34 ms·

I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

• MartijnBraam 6y ago
  I'm not even a wayland developer and I get annoyed by all the posts about wayland not working, I've been running it for years and it Just Works(tm) for me aside from the occasional gotcha.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Which of course means that it must be good enough for everyone, because it works for you.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • mdiesel 6y ago
      No, but Wayland is not a bit of software you even think about until it goes wrong. That means the internet gets disproportionately filled with posts about Wayland not working, which presents the wrong image. When reading up on what desktop environment to use, it's hard to get a balanced view unless there are commenters like this, saying that running Wayland works.
      • turminal 6y ago
        > No, but Wayland is not a bit of software you even think about until it goes wrong. That means the internet gets disproportionately filled with posts about Wayland not working, which presents the wrong image. Kind of like reverse survivorship bias. The only wayland sessions that get attention on the internet arw the ones that don't work.
    • arghwhat 6y ago
      The funny thing about your funny remark is that the inverse is used as primary anti-wayland argument. Oh no, a single thing doesn't work yet, the entire system must be fundamentally broke for everyone. Definitely not just a bug or feature someone hasn't gotten to yet, no no. If anyone wants to keep using X, they're free to step up and maintain it. So far no one has been willing.
      • bluefox 6y ago
        I don't understand the point about maintenance. Is Xorg maintained? If so, are the current maintainers handcuffed to it? I assume they aren't, so what's the problem? If Xorg is not maintained, again, what's the problem? Software is known to outlive its creators and maintainers. If there's a need, it will eventually get new maintainers. Software is not magic.
        • kevincox 6y ago
          X is barely maintained anymore. To a large extent all of the X developers are working on Wayland now. A lot of people have the impression that Wayland is some outside competitor to X but the truth is that the vast majority of the people who started Wayland are long-time X developers who know its flaws inside and out.
          • bluefox 6y ago
            Sure, I can understand people working on software X for a long time getting fed up with it and start working on software W. I can also understand that these people have strong opinions on why W is so much better. The only trouble is that others, who are possibly not developers of window systems, may not care, or may find that it breaks their software, or may not want to write software that depends on W and doesn't work on X. So what if Xorg is "barely maintained"? It works. Hell, as long as it works, it's likely better for it not to change. If there are issues, in the free software world we say "patches welcome". No developer should feel chained to a project.
            • arghwhat 6y ago
              There are not enough developers to even create a new release or review contributor patches. The Wayland community contributes a fair share due to xwayland, and we get stuck on this quite often. And yeah, it'll need fixes. over time. It's big, complex, and interacts with device drivers that are very much in flux.
              • 6y ago
    • jamienicol 6y ago
      "X11 works perfectly there was no need for Wayland"
  • vaylian 6y ago
    As someone who has no experience with Wayland: What are the telltale signs that a problem is related to Wayland and not the application itself? I've gotten curious. I want to try Wayland in the near future. But it would be good to have an idea of what kind of issues I might encounter, so that I can change back to X11 in an emergency.
    • kevincox 6y ago
      I don't think there is really much. Most of the bugs you will see stem from software having a different codepath for each. For example I know that drag and drop is a little buggy on Firefox under Wayland not because of the protocol, just a state management bug that they are trying to track down. (however Firefox still uses XWayland by default so it isn't really relevant anyways). But I suspect we are roughly around the point where the X codepaths, while more battle hardened, are probably starting to rot so the current state you are probably getting the sameish number of bugs under each (AKA applications are differently broken under both). If you are seeing a bug I guess just try the other one out and see if it reproduces, but I can't think of the last time I did that. The only thing that is a common issue is screen capturing not working. If you have PipeWire setup it will work for most applications but it is still quite new. So if something related to screen content grabbing is not working it could be a Wayland triggered bug.
      • vaylian 6y ago
        Thanks! I'll look up PipeWire.
    • PurpleFoxy 6y ago
      So far every single complaint I have seen about wayland is something that wayland actually supports but that a specific program hasn’t been updated to use yet.
  • happytoexplain 6y ago
    This is confusing - "works for me" is a common joke. The point of that phrase is usually that it is not a good reason to minimize those for whom it does not work.
• bluefox 6y ago
  People using software that breaks with Wayland keep to their existing window system. News at X11.
  • PurpleFoxy 6y ago
    No one minds what you use, it’s the people who go online and post complete lies about what wayland is and what it is capable of. And then they feel entitled to tell other people that they are wasting their time on wayland instead of working on X12.
    • bluefox 6y ago
      Well, people _are_ entitled to telling other people their thoughts. You say "complete lies" but it's not black and white. This devault post is an emotional hyperbole, and you're just dragging it on.
• sigmaprimus 6y ago
  Yikes! I have no experience or knowledge regarding Wayland, infact this post was the first I have heard of it. That being said, if the author's rant truly reflects the attitude of the community, it's sounds pretty toxic.
  • Shared404 6y ago
    Standing as an outside observer, usually when someone posts about progress on Wayland they are immediately greeted by "Well, I don't like it." "That sucks" "just use X" etc. I've seen that sometimes here, although it's more frequent on Reddit.
    • oceliker 6y ago
      I mean, that's just internet in general, isn't it?
      • bluGill 6y ago
        Yes, and it is frustrating to those doing real work, in all incarnations. I try to not contribute, but even knowing about the problem I catch myself - it seems to be human nature.
    • sigmaprimus 6y ago
      It's really a shame how that happens, it is pretty much a universal problem. I have seen people get into physical fights and shouting matches IRL charitable organizations where everyone is volunteering their time. The OP's feelings are probably justified and I can empathize with them but the rant was still jarring and probably won't have any impact on the haters but will affect others. Just my thoughts, maybe I'm virtue signaling a bit too much.
  • geofft 6y ago
    I don't know that it does - the author has, as far as I can tell, three small commits in Wayland: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/commits/master?author=Drew%20DeVault https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/commits/mas...
• wayneftw 6y ago
  > Maybe Wayland doesn’t work for your precious use-case. > Wayland works for almost everyone... Oh good. Tell me how to get XFCE running with Wayland then? I'm not a user of X11 or Wayland, not really. I just picked a DE that I liked. I guess my choice puts me firmly in the anti-Wayland camp though since I won't be running it anytime soon.
  • Rhedox 6y ago
    That's not a Wayland problem. It's up to XFCE to implement it.
    • phone8675309 6y ago
      Not really though. XFCE works fine under X11. Stay with X11 in that case, but it's incredibly arrogant and dismissive of the Wayland folks to say "your use case will work under Wayland, you have no excuses" and then also say "well, actually, it will work if you force your upstream to port your DE to it".
  • g8oz 6y ago
    Right? XFCE is definitely not what I would call a precious use-case.
  • johnisgood 6y ago
    Not sure why you are getting down-voted. I use a window manager that has no Wayland support, so I am not switching anytime soon either. Perhaps I will when and if it ever gets Wayland support, but for now, everything works on my end with Arch Linux. I also have "~/.xinitrc", "~/.Xdefaults", and I use "startx" to start my window manager. I have absolutely no clue how to have the equivalent of those in Wayland, including "xsetroot", "xset", and "setxkbmap", among a lot of other stuff, but that is due to my ignorance, so if anyone knows, lead the way please. :)
    • cfcosta 6y ago
      Depends on what you plan on use when you do make a switch. In general, X applications will keep using Xdefaults because they run on XWayland, and the window manager will handle input configuration, displays, wallpaper and so on. There are some ad-hoc implementations for doing what you want iirc, but it really is more "integrated" than what you are used for. I have to test, have not done that in quite a while, but I think that you can just call let's say "sway" on the CLI and it will start wayland directly.
• darkwater 6y ago
  Wayland is being treated like PulseAudio and systemd before. So, it will probably win its battle, thanks $DEITY.
  • ragnese 6y ago
    I always found systemd to be fine (I'm not a sysadmin, just prefer Linux on my PCs). PulseAudio did have some growing pains, though. I don't remember them exactly, but I remember having to tinker way too much to get apps to work together/correctly between ALSA and PulseAudio, etc. I still have a finicky laptop that REFUSES to do audio over HDMI unless I boot the machine with the HDMI cable plugged in already. No real point, here. Just rambling.
    • Shared404 6y ago
      > I always found systemd to be fine (I'm not a sysadmin, just prefer Linux on my PCs). I mostly agree, although I prefer OpenRC personally. I was bit by [* ] Stopping service 1:30 remaining too many times to really like SystemD, although I tolerate it on my daily driver these days.
      • alyandon 6y ago
        You can fix the problematic service with: systemctl edit service-name [Service] TimeoutStopSec=XX You can also override the global default DefaultTimeoutStopSec in /etc/systemd/system.conf.
        • unanswered 6y ago
          See, this right here is the (technical, not social) problem with systemd. Whether anyone points out that systemd is doing something stupid and wrong, the systemd shills' answer is always "well duh what did you expect when you didn't modify one of the hundred default configuration files to have `[stupidshit] = false`! You brought this on yourself!" And you're lucky if that even works to solve the problem.
• FartyMcFarter 6y ago
  > So my new approach is “fuck you”. None of the Wayland detractors have a clue. Mmmmkay. That's a pretty broad statement, good luck with that attitude! > I’ve tried appealing to reason and rationally debunking each lie that some Wayland detractor flavor-of-the-week is touting to tow the party line, but it didn’t work. I guess he's referring to this post? https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-debunked.html https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-de...
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • Y_Y 6y ago
    I wonder where they're "towing" the party line to? Maybe it was parked in front of a hospital.
  • turminal 6y ago
    > I guess he's referring to this post? https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-de https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-de... And to numerous comments on HN and elsewhere. The 'wayland sucks' movement is sooo annoying, even to me and I'm just a happy wayland user and haven't spent any of my free time writing those thousands of lines of code.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • Aardwolf 6y ago
    That post doesn't tackle the issue of being unable to do keyboard and mouse automation
    • singron 6y ago
      Have you tried ydotool?
      • 6y ago
• freeone3000 6y ago
  I'm really tired of this Wayland horseshit. If there was an actual reason for users to use it, fine, but instead it breaks forwarding and vnc and xclip, and for what exactly? Why should I upgrade?
  • kuschku 6y ago
    Wayland improves: - Multi-Monitor support (especially with multiple different resolutions) - HiDPI support (even if some of your programs haven’t been updated for that yet) Now why does wayland break xclip and vnc? Because "every program is a keylogger by default and can see any event, look at the contents of any window" is a major security issue, especially as it means the entire security model of screen lockers or containerized applications is useless. Under X11, basically every application you run can trivially escalate itself to root. As even your Zoom client can just listen to your key events when you unlock your screen or use sudo in your terminal, save your password, and tada it can elevate itself. Under X11, there is no security whatsoever, and no separation of privileges.
    • superkuh 6y ago
      That's because PCs aren't phones and the software run on PCs does not attack the user. This is different from phones where the user is the product to be sold and almost all software is antagonistic but it doesn't apply to the linux desktop, yet. edit: I completely agree about "electron applications". Those are not native applications on linux, those are badly made backdoors using browser runtimes. I do not run them and I strongly recommend to my family, friends, and peers not to run them.
      • kuschku 6y ago
        > but it doesn't apply to the linux desktop, yet. Microsoft has VSCode, Skype and Teams on linux, Zoom has a native linux client. With modern electron apps, often even being able to be updated remotely, you have to start treating more and more software as hostile as well. That said, even if you’d only have trustful software, you should still sandbox it, as if there’d be an RCE in a chat client you wouldn’t want the attacker to be able to elevate itself to root.
• kuschku 6y ago
  I’m using a Dell UP2718Q (3840x2160, 144dpi, 60Hz) and a Fujitsu Siemens P17-2 (1024x1280, 96dpi, 75Hz) side by side, and without Wayland this setup isn’t even possible to get working properly. Sadly, KDE still doesn’t support it nicely under Wayland (so I moved to Ubuntu Budgie), but under X11 it’s entirely impossible to run it properly, as except for Qt nothing supports mixed DPI, or mixed refresh rates properly. Once proper wide color gamut and bitdepth support is added, it’ll be even better, as the monitors are 10-bit Rec.2020 and 8-bit sRGB. Which under X11 isn’t even possible to support, as again, Xorg only sees one single screen it’s drawing on, and it’s up to the lower levels of the stack to split that. EDIT: Answering the most common question which is asked all the time as my comment is getting some visibility here: Now why does wayland break screenshot and keyboard tools? Because "every program is a keylogger by default and can see any event, look at the contents of any window" is a major security issue, especially as it means the entire security model of screen lockers or containerized applications is useless. Under X11, basically every application you run can trivially escalate itself to root. As even your Zoom client can just listen to your key events when you unlock your screen or use sudo in your terminal, save your password, and tada it can elevate itself. Under X11, there is no security whatsoever, and no separation of privileges. EDIT2: Why is sandboxing applications important? (a) more and more proprietary software is also released for linux, which you probably shouldn’t trust. And (b) if e.g. your XMPP client is compromised, you don’t want the attacker to gain root. EDIT3: Yes, screenshot tools and screensharing still works. I can use KDE Spectacle under Budgie or Chrome, and Slack, Teams, Discord, Jitsi all work just fine. OBS requires a patch, but also works nicely. It’s not impossible, it just requires software using it to be updated.
  • lmm 6y ago
    > Sadly, KDE still doesn’t support it nicely under Wayland (so I moved to Ubuntu Budgie), but under X11 it’s entirely impossible to run it properly, as except for Qt nothing supports mixed DPI, or mixed refresh rates properly. Sounds like a roughly equivalent situation either way? Personally I'd sooner use only Qt applications than have to use Gnome.
    • kuschku 6y ago
• himinlomax 6y ago
  Well I wish I could use it, but it simply does not let me run any Steam games at this point.
  • phone8675309 6y ago
    This should be fixed soon: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/587?_sm_au_=isVTPvsr14QtQlqPML8tvK34L00HF https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...
    • himinlomax 6y ago
      Using a Radeon, it was crashing last time I tried on Fedora 33 last week.
  • Shared404 6y ago
    Same here. I would daily drive it except my laptop has Nvidia/I use Steam. My other machines mostly use KDE or Sway on Wayland though.
  • DiabloD3 6y ago
    This is a common misconception, thank you for bringing it up. Wayland and modern post-KMS Xorg do not control your hardware, and have no real ability to do anything with 3D acceleration outside of what Mesa/DRI/DRM/KMS grant them the permission to do. Wayland and Xorg both call the same APIs provided by them, and call them effectively the same way. The side effect of this is fbcon can be ran on modern "all shader/no fixed function" hardware without special hacks and I can run a 3D accelerated program on the console with no X or Wayland running... which also, by extension, makes X and Wayland both just simple normal programs that don't particularly do anything special. If you can't run Steam games, this either means Proton (or the native Linux binary of that game, for the few that have them) has a bug that has nothing to do with Wayland, or your system isn't setup correctly (this happens most often if you accidentally install an Nvidia GPU and use binary drivers).
    • genpfault 6y ago
• k33n 6y ago
  Thank you! Some arguments are just so stupid and misguided, that they don't deserve any consideration. I feel like the Wayland "truthers" are wasting their energy with absurd arguments amounting to "Everyone should use old software because I want them to!"
• neonihil 6y ago
  Imho he is right. Wayland works just fine. Thank you for building it!
  • linuxlizard 6y ago
    Same here. I still remember the days of XF86Config. X.org was a great step up. And now I've never even noticed the transition to Wayland. Everything still works great.
• metalliqaz 6y ago
  Now that was a proper rant. I use Windows so I have no skin in the game, but that was a good read.
  • zamadatix 6y ago
    I've really come to appreciate Window's DWM these last couple of years. Per monitor true fractional DPI, per monitor refresh rate, and HDR/WCG. The only other platform that has it this good is Android.
• mkl95 6y ago
  I don't hate Wayland. But every time I use it random things stop working, so I'm sticking with x11 for the time being. I'm a firm believer in "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
  • johnisgood 6y ago
    I have been attacked for daring to say that software can be finished. Maybe it is my fault for not having said explicitly that it does not mean that they do not get 1) security patches, 2) compatibility patches, 3) bug fixes. That said, I have been attacked for using X11, too, which pretty much works for me and has worked without an issue under Arch Linux for years. It just works, and Wayland would not because my window manager does not support it. I do not blame Wayland for it, of course, but I think many software that I use have no Wayland support. I have been attacked for using irssi, too, instead of weechat. They still hold the view that it is not maintained despite showing them the commit history. Crazy. Make no mistake, I am not complaining, it is the Internet after all.
  • talhah 6y ago
    It depends what level of broken is okay with you. X11 by design allows any application to see what you type which I would consider broken and a security risk.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• oytis 6y ago
  Tried it on Arch with i3 a year (maybe more) ago. Wasn't really usable back then, switched back to X11. For embedded applications I'd probably start with Wayland, but yeah, for my host machine I'm not motivated enough to be more than a mere user.
  • Macha 6y ago
    Were you running i3 in xwayland? I thought that legacy WMs were inherently tied to X, hence author of this post's own project, Sway
    • oytis 6y ago
      Yes, probably it was xwayland, you're right. At least I can remember it _almost_ working, but not quite, so there should have been something.
  • the_duke 6y ago
    You might have confused something here. i3 is a X11 window manager and has no Wayland support at all. Sway is a Wayland compositor that closely resembles i3.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  > In the case of Wayland, the “vague authority” are a bunch of volunteers who have devoted tens of thousands of hours of their free time towards making free shit for you. That does not mean anyone is under an obligation to like it. > Maybe Wayland doesn’t work for your precious use-case. More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago. If you insist on disregarding people's use cases, don't be surprised they don't like your software. I've been down this road a lot with FOSS software: "I don't use it because it doesn't do what I need", "sure it does!", "no, it really doesn't", "well you don't need that anyway!"... On the whole however, I can certainly understand the frustration at having to deal with a community that gets annoyed at anything that changes simply because they're already so used to the garbage pile they have that they now hold the delusion that it's actually not garbage. In my admittedly somewhat distanced opinion, Wayland's biggest mistakes were not launching with a coherent strategy for replicating functionality like screen sharing, screenshots, and to a lesser extent remote desktop/applications. They just punted and said "that's a compositor problem!" as though that was supposed to make it ok. People have thus harbored some inherent resentment ever since.
  • sixothree 6y ago
    That amount of negativity on the internet is just astounding sometimes. Technology Connections has called for some positivity in twitter responses. He throws out random crazy suggestions on twitter, as he points out it was designed for. But there is always someone faulting it. Yesterday I made a casual observation about something quite obvious, and more importantly, completely irrelevant. And without fail, the only response was that it was because of x and y. It isn't. On facebook, the only way I ever get an answer is to use Cunningham's Law. And I even usually use the words "cunninghams law" in the comments. But it always seems to get me my answer.
    • nabla9 6y ago
      In HN healthy ratio is something like 10% positive 90% negative, I think. It would match the ratio between good software and self promoted junk. ---- I think Ubuntu is good gauge for the real state of Wayland. They would like to switch to Wayland as soon as possible but even in the 21.04 Ubuntu still defaults to Xorg on Nvidia based systems.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• BoysenberryPi 6y ago
  I have no beef with Wayland specifically and I agree that if you are harassing maintainers of any project you're probably an asshole. However, >Maybe Wayland doesn’t work for your precious use-case. More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago. I'm a game developer. None of the software I use works reliably or at all on Wayland. None of it. And I'm completely fine with that, I'll keep using Xorg and you can give me a call when my "precious use-case" is handled.
  • creata 6y ago
    If it's not too much trouble, can you list the software you use which doesn't work on Wayland?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • dleslie 6y ago
      Emacs
      • tsujp 6y ago
        Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26002420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26002420
      • ahendriksen 6y ago
        Emacs works perfectly fine under xwayland. The recent pgtk feature branch does not use X anymore under wayland. What is not working for you?
        • dleslie 6y ago
          Yes, when Wayland acts like X then X apps sometimes work. In the process you abandon the security and performance features of Wayland. Getting xwayland working is another story. I can't seem to get it to work at all on my PinePhone; but to Wayland's credit, the phone crashes for all sorts of reasons.
• Queue29 6y ago
  Been using Wayland since 20.04, without problems. Thank you for building it.
• wpietri 6y ago
  Anybody care to point to a backgrounder? I enjoy a good rant better when I have some idea of the stakes.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • the_duke 6y ago
    Earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25999071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25999071
  • kaladin_1 6y ago
    This https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25999071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25999071 And other -ve comments on HN.
• datavirtue 6y ago
  Welcome to free software stewardship. I too have had my ass reamed online for publishing and maintaining free software. I thought it was funny. How crazy do you need to be to shit post about a free product that has no strings attached? And yet....
• hprotagonist 6y ago
  i like i3. i don't care to know about sway. I'll stay on Xorg until there's a gun to my head, thanks.
  • Shared404 6y ago
    Sway is literally "i3, but Wayland". It is a drop in replacement.
    • hprotagonist 6y ago
      https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Differences-from-i3 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Differences-from-i3 and so thoroughly documented! /s
      • gspr 6y ago
        > and so thoroughly documented! /s Why is this sarcasm? I've rarely seen a young free software project even come close to the level of documentation of Sway! Have you tried `man 5 sway` yet?
      • Shared404 6y ago
        > Sway is documented through man pages, rather than the website From your link. Oh, hey. That was hard.
      • mnd999 6y ago
        Unless you have nVidia graphics, sway is probably a drop in replacement for you, with minimal changes from your i3 config. You can literally cp ~/.config/i3/config ~/.config/sway/config and it will work. If you have nVidia, you're outta luck.
        • hprotagonist 6y ago
          I work in ML and the sciences, so nvidia is a huge huge part of my daily life. intentionally crippling a DE out of spite so it cannot run on the drivers i use every single day is also a crappy look. https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
• SXX 6y ago
  Mandatory video to watch for all X fans: > Daniel Stone ~ The real story behind Wayland and X' https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
• geofft 6y ago
  > In the case of Wayland, the “vague authority” are a bunch of volunteers who have devoted tens of thousands of hours of their free time [...] > We’ve sacrificed our spare time to build this for you for free. [...] > You’re gonna maintain Xorg yourself, because we’re not going to volunteer our time, sacrifice our weekends and evenings staying up late for your sake [...] This surprises me - I thought Wayland was developed mostly by people who were being paid full-time to develop it, at the various commercial Linux vendors (Red Hat etc.) or companies like Collabora. (And I thought the same was true of Xorg, and has been true for many years.) Is it really true that Wayland is primarily volunteer-driven? It's true that most people are nonetheless getting Wayland for free (and, to be absolutely clear, harassment is unacceptable even to people being paid to work on the project), but the dynamics of the situation change a lot based on whether the developers are volunteers or paid by some company.
• perryizgr8 6y ago
  TL;DR: you're holding it wrong.
• tych0 6y ago
  People are dicks to maintainers of X11-based software too. I think people are just dicks. It's one of the reasons I love stale closing bots. I don't have to pay attention to people who are dicks. I can just unsubscribe from their issues and let a bot handle it.
  • t0astbread 6y ago
    Okay but why not close angry issues immediately with a cookie-cutter response and avoid stale closing bots? Stale closing bots also have the tendency to close real issues just because nothing has changed regarding the issue in a while.
    • tych0 6y ago
      Because it's hard to write a "you're being a dick" cookie cutter response for every possible case. People are dicks in a huge variety of ways. I don't enjoy figuring out prose that won't offend people, I enjoy writing and reviewing code, so I do that instead. No solution is perfect, but this one keeps me sane.
• teunispeters 6y ago
  If I wanted wayland, I'd run windows or MacOSX who both deliver what wayland promises. I'd rather have X11/XWindows, and an internetwork of computers instead of an isolated desktop. There were better solutions in the past. Still could be, and possibly better solutions for the future.
• ChrisRR 6y ago
  Acting like an arse is not the way to get your point across. Wayland definitely does not work under every use case, but claiming that anyone who does have issues with it is a conspiracy theorist is wrong Guess what, you're using linux, and these things take time to develop and be adopted. That's the way linux always has been, you trade off less than perfect software for the benefit of endless configuration. Wayland will be widely adopted one day, but insulting anyone who has issues with it does not help your case.
• apolymath 6y ago
  Vaccines kill.
• FriedrichN 6y ago
  Can't say I like the attitude in this post. It seems to me that either he thinks that criticism on the software is criticism of the developer, or he spends too much time reading posts by people using the kind of language he's using. There will always be people who'll criticize what you do, especially on the internet. You can't let it get to you.
• uncledave 6y ago
  Oh ffs I’m quite frankly fed up of gargling alpha grade crap from people forcing it down my throats. I don’t have to drink it and praise it if it doesn’t work. When exactly on Linux my NVidia 1660 GTX will do fractional scaling at 150% so a 27” 4K monitor is usable, doesn’t crap out every two minutes and actually ships with some distributions and importantly actually stays working every time I update it, I will stop berating it. This has been promised forever and it’s still a pile of random things I have to hack around and then I barely works. Until then I’m a Mac and Windows desktop user.
  • mondoshawan 6y ago
    You're getting downvoted, but its not clear why. This is a perfectly valid argument about why wayland doesn't work, from a user's perspective, not a developer's. This is precisely what users expect from the system, and frankly, Xorg made it work, despite the mess it was of a tech stack. Wayland is a very beautiful ivory tech stack, but it was created for a much different use casw than what an average user is going to care about, and as such, it suffers greatly in the end-user's eyes vs. the old and busted Xorg.
    • uncledave 6y ago
      Probably my inflamed tone. I’m just fed up of being told constantly that something works really well when it doesn’t. I’m fed up of people telling me when it doesn’t that I’m not believing hard enough or have some obscure combination which doesn’t work on Tuesdays. If I sit down and use something and it doesn’t work then it doesn’t work. It’s Boolean.
• varbhat 6y ago
  I am neither fond of Xorg nor Wayland. I have used both and I see shortcomings of both. Xorg is Overly Bloated/Done without giving much importance to security. On the other hand, Wayland is technically superior , might be more secure than Xorg. But, it's feature parity doesn't match with that of Xorg. Now,i don't think those features must be pushed into Wayland itself. i don't know but something desktop oriented Wayland implementation with those missing pieces filled would be good idea. But, will security suffer? Maybe. For example, Wayland is said to be secure because window can't see other windows. But, necessity arose due to requirement of Screen Recording so some API was created to access The Screen. So, didn't it make that security claim irrelevant because each window can access the screen? i think it's still not thought out properly.
  • ilaksh 6y ago
    Is there a special privilege or group membership or root or anything required for that screen access API?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • kevincox 6y ago
      It depends on the compositor. Some allow any app to record the screen (bringing us back to X) but most require user approval.
  • shadowgovt 6y ago
    Once upon a time, I had to write a system where the rendering architecture was broken up into an engine that ran in a separate service, and the pixels were then dumped to windows owned by client programs. Long story, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Mac OS X had a very secure graphics architecture where no program could emit pixels into the window content of another program. As a result? We could barely support OSX. We ended up having to do rendering to pixel buffers and then using mmap through an invisible file shared between the service and client, then dumping the contents of the pixel buffer straight to screen using some code every client ran. Rendering from graphics card to RAM back to video buffer cost us half our frame rate. On Windows? Client program passed its HWND to the service. Service bound an OpenGL target as a child of the client program's window. Security is important, but in a graphics service, it creates a solid trade-off between what is possible and what is safe. That HWND trick can definitely be used to fake a login window and steal user passwords. But it also allows some programs to run on Windows that were technically impossible on Mac OSX without a complete rearchitecting. (Clarification: I've gotten out of the game of writing Mac OSX software, but if I understand correctly that trick is possible under the modern architecture. It turns out Apple needed the ability for one program to write into another program's windows directly because they architected QuickTime as a service and performant video display required a similar trick to the one we were doing. So they added a mechanism for two processes to describe a shared rendering target to Quartz).
• rubyist5eva 6y ago
  I love it when experts lose their shit. It's awesome, fuck the haters.
  • enriquto 6y ago
    as a non-expert wayland hater, I agree. Colorful language for the win!
    • rubyist5eva 6y ago
      When used sparingly, it's a fucking wonderful thing!
• davidcollantes 6y ago
  I agree with mostly everything Drew wrote, yet these two things are antagonistic to the main sentiment of the post, in my opinion (English isn’t my mother tongue, and I might have gotten things wrong): > […] just to maintain that broken pile of shit. > […] If you do know what you’re doing, though, you’ll soon realize you want nothing to do with that shitty codebase. If it is a "broken pile of shit," and a "shitty codebase," wouldn’t the anti-Wayland be right? I do not use Linux on the desktop.
  • freeone3000 6y ago
    He's referring to X11 with that.
    • davidcollantes 6y ago
      Oooooh! It makes sense now. Thank you, I completely missed the context.
• Gasp0de 6y ago
  I've been using Wayland since it became the default in Arch Linux with Gnome and it almost always worked flawlessly. There are some (rare) programs that don't work well with wayland but I assume that's mostly the programs fault.
• noobermin 6y ago
  Dear god, Drew has spicy takes but this takes the cake, comparing anti-wayland sentiment to 9/11-truthers is quite the comparison. Not sure I can stomach reading past the first sentence.
  • zests 6y ago
    Beware writing things on the internet when you are angry.
  • bionade24 6y ago
    I only developed on smaller FOSS projects but can tell you this blogpost ist just an abyssnormally small piece of the hate you'll get for changing things.
• mondoshawan 6y ago
  I generally like wayland, and on systems where I can use it, I use it. I'm even writing my own compositor for a side project on embedded hardware because Wayland (the protocols) better defines the roles of parts of the software and has better performance. Functionally, though, Wayland is still not fully there yet. It's better now than it ever was, but the authors are still punting on major chunks of missing functionality. > We’re out here trying to make things better. Wayland fixes unfixable problems with X11, and might have invented some new, fixable problems in the process — most of which have been fucking fixed already, and years ago! Keyboard remapping has been punted on entirely and is still horrifically broken and undefined in the protocol definitions. Despite this, compositors still to this day, use XKB as the basis for keyboard input mapping because there is no standard way of doing this for a compositor. Even wlroots does this. This is a really bad workaround to the problem because XKB itself was an incomplete rewrite of the existing keyboard mapping code in the original X11 server, and even it doesn't work right, which is why Xorg desktops have awful things like ibus. Full nvidia support is nonexistant except with nouveau, which often doesn't work correctly for basic 2D graphics. Obviously this is out of the hands of the wayland devs, but for a user it is still major functionality that is lost, and pretending that nouveau is an equivalent replacement is problematic -- I've had generic VGA drivers perform better. And "perform better" in this context means "managed to draw a coherent image to my monitor", not "maintain 60fps". There are other features/problems that have also been punted on (remoting support, but that arguably doesnt belong in the compositor stack) that users actually need in some cases that wayland devs -- probably because of the rush to get rid of Xorg -- have avoided implementing. I get that it is hard, and major kudos for the progress that has been made, but Wayland is definitely not there yet without some coherent answer to these features. I say this as a user and a dev using wlroots.
• evmar 6y ago
  It’s ironic, seeing this sentiment from this person in particular. My short list of “people who are jerks to free software maintainers” has him at the top.
• gutino 6y ago
  Sadly the first line of the article started bad, and easily rebuttable, sugesting that if you keep reading, the risky of not learning anything is too high.
• ilaksh 6y ago
  How does Fuchia OS handle screen access and security?
• duxup 6y ago
  I understand the frustration, but somewhat related: I'm dismayed by how much people just categorize everything as 'anti-' or 'hit piece' (when it comes to news) or ... something that implies some sort of extreme bias or conspiracy when it comes to an opinion they don't like these days. Nobody it seems has a valid point of view, it's so often just some sort of 'propaganda' or something...
  • Fellshard 6y ago
    The irony in this case being that the author of the post sounds like they believe there is a conspiracy of conspiracy-theorists against the tool.
    • duxup 6y ago
      I don't know anything about 'conspiracy of conspiracies' as much as people just reach for that type of terminology when they see an opinion they don't like.
• mjw1007 6y ago
  I think Wayland has come too close to the following pattern, which I've seen in other cases of free software which have become controversial: - decide it's time to make a New Thing which will supersede the Old Thing rather than living beside it - decide that some features of Old Thing will not be directly supported by New Thing; instead New Thing will be flexible enough that people could implement those features on top of it - declare that the work done to support those features will have to be done by the people who want to use them - declare that the time has come for New Thing to supersede Old Thing, before said work has been done [Edit: this wasn't intended to be a list of things that are individually bad ideas. It's only the last, in combination with the others, that I think is ill-advised.]
  • gspr 6y ago
    > - decide it's time to make a New Thing which will supersede the Old Thing rather than living beside it That doesn't really describe the situation very well, seeing as XWayland works seamlessly. Wayland compositors very much support living beside X programs.
  • Out_of_Characte 6y ago
    This is exactly the kind of post that the author was talking about. "decide it's time to make a New Thing which will supersede the Old Thing rather than living beside it" A non-substantial argument. Whats the difference between a wayland 'superceding' X and a wayland 'living besides' X? Does implementing Xwayland not constitute trying to 'live beside' it? your argument is vague and you can respond with more ambiguity. Install X and wayland. Nothing stops you. "decide that some features of Old Thing will not be directly supported by New Thing; instead New Thing will be flexible enough that people could implement those features on top of it" WHICH features? the 'old thing' can never equal the 'new thing' otherwise they would be the same. Wayland is purposefully LESS flexible (again, how is wayland more flexible? Or is that another vague statement?) in its input handling and screen handling which is why screen recorders needed to be reimplemented in the name of security. "declare that the work done to support those features will have to be done by the people who want to use them" How is this controversial? You seem to ascribe some kind of motivated reasoning for the statement that certain features aren't being maintained/developed by wayland developers. Dev says 'no' to a feature request, why is this controversial? EGLstreams is the closest thing to a controversy but nothing prevents anyone from forking and implementing support. Open source, no excuses. "declare that the time has come for New Thing to supersede Old Thing, before said work has been done" no such declaration has been made.
• _coveredInBees 6y ago
  So many comments here are missing the point of the rant. If it doesn't work for you, fine, move on. But it takes a special type of asshole to go around harassing maintainers and continuously putting down their hard work and in many cases just making overly broad and incorrect generalizations or propagating outright lies. There is a big difference between constructive criticism and what drove the author to write that rant in the first place. It boggles my mind how people can be complete assholes to people writing FOSS because the sense of entitlement that users have when it comes to FOSS is staggering, and the more technical someone believes themselves to be, oftentimes, the more caustic they tend to be in how they interact with FOSS developers. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone, but having been a silent observer on Github issues for many FOSS projects as well as reading the rants on reddit and HN against FOSS technology <X>, it really pisses me off even though I have no skin in the game. These are real humans and people devoting their own free time to build something they are passionate about and believe in. It may not work for you, you may even think what they are doing is a terrible idea. Then provide constructive criticism if you wish and move along. That's all too rare though. In reality, what people really want is they want Wayland (or insert Technology <X> here), but they want it the way they would wish it to be, and so they will essentially engage in negging developers and their decisions trying to beat them into submission. It's despicable behavior and no one should be defending this. Measured criticism is fine, but then move the fuck on. Let people passionate about FOSS they care about, continue working on it. But don't be an asshole and keep trying to tear them down just because you selfishly want what they are building, but you want them to really build it the way you want it and to meet your specific use cases.
  • roel_v 6y ago
    At first they came for x, and I didn't speak out, etc...
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • R0b0t1 6y ago
    He's saying, literally, > So my new approach is “fuck you”. None of the Wayland detractors have a clue. Lumping everyone who may not have a rosy view of Wayland together. There's a good comment by an (alleged) pentester mentioning how Wayland doesn't really buy you that much. He's right. The bigger issue is lack of isolation within a gid. I can still debug your terminal and try to get your root password.
• hanikesn 6y ago
  I'd love to use Wayland, but having to use proprietary nvidia drivers for performance and working screen sharing via Firefox, Chrome, Zoom and Teamviewer force me to stay with X11 for some time. Though there's much progress on the Chrome Firefox front I fear it will take some time until proprietary apps will follow.
  • kevincox 6y ago
    Screensharing works well these days with PipeWire. I use it from Firefox regularly. But yes, proprietary divers are still slow to update.
• Lammy 6y ago
  Why do people have to politicize everything to this degree? I guess I’m on this dude’s “enemies” list now because I don’t want to throw away the window manager I’ve used for literally two decades. I’m okay with that :)
• pmlnr 6y ago
  And I'm tired of the Wayland-ra-ra-ra horseshit.
• knoebber 6y ago
  My usecase that doesn't work is using Emacs on a high DPI screen. I'll move over to sway as soon we get a native Emacs Wayland build.
  • jeromenerf 6y ago
    In my experience, emacs is ok with xwayland or in a terminal such as foot. I am using both.
• wetpaws 6y ago
  And yet here in 2021 I can't even start a plasma session with wayland
• SEJeff 6y ago
  The author is kind of a jerk. He complains that users don't like wayland when he entirely and wholesale rejects anyone who wants to use an nvidia graphics card. Maintainers with attitudes like this are why we can't have nice things: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html Sadly, the OSS driver doesn't support the 4k monitors I use for work well enough to actually use day to day. So my option is to use an "evil" but very stable driver and no wayland to do my job and get paid, or not.
  • kuschku 6y ago
    Or you start buying a GPU that actually supports linux? If you buy a proprietary product with no actual linux support, then why are you complaining to the unpaid volunteer to fix it, and not the multi-billion dollar company you just made several hundred dollars richer?
    • h_anna_h 6y ago
      In their defence until a few years ago it was nvidia that had the good linux drivers while AMD was stuck with bad ones. The tables turned after AMDGPU as far as I know.
      • kuschku 6y ago
        That’s true, but that’d mean running a 900 series Nvidia card or even earlier, which wouldn’t be able to handle multiple 4K monitors natively at 60Hz with or without the proprietary driver. Which means that the author bought an nvidia GPU at a point in time when it was already obvious that nvidia would treat linux as a second class citizen. And even if not, you should first complain to the company you paid hundreds of dollars to, not the unpaid volunteers.
        • SEJeff 6y ago
          Nvidia treats Linux as a first class citizen. In fact, the CUDA stuff on Linux is industry leading. As a result, machine learning on Nvidia is really good. I work with Nick Wilt, the author of the book on CUDA. Nvidia on Linux is amazing. Nvidia on Linux without X11 (for guis) is not, sadly.
• _pmf_ 6y ago
  Look, desktop Linux has enough things that barely work (I haven't had working sound since the switch to Pulse Audio). The strong reaction to Wayland is due to breaking even the few things that used to work.
• zippergz 6y ago
  I barely know what Wayland is, but this attitude doesn't make me eager to try it.
• captainmuon 6y ago
  One thing I rarely see discussed - and one of the reasons I don't like Wayland personally - is the second order effect of putting everything in the compositor: It is now really hard to write a "window manager" or window tools. And this leads to a certain uniformity of desktop environments (the big ones, GNOME + Plasma, and then a bunch of keyboard driven minimal environments "for hackers") What I mean is, back in the day with X11, all clients were equal and there were nice little tools that let you switch between virtual desktops graphically (desktop pagers). I myself wrote a little taskbar (with the kind of glow animation that moves with the cursor that Windows 7 made popular), but never published it unfortunately. A lot of people wrote or hacked on window managers. It was never really easy, but at least it was possible. Now with wayland, you have to write not only the code that draws the titlebars, but the code that puts the pixels on the screen, input handling, clipboard handling and all kinds of stuff. Of course you can fork an existing window manager, or use something like wlroots, but they are all opinionated. If you just want "GNOME with different titlebars" someone else wants "KDE with different titlebars" - you're out of luck. So this makes the barrier to entry really high. On the other hand, if somebody would write a "window decorator" interface, you could write a small window decorator process (like we had with Compiz). I don't believe this will happen, because it would have to be adopted by multiple compositors to make sense. If it did, I would have a bunch of ideas I'd like to try out one day.
  • dashboardmess 6y ago
    “Putting everything in the compositor” isn’t mandated by Wayland at all, and I think only gnome does it. If you implement the protocols defined by Kwin, you can reuse everything in KDE without using it. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but properly implementing it on X11 also is more work than you would expect. The only problem here is politics, as KDE hasn’t stabilized the interface as far as I know. Wlroots isn’t opinionated at all. In theory, it’s perfectly possible to write a gnome shell alternative using wlroots. Writing a taskbar for nearly all wlroots based compositors is also possible. You could even write a plugin for wayfire to implement the Kwin protocols, and write another plugin to implement a simple window manager. As for changing the titlebars, as long as you enable CSD, you could just write a theme.
• _pmf_ 6y ago
  > just to maintain that broken pile of shit. > It has a real cost, you know, being a dick to maintainers. Which way is it, chief?
  • ddevault 6y ago
    There aren't any Xorg maintainers left. Xorg was abandoned, by its maintainers, because it's a broken pile of shit. Calling it a broken pile of shit is validating its (ex-)maintainers, not being a dick to them.
    • davidcuddeback 6y ago
      I highly doubt that nobody who used to work on Xorg would be offended by you calling it a broken pile of shit. And then there's this, from you, today: > GNOME is a dumpster fire [1] Can you say the same about Gnome maintainers? Do you think they're not offended by you calling their project a dumpster fire? You're being hypocritical and going to great lengths to spin a narrative to justify your abusive language. I feel you on entitled and abusive users, but stooping to their level reflects poorly on you and to a lesser extent on the projects associated with you, including Wayland. You can choose to be better than that. Honestly, your attitude in TFA and here is doing more harm than good. Have you considered taking a hiatus for a while to re-center yourself? Maybe find another outlet for your frustrations? Or maybe consider @titzer's suggestion [2]: delete the post and start over. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26004413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26004413 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26002869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26002869
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• notmenope 6y ago
  How about less bitching and more making Sway not suck ass and freeze all the damn time?
• oskenso 6y ago
  I still have mouse and keyboard issues under wayland + gnome. This bug causes the ui to drop mouse and keyboard input events whenever the rendering takes too long to complete Issue tracking: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745032 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745032 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/749 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/749
• malwarebytess 6y ago
  This is flamebait.
• dtx1 6y ago
  I know the author is reading HN. I use sway everyday and i freaking love it. Mixing monitors with different resolutions AND different refresh rates all running at their native speeds with no tearing, all while keeping my nice i3 Shortcuts? FREAKING AWESOME! Does EVERYTHING work? Nope, somethings are broken, some require config changes or workarounds. I have an XFCE desktop installed as a backup for work when i know i need to do a lot of Zoom conferences but for my private stuff i can just avoid non-wayland software and for most things IT.JUST.WORKS. and it's superbly fast and comfy AF to use. Complain away how wayland doesn't do everything xorg does. Stick to your abandonware for legacy reasons. That's fine. That's your freedom. I just like the Window Manager :)
  • spiznnx 6y ago
    I also run sway every day. I get tear-free video that way, monitors turn on faster, etc. Only thing I'm missing is copy and paste isn't working with Chrome Remote Desktop. Overall it's been great and smooth experience since I switched last year.
• pwdisswordfish6 6y ago
  Just an observation, here's something that's a result of the fact that self-published opinion pieces on the Internet don't necessarily go through an editorial process before publication: > It has a real cost, you know, being a dick to maintainers. [...] We’re out here trying to make things better [...] We’ve sacrificed our spare time to build this for you for free. Yes, but who are you addressing? There's a subtext here that discouraging behavior can be such a burden that it takes away resources from the project. Perhaps it takes such a toll that a maintainer just calls it quits on the whole thing. That makes sense when addressing your fans who are consuming your work but nonetheless burdening you. To a detractor, who isn't using Wayland and doesn't want Wayland to succeed, discouragement leading to burnout is not failure condition. This logical slip is probably the result of leaning too heavily on the vaccine metaphor. Now playing Devil's advocate (contra this piece): In the real world, anti-vaxxers benefit no matter what they believe. But that's not so in Wayland v. X11 duel, which is not only a genuine a matter of preference, but there are actually shades of a zero-sum relationship here. The idea of Wayland, like a vaccine, being good for you whether you know it or not doesn't hold up. If you're in the X11 camp and oppose Wayland, improvement to the Wayland ecosystem isn't bringing nice things like herd immunity. It's actually a threat if your vision is one where X11 remains entrenched for the foreseeable future. It would also be really easy for a detractor of Wayland to use this post for ammunition, for example labelling this as self-aggrandizement and maybe claiming that there's an attitude where Waylanders see themselves as saviors, rescuing others from a plight they don't even agree exists, and that it's an attitude indicative of the project as a whole.
• brokenkebab 6y ago
  tldr The author is seriously upset, insists that Wayland works for almost everyone, and if you don't like Wayland - you don't have a clue, and f... you, and you will maintain Xorg yourself, and f... you. And f... you. Did I mention f... you? That's it.
• account42 6y ago
  > In the case of Wayland, the “vague authority” are a bunch of volunteers who have devoted tens of thousands of hours of their free time towards making free shit for you. This argument is plain and simple abuse behavior. The people criticising Wayland never asked you to make free shit. They have no obligation to like it or to not voice their concerns when they might be impacted by your free shit. If you don't want to hear criticism of your free shit, get off the internet. > It has a real cost, you know, being a dick to maintainers. Same goes for being a dick to your users (especially those who didn't choose to be your users) or random people on the internet. > [...] Most of the lies you’ve heard about ways that it’s broken are just that: lies Ah yes, shouting "fake news" works so well. I'm not even anti-Wayland really - it simply does not provide any advantages for me at the moment while breaking some things - but this kind of attitude makes me not want to touch it.
• blastonico 6y ago
  hahaha, love it
• Deganta 6y ago
  I think one of the biggest problems of Wayland are the "non standard, but kind of necessary" extensions. E.g. screencapture. Does Wayland support screencapture? Yes (kind of), but I can't write a Wayland screencapture app. I need to write a Gnome screencapture app or a wslroot screencapture app, or I can even write one that supports both. But what if someone using the new Future Desktop Environment wants to use my app? It probably won't work because it probably will use a different extension for the same behaviour. So I need to add the extension for that too...
• sn41 6y ago
  At this point, Wayland looks like GNU HURD. Probably it is better, but the milestones keep shifting. I will stick to Xorg, since it supports tiling window managers better.
  • zamadatix 6y ago
    Curious what makes you say the last bit. This comment coming from a tiling Wayland window manager written by the author of the post (sway, drop in replacement for i3).
    • sn41 6y ago
      Oh sorry, did not know that. Thanks for replying. I will try sway out in my next install.
• crgi 6y ago
  Big shoutout to all the wayland contributors: Thanks a ton for all the hours you spend on the project. Please keep up the good work and don‘t let the haters get to you!
• tutfbhuf 6y ago
  It's post like these that bring up emotional flame wars. If someone says that Wayland sucks, and tells why he thinks so, then this is a very legitimate opinion that has nothing to do with 9/11.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• chuckSu 6y ago
  Horseshit article
• seabird 6y ago
  It's really rich when these types get riled up about software having very obvious flaws. I respect the author and really want to like Wayland, but there's big things missing. I recently installed Fedora after my Windows install bombed out after an update. I went to play World of Warcraft with my buddies and found that the mouse handling in Wayland was pretty severely broken, at least for WoW. You move by clicking both of your mouse buttons, which starts moving you forward, and then you turn your mouse to steer. Under X11, your mouse is in the same place after you release your buttons (this is the intended behavior). Under Wayland, only god knows where it's going to pop up; it seems to be following your mouse movement while you turn, but not exactly. I said "whatever, it's a good thing I don't play too much WoW" and made peace with what it was. Then I went to share my screen. I couldn't. Total showstopper -- I use this functionality every single day, and I can't part with it. Wayland is officially off the table. I've been using X11 since. Everything has worked perfectly. I'm not going to suffer through some software that I actually need to use under WINE having fucked up mouse handling, or hold out for multiple years before I can share my screen again. I can't imagine even attempting taking Wayland seriously if I had Nvidia hardware. If somebody's take is that I should go fuck myself for expecting things to work while they tell me that my other options are wrong and bad because it works for "most people" (which is pretty stupid -- even Average Joe has a lot of showstoppers, it's why the Year of the Linux Desktop hasn't happened), they can have fun dumping time into software that's inferior in many regards. EDIT: in response to Drew's flagged and dead comment (which I feel is quite unreasonable, he brings up a point about the compositor having some responsibility here too) -- I am not using Wayland under GNOME -- I switched to KDE and spent a fair amount of time digging through DE, WINE, and software settings trying to get these things working. I'm willing to slog through a lot of shit to get the technically correct solution, but some bridges are too far. I'm not changing my entire DE, GPU, software choices, etc. for the sake of using Wayland, even though it's superior to X11, and I think that's what a lot of proponents of it are missing.
  • ddevault 6y ago
    Author of the OP here. What you're describing is a bad experience with GNOME, not with Wayland. Each of your examples works great on most other Wayland compositors. The ignorance which leads you to blame it on Wayland is a major part of the same frustrations I'm venting in this rant. No one is saying you can go fuck yourself for wanting these use-cases. We're saying you can go fuck yourself because we made these use-cases work for you, and you still blame it on Wayland when GNOME is the one not playing ball.
• jancsika 6y ago
  "7 years ago" is a bit much. Ubuntu 20.04 probably had good reasons not to ship Wayland as the default. I think this because I've had the experience of using OBS in Ubuntu 20.04-- which works-- vs OBS under Debian buster (using Wayland by default)-- which, as of two months ago, didn't. And I wasn't even looking for differences here-- just that my workflow got interrupted on Debian because of this problem. I'd wager there are surely other such outstanding issues with Wayland as the default. The issue I ran into is being fixed-- or perhaps is already fixed-- which is great. I'm not anti-Wayland. I'm also not a Wayland developer, or Wayland fan. All I know is it's supposed to replace another part of the stack that I don't develop or give a shit about. To the degree that things don't break when that happens, I'm happy. When they do break, I will be temporarily frustrated.
• rpiguyshy 6y ago
  thats cool that its also on gemeni. why did ubuntu use wayland and then switch back to X? i think this is a great piece of evidence in the case for all these open source guys to stop wasting their effort on open source projects. the amount of utility that is got per unit time and effort is pathetic. its thankless, hard work that in this case will basically be rejected by the very people it was designed for. i think a better model is something like system76 where the core developers are paid and people get really good, well integrated hardware as well.
  • GrayShade 6y ago
    > why did ubuntu use wayland and then switch back to X? They're switching again to Wayland: [1] [1]: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/trying-wayland-by-default-again/20575 https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/trying-wayland-by-default-aga...
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      Default is X for nvidia users. Phew.
• h_anna_h 6y ago
  Since this is a new thread I will repost my question from the old one. Honest question by someone who wants to try out wayland, do steam, gog games, and wine games work on wayland well? What about things like obs?
  • ddevault 6y ago
    Games: yes, albiet mostly through Xwayland, which is a compatibility layer. Most games Just Work through this compatibility layer. OBS works fine, but you need a plugin. Caveat: this applies only to compositors based on wlroots, list of them here: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-wlroots https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-wl... The most mature compositors from this list are sway, wayfire, hikari, and cage. YMMV with other Wayland compositors, and if you have issues with them, you should speak to them, but not blame Wayland in general. If you have Nvidia hardware, you will also have to use the nouveau driver, and YMMV with that, too. I recommend Intel or AMD GPUs, both companies are much more cooperative with the FOSS community.
    • h_anna_h 6y ago
      Thanks for the reply. You would think that these that have the opinion that games do not work on wayland would at least provide their own response than just downvote you.
• arbitrage 6y ago
  how long have people been workng on wayland? how often have they said it's almost ready? what do they have to show for this charade? the crazy conspiracy theory here actually is that we need to replace Xorg/X11 with something that just doesn't work, and nobody actually wants to use. keep appealing to outrage, though. hypocrite.
• voldacar 6y ago
  > a blithe rejection of facts to embrace a narrative of victimization by a vague authority actually I am victimized by the extra frame of latency. cool rant though
  • webkike 6y ago
    Wayland adds a frame of latency? Do you have a source on this (no skin on this game just really want to find out more about this)
• dschuetz 6y ago
  I have never even used Wayland, because it's so broken for me that I thought it's still unstable and experimental. On that note, if the developers are so frustrated that all their work doesn't get the resonance they wished for, probably they are in the wrong business. I am very familiar with the fuck-you-all attitude. But if it comes to this on my part it is usually because I messed up really-really big somewhere and got lost, and needed self-reflection. EDIT: Btw, I was considering to comment on his flaming, but then I read "mailing list etiquette" and figured that flaming like he does actually breaks etiquette, oh well... Let him flame, I don't care.
• CyberRabbi 6y ago
  > “Wayland sucks!” is a conspiracy theory with no basis in truth It’s an opinion, not a theory. People should be able to hold the opinion that “Wayland sucks” without being labeled conspiracy theorists.
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I feel your pain. In my case, ranting didn't help. In fact, it made things much worse. Also, in my case, I was lucky enough to hand my project over to some really sharp, energetic and positive people that have taken my work to the next level. Turns out, the absolute best thing that I could do for my project, was to step away from it completely (not even being a "benevolent dictator emeritus"), after ten years of dealing with some really annoying crap. My being associated with the project was actually a boat anchor. I hate to say it, but not everybody loves me, and I'm fairly good at giving as well as I get (see "didn't help," above).
• nlstitch 6y ago
  Is screen sharing on a modern laptop with a Nvidia 1070 too much to ask though?
• titzer 6y ago
  Oh yes, the solution to people being pissed off at you is to be even more pissed right back at them. That'll teach them how wrong they are! Drew, all of the points that you have made here might have some backing in facts, and it is clear from the tone and overall message that you're frustrated, angry, at your wits' end....but such a rant will accomplish nothing but make you look like an asshole, which hurts everyone in the long run. I would encourage you to delete this and start over. Even if you are a 100% right, this looks terrible, and nobody wants to see this.
• mindcrime 6y ago
  So, I have to admit, I'm sadly under-informed on many aspects of this discussion. While I'm a "Linux diehard" and have been for decades, I care more about the command line and generally look at the desktop environment as just something to run a browser and an IDE. So I'm FAR from a "Linux Desktop UI / Graphics Geek". With that in mind, can anybody recommend one or more good books / websites / whatever, that represent a moderately comprehensive introduction to all this "desktop stuff"? That is, graphics servers, window managers, compositors, yadda, yadda, yadda. I'd like to dig in and actually start to understand some of the underlying details of what's going on with all of this.
  • forgotpwd16 6y ago
    An interactive introduction (now unmaintained as author wrote to an HN submission) to X windowing system: https://magcius.github.io/xplain/article/index.html https://magcius.github.io/xplain/article/index.html That covers the graphics part which is the same for the two windowing systems. See Wayland's FAQ[1] and architecture[2] page for why it was made and how they differ. https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html https://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html https://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html Though not primary goal according to their FAQ, Wayland also improves security. For this see: https://lwn.net/Articles/517375/ https://lwn.net/Articles/517375/ http://mupuf.org/blog/2014/02/19/wayland-compositors-why-and-how-to-handle/ http://mupuf.org/blog/2014/02/19/wayland-compositors-why-and...
• leephillips 6y ago
  I use dwm and X11. I don’t use a “desktop” and never will. I only use one monitor, and don’t care about screen sharing. X11 works fine for me in almost all respects—the exception is some applications drawing some of their text too small on my high-resolution screen. Is there any reason for me to know about Wayland?
  • zamadatix 6y ago
    Wayland gives a better way for those apps to draw on high resolution displays appropriately and at worst case if they don't know about Wayland they draw all the same as now via XWayland anyways. Ddevault actually created sway which is a Wayland i3 clone so his workflow probably wasn't all that different from yours on dwm.
    • leephillips 6y ago
      OK. I may want to try it, in that case. Do you know if there is a good guide somewhere to how to do this? The idea seems a bit scary, as X11 is embedded pretty deeply into the system.
      • zamadatix 6y ago
        I did it on a fresh secondary install first just to get an understanding of what I wanted to do. If you were going for a more prepackaged system like KDE it's just a click but dwm -> sway is basically rebuilding everything you did in dwm and (at least for me) couldn't be done in one shot on a Saturday afternoon. I hear if you're coming from i3 it's dead simple but I was coming from KDE basically so had to figure everything out plus figure the wayland bits out. As far as documentation I think this comment chain has the perfect set of links for that https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/l54a1a/guidestutorials_for_sway_where_are_they/gksvfui/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/l54a1a/guidestutori... and the subreddit in general is a great source of information/tips on it. In general it's going to come down to 1) packages for sway, and wayland tools for things like clipboard/screenshot/xwayland/etc, and wayland compatibility on different toolkits/libraries 2) your sway config file which ties all of those packages together and personalizes the look, feel, and functionality of your workspace 3) envvars and other configurations to signal to GTK/Firefox/QT/etc you want to prefer wayland native (otherwise a lot of things still default to X11 which will run via xwayland). Right now I'd classify it as "no harder than getting dwm/i3 working the way you want it for the first time but a lot of work". Also like I said it gives the apps the ability to understand per monitor DPI or fractional DPI and so on, not it makes every app work perfectly. E.g. FF has really solid and performant GPU accelerated rendering and video decoding you can enable on top of webrender in Wayland but it's a GTK app so if you have it run at 1.5x scale GTK is going to render it at 2x your screen resolution at 3x your configured DPI and downscale the output by 2x to end up at your resolution with 1.5x scale like you asked. Not much different than when it was on X11, except it's a bit more performant and they say it's easier to maintain/simpler than the X11 GPU acceleration code. On the flipside you have Chromium which now has the same GPU accelerated story in Wayland (with configuration) but understands how to do 1.5x without rescaling when running in Wayland and can move to another monitor that's 1x and scale appropriately. tl;dr: it's a lot of work and a bit scary, don't jump unless you've really got some time and interest. If you do jump it does do what it says on the tin though and apps are only going to get more native Wayland support with time not less.
• peanut_worm 6y ago
  Arrogant
• ekianjo 6y ago
  > None of the Wayland detractors have a clue. They don’t understand Wayland, they don’t understand X11, they don’t understand Linux graphics or OpenGL or Vulkan or anything else in the stack. So, end users are not supposed to complain because they don't know the full stack by heart? What kind of crappy piece of opinion is that?
• 0027 6y ago
  This is a poor analogy. "Wayland sucks!" isn't a conspiracy theory, its an opinion. There is no basis in truth to the statement "Santa Claus is awesome." Developing software is difficult and thankless, even if FOSS. I don't know what else to say other than this article feels like a waste of space.
• renewiltord 6y ago
  I hope Ubuntu stays on X because I use it with proprietary nvidia drivers and everything is very nice for me. Linux has never been better. Nouveau was pretty good but wouldn't properly handle 144 Hz. If Ubuntu keeps using X, I think I'll be fine for a while.
  • zamadatix 6y ago
    KDE Wayland supports the Nvidia proprietary driver, Gnome Wayland kinda supports it but is still working on it. If/when Ubuntu switches from X for Nvidia users you won't have to go to the nouveau driver.
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      Okay, that's great. Thanks. I hope it won't break any of the video based flows: screensharing, screencasting, etc.
      • zamadatix 6y ago
        Gnome Wayland and KDE Wayland already have this figured out via xdg-desktop-portal-* and pipewire. 21.04 is going to try to do Wayland by default for non-Nvidia as part of a run up to enable it for all by default in 22.04 LTS.
        • renewiltord 6y ago
          Looking forward to it. I'm a super tech agnostic user so I'll use whatever so long as it does the thing I need.
• bjourne 6y ago
  Hear ye, hear ye. "Don't criticize what you can't understand"
• StillBored 6y ago
  Wayland is one of those projects that could die tomorrow and no one would really care. Which is a symptom of them deciding to rearchitect the world to solve a problem they could have solved by doing some hard work with the existing project. That tells me pretty much everything I need to know about wayland.
• mechnesium 6y ago
  Reminds me of people who are staunchly anti-systemd. They are luddite masochists who prefer shit that is inconvenient or broken for the sake of being a contrarian hipster.
• zug_zug 6y ago
  This just sounds like the heavy cost of software development. Part of providing a good user-experience is documentation, patience, user-research, understanding the sophistication level (or lack thereof) of your users, etc. From what I've observed most FOSS software doesn't have time/interest for that kind of hand-holding (and I can't blame them, they aren't getting paid and probably don't like that part). The counterpoint is that a lot of great FOSS software that is 80-90% great but with a terrible UI, terrible documentation, or glaring incompatibility that makes the experience entirely unpalatable for a swath of users. And so a lot of people don't use it. Which is also fine.
• stevepike 6y ago
  Ok, here is my use case that wayland doesn't work for. I have an AMD graphics card (5700xt) and two 4k screens. I want to run firefox, chrome, emacs, and a terminal. Using KDE or Sway, if I set my desktop scaling to 2x, all programs that run through XWayland have extremely blurry display (they've been rendered at 1x and then crudely scaled up). This includes firefox, chrome, and emacs. The browsers have ongoing work to support wayland natively, but neither is stable for me. If I set my desktop scaling to 1x, I can then scale up individual xwayland programs with flags like `--force-device-scale-factor` if they support them. This gets me close to the behavior on X but on X I can just set a global 2x scale. I totally understand the frustration of OSS maintainers when people demand they fix things with no intention of getting into the code. On the other hand, the marketing behind wayland encourages some unrealistic expectations. I went out and bought a new graphics card and it turns out I can't even run firefox! That was not what I expected to happen.
  • minifridge 6y ago
    A pgtk build of emacs is what I have been using for quite some time without any significant problems (native Wayland build) https://github.com/masm11/emacs https://github.com/masm11/emacs Pretty sure there are builds for the browsers you mentioned that run natively on wayland
    • stevepike 6y ago
      Yeah, here's where I think things tend to go off the rails in the wayland discussions with people having different personal experiences. I've tried to run both firefox and chrome in the native wayland mode and neither works properly _for me_. I forget what the chrome issue was, but in firefox on KWIN if I enlarge a window the portion of the window that was added doesn't render properly --- it's a flashing white rectangle --- and then if I resize it down it either crashes or garbles the whole window. I'm sure this doesn't happen to everyone.
  • zamadatix 6y ago
    Not sure about emacs but Chrome and Firefox can run under Wayland native these days though still a bit off from them using it on a default launch I think. As for the general workaround you landed on that kind of approach is probably still the best approach at the moment. You can also set the scaling algorithm to something else (I prefer nearest neighbor) if that helps any. There was a PR to support setting X hidpi for XWayland but it got held up somewhere in XWayland stuff apparently. Definitely a painful use case combination still but one that should solve itself once things actually start using Wayland rather than XWayland.
• hyperion2010 6y ago
  However bad people think X11 is, the engineering decision (or more likely lack of any intentional design decisions beyond the initial extremely narrow use cases?) to "replace" a huge portion of its functionality with windowing toolkits is a disaster for open source. I have written about this before, but the amount of waste and rework that it induces is completely unsustainable. If you want to see another generation wasted in the bazaar then stick with wayland. Wayland is very good at the use case it was developed to serve, which is fast booting systems for automobile backup cameras. Everything beyond that is at best an afterthought. Forcing dbus on everyone to replace xlib is like chopping off your legs because you heard that you can run faster with the new carbon fiber prosthetics -- it will work fine on a track, but the second you try to go hiking off the trail with boulders you will fall and break your skull.
  • kaba0 6y ago
    Gnome developers are the ones advocating for “dbus everything”, wlroots prefers wayland protocol extensions. And since no one company is behind the linux ecosystem, everyone works on what they want to work on, so every change is fundamentally starts with chaos in linux. But it will stabilize on a good enough solution (eg. I don’t see much ill with the current 3-4 implementation of the protocol with one of them being a minimal “lib”, that can be used for small niche window managers to build on)
• spion 6y ago
  No, Wayland is not currently usable for the "vast majority" of people. Anyone that has a high DPI display and/or NVIDIA card and uses most of the popular Electron based apps or Chrome will have a bad experience. Not saying Xorg is any good, or the scaling decisions in Wayland are bad. Just that its not objectively possible to switch away from it yet, for a large number of people See e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/d2qqtk/yet_another_xwayland_post_about_blurriness/ https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/d2qqtk/yet_another_...
  • zamadatix 6y ago
    This was a sway thing more than a Wayland thing and a PR for it was made back in March https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/pull/2064 https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/pull/2064 Edit: but not merged yet :/ Also it's (ironically) an X11 related issue which shows up do to XWayland backwards compatibility, not something new with Wayland. Chrome also since supports Wayland natively so the workaround in that PR isn't even needed for it anymore. Electron is still a bit behind but it's looking like Electron 12 should have native Wayland support as well, until then the workaround for X11 app scaling is there. There are still a few things I'd like to see land (which are closing in) before saying Wayland is a better fit for most users but better DPI scaling certainly isn't one, it was one of the first wins to land to be honest. . Regardless sway isn't for most users and will probably never be. I'd look more to issues in KDE or similar where it's more focused on the "normal" use case, supports Nvidia just fine, and is expected to work out of the box.
    • spion 6y ago
      From the user's perspective, if they get blurry Electron apps, they get blurry Electron apps. Its not a win if you don't get to use the win.
      • zamadatix 6y ago
        An X11 presented app having DPI issues not solved by copying that up through XWayland (X11) is not a lose on Wayland's part but the apps working with multi-monitor fractional DPI awareness on Wayland are definitely wins. The aforementioned workaround would make some X11 use cases work but not all, because X11 has no way to do multi-monitor fractional DPI awareness without rescaling so there is only so much hack workaround you can do in the meantime. But there's no need to rush users to it just because it can work. IMO let Electron and whatnot get updated in the meantime so it's a smoother transition.
• VoodooJuJu 6y ago
  I can understand the frustration, but the "you owe it to us!" sentiment is so juvenile, so unwarranted. No one owes you anything.
• ceronman 6y ago
  I'm writing this from my Fedora laptop where Wayland works extremely well. I want to say thank you to all the developers behind it! I know that the process of moving to Wayland has been slow and hard. It is definitely not an easy task. I know it's frustrating when something that used to work does not any more. I know the process is not complete and there are still a few things that might not work well. But for god sake, these people are volunteers. Stop bullying them with angry posts complaining about their work. You likely don't pay a penny for all this great software that you are using. If you think that X is better, just use it, and live with its unfixable issues. If you don't like distros moving to Wayland, contribute the packages to keep using X, maintain X, these guys are offering you the keys! Please stop shitposting about the work of people trying to make things better. Apple breaks things all the time and they don't get half of the heat. And they charge a lot of money.
  • red_trumpet 6y ago
    > If you think that X is better, just use it, and live with its unfixable issues. Out of curiosity: What are those issues with X? On my day to day use of Xubuntu I don't encounter any problems. What would I gain from switching to Wayland?
    • lytedev 6y ago
      The main issues for me were HiDPI support and screen tearing (when not running a compositor)
    • PurpleFoxy 6y ago
      When you plug your laptop in to a 4K screen it sets the 4K screen at 200% scale and the laptop at 100%. When you move windows over the screen border they switch scale. On X you either have to pick one scale or have windows die and be spawned again on the next screen
• hatsunearu 6y ago
  >What do anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, 9/11 truthers, and anti-Wayland activism all have in common? Bro what, are you kidding me? When systemd got jammed down our throats all I felt was "well, I'm against it by principle, but I guess strictly speaking nothing is getting worse"... If this half baked Wayland nonsense gets shoved down our throat, I am toast. I need good functioning color management and Wayland seems to say "well, nobody buys displays more than 100 dollars, so sRGB it is"
• btinker 6y ago
  > Wayland works for almost everyone, and works for more people than is even possible with X11. Most of the lies you’ve heard about ways that it’s broken are just that: lies. And if you insist on living in that fantasy, then keep it to yourself, asshole. But it doesn't work for me (aka. important features are buggy in the gnome/wayland/whatever stack I am using if I select wayland in gdm). Am I now a lier or an unimportant victim of the March of technology? I am using wayland on my laptop anyway, as it comes with better scaling. I actually want to like it and I am very thankful for the developers putting so much work into it. But the rollout, especially of gnome-wayland, was a disaster. It wasn't ready* when it came to fedora and it wasn't ready when it first came to Ubuntu and it is barely ready today. The developers (and some diehard fans) repeatly insisting it was robbed many of any faith in the project. People are saying so much about it because they tried and something broke. And yes it may be QT's (still problems with clipboard) or Firefox's or Gnome's or Nvidia's (half of all linux desktops) fault, not the Wayland core teams or the Wayland protocol's. Doesn't matter in the end. * With ready I mean feature parity with gnome-x11. Working for "almost everyone" (and with a very, very, significant almost at that nvidia) is just not good enough. Not if you want to replace one of the most important components of a user's desktops. At least for my day to day usage it is pros and cons, but all the pros are something we learned to live without, all the cons are fresh wounds.
  • ddevault 6y ago
    >But it doesn't work for me (aka. important features are buggy in the gnome/wayland/whatever stack I am using if I select wayland in gdm). GNOME doesn't work for you. GNOME uses Wayland, but the bugs you experienced are not the fault of Wayland. They're the fault of GNOME. GNOME is a dumpster fire and its premature roll-out to Fedora, Ubuntu, etc was very badly done. None of that has any bearing on Wayland, except to fuel the flames for spiteful people who choose to use the botched GNOME roll-out to harass anyone who has anything to do with Wayland.
    • whatisthisfield 6y ago
      Maybe GNOME doesn’t work for your precious use-case. More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago. GNOME works for almost everyone. Most of the lies you’ve heard about ways that it’s broken are just that: lies. And if you insist on living in that fantasy, then keep it to yourself.
• kristjansson 6y ago
  Wayland folks generally, and ddevault in particular, have built the software they wanted to build, with the tradeoffs they wanted to make. That's good! Users don't have a right to demand they make different software, with different tradeoffs, that they didn't want to make, and definitely don't have the right to invective when they don't get their way. However, proponents probably also shouldn't push 'no yes it does work for you' replies though, particularly on the Nvidia thing, since that statement has to be followed by 'if you make serious performance and capability tradeoffs that you may not want to make.' This software disclaims support for this and that thing [1] - that's fine, just add those to your constraint set and see if you still want to use that software at the end of the day. If you don't, that's fine, either write some code to lift your constraints or move on, but don't be a dick about it. [1]: maybe because the guys that build that thing are jerks, and aren't being good citizens. Which, sure, fine, but from a user perspective, this peg doesn't go in that hole.
• lrossi 6y ago
  > So my new approach is “fuck you”. None of the Wayland detractors have a clue. Nowadays I think even Microsoft is more friendly with its users than Linux desktop developers.
• xupybd 6y ago
  Users don't like change. They don't like having to learn new things they don't care about.
• eigenrick 6y ago
  As a Wayland (and Sway) user; Overall, I have loved the Wayland experience. I am very grateful to all of the devs who've worked to make this happen. That said, I feel that Wayland devs (and users) are just now (re)learning the ecosystem catch-22 problem. The ecosystem hasn't caught up with Wayland's new architecture because the layers don't line up the same way. This means entirely new layers (or adapters) need to be created all the way up the stack. Also, this new design and these interfaces are almost completely undocumented, so it makes it very hard for a non-waylander to step in and contribute. I made a couple attempts to fix bugs, but after wading through Github issues for 4 hours, and getting no help on IRC, I gave up. Unfortunately the ecosystem is responsible for building the rest of the stack, but it's hard, because there isn't much in the way of documentation or examples in the ecosystem. That's the catch. The ecosystem is expanding very slowly because there isn't much of an ecosystem.
• mdoms 6y ago
  I don't really even know what Wayland is but I know I'll never bother to find out with morons like this behind it.
• beshrkayali 6y ago
  Equating between flatearthers/antivaxers and criticism of Wayland has got to be a prime example of False equivalence [1]. This style of argumentation is as bad (if not worse) than baseless rejection of Wayland because of "vague" criticism. If I try to read between the lines, the author is worried that if more people don't jump ship and switch to Wayland, suffering through whatever trouble they might face, Wayland won't get better faster. Which although true, is a very selfish argument that does not see beyond the author's own use case. I'd like to try Wayland sometime, so far I haven't. I don't think there will be a lot of issues that I'll have to get around, but honestly I'm not looking to find out right now. I use Xorg and I'm happy. At some point, I'll try Wayland. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
• bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  I expected a different Wayland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_the_Smith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_the_Smith which I thought, anti-Wayland horseshit! I agree, that must be stopped!
• ChiefOBrien 6y ago
  I'm tired of this pro-Wayland horseshit You have been trying to reinvent the wheel for a decade and splitting the whole community on petty shit like this, halving development effort on an already non-popular platform, and yet you wonder why people are angry. Instead of evolving X11 and deprecating old features to drop tech debt over time, you went and created your snowflake project and paraded over how much more secure your project is when it doesn't have features to this day, features which are working perfectly on X11. This blog post is the epitome of the whole wayland development group's selfishness. You did this thing for yourselves, for your own comfort and feel-good bullshit, not for the whole community. The Linux ecosystem has suffered too much for no good reason, to the detriment of user experience and market share.
  • zamadatix 6y ago
    Eh, if a bunch of X11 devs were tired enough of X11 they decided to drop it for working on Wayland I'm not upset at them for working on what they want to work on rather than what I want them to work on. I'll gladly take reinventing the wheel every 30 years over people dropping out altogether, though if they want to that's fine it's their own time and energy. If they did it for their own reasons instead of the community I'm glad if I still find value in what they made and indifferent if I didn't. It's not like I paid them to make me something or they owe me something. I do wish tensions about it could be lower. I think there is real damage for all any time they rise.
    • ChiefOBrien 6y ago
      It's not just wayland. For every single thing you can do on linux there exists several hundred different implementations/projects with the same goal of do that thing, and it has led to bad cohesion between system components. Even Microsoft couldn't figure out how to drop Win32 and introduce other safer environments without alienating everyone. How can we expect Linux to survive and become better if we treat everything in it with such a garbage attitude.
      • zamadatix 6y ago
• slackfan 6y ago
  Maybe if you stopped baselessly accusing me of all sorts of random shit, I would be more willing to listen to what your project has to say.
• wing-_-nuts 6y ago
  The biggest beef I have with wayland is it's security model. Ok, you don't want to let other applications listen to keystrokes, record the screen, etc, by default? Fine. There should be some low level implementation that pops up a box asking the user if they wish to allow that app to do that, not outright breaking the practice! Wayland feels like some ivy tower academic's ideal of what a display system should be. Everything usable is an 'exercise left to the reader'. Look, if you're a dev working on an open source project meant to replace a critical piece of infrastructure, don't be surprised when people don't like or adopt it when it breaks a lot of their uses cases.
  • zamadatix 6y ago
    I was really hoping Wayland would be a bit like a programming language in that aspect. I.e. in a programming you have the language itself, the stdlib, and then the ability to load whatever other library you want. In Wayland you have Wayland itself and the ability to load whatever other stuff you want. For core use cases like screen sharing this approach has been an absolute pain. I get not wanting to specify screen sharing as part of Wayland itself but that doesn't mean throwing it to the crowd was a good answer.
  • cycloptic 6y ago
    >There should be some low level implementation that pops up a box asking the user if they wish to allow that app to do that I'm not sure what you mean. This is actually exactly what is being done in GNOME and KDE's wayland implementations.
    • wing-_-nuts 6y ago
      There should be some base implementation of wayland (wlroots?), and this sort of thing should happen there. I just disagree with the whole concept that a desktop environment, window manager, or whatever else has to change because the underlying display server changes. That should be fully transparent. It seems to me that these guys have handed way too much off to the desktop / window manager, washed their hands of it and said 'deal with it'.
• carapace 6y ago
  Nicely ranted. I'm one who feels that ranting is a kind of art (or can be profitably interpreted that way), and well-formed rant counts as art. This is a good rant, not great, but heartfelt and sincere with judicious use of curse words and rhetorical flourish. (For greatness in ranting see the work of Mickens, perhaps our finest performing ranter of the day. https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens ) - - - - On a tangent, I've been keeping an eye on the Arcan project https://arcan-fe.com/ https://arcan-fe.com/ > Arcan is a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything between user interfaces for specialised embedded applications all the way to full-blown standalone desktop environments. > At its heart lies a robust and portable multimedia engine, with a well-tested and well-documented interface, programmable using Lua. (Nothing against Wayland, I'm just mentioning it to say something potentially useful to someone.)
• worik 6y ago
  Drew was not talking about people not liking Wayland, not wanting to use Wayland, or having criticisms of Wayland. He was talking about the bullying and abuse that many people think they are entitled to hand out, just because because. I have no opinion on Wayland - I use what ever is in front of me, but I share the disgust at the bullying. Times have changed. We are no longer a bunch of young men, tough and full of testosterone, able to give and take all teh shit - and loving it. Times have changed, now the time is to be nice
• jlbooker 6y ago
  Can it support screen sharing yet, out of the box?
  • zamadatix 6y ago
    Pipewire works for "screen" sharing (not window/monitor sharing, screen sharing) and Firefox/Chrome support it. That being said I'd still say "give it more time" before I'd say "screen sharing is solved" at the moment.
• jeffnappi 6y ago
  This is just a reminder to be nice to your maintainers folks. XOrg has had 16 years to get to the functionality level it has, and there are massive holes in it's security model etc that Wayland is attempting to solve. It's going to take time for it to reach feature parity. And they have to bring along all of the popular applications while they are at it. If you're going to complain, at least be constructive, research solutions yourself and provide feedback that has value. I'm not sure if the Wayland contributors are overreacting, but I'm guessing people are not being nice when something doesn't work and write posts like "Wayland sucks so bad it doesn't work on XYZ" rather than posting "So I found out that Wayland doesn't work for XYZ, how can I help the project with this?" And helping in the context might be as simple as writing up the use case and providing logs, or maybe raising the issue with the app developer. For example - here's a bug report I wrote instead of just complaining that BT doesn't work well on Linux/Ubuntu: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/1838151 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/18... It's getting solved! <3 to all the maintainers out there - thanks for your hard work. The open source ecosystem is all of ours and we should nurture it rather than just wine about it's problems. At least they are our problems and we can have a meaningful impact on them :) * small grammatical edit
• greyhair 6y ago
  I haven't gone back to re-examine Wayland for a while now, because forever I have used RDP to access my headless servers. And before you waste time with "Instead of RDP you should..." Save the effort, I have no interest. RDP works with XFCE exactly the way I want it to. But I understand there is a working GNOME RDP interface now, so maybe I'll give it a shot with Wayland when I bring up a new server.
• timvisee 6y ago
  Though, does it work with Nvidia yet?
• tpoacher 6y ago
  > "anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, 9/11 truthers" You should also call them nazis, you know, just to strengthen your argument.
• potato24 6y ago
  I could use Wayland and deal with all the issues it has with hacky ways. Or, I could not use Wayland and continue working with things like team viewer and do my recordings and presentations with actually useful programs and industry standards. Just because something is a 'niche' use case doesn't mean its not important. Yes the average programmer is just fine under Wayland. Every other niche case Linux has been working to accommodate all these years isn't because, even if slight, Wayland causes issues. I am also even less inclined to use it again after these comments. Don't compare your detractors to anti-vaxxers!
• ExcavateGrandMa 6y ago
  Greeting from X11 :p KrkrkrkrkrkRKrkrkrkrk
• DrBazza 6y ago
  Many of the comments here complete vindicate Drew's post. In fact he's written a few articles on Wayland, with links to others, that some commenters here would do well to read. They explain Wayland, they explain X11, they explain desktop environments. His post is well-founded.
• cudgy 6y ago
  “We’ve sacrificed our spare time to build this for you for free.” Really? You are just doing it to provide free software with no returns for you? I find this hard to believe. You aren’t doing it because you wanted to explore a particular technical area that you are unable to explore at a day job, pad one’s resume, impress your developer friends, or help maintain the software as part of your day job?
• jdthedisciple 6y ago
  I'd be careful with saying that being a 9/11 truther means "not accepting the facts" ... in fact, quite the opposite seems zo be the case!