8 ms·

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'r

by 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.
- DCKing 6y ago
  Maybe, but I think it matters when discussing it. If we talk about it like this, it seems that Wayland is to blame. But there's nothing wrong with Wayland [1]. Wayland here ends up often being the scapegoat of a Linux community that looks to want to change but can't sort itself out. The result of blaming these issues on Wayland instead of - mostly - Gnome and KDE means that we're not going to the right places to have this fixed. In terms of bug reports, and contributions of code and money. [1]: I mean, if you can come to terms with the substantial architectural differences implied by Wayland w.r.t. to X11. But that's a discussion on another level.
- samsari 6y ago
  The distinction really really does matter, if your argument is "wayland is shit".
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    That depends on if the precise argument is closer to "Wayland, as experienced by everyday users, is shit" or "Wayland, as a Platonic ideal, is shit." People, especially people trying to work done on their computers, usually mean the former.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      Just say Mutter or Kwin are shit then. Saying Wayland is shit is like HTML is shit because you don't like Firefox.
      - Too 6y ago
        Most users don't know the difference, to either of those statements. For them "the internet is broken".
        Spivak 6y ago
        I don’t disagree but in a forum of tech-savvy people I expect some level of preciseness. We shouldn’t be saying Wayland sucks when we’re talking about Mutter in the same way we shouldn’t say the internet crashed when we mean Chrome crashed. Unknowing users can freely associate Wayland with bad vibes due to how KDE and GNOME chose to brand their new compositors but we can do better.
        dralley 6y ago
        Nobody complains about the W3C because their internet is broken.
      - troyvit 6y ago
        That doesn't work for users though. I've used KDE since the 20th century and it has been pretty reliable. Kwin hasn't been shit. Maybe it's best to say Kwin + Wayland is shit, or Mutter + Wayland is shit. But if Kwin & Mutter aren't quite shit when it was combined with X, but are shit when combined with Wayland, how does that shape perceptions of Wayland?
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Precisely this. There's a meta-lesson useful here for anyone who doesn't know it yet: modern software has network effects. And the same phenomena you see with other networks apply to software stacks. If everyone else has implemented a protocol wrong, for example, and your software comes along that has implemented the protocol correctly, but as a result your software doesn't work with the existing stack, a) Odds are, the rest of the world will not change to work with your software b) New users, using your software, will perceive the problem is your software doesn't work, not that the rest of the stack is wrong and you're the only one that did it right. Maddening, but it's the nature of complicated systems built by thousands of people in a distributed fashion. (I can't lay hands on the link right now, but there was an ex-Microsoft engineer who had a blog where he talked about the heroics MS developers would go to every major Windows release making sure their OS was compatible with popular user software. It didn't matter that they were the company setting the rules in their ecosystem... If the latest version of Windows broke Photoshop, they had to figure out why. In that particular instance, it was because Photoshop had gained some performance optimizations by baking binary images of default structs the OS gave it into their code instead of calling the right API to get a struct properly initialized, saving a library call. MS had to reimplement some C++ structures in C so they could maintain the memory image of the relevant structs to avoid breaking Photoshop).
gnulinux 6y ago
Why does this distinction matter? Gnome on X works perfectly fine, Gnome on Wayland does not. Why does it matter it to state that Wayland is a protocol, not the implementation?
- DCKing 6y ago
  Because if what's bothering you is the implementation and not the protocol, you should be talking about fixing the implementation instead of diverting attention to the protocol? I might not understand your question here.
  - Fellshard 6y ago
    If every implementation of a protocol seems stuck with deal-breaking bugs or incompatibilities, it's time to start asking whether the protocol itself has some problems that make it impossible to implement consistently - unstated assumptions, for example, in the reference implementation that never made it to the protocol spec. For a modern example of this in action, see Bluetooth and the madhouse of device 'quirks' you have to settle with day-to-day, since each device has subtly protocol-breaking opinions on how to implement it.
    - DCKing 6y ago
      I would agree here, if you could make a reasonable case that the problems trace back the protocol. But my point here is that practically all issues at hand happen outside of what Wayland is used for. Wayland is a display protocol. Practically all of the pain people are experiencing has nothing to do with how Gnome/KDE/Sway really display things differently. The pain everybody experiences is that the realization that suddenly we need a new input stack too, a new way to screenshare, a new way to do clipboard access, a new way to do a bunch of other things. All stuff that also needs to made, standardized, and achieve maturity outside of the new display protocol. It's tempting to call that fallout of other stuff that needs to be changed "Wayland" as well, but I'd say that misses the point completely and calling it that won't help anyone get this stuff fixed.
zepto 6y ago
This is be a fine distinction to make if there is an implementation of Wayland that is there. Then we can say this is just about a particular implementation, and not Wayland itself. If no implementation of Wayland is ‘there’, it seems pretty reasonable to say Wayland is not there yet.
- DCKing 6y ago
  People use the name "Wayland" as an umbrella term for "the entire effort on the Linux desktop get rid of X11". I'd generally agree that there aren't any desktops that flawlessly replace X11 [1], but I don't like that Wayland is the name for "the entire effort on the Linux desktop get rid of X11". I think it can be seen in OP's list that most of the issues that OP raised are actually not due to deficiencies in the display protocol. Specifically replacing of the X11 display protocol with the Wayland display protocol. But Wayland solves fewer problems than X11. So to replace things like standardized screen recording and input processing, you need other things on top of Wayland. And that's where by far the most issues with "Wayland" come from - stuff that has nothing to do with the display protocol, but the tremendous pains it takes to replace X11. [1]: It's worth pointing out for fairness that X11 based desktops are also pretty flawed even if you're used to some of the flaws.
  - zepto 6y ago
    I mean this is all true, but it’s worth pointing out that Wayland is actually an effort to get rid of X11 on the Linux desktop by introducing a new protocol. Given this, it’s not surprising Wayland has become the name associated with the overall goal.
corty 6y ago
It is actually one of the big, unfixable, conceptual problems of Wayland that all the effort is duplicated in each compositor. The Wayland concept pushes out most of the work to the DEs. That of course will result in tons of predictable inconsistency, incompatibility, bugs, delays, consolidations and general pain. Wayland devs are then generally in the lazy "worksforme, use sway (or whatever)" position while the user (of some other compositor) will be out there complaining to yet another maintainer duplicating yet another feature badly. Lather, rinse, repeat. Wayland is bad design, and it shows in the users' and maintainers' attrition.
- tapoxi 6y ago
  But isn't this the point of wlroots?
- DCKing 6y ago
  I honestly think this complaint is completely bogus. This is not something conceptual about Wayland, or intrinsic to it. Any display protocol can have multiple client/server implementations. It just so happens that most of the free desktop standardized around the X.org implementation for X11, but even for X11 there were multiple client and server implementations. The second thing is that software duplication efforts have a well known, tried and tested solution: implement the duplicated effort in shared implementations or libraries [1] ! The thing I find hard to wrap my head around is that this complaint is given in a community that usually champions protocol-over-implementations and diversity of implementations. The people actually making a difference on the Linux desktop are damned if they do and they're damned if they don't. [1]: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots
  - spion 6y ago
    Once there are 2 implementations already, a 3rd reusable one won't fix the problem (the problem being that the users need to configure everything in 3 places). What you want at that point is to agree where to read and write common configuration. I'm not sure this is likely to happen either, as gnome has gsettings/dconf and kde has simple files and you will now awaken the plaintext vs efficiency dragon.
cheaprentalyeti 6y ago
You're dancing around the problem: Wayland works (such as it is) by offloading functionality that was part of X to the desktop software like gnome or kde and then saying "but that's not our problem!" when something breaks. Never mind that program collection 'A' (including X11) was working and program colleciton 'B' (the Wayland way) wasn't.
- dralley 6y ago
  That's just it, Xorg did tons of things that it never should have been involved with. It used to have a print server FFS. Wayland is trying to do one thing well, whereas Xorg did many things poorly. It's valid to feel frustration that the community doesn't coordinate to put those APIs in place, but it's very much not valid to blame Wayland developers for it.
- DCKing 6y ago
  > You're dancing around the problem Please be a little bit more charitable: I'm very candid about the usability problems on the Linux desktop, I'm just telling people where they need to send their time, money and concerns to fix it. > "but that's not our problem!" when something breaks. Which is the entire point of getting rid of X11. Wayland is a display protocol and does not intend to solve all of the problems that X11 ended up solving, same as the display stack in any OS designed after 1990 (like Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, Android and ChromeOS) do not solve these problems either.
welterde 6y ago
On the face of it that does sound even worse.. Instead of just having to fix those issues once you will now have to fix them in every desktop environment/window manager equivalent?
phkahler 6y ago
>> 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. While technically true, that is a bit of deflection. In some cases none of the compositors have implemented certain things yet. My biggest issue with gnome is that it doesnt remember where my windows were last time I ran an app. Someone over in way-land probably should have told them that would become a their-problem so it could be addressed it sooner. Same with window decorations, they should be handled by the compositor IMHO. Sometimes a new thing should come with recommendations for use.
- DCKing 6y ago
  > While technically true, that is a bit of deflection. In some cases none of the compositors have implemented certain things yet. Deflection is entirely my point here :) These things are real problems, but they should be fixed in Gnome/KDE/Sway/wherever you find them. Complaints should be addressed there, and not at "Wayland", because "Wayland" can't fix em!
  - phkahler 6y ago
    Agreed, but my point was they could have made more clear how the line was moving relative to what they were used to. Maybe they did and it's just an issue of resources.
zests 6y ago
When I'm at my framebuffer terminal, I can either type 'startx' or 'sway'. If I go from typing 'startx' to typing 'sway' does that count as "switching to Wayland"?
- DCKing 6y ago
  Since the startx command starts the X11 client and server maintained more or less straight from the X.org project, and the sway command does not start any code that came from the Wayland project, I'd say that counts as "switching to Sway". Wayland is the implementation detail in Sway to have a display protocol your Gtk, Qt and XWayland apps use to draw themselves, really no need to draw more attention to it than necessary. It's the Sway implementation that does all the magic.
b93rn 6y ago
Yeah Sway looks really appealing to me since i'm already using i3wm. But every now and then i'm searching if screen sharing on MS Teams already works. As a Software Engineer in this pandemic i rely a lot on screen sharing. But every time i search for it i find out that it still does not work (without a work around). That's basically the only thing that holds me back. Does anyone know if Sway or Wayland is trying to fix this? Seems like a high priority fix to me in this pandemic.
- danhor 6y ago
  xdg-desktop-portal-wlr works (with a bit of cli work) with MS Teams in chromium with a flag to enable pipewire. The Desktop app will only support it when the Electron release containing pipewire support releases & gets used in Teams.
tengbretson 6y ago
> ...or as I've recently taken to calling it, Gnome plus Wayland
- utxaa 6y ago
  gnu wayland thank you very much.
alisonkisk 6y ago
"3 incomplete implementations and 0 complete implementations." Is Desktop Linux's epitaph.
utxaa 6y ago
really?!? what next? tomatoes are fruit? asshole.

by DCKing 6y ago

londons_explore 6y ago

I completely agree. But as a user the distinction doesn't matter.

DCKing 6y ago
Maybe, but I think it matters when discussing it. If we talk about it like this, it seems that Wayland is to blame. But there's nothing wrong with Wayland [1]. Wayland here ends up often being the scapegoat of a Linux community that looks to want to change but can't sort itself out. The result of blaming these issues on Wayland instead of - mostly - Gnome and KDE means that we're not going to the right places to have this fixed. In terms of bug reports, and contributions of code and money. [1]: I mean, if you can come to terms with the substantial architectural differences implied by Wayland w.r.t. to X11. But that's a discussion on another level.
samsari 6y ago
The distinction really really does matter, if your argument is "wayland is shit".
- sokoloff 6y ago
  That depends on if the precise argument is closer to "Wayland, as experienced by everyday users, is shit" or "Wayland, as a Platonic ideal, is shit." People, especially people trying to work done on their computers, usually mean the former.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Just say Mutter or Kwin are shit then. Saying Wayland is shit is like HTML is shit because you don't like Firefox.
    - Too 6y ago
      Most users don't know the difference, to either of those statements. For them "the internet is broken".
      - Spivak 6y ago
        I don’t disagree but in a forum of tech-savvy people I expect some level of preciseness. We shouldn’t be saying Wayland sucks when we’re talking about Mutter in the same way we shouldn’t say the internet crashed when we mean Chrome crashed. Unknowing users can freely associate Wayland with bad vibes due to how KDE and GNOME chose to brand their new compositors but we can do better.
      - dralley 6y ago
        Nobody complains about the W3C because their internet is broken.
    - troyvit 6y ago
      That doesn't work for users though. I've used KDE since the 20th century and it has been pretty reliable. Kwin hasn't been shit. Maybe it's best to say Kwin + Wayland is shit, or Mutter + Wayland is shit. But if Kwin & Mutter aren't quite shit when it was combined with X, but are shit when combined with Wayland, how does that shape perceptions of Wayland?
shadowgovt 6y ago
Precisely this. There's a meta-lesson useful here for anyone who doesn't know it yet: modern software has network effects. And the same phenomena you see with other networks apply to software stacks. If everyone else has implemented a protocol wrong, for example, and your software comes along that has implemented the protocol correctly, but as a result your software doesn't work with the existing stack, a) Odds are, the rest of the world will not change to work with your software b) New users, using your software, will perceive the problem is your software doesn't work, not that the rest of the stack is wrong and you're the only one that did it right. Maddening, but it's the nature of complicated systems built by thousands of people in a distributed fashion. (I can't lay hands on the link right now, but there was an ex-Microsoft engineer who had a blog where he talked about the heroics MS developers would go to every major Windows release making sure their OS was compatible with popular user software. It didn't matter that they were the company setting the rules in their ecosystem... If the latest version of Windows broke Photoshop, they had to figure out why. In that particular instance, it was because Photoshop had gained some performance optimizations by baking binary images of default structs the OS gave it into their code instead of calling the right API to get a struct properly initialized, saving a library call. MS had to reimplement some C++ structures in C so they could maintain the memory image of the relevant structs to avoid breaking Photoshop).

gnulinux 6y ago

Why does this distinction matter? Gnome on X works perfectly fine, Gnome on Wayland does not. Why does it matter it to state that Wayland is a protocol, not the implementation?

DCKing 6y ago
Because if what's bothering you is the implementation and not the protocol, you should be talking about fixing the implementation instead of diverting attention to the protocol? I might not understand your question here.
- Fellshard 6y ago
  If every implementation of a protocol seems stuck with deal-breaking bugs or incompatibilities, it's time to start asking whether the protocol itself has some problems that make it impossible to implement consistently - unstated assumptions, for example, in the reference implementation that never made it to the protocol spec. For a modern example of this in action, see Bluetooth and the madhouse of device 'quirks' you have to settle with day-to-day, since each device has subtly protocol-breaking opinions on how to implement it.
  - DCKing 6y ago
    I would agree here, if you could make a reasonable case that the problems trace back the protocol. But my point here is that practically all issues at hand happen outside of what Wayland is used for. Wayland is a display protocol. Practically all of the pain people are experiencing has nothing to do with how Gnome/KDE/Sway really display things differently. The pain everybody experiences is that the realization that suddenly we need a new input stack too, a new way to screenshare, a new way to do clipboard access, a new way to do a bunch of other things. All stuff that also needs to made, standardized, and achieve maturity outside of the new display protocol. It's tempting to call that fallout of other stuff that needs to be changed "Wayland" as well, but I'd say that misses the point completely and calling it that won't help anyone get this stuff fixed.

zepto 6y ago

This is be a fine distinction to make if there is an implementation of Wayland that is there. Then we can say this is just about a particular implementation, and not Wayland itself. If no implementation of Wayland is ‘there’, it seems pretty reasonable to say Wayland is not there yet.

DCKing 6y ago
People use the name "Wayland" as an umbrella term for "the entire effort on the Linux desktop get rid of X11". I'd generally agree that there aren't any desktops that flawlessly replace X11 [1], but I don't like that Wayland is the name for "the entire effort on the Linux desktop get rid of X11". I think it can be seen in OP's list that most of the issues that OP raised are actually not due to deficiencies in the display protocol. Specifically replacing of the X11 display protocol with the Wayland display protocol. But Wayland solves fewer problems than X11. So to replace things like standardized screen recording and input processing, you need other things on top of Wayland. And that's where by far the most issues with "Wayland" come from - stuff that has nothing to do with the display protocol, but the tremendous pains it takes to replace X11. [1]: It's worth pointing out for fairness that X11 based desktops are also pretty flawed even if you're used to some of the flaws.
- zepto 6y ago
  I mean this is all true, but it’s worth pointing out that Wayland is actually an effort to get rid of X11 on the Linux desktop by introducing a new protocol. Given this, it’s not surprising Wayland has become the name associated with the overall goal.

corty 6y ago

It is actually one of the big, unfixable, conceptual problems of Wayland that all the effort is duplicated in each compositor. The Wayland concept pushes out most of the work to the DEs. That of course will result in tons of predictable inconsistency, incompatibility, bugs, delays, consolidations and general pain. Wayland devs are then generally in the lazy "worksforme, use sway (or whatever)" position while the user (of some other compositor) will be out there complaining to yet another maintainer duplicating yet another feature badly. Lather, rinse, repeat. Wayland is bad design, and it shows in the users' and maintainers' attrition.

tapoxi 6y ago
But isn't this the point of wlroots?
DCKing 6y ago
I honestly think this complaint is completely bogus. This is not something conceptual about Wayland, or intrinsic to it. Any display protocol can have multiple client/server implementations. It just so happens that most of the free desktop standardized around the X.org implementation for X11, but even for X11 there were multiple client and server implementations. The second thing is that software duplication efforts have a well known, tried and tested solution: implement the duplicated effort in shared implementations or libraries [1] ! The thing I find hard to wrap my head around is that this complaint is given in a community that usually champions protocol-over-implementations and diversity of implementations. The people actually making a difference on the Linux desktop are damned if they do and they're damned if they don't. [1]: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots
- spion 6y ago
  Once there are 2 implementations already, a 3rd reusable one won't fix the problem (the problem being that the users need to configure everything in 3 places). What you want at that point is to agree where to read and write common configuration. I'm not sure this is likely to happen either, as gnome has gsettings/dconf and kde has simple files and you will now awaken the plaintext vs efficiency dragon.

cheaprentalyeti 6y ago

You're dancing around the problem: Wayland works (such as it is) by offloading functionality that was part of X to the desktop software like gnome or kde and then saying "but that's not our problem!" when something breaks. Never mind that program collection 'A' (including X11) was working and program colleciton 'B' (the Wayland way) wasn't.

dralley 6y ago
That's just it, Xorg did tons of things that it never should have been involved with. It used to have a print server FFS. Wayland is trying to do one thing well, whereas Xorg did many things poorly. It's valid to feel frustration that the community doesn't coordinate to put those APIs in place, but it's very much not valid to blame Wayland developers for it.
DCKing 6y ago
> You're dancing around the problem Please be a little bit more charitable: I'm very candid about the usability problems on the Linux desktop, I'm just telling people where they need to send their time, money and concerns to fix it. > "but that's not our problem!" when something breaks. Which is the entire point of getting rid of X11. Wayland is a display protocol and does not intend to solve all of the problems that X11 ended up solving, same as the display stack in any OS designed after 1990 (like Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, Android and ChromeOS) do not solve these problems either.

welterde 6y ago

On the face of it that does sound even worse.. Instead of just having to fix those issues once you will now have to fix them in every desktop environment/window manager equivalent?

phkahler 6y ago

>> 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. While technically true, that is a bit of deflection. In some cases none of the compositors have implemented certain things yet. My biggest issue with gnome is that it doesnt remember where my windows were last time I ran an app. Someone over in way-land probably should have told them that would become a their-problem so it could be addressed it sooner. Same with window decorations, they should be handled by the compositor IMHO. Sometimes a new thing should come with recommendations for use.

DCKing 6y ago
> While technically true, that is a bit of deflection. In some cases none of the compositors have implemented certain things yet. Deflection is entirely my point here :) These things are real problems, but they should be fixed in Gnome/KDE/Sway/wherever you find them. Complaints should be addressed there, and not at "Wayland", because "Wayland" can't fix em!
- phkahler 6y ago
  Agreed, but my point was they could have made more clear how the line was moving relative to what they were used to. Maybe they did and it's just an issue of resources.

zests 6y ago

When I'm at my framebuffer terminal, I can either type 'startx' or 'sway'. If I go from typing 'startx' to typing 'sway' does that count as "switching to Wayland"?

DCKing 6y ago
Since the startx command starts the X11 client and server maintained more or less straight from the X.org project, and the sway command does not start any code that came from the Wayland project, I'd say that counts as "switching to Sway". Wayland is the implementation detail in Sway to have a display protocol your Gtk, Qt and XWayland apps use to draw themselves, really no need to draw more attention to it than necessary. It's the Sway implementation that does all the magic.

b93rn 6y ago

Yeah Sway looks really appealing to me since i'm already using i3wm. But every now and then i'm searching if screen sharing on MS Teams already works. As a Software Engineer in this pandemic i rely a lot on screen sharing. But every time i search for it i find out that it still does not work (without a work around). That's basically the only thing that holds me back. Does anyone know if Sway or Wayland is trying to fix this? Seems like a high priority fix to me in this pandemic.

danhor 6y ago
xdg-desktop-portal-wlr works (with a bit of cli work) with MS Teams in chromium with a flag to enable pipewire. The Desktop app will only support it when the Electron release containing pipewire support releases & gets used in Teams.

tengbretson 6y ago

> ...or as I've recently taken to calling it, Gnome plus Wayland

utxaa 6y ago
gnu wayland thank you very much.

alisonkisk 6y ago

"3 incomplete implementations and 0 complete implementations." Is Desktop Linux's epitaph.

utxaa 6y ago

really?!? what next? tomatoes are fruit? asshole.