure.
  • canofbars 6y ago
    I think the project wlroots exists to make it easy to just import wayland support so each DE/WM doesn't have to implement it.
    • shmerl 6y ago
      It exists and its idea is good, but major compositors aren't using it, so the benefit is lost in result.
      • canofbars 6y ago
        The major compositors don't seem to be having issues managing their own implementations so I don't see the issue. wlroots seems like the ideal tool for building your own DE/WM
        • shmerl 6y ago
          Not sure how you don't see any issues. I explicitly mentioned several ones in the other comment.
  • zanny 6y ago
    They went that way for a reason, though. All the Xorg window managers (Mutter, KWin, etc) largely became behemoth projects in their own right to fill holes in X that could not be easily fixed universally. Since those projects were already faux display managers the X devs that started Wayland wanted to avoid that duplication again.
    • 6y ago
• Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  They underestimated and had no idea what people are doing with their computers. Wayland removed many features and use cases from X11 because they thought no one used them. This is what happens when isolated developers without market research make the shots I suppose. Originally libinput did not even offer a way to disable mouse acceleration as they thought no one would ever do that — anyone who plays video games would obviously laugh at this notion since the præcision required for many video games is completely compromised by the floaty feel of m.a., but they don't play them I suppose. Talking with many of the Wayland devs reveals their ignorance, this would be fine if they were willing to listen, but at this point it has clearly become an issue of tribalism and because they probably heard it so many times they simply become defensive now as admitting it this point would be admitting defeat an that they were wrong, with pride on the line they continue to insist that one does not “need” these features because the compositor can provide everything, yet no compositor exists that does and it would be madness to expect any to.
  • pjmlp 6y ago
    Wayland is mostly driven by X.Org Server devs actually.
    • Blikkentrekker 6y ago
      Only insofar that the same developers work on the hardware and input drivers for both, and even frequently share code with one another, libinput also works with Xorg of course, and logind's mechanism for starting an unprivileged compositor was backported to Xorg as well. However, the original designers of the X11 protocol no longer even work on X for the most part, and some of them are dead. And even with the hardware it was inherited, it is true that the developer of libinput was the maintainer of synaptics, but he did not originally designed it, and found useless many of it's features that he was forced to maintain for backwards compatibility — with libinput hwas free to drop them, and initially did, but after many complaints has yielded to bring some of them back. synaptics and all the Xorg input drivers are really quite configurable allowing one to even edit the transformation matrix used for pointer acceleration directly, or to manually control the size of the touchpad scroll region, or configure rather præcisely via what criteria palm detection works — Hutterer originally removed this from libinput and considered it unnecessary overkill, but has later restored much of it after complaints, finding that many users indeed used and configured this.