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> 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 shi

> 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.
patrickaljord 6y ago
> 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. It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones). It really makes people angry when things don't work the same anymore, let alone when it doesn't even work anymore for their use case. > 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!" My guess is that it wasn't a deliberate strategy, it just that like anything related to the Linux desktop, the project was underfunded so they had to focus on certain issues. In this case it was focusing on improving from xorg and making sure it doesn't break anything on the main use cases of whoever was funding the project (mainly redhat). Apple and Microsoft can afford to pour billions in their display server/protocol/windowing system. Not so much for Linux.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  well yeah, i just got used to it working a certain way, now i gotta figure it out again. fucking nerds acting like it,s no big deal when shit i use every day is all changed up. do you have any idea how much cognitive load that is for the average user to figure out new ui? and usually for no good reason, just to change shit up so someone can get credit for a project. don,t blame the users for software being shit. it,s shit. it,s built by arrogant emotionally-children with no concern for empathy or quality.
  - boudin 6y ago
    The reverse is also true. Don't blame people maintaining software for changing your routine. You make a lot of assumptions there but the reality is often much more nuanced. Everything changes, all the time, that's a rule that is true for absolutely everything in life.
    - 6y ago
shadowgovt 6y ago
And that punting is indicative of the problem. The reason the stacks we have are hot garbage is because they didn't have the luxury of punting on hard problems, and hard problems solved quickly make your stack hot garbage. It does give you a garbage stack that solves problems though.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  I don't see how screen shots/sharing is really that hard of a problem. Wayland's model doesn't give the ability to arbitrarily capture these things the way X did, but surely it couldn't have been that difficult to add an escape hatch for common use cases like this to the base protocol. Remote desktop is a harder problem to be sure, but it is also a pretty common use case (window remoting less so). If you're setting out to modernize and replace such a fundamental component of Linux Desktop then you should probably have a plan for that. If not in the first spec, at least a statement to the effect that it will be part of a future spec instead of just punting to "implementation defined".
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    I'm not a developer on Wayland and I haven't looked at the code, so I can't comment directly on their situation. A hypothetical I can come up with is that if they've tried to implement a very secure architecture, they may have painted themselves into a corner if there's no easy way to capture pixels post-composite... Then no one piece of the system has enough authority to see all the pixels to capture an arbitrary screenshot, and oops. An unsecured screenshot escape hatch can be used by malicious software to scrape information shown in windows on your system, and with modern OCR being what it is (or, hell, a shady Mechanical Turk transcription job), that could be an attack vector for surfacing people's private information.
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      Security is one of the major reasons, and this is indeed a privileged operation that should not be accessible by all clients. The other reason is that this isn't base functionality, for example an embedded implementation has no need for screenshots.
londons_explore 6y ago
Every 6 months I try switching to Wayland. I spend an hour or so using it for regular desktop gnome use and fixing minor bugs (ie. The kind I can fix with a config tweak). I then switch back again because it just isn't there yet. Recent issues: * The brightness control for my screen doesn't work with it. * The mouse sometimes lags * Graphical corruption in Chromium when on webgl sites. * Blank screen after resume from hibernate. * Seems to randomly freeze forever sometimes after an OOM killer run. * Chromecast wouldn't work
- corndoge 6y ago
  Did you report any of these?
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    They all come up with plenty of Google results when you search for them, so I assume the devs are well aware but have other things on their plate to work on.
- DCKing 6y ago
  I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but there's no such thing as "switching to Wayland". What most people mean when they "switch to Wayland" is that they're switching from Gnome on X11 to a "pure Gnome" stack that uses Wayland and a bunch of other Freedesktop standards for interopability. There is absolutely no code from the "Wayland project" running there, because the Wayland implementation is Gnome's own (it's called Mutter). Similarly, KDE's implementation is in KWin itself. The source article is from an author of yet another window manager (Sway) implementing Wayland. What you're observing is not "Wayland not being there yet", it's Gnome not being there yet. All of these deficiencies have nothing to do with Wayland itself: they're general QA issues that plague an underfunded Linux desktop that's making a slow technology transition.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    I completely agree. But as a user the distinction doesn't matter.
ilaksh 6y ago
How does this work? https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484 Is it just basically a backdoor going through the hardware? Is there some way that a compositor works with Linux security so that you need a special privilege or root or something in order to record the screen?
- bionade24 6y ago
  Using EGLFS instead of libDRM are two diffrent ways wayland compositors work, this argument doesn't work against sway because it only supports libDRM.
richrichardsson 6y ago
> "well you don't need that anyway!" Something similar used to frustrate me no end when asking the Python community for help trying to solve a problem. Regularly someone would comment, "Why would you want to do that?". I wouldn't be asking if I didn't have a need to do it! It's bizarre that some people can't see beyond the end of their own nose and imagine different use cases to their own.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  To be fair, there's a lot of people asking for help on X-Y problems in the programming world, especially on python, and often the fastest way to sort out someone's issue is to walk it back to the original problem X they were trying to solve.
  - at_a_remove 6y ago
    Yeah, but if you don't have an XY problem, you have to spend a lot of your question pre-defending the "it's not an XY problem" stance and lordy ... is that frustrating. There's a lot of people out there who are happy to tell you that you have an XY problem, but when you explain why it is not, ... crickets.
  - regularfry 6y ago
    There's all the difference in the world between asking "why do you want to do that?" and "why would you want to do that?"
- js2 6y ago
  Often asking "why" is to tease out XY problems. It's not that the experts can't see past the end of their own nose, but rather that they have the experience to recognize questions that indicate the questioner has wandered off into the weeds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
- Veen 6y ago
  As an amateur developer, I've often found that "Why would you want to do that?" is followed by an explanation of a much better way that I hadn't even thought of. Sometimes it's asshole-behaviour, but it's often people sharing the benefit of their experience; my thinking has gone awry at some point several steps back and they want to make life easier for me.
PaulHoule 6y ago
The fact that has gone on more than seven years and Wayland is not mainstream is exactly what the problem is. It seems impossible that it will be ready for use before it is hopelessly obsolete (e.g. Windows and MacOS will be beaming images straight into your brain or something.)
- kaba0 6y ago
  Or you know, development on Linux is not cathedral but bazaar based, and they can’t just say “this is the new display protocol”. And until a critical mass is achieved noone will even start porting apps over, and all that. Wayland is (fortunately) coming, but changing a whole ecosystem is not a small feat (even with the great backward compatibility with XWayland, because unmaintained apps will never port)
cat199 6y ago
> 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. agree 1000% - really don't care about X per se, but remote windowing is an awesome and unique feature, and disrespecting it by treating it like some obscure/uneeded thing and qustioning why people are mad about it conveys alot about the attitude that i don't want to get behind
- cturner 6y ago
  Remote windowing is a legacy of the era when universities ran dozens of dumb terminals from a server. It would be bizarre to pursue that in an era of hardware-accelerated graphics. If the Wayland design was weighed down by such things, it could never hope to be progress.
  - andrewprock 6y ago
    This ignores the current tend of hosted gaming services. The pendulum regularly swings back and forth between thin and fat clients as cost and innovation evolve.
    - Jarolis 6y ago
      Quite true. I've have to switch my desktop back to Windows because the only remote gaming server worth using (Parsec) doesn't work on Linux.
    - kaba0 6y ago
      There is no reason for a display protocol to know about these things. At most it is responsible for giving access to a window’s/screen’s buffer and then any app can do whatever they want with it, eg compress it and stream it (which as I wrote in an other topic is usually better performing than today’s frameworks over whatever remained of X remoting, with bitmap transfers and the like)
derefr 6y ago
> That does not mean anyone is under an obligation to like it. He’s not asking anyone to like it; in fact, an informed dislike would be much better than the reaction many people have to Wayland. A lot of the response the Wayland maintainership receives is instead a reflex-response of uninformed people repeating out-of-date FUD they heard somewhere, without ever having actually looked into the issue themselves. Which is something you just don’t do if you think of the people on the receiving end of it as real human beings. (That kind of scarlet-lettering does have a place! It’s a perfect tactic to allow newer community members to assist in suppressing a widespread “old evil” which the community long ago chose to excommunicate, for complex reasons that the newer community-members haven’t been around long-enough to absorb. It’s the reason people belittle/make jokes about Multi-Level Marketing schemes, pseudoscience, etc. — or in the FOSS sphere specifically, about bought-out projects like AdBlock Plus. The people who reflexively just laugh at newbs for using $thing, are acting as part of an “insulation layer” of people defending a community from a threat at the margins without really understanding the threat themselves; and they’re acting at the behest/connivance of people closer to the core of the community who do understand the threat.) But Wayland was never excommunicated from FOSS. There is no old threat; only old arguments. The core people working on Wayland are in fact the same people who work on X. The other core people, those working at the distros who package these components, were never against Wayland; just wary at first, because they didn’t want degraded functionality. (And even then, they’ve always been shipping it on distro spins for e.g. mobile, where using X11 has never worked.) > 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. It’s not punting when the same maintainers also write the compositor. (Yes, they do!) They’re effectively doing the same thing StackOverflow does when it tells you “this is best handled on [other StackExchange site X]”: not trying to make you Somebody Else’s Problem, but rather telling you to go to the counter two paces to your left, where they’ll trundle over wearing a different hat, and then help you solve your problem there. The whole project of Wayland was to take a monolith with mixed responsibilities (Xorg) and refactor it so that the responsibilities were each handled in the correct places, by teams who best understood that layer of the stack. As such, “Wayland” as a project staff covers all the resulting components—they’re all outgrowths of one project. But all those resulting components are all also their own codebases, with their own growing maintainerships, with their own negotiated APIs, so that they can grow separately, be swapped out for competitor projects, etc.
axaxs 6y ago
Agreed. Tried Wayland again last year. Screen sharing in Electron doesn't work, so can't share screen in Slack. Googled, known issue. I don't care how much better Wayland is...if it can't do something I'm used to and need, it's going in the trash. I don't have time or interest to read mailing lists and bug trackers to know when it's fixed.
- away_throw 6y ago
  I believe that this is being fixed soon if you compile Electron with "Ozone" support. Otherwise, I use the current workaround of using OBS with a "virtual webcam" which allows me to stream OBS to a webcam and just use my webcam as the screenshare. Actually ends up working better than any screenshare utility that I've used.
  - axaxs 6y ago
    This doesn't seem as straightforward as 'click the screenshare button to share your screen', which is how it works in xorg mode. Editing since I can't reply - I didn't mean to come across as rude, sorry for that. Just explaining that as a user, it doesn't work out of the box. Having to explain to users to do the above is not an ideal solution.
    - away_throw 6y ago
      That's true. Hopefully Ozone will be officially released in Chromium/Electron which will make this as simple as that. At least in Discord, XOrg screenshare always gave me trouble.
      - aeroevan 6y ago
        There's also pipewire which doesn't depend on ozone, but is optional I guess. What's even worse, slack doesn't allow sharing from chrome which just works for MS Teams via pipewire.
- senko 6y ago
  ... sounds like you should complain to Slack?
lewispollard 6y ago
> 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!"... Just recently (I was on a Fedora box temporarily) I was trying to figure out how to get Nautilus to stop starting a search whenever I typed something, and instead highlight the nearest match in the current directory, y'know, like pretty much every other file manager in existence. Eventually I found a thread where the core Gnome contributors were saying "it sounds like you don't want this feature, what you really want is a better search function". They probably should never have enabled "reactions" on their bug tracker since it was piled 100's high with negative reactions - yet they still doubled down and said it's not something they're going to support (despite having supported it in the past, and Ubuntu even bundling patches to make it happen up until recently). It's a frustrating trend in FOSS that contributors feel like "we're doing this for FREE don't you know, so whatever we say is lore and since you're not paying, we don't have to listen to you". Yes, I understand how amazing it is that this software is truly free and created by volunteers, no, I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made.
- foldr 6y ago
  > Yes, I understand how amazing it is that this software is truly free and created by volunteers, no, I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made. To be honest I don’t see how you can understand the first bit but not the second. Yes, they can make changes that you don’t like without consulting you.
  - barrkel 6y ago
    They can; but they shouldn't expect a life free of complaints. Commercial software, like most things in life, is responsive to incentives. The people who buy things get the most say in the product. For open source where the end users aren't buying anything, and the developers are either creating product for their own gratification, or for some more nebulous corporate goal, the incentives are rather indirect. And that makes a big difference. Software, under those conditions, will frankly be worse for the majority of users.
cycloptic 6y ago
>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. I am not sure what you mean here. Weston, the original implementation, includes support for screenshots, screensharing and RDP. Other implementations decided to implement those in a different way, for various reasons. The way to not "punt" this would be to use libweston but that has its own set of issues, and it seems strange to blame the Weston hackers for not upstreaming every single other thing that some implementer is working on.
- olejorgenb 6y ago
  > screensharing and RDP. Other implementations decided to implement those in a different way I'm not fully up to date on the state of these things, but if the different implementations doesn't have a common interface it's goodbye to ever having screensharing work for everyone. I think that's what the parent means. If we're lucky Discord/Zoom/etc. will implement it for the most popular compositor(s). Similarly with screenshots - even though it's a much simpler problem it's annoying if the program taking the screenshot is fundamentally bound to a specific compositor. If I'm not mistaken there are standardization efforts underway today though?
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    >if the different implementations doesn't have a common interface it's goodbye to ever having screensharing work for everyone. No, not really. In practice what happens is Discord/Zoom/etc do implement it for the most popular compositors and then the other compositors follow suit if they want to support those applications. You would be complaining even more if they only supported weston because their screencast mechanism is pretty limited, and it would suck if the other ones just copied that. The current "standard" is to just use pipewire and have the display server talk to the pipewire server, most commonly using xdg-desktop-portal. This is obviously outside the scope of Wayland, because any application can talk to pipewire and share/receive a video stream. I don't know about Zoom, but Chromium has support for this in the works, so Discord should get that eventually from updating their Electron: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/26022 https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/26022
teekert 6y ago
To be honest I find It a bit pretentious to call this a "mistake". This happens: Devs don't like to maintain old codebase, start a new one, anybody is free to start maintaining the old code. And then there is you, who calls their strategy "a mistake". You can still use Xorg on most distros. In Ubuntu it's one checkmark.
ironmagma 6y ago
Even if it does do exactly what it’s supposed to, free software requires marketing, same as commercial software. Make it obvious how to do it, or create a utility that does it for you if necessary.
itsoktocry 6y ago
>"I don't use it because it doesn't do what I need" Why do you feel the need to announce this to anyone, particularly the people who work on it for free and owe you nothing? Is that not his point?
devilduck 6y ago
Username checks out
brnt 6y ago
Change causes stress, it's a scientific fact. It is thus not surprising that many don't like change for any reason, nor is it a reason not to change if the reasons are sound. While we can all agree X is a pile of something, I am in the camp that remains unconvinced by Wayland. It does not work on my hardware, it does not solve problems I have. OK, no more screen tearing, which is nice. Wayland have to understand that if they want to replace X, they'll have to replace X.
strofcon 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. Doesn't seem that was the point of that statement. Rather, it's asserting that it's invalid to claim that the very people who built the thing in the first place are a "vague authority". How true the accusation it, I dunno, but that's my read of the sentence - not that the volunteer devs are somehow entitled to endearment by virtue of their volunteering. :-)
m-p-3 6y ago
> If you insist on disregarding people's use cases, don't be surprised they don't like your software. Eventually that use-case in Xorg/X11 will cease to function when it becomes obsolete and unmaintained, but I agree how bad the outright dismissal of someone's use-case can be perceived. There has to be a civil discussion on both ends.
bitwize 6y ago
> 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. It's not just about replicating this functionality. It's about having an open framework that makes building these tools, and other unforeseen tools, easy. X11 was very accommodating of this. For example, I like to run xsnow during the holidays. Wayland's answer to xsnow is -- we don't support that, but tell you what, draw up an RFC for a D-Bus API for desktop snow and wait 5-7 years for compositor implementors to consider incorporating it. Or something completely different. You know, whatever. It's like you have to prove your use case is valid to the community before you can even start hacking on it in a way that you can expect it to work with more than one DE. For Wayland the attitude is "Fuck you. You get a buffer for a desktop window and that's it. [Wayland does not support nested windows.] Oh, that's not enough? You're not writing a desktop app? You want snow on the desktop/a desktop magnifier/a hall of mirrors effect toy/an anime window sitter/pinnable menus/something that responds to global hotkeys/etc.? I'm sorry, did we not anticipate your pwecious widdle use case? Fuck you. No one actually writes applications that way any more, nerd. Go back to the nerd table. We're trying to get the cool popular Mac-using kids to notice us here." The X11 security issues are mitigatable with some changes to the server implementation. The Wayland approach really never was about security. It's about letting the cool kids define the shape of the Linux desktop to the exclusion of ordinary users/hackers.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  I'm not sure what are the changes in the X11 server implementation you're talking about, but if they do indeed meet every single possible use case, then maybe someone can bring them over to Wayland? I'm sorry to say, but you have to acknowledge these are novelty applications and are really not driving progress right now, the main focus is in getting all the other applications to work. FYI there is some prior art for poking a security hole in the Wayland server to support X11 features, but obviously not all implementations will want to support this: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/blob/master/unstable/xwayland-keyboard-grab/xwayland-keyboard-grab-unstable-v1.xml https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/b...
rdsubhas 6y ago
Critically speaking about Wayland for what Wayland is, reporting bugs, asking for enhancements, this is good. The author is not speaking about closing down the bug board or enhancement feedback. But criticizing Wayland on a pure comparison basis, clinging on to Xorg server – absolutely doesn't benefit anyone, including whoever is posting it. X window system (the idea) and Xorg server (the project) – is kind of abandonware [1] at this point. The last release was in 2018. Don't want to get into random philosophy about contributing vs complaining vs criticizing, etc. But in this situation – there's just a definitive community health benefit in moving on. Not complaining, not contributing, but just moving on. There is no further value left to be added in any comparison. 1: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XServer-Abandonware https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XServer-...
tinus_hn 6y ago
> "that's a compositor problem!" Then why not include an example compositor that solves these issues?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

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.

patrickaljord 6y ago

> 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. It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones). It really makes people angry when things don't work the same anymore, let alone when it doesn't even work anymore for their use case. > 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!" My guess is that it wasn't a deliberate strategy, it just that like anything related to the Linux desktop, the project was underfunded so they had to focus on certain issues. In this case it was focusing on improving from xorg and making sure it doesn't break anything on the main use cases of whoever was funding the project (mainly redhat). Apple and Microsoft can afford to pour billions in their display server/protocol/windowing system. Not so much for Linux.

forgotmypw17 6y ago
well yeah, i just got used to it working a certain way, now i gotta figure it out again. fucking nerds acting like it,s no big deal when shit i use every day is all changed up. do you have any idea how much cognitive load that is for the average user to figure out new ui? and usually for no good reason, just to change shit up so someone can get credit for a project. don,t blame the users for software being shit. it,s shit. it,s built by arrogant emotionally-children with no concern for empathy or quality.
- boudin 6y ago
  The reverse is also true. Don't blame people maintaining software for changing your routine. You make a lot of assumptions there but the reality is often much more nuanced. Everything changes, all the time, that's a rule that is true for absolutely everything in life.
  - 6y ago

shadowgovt 6y ago

And that punting is indicative of the problem. The reason the stacks we have are hot garbage is because they didn't have the luxury of punting on hard problems, and hard problems solved quickly make your stack hot garbage. It does give you a garbage stack that solves problems though.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
I don't see how screen shots/sharing is really that hard of a problem. Wayland's model doesn't give the ability to arbitrarily capture these things the way X did, but surely it couldn't have been that difficult to add an escape hatch for common use cases like this to the base protocol. Remote desktop is a harder problem to be sure, but it is also a pretty common use case (window remoting less so). If you're setting out to modernize and replace such a fundamental component of Linux Desktop then you should probably have a plan for that. If not in the first spec, at least a statement to the effect that it will be part of a future spec instead of just punting to "implementation defined".
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  I'm not a developer on Wayland and I haven't looked at the code, so I can't comment directly on their situation. A hypothetical I can come up with is that if they've tried to implement a very secure architecture, they may have painted themselves into a corner if there's no easy way to capture pixels post-composite... Then no one piece of the system has enough authority to see all the pixels to capture an arbitrary screenshot, and oops. An unsecured screenshot escape hatch can be used by malicious software to scrape information shown in windows on your system, and with modern OCR being what it is (or, hell, a shady Mechanical Turk transcription job), that could be an attack vector for surfacing people's private information.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    Security is one of the major reasons, and this is indeed a privileged operation that should not be accessible by all clients. The other reason is that this isn't base functionality, for example an embedded implementation has no need for screenshots.

londons_explore 6y ago

Every 6 months I try switching to Wayland. I spend an hour or so using it for regular desktop gnome use and fixing minor bugs (ie. The kind I can fix with a config tweak). I then switch back again because it just isn't there yet. Recent issues: * The brightness control for my screen doesn't work with it. * The mouse sometimes lags * Graphical corruption in Chromium when on webgl sites. * Blank screen after resume from hibernate. * Seems to randomly freeze forever sometimes after an OOM killer run. * Chromecast wouldn't work

corndoge 6y ago
Did you report any of these?
- londons_explore 6y ago
  They all come up with plenty of Google results when you search for them, so I assume the devs are well aware but have other things on their plate to work on.
DCKing 6y ago
I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but there's no such thing as "switching to Wayland". What most people mean when they "switch to Wayland" is that they're switching from Gnome on X11 to a "pure Gnome" stack that uses Wayland and a bunch of other Freedesktop standards for interopability. There is absolutely no code from the "Wayland project" running there, because the Wayland implementation is Gnome's own (it's called Mutter). Similarly, KDE's implementation is in KWin itself. The source article is from an author of yet another window manager (Sway) implementing Wayland. What you're observing is not "Wayland not being there yet", it's Gnome not being there yet. All of these deficiencies have nothing to do with Wayland itself: they're general QA issues that plague an underfunded Linux desktop that's making a slow technology transition.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  I completely agree. But as a user the distinction doesn't matter.

ilaksh 6y ago

How does this work? https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484 Is it just basically a backdoor going through the hardware? Is there some way that a compositor works with Linux security so that you need a special privilege or root or something in order to record the screen?

bionade24 6y ago
Using EGLFS instead of libDRM are two diffrent ways wayland compositors work, this argument doesn't work against sway because it only supports libDRM.

richrichardsson 6y ago

> "well you don't need that anyway!" Something similar used to frustrate me no end when asking the Python community for help trying to solve a problem. Regularly someone would comment, "Why would you want to do that?". I wouldn't be asking if I didn't have a need to do it! It's bizarre that some people can't see beyond the end of their own nose and imagine different use cases to their own.

Enginerrrd 6y ago
To be fair, there's a lot of people asking for help on X-Y problems in the programming world, especially on python, and often the fastest way to sort out someone's issue is to walk it back to the original problem X they were trying to solve.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  Yeah, but if you don't have an XY problem, you have to spend a lot of your question pre-defending the "it's not an XY problem" stance and lordy ... is that frustrating. There's a lot of people out there who are happy to tell you that you have an XY problem, but when you explain why it is not, ... crickets.
- regularfry 6y ago
  There's all the difference in the world between asking "why do you want to do that?" and "why would you want to do that?"
js2 6y ago
Often asking "why" is to tease out XY problems. It's not that the experts can't see past the end of their own nose, but rather that they have the experience to recognize questions that indicate the questioner has wandered off into the weeds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
Veen 6y ago
As an amateur developer, I've often found that "Why would you want to do that?" is followed by an explanation of a much better way that I hadn't even thought of. Sometimes it's asshole-behaviour, but it's often people sharing the benefit of their experience; my thinking has gone awry at some point several steps back and they want to make life easier for me.

PaulHoule 6y ago

The fact that has gone on more than seven years and Wayland is not mainstream is exactly what the problem is. It seems impossible that it will be ready for use before it is hopelessly obsolete (e.g. Windows and MacOS will be beaming images straight into your brain or something.)

kaba0 6y ago
Or you know, development on Linux is not cathedral but bazaar based, and they can’t just say “this is the new display protocol”. And until a critical mass is achieved noone will even start porting apps over, and all that. Wayland is (fortunately) coming, but changing a whole ecosystem is not a small feat (even with the great backward compatibility with XWayland, because unmaintained apps will never port)

cat199 6y ago

> 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. agree 1000% - really don't care about X per se, but remote windowing is an awesome and unique feature, and disrespecting it by treating it like some obscure/uneeded thing and qustioning why people are mad about it conveys alot about the attitude that i don't want to get behind

cturner 6y ago
Remote windowing is a legacy of the era when universities ran dozens of dumb terminals from a server. It would be bizarre to pursue that in an era of hardware-accelerated graphics. If the Wayland design was weighed down by such things, it could never hope to be progress.
- andrewprock 6y ago
  This ignores the current tend of hosted gaming services. The pendulum regularly swings back and forth between thin and fat clients as cost and innovation evolve.
  - Jarolis 6y ago
    Quite true. I've have to switch my desktop back to Windows because the only remote gaming server worth using (Parsec) doesn't work on Linux.
  - kaba0 6y ago
    There is no reason for a display protocol to know about these things. At most it is responsible for giving access to a window’s/screen’s buffer and then any app can do whatever they want with it, eg compress it and stream it (which as I wrote in an other topic is usually better performing than today’s frameworks over whatever remained of X remoting, with bitmap transfers and the like)

derefr 6y ago

> That does not mean anyone is under an obligation to like it. He’s not asking anyone to like it; in fact, an informed dislike would be much better than the reaction many people have to Wayland. A lot of the response the Wayland maintainership receives is instead a reflex-response of uninformed people repeating out-of-date FUD they heard somewhere, without ever having actually looked into the issue themselves. Which is something you just don’t do if you think of the people on the receiving end of it as real human beings. (That kind of scarlet-lettering does have a place! It’s a perfect tactic to allow newer community members to assist in suppressing a widespread “old evil” which the community long ago chose to excommunicate, for complex reasons that the newer community-members haven’t been around long-enough to absorb. It’s the reason people belittle/make jokes about Multi-Level Marketing schemes, pseudoscience, etc. — or in the FOSS sphere specifically, about bought-out projects like AdBlock Plus. The people who reflexively just laugh at newbs for using $thing, are acting as part of an “insulation layer” of people defending a community from a threat at the margins without really understanding the threat themselves; and they’re acting at the behest/connivance of people closer to the core of the community who do understand the threat.) But Wayland was never excommunicated from FOSS. There is no old threat; only old arguments. The core people working on Wayland are in fact the same people who work on X. The other core people, those working at the distros who package these components, were never against Wayland; just wary at first, because they didn’t want degraded functionality. (And even then, they’ve always been shipping it on distro spins for e.g. mobile, where using X11 has never worked.) > 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. It’s not punting when the same maintainers also write the compositor. (Yes, they do!) They’re effectively doing the same thing StackOverflow does when it tells you “this is best handled on [other StackExchange site X]”: not trying to make you Somebody Else’s Problem, but rather telling you to go to the counter two paces to your left, where they’ll trundle over wearing a different hat, and then help you solve your problem there. The whole project of Wayland was to take a monolith with mixed responsibilities (Xorg) and refactor it so that the responsibilities were each handled in the correct places, by teams who best understood that layer of the stack. As such, “Wayland” as a project staff covers all the resulting components—they’re all outgrowths of one project. But all those resulting components are all also their own codebases, with their own growing maintainerships, with their own negotiated APIs, so that they can grow separately, be swapped out for competitor projects, etc.

axaxs 6y ago

Agreed. Tried Wayland again last year. Screen sharing in Electron doesn't work, so can't share screen in Slack. Googled, known issue. I don't care how much better Wayland is...if it can't do something I'm used to and need, it's going in the trash. I don't have time or interest to read mailing lists and bug trackers to know when it's fixed.

away_throw 6y ago
I believe that this is being fixed soon if you compile Electron with "Ozone" support. Otherwise, I use the current workaround of using OBS with a "virtual webcam" which allows me to stream OBS to a webcam and just use my webcam as the screenshare. Actually ends up working better than any screenshare utility that I've used.
- axaxs 6y ago
  This doesn't seem as straightforward as 'click the screenshare button to share your screen', which is how it works in xorg mode. Editing since I can't reply - I didn't mean to come across as rude, sorry for that. Just explaining that as a user, it doesn't work out of the box. Having to explain to users to do the above is not an ideal solution.
  - away_throw 6y ago
    That's true. Hopefully Ozone will be officially released in Chromium/Electron which will make this as simple as that. At least in Discord, XOrg screenshare always gave me trouble.
    - aeroevan 6y ago
      There's also pipewire which doesn't depend on ozone, but is optional I guess. What's even worse, slack doesn't allow sharing from chrome which just works for MS Teams via pipewire.
senko 6y ago
... sounds like you should complain to Slack?

lewispollard 6y ago

> 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!"... Just recently (I was on a Fedora box temporarily) I was trying to figure out how to get Nautilus to stop starting a search whenever I typed something, and instead highlight the nearest match in the current directory, y'know, like pretty much every other file manager in existence. Eventually I found a thread where the core Gnome contributors were saying "it sounds like you don't want this feature, what you really want is a better search function". They probably should never have enabled "reactions" on their bug tracker since it was piled 100's high with negative reactions - yet they still doubled down and said it's not something they're going to support (despite having supported it in the past, and Ubuntu even bundling patches to make it happen up until recently). It's a frustrating trend in FOSS that contributors feel like "we're doing this for FREE don't you know, so whatever we say is lore and since you're not paying, we don't have to listen to you". Yes, I understand how amazing it is that this software is truly free and created by volunteers, no, I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made.

foldr 6y ago
> Yes, I understand how amazing it is that this software is truly free and created by volunteers, no, I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made. To be honest I don’t see how you can understand the first bit but not the second. Yes, they can make changes that you don’t like without consulting you.
- barrkel 6y ago
  They can; but they shouldn't expect a life free of complaints. Commercial software, like most things in life, is responsive to incentives. The people who buy things get the most say in the product. For open source where the end users aren't buying anything, and the developers are either creating product for their own gratification, or for some more nebulous corporate goal, the incentives are rather indirect. And that makes a big difference. Software, under those conditions, will frankly be worse for the majority of users.

cycloptic 6y ago

>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. I am not sure what you mean here. Weston, the original implementation, includes support for screenshots, screensharing and RDP. Other implementations decided to implement those in a different way, for various reasons. The way to not "punt" this would be to use libweston but that has its own set of issues, and it seems strange to blame the Weston hackers for not upstreaming every single other thing that some implementer is working on.

olejorgenb 6y ago
> screensharing and RDP. Other implementations decided to implement those in a different way I'm not fully up to date on the state of these things, but if the different implementations doesn't have a common interface it's goodbye to ever having screensharing work for everyone. I think that's what the parent means. If we're lucky Discord/Zoom/etc. will implement it for the most popular compositor(s). Similarly with screenshots - even though it's a much simpler problem it's annoying if the program taking the screenshot is fundamentally bound to a specific compositor. If I'm not mistaken there are standardization efforts underway today though?
- cycloptic 6y ago
  >if the different implementations doesn't have a common interface it's goodbye to ever having screensharing work for everyone. No, not really. In practice what happens is Discord/Zoom/etc do implement it for the most popular compositors and then the other compositors follow suit if they want to support those applications. You would be complaining even more if they only supported weston because their screencast mechanism is pretty limited, and it would suck if the other ones just copied that. The current "standard" is to just use pipewire and have the display server talk to the pipewire server, most commonly using xdg-desktop-portal. This is obviously outside the scope of Wayland, because any application can talk to pipewire and share/receive a video stream. I don't know about Zoom, but Chromium has support for this in the works, so Discord should get that eventually from updating their Electron: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/26022 https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/26022

teekert 6y ago

To be honest I find It a bit pretentious to call this a "mistake". This happens: Devs don't like to maintain old codebase, start a new one, anybody is free to start maintaining the old code. And then there is you, who calls their strategy "a mistake". You can still use Xorg on most distros. In Ubuntu it's one checkmark.

ironmagma 6y ago

Even if it does do exactly what it’s supposed to, free software requires marketing, same as commercial software. Make it obvious how to do it, or create a utility that does it for you if necessary.

itsoktocry 6y ago

>"I don't use it because it doesn't do what I need" Why do you feel the need to announce this to anyone, particularly the people who work on it for free and owe you nothing? Is that not his point?

devilduck 6y ago

Username checks out

brnt 6y ago

Change causes stress, it's a scientific fact. It is thus not surprising that many don't like change for any reason, nor is it a reason not to change if the reasons are sound. While we can all agree X is a pile of something, I am in the camp that remains unconvinced by Wayland. It does not work on my hardware, it does not solve problems I have. OK, no more screen tearing, which is nice. Wayland have to understand that if they want to replace X, they'll have to replace X.

strofcon 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. Doesn't seem that was the point of that statement. Rather, it's asserting that it's invalid to claim that the very people who built the thing in the first place are a "vague authority". How true the accusation it, I dunno, but that's my read of the sentence - not that the volunteer devs are somehow entitled to endearment by virtue of their volunteering. :-)

m-p-3 6y ago

> If you insist on disregarding people's use cases, don't be surprised they don't like your software. Eventually that use-case in Xorg/X11 will cease to function when it becomes obsolete and unmaintained, but I agree how bad the outright dismissal of someone's use-case can be perceived. There has to be a civil discussion on both ends.

bitwize 6y ago

> 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. It's not just about replicating this functionality. It's about having an open framework that makes building these tools, and other unforeseen tools, easy. X11 was very accommodating of this. For example, I like to run xsnow during the holidays. Wayland's answer to xsnow is -- we don't support that, but tell you what, draw up an RFC for a D-Bus API for desktop snow and wait 5-7 years for compositor implementors to consider incorporating it. Or something completely different. You know, whatever. It's like you have to prove your use case is valid to the community before you can even start hacking on it in a way that you can expect it to work with more than one DE. For Wayland the attitude is "Fuck you. You get a buffer for a desktop window and that's it. [Wayland does not support nested windows.] Oh, that's not enough? You're not writing a desktop app? You want snow on the desktop/a desktop magnifier/a hall of mirrors effect toy/an anime window sitter/pinnable menus/something that responds to global hotkeys/etc.? I'm sorry, did we not anticipate your pwecious widdle use case? Fuck you. No one actually writes applications that way any more, nerd. Go back to the nerd table. We're trying to get the cool popular Mac-using kids to notice us here." The X11 security issues are mitigatable with some changes to the server implementation. The Wayland approach really never was about security. It's about letting the cool kids define the shape of the Linux desktop to the exclusion of ordinary users/hackers.

cycloptic 6y ago
I'm not sure what are the changes in the X11 server implementation you're talking about, but if they do indeed meet every single possible use case, then maybe someone can bring them over to Wayland? I'm sorry to say, but you have to acknowledge these are novelty applications and are really not driving progress right now, the main focus is in getting all the other applications to work. FYI there is some prior art for poking a security hole in the Wayland server to support X11 features, but obviously not all implementations will want to support this: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/blob/master/unstable/xwayland-keyboard-grab/xwayland-keyboard-grab-unstable-v1.xml https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/b...

rdsubhas 6y ago

Critically speaking about Wayland for what Wayland is, reporting bugs, asking for enhancements, this is good. The author is not speaking about closing down the bug board or enhancement feedback. But criticizing Wayland on a pure comparison basis, clinging on to Xorg server – absolutely doesn't benefit anyone, including whoever is posting it. X window system (the idea) and Xorg server (the project) – is kind of abandonware [1] at this point. The last release was in 2018. Don't want to get into random philosophy about contributing vs complaining vs criticizing, etc. But in this situation – there's just a definitive community health benefit in moving on. Not complaining, not contributing, but just moving on. There is no further value left to be added in any comparison. 1: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XServer-Abandonware https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XServer-...

tinus_hn 6y ago

> "that's a compositor problem!" Then why not include an example compositor that solves these issues?

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