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> It's the sort of thing that seems attractive to junior developers You make it sound like Wayland has been pushed by some script kiddies, when in fact the lea

> It's the sort of thing that seems attractive to junior developers You make it sound like Wayland has been pushed by some script kiddies, when in fact the lead developers on Wayland are the actual Xorg maintainers. To me, the migration from X11 to Wayland looks similar to the switch from DOS-based Windows to Windows NT. At the time, lots of programs were broken by the move because they assumed you could meddle in other application's internal memory. But breaking those applications was not malicious intent on the side of the Windows devs. It was a legimitate move towards a more sustainable architecture. I'm not intimately familiar with X11 internals, but my read of the situation is that X11 just exposes too many internals in its interfaces, and therefore it becomes increasingly impossible to adapt it to contemporary needs (in this case, application sandboxing).

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
> when in fact the lead developers on Wayland are the actual Xorg maintainers. Daniel Stone[0] incredibly funny and educational talk[1] from 2013 could help many critics who missed the 3 decade long ongoing discussion of why X is bad. We've talked about this already in the mid 90ies (when there were no alternatives) and now 8 years after this popular linux.conf.au talk, people still having troubles understanding why X has always been a terrible tradeoff for both security and performance (well for literally everything). [0] https://www.fooishbar.org/about/ https://www.fooishbar.org/about/ [1] The Real Story Behind Wayland and X https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 edit: BUT X IS THE UNIX WAY! << so what is the 1 thing X does, and what is it doing well?
- posix_me_less 6y ago
  The talk was interesting but it also shows how the speaker is a little deluded that everything turns around technical quality of code and developers. X is used and preferred by many users and application authors because it is the standard and it works. > so what is the 1 thing X does, and what is it doing well? It provides functional and well-established(accepted standard) graphics server technology/libraries for any application that uses graphics. I don't care if it takes 10 liters of blood to compile one version of X or whatever. I'm a user. All I care is that my desktop works as robustly as did it yesterday or 5 years ago. If that's not happening, I'm not interested in macros, classes, variables, declarations, structs, or any other geeky CS technobabble. That's irrelevant. And a product that advertises itself as being created to be convenient for the people developing it is a paradox. Don't develop it, then. Makes things even easier. -- from https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/fedora-25-wayland-vs-xorg.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/fedora-25-wayland-vs-xor...
ralfn 6y ago
Yes and no. Application sandboxing is not a need I have or one that I want my display manager to solve. But incompatibility vs the architecture disallows features like screen sharing, automation or accessibility means I will not ever have it installed anywhere. I can't tell people want to do, but those features seem very "contemporary" to me. Perhaps it's because I use linux as my work desktop. I suppose if this is the feature I should just migrate to OSX. Because I need video conferencing. I don't need a sandbox. I already am selective about what I install and most of those things aren't even desktop applications.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  > I already am selective about what I install and most of those things aren't even desktop applications. in X any application can turn into a keylogger, and you don't need a GUI for it, as long as the program can "speak X" it will be able to read the shared memory of all other programs the X server manages.
  - ralfn 6y ago
    Yeah. But that's a company risk. Not being able to participate in video conferencing and desktop sharing is an employment risk. Im a picky person though. I already use i3, but also have NVidia gpu's. I don't mind spending some money on another real GPU (will it work with AMD). I understand the frustration of the developers too. But screen sharing or my custom screenshot tool.. are things that will make me recompile if needed for days before I give up and abandon linux for the desktop. I realize I'm spoiled, but I do wonder if this is the direction things are going who is going to be that hypothetical user that cares?
  - sam_lowry_ 6y ago
    I run 4 applications: Chromium, Xterm, Gimp and IntelliJ. Am I unsecure?
- rkangel 6y ago
  You don't need application sandboxing from your display manager. I at least, do want my display manager not to break all other application sandboxing.
gattis 6y ago
Exactly! I laugh at this petition because nobody is maintaining X.org server right now or even wants to touch it. Last major release was iin 2018. It is a nightmarish cludge. Nobody is forcing anyone to upgrade their software but the rest of us want a future without X11. It's not just the internals of X11 that are the problem, it's that the entire concept was baked in a different time. The major innovation of the X11 server was that, well, it's a server. It can be completely decoupled from the client, even physically if you use it over tcp. That was kinda nice, but then came GPUs, and direct rendering. The name of the game is now violating every single abstraction that stands between a userland app drawing directly to the display with only a GPU and a single graphics api in between. It was definitely not junior developers who rewrote the entire kernel graphics stack to move from frame buffers to direct rendering. Computer graphics are pretty tough if you think about how many bits/s are being transferred to your 4k display at 60hz and how little latency we will tolerate. It's not like network data where we can afford to encapsulate it five times over and abstract it and forget about the contents. Any criticism of Wayland should be with regard to what is next. Hell I'm not even convinced we need a display server, let's talk about that. I'm not going to take anyone seriously who says X11 is better, and because of a few insignificant issues like taking a damn screen cap (really? and that works fine now btw).
- gattis 6y ago
  And by the way, that whole "never rewerite software from scratch"... that might be what they teach you in your startup accelerator or your CS classes, but in the real world, hardware changes fast, your clients change fast, and you will do well to start from scratch sometimes when fundamental assumptions change and you no longer want to support legacy hardware or legacy features that slow you down and everything can be drastically simplified with your new assumptions in hand. Take for example, Mac OS 9 -> 10. Complete rewrite. One of the best decisions in computing history. And especially relevant here because the display server was one of the babies they threw out the window or whatever, and the quartz compositor was born.

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago

> when in fact the lead developers on Wayland are the actual Xorg maintainers. Daniel Stone[0] incredibly funny and educational talk[1] from 2013 could help many critics who missed the 3 decade long ongoing discussion of why X is bad. We've talked about this already in the mid 90ies (when there were no alternatives) and now 8 years after this popular linux.conf.au talk, people still having troubles understanding why X has always been a terrible tradeoff for both security and performance (well for literally everything). [0] https://www.fooishbar.org/about/ https://www.fooishbar.org/about/ [1] The Real Story Behind Wayland and X https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 edit: BUT X IS THE UNIX WAY! << so what is the 1 thing X does, and what is it doing well?

posix_me_less 6y ago
The talk was interesting but it also shows how the speaker is a little deluded that everything turns around technical quality of code and developers. X is used and preferred by many users and application authors because it is the standard and it works. > so what is the 1 thing X does, and what is it doing well? It provides functional and well-established(accepted standard) graphics server technology/libraries for any application that uses graphics. I don't care if it takes 10 liters of blood to compile one version of X or whatever. I'm a user. All I care is that my desktop works as robustly as did it yesterday or 5 years ago. If that's not happening, I'm not interested in macros, classes, variables, declarations, structs, or any other geeky CS technobabble. That's irrelevant. And a product that advertises itself as being created to be convenient for the people developing it is a paradox. Don't develop it, then. Makes things even easier. -- from https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/fedora-25-wayland-vs-xorg.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/fedora-25-wayland-vs-xor...

ralfn 6y ago

Yes and no. Application sandboxing is not a need I have or one that I want my display manager to solve. But incompatibility vs the architecture disallows features like screen sharing, automation or accessibility means I will not ever have it installed anywhere. I can't tell people want to do, but those features seem very "contemporary" to me. Perhaps it's because I use linux as my work desktop. I suppose if this is the feature I should just migrate to OSX. Because I need video conferencing. I don't need a sandbox. I already am selective about what I install and most of those things aren't even desktop applications.

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
> I already am selective about what I install and most of those things aren't even desktop applications. in X any application can turn into a keylogger, and you don't need a GUI for it, as long as the program can "speak X" it will be able to read the shared memory of all other programs the X server manages.
- ralfn 6y ago
  Yeah. But that's a company risk. Not being able to participate in video conferencing and desktop sharing is an employment risk. Im a picky person though. I already use i3, but also have NVidia gpu's. I don't mind spending some money on another real GPU (will it work with AMD). I understand the frustration of the developers too. But screen sharing or my custom screenshot tool.. are things that will make me recompile if needed for days before I give up and abandon linux for the desktop. I realize I'm spoiled, but I do wonder if this is the direction things are going who is going to be that hypothetical user that cares?
- sam_lowry_ 6y ago
  I run 4 applications: Chromium, Xterm, Gimp and IntelliJ. Am I unsecure?
rkangel 6y ago
You don't need application sandboxing from your display manager. I at least, do want my display manager not to break all other application sandboxing.

gattis 6y ago

Exactly! I laugh at this petition because nobody is maintaining X.org server right now or even wants to touch it. Last major release was iin 2018. It is a nightmarish cludge. Nobody is forcing anyone to upgrade their software but the rest of us want a future without X11. It's not just the internals of X11 that are the problem, it's that the entire concept was baked in a different time. The major innovation of the X11 server was that, well, it's a server. It can be completely decoupled from the client, even physically if you use it over tcp. That was kinda nice, but then came GPUs, and direct rendering. The name of the game is now violating every single abstraction that stands between a userland app drawing directly to the display with only a GPU and a single graphics api in between. It was definitely not junior developers who rewrote the entire kernel graphics stack to move from frame buffers to direct rendering. Computer graphics are pretty tough if you think about how many bits/s are being transferred to your 4k display at 60hz and how little latency we will tolerate. It's not like network data where we can afford to encapsulate it five times over and abstract it and forget about the contents. Any criticism of Wayland should be with regard to what is next. Hell I'm not even convinced we need a display server, let's talk about that. I'm not going to take anyone seriously who says X11 is better, and because of a few insignificant issues like taking a damn screen cap (really? and that works fine now btw).

gattis 6y ago
And by the way, that whole "never rewerite software from scratch"... that might be what they teach you in your startup accelerator or your CS classes, but in the real world, hardware changes fast, your clients change fast, and you will do well to start from scratch sometimes when fundamental assumptions change and you no longer want to support legacy hardware or legacy features that slow you down and everything can be drastically simplified with your new assumptions in hand. Take for example, Mac OS 9 -> 10. Complete rewrite. One of the best decisions in computing history. And especially relevant here because the display server was one of the babies they threw out the window or whatever, and the quartz compositor was born.