16 ms·

I don't get why everyone gets so defensive for Wayland. It's a fact that a lot of things still do break for users if they switch, without existing alternatives

I don't get why everyone gets so defensive for Wayland. It's a fact that a lot of things still do break for users if they switch, without existing alternatives or workarounds. Yes, Xorg is now legacy, outdated, insecure, and does too much. But what wayland did was to replaced one functionality of Xorg, without offering alternatives to other functionalities. Which is good, I guess, it has a clear and focused responsibility. But now compositors are responsible for other functionalities and they seem to be doing things in their own way. Which is also good, I guess, they explore the design space and then they can gravitate to a standardized way of doing things later. But it's more than a decade now, many things seem to be stuck in the "exploring design space" phase, so it's understandable if some users are impatient. Yes, it's free software without warranties, it doesn't mean immunity from criticism though. I also get performance regressions in wine games on xwayland, didn't try wine-wayland yet though. But many games I play will never move from X.

Deukhoofd 6y ago
People get defensive for Wayland due to the tone of the article. Sentences like "Let Wayland not destroy everything and then have other people fix the damage it caused" sound extremely hostile, making people who disagree immediately defensive.
- steerablesafe 6y ago
  People get defensive for Wayland whenever it comes up. While I don't agree with the tone of the article, the author brings up valid points (mostly in the comments though). Also I believe the problem is not Wayland. It's the lack of other standard protocols on top of it that are required for application developers to not chase ad-hoc, desktop environment dependent protocols for basic needs like screen sharing. The issues are probably political rather than technical, and the solution is coordination between the desktop environment implementers to use the same standards and provide common interfaces for application developers.
TwoNineFive 6y ago
>I don't get why everyone gets so defensive for Wayland Red Hat blogger marketing budget.
Too 6y ago
The biggest roadblock and catch22 is nvidia support. Developers using nvidia can't use wayland and hence can't contribute to better compositors as there is no incentive for themselves. Statistics say nvidia has around 20% global marketshare and for gamers it's up to 80%. My guesstimate is developers are somewhere in the middle there so you are looking at 50% of all developers that can't use wayland themselves. How is that ever going to make the compositor ecosystem catch up. Luckily Nvidia announced support earlier this month so hopefully this stalemate will soon end. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26004651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26004651
- steerablesafe 6y ago
  What's nvidia's market share among desktop Linux users? I picked AMD particularly because of the driver situation, and I don't even use Wayland.
- gattis 6y ago
  I have nvidia and use wayland. It works just fine. I think you are referring to a nested caveat of this which is that the subset of applications still coded soleley against the X protocol will run without gpu acceleration under nvidia and Xwayland. The number of these apps has dwindled thanks to gtk and qt moving over to wayland, now chrome and firefox have early wayland support, and like you said nvidia will soon support Xwayland.

Deukhoofd 6y ago

People get defensive for Wayland due to the tone of the article. Sentences like "Let Wayland not destroy everything and then have other people fix the damage it caused" sound extremely hostile, making people who disagree immediately defensive.

steerablesafe 6y ago
People get defensive for Wayland whenever it comes up. While I don't agree with the tone of the article, the author brings up valid points (mostly in the comments though). Also I believe the problem is not Wayland. It's the lack of other standard protocols on top of it that are required for application developers to not chase ad-hoc, desktop environment dependent protocols for basic needs like screen sharing. The issues are probably political rather than technical, and the solution is coordination between the desktop environment implementers to use the same standards and provide common interfaces for application developers.

TwoNineFive 6y ago

>I don't get why everyone gets so defensive for Wayland Red Hat blogger marketing budget.

Too 6y ago

The biggest roadblock and catch22 is nvidia support. Developers using nvidia can't use wayland and hence can't contribute to better compositors as there is no incentive for themselves. Statistics say nvidia has around 20% global marketshare and for gamers it's up to 80%. My guesstimate is developers are somewhere in the middle there so you are looking at 50% of all developers that can't use wayland themselves. How is that ever going to make the compositor ecosystem catch up. Luckily Nvidia announced support earlier this month so hopefully this stalemate will soon end. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26004651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26004651

steerablesafe 6y ago
What's nvidia's market share among desktop Linux users? I picked AMD particularly because of the driver situation, and I don't even use Wayland.
gattis 6y ago
I have nvidia and use wayland. It works just fine. I think you are referring to a nested caveat of this which is that the subset of applications still coded soleley against the X protocol will run without gpu acceleration under nvidia and Xwayland. The number of these apps has dwindled thanks to gtk and qt moving over to wayland, now chrome and firefox have early wayland support, and like you said nvidia will soon support Xwayland.