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Ask HN: Why is Wayland is discussed as replacement rather than alternative?

• eyelidlessness 6y ago
  I mean this question sincerely and respectfully: is there something in your chosen hardware or software that substitutes commas for apostrophes? Is it a linguistic thing I’m not aware of?
  • tehlike 6y ago
    Likely a different keyboard layout from the one op is used to.
  • forgotmypw17 6y ago
    On that particular keyboard, the comma is accessible with one tap, while the apostrophe requires several.
• innagadadavida 6y ago
  I no longer run Linux on any machines I own, but grew up with booting slackware off of floppy disks. X works as you said for many use cases but also has some limitations for other modern use cases. I guess the Wayland folks want to bring parity with other modern desktop systems such as OSX and Windows. None of this is going to be a reality unless there are folks contributing and hacking on the system. The Wayland folks are trying to get mindshare so that the hackers feel they are working on something significant and worthwhile - as opposed to just fixing some X bugs. As much as users just want to just get bug free software, hackers like to design and reinvent the wheel so they have something to cherish - especially when no one is paying for their work. Just my .02.
• Centigonal 6y ago
  From: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_4 https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_4 > ## Is wayland replacing the X server? > Mostly, yes. User sessions are able to run under Wayland today, via a number of compositors: Weston itself as well as Enlightenment, GNOME Shell, KDE, and a number of others under development. With most toolkits having Wayland ports, as well as frameworks such as GStreamer and SDL, it's perfectly possible to run a purely native Wayland session as your desktop. > That being said, there are some clients which rely on X11, and always will be. To that end, XWayland provides a plugin for Wayland compositors, running a real X server. This gives legacy clients a real and compliant X11 platform to run on, displayed side by side with native Wayland clients in your Wayland session. > ## Why not extend the X server? > Because for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that. It's entirely possible to incorporate the buffer exchange and update models that Wayland is built on into X. However, we have an option here of pushing X out of the hotpath between clients and the hardware and making it a compatibility option. What's different now is that a lot of infrastructure has moved from the X server into the kernel (memory management, command scheduling, mode setting) or libraries (cairo, pixman, freetype, fontconfig, pango, etc) and there is very little left that has to happen in a central server process. > ## What is wrong with X? > The problem with X is that... it's X. When you're an X server there's a tremendous amount of functionality that you must support to claim to speak the X protocol, yet nobody will ever use this. For example, core fonts; this is the original font model that was how your got text on the screen for the many first years of X11. This includes code tables, glyph rasterization and caching, XLFDs (seriously, XLFDs!). Also, the entire core rendering API that lets you draw stippled lines, polygons, wide arcs and many more state-of-the-1980s style graphics primitives. For many things we've been able to keep the X.org server modern by adding extensions such as XRandR, XRender and COMPOSITE and to some extent phase out less useful extensions. But we can't ever get rid of the core rendering API and much other complexity that is rarely used in a modern desktop. With Wayland we can move the X server and all its legacy technology to an optional code path.
• emilsedgh 6y ago
  What you're proposing would've worked if there were competing teams behind X and Wayland and they could've competed and coexisted. But Wayland is created by people who maintained and developed X. Since they have stopped developing X, that means it'll eventually become abandonware, in favor of Wayland. On a different note, I don't understand what the fuss is all about. X is in a very good shape. If Wayland is not there for you yet, keep using X, until Wayland gets there.
  • erik_seaberg 6y ago
    Software rendering in the datacenter is a pig. I was excited to read about Waypipe but it can’t really do better than VNC. If neither Wayland nor GTK+/KDE get around to solving the remote GPU problem, I think the industry will continue to abandon native GUIs and move everything to JavaScript apps because at least the browser has hardware acceleration. Do I even need a compositor if my browser is the only client? I guess ChromeOS does overlap windows sometimes.
  • forgotmypw17 6y ago
    >On a different note, I don't understand what the fuss is all about. X is in a very good shape. If Wayland is not there for you yet, keep using X, until Wayland gets there. What caused my concern was seeing several posts in the form of "replacing X with Wayland in [application]".
• bitwize 6y ago
  Because X is deprecated. No one but Keith Packard wants to maintain it, and all of the Wayland maintainers are former X maintainers who got tired of that shit. When literally everyone (again excepting Keith Packard) who knows anything about graphics on Linux is telling you that X is a lost cause, with unfixable security holes and a buggy graphics model no one uses anymore, and that Wayland is the future of graphical display on Linux, maybe you should consider listening.
  • forgotmypw17 6y ago
    I don't know how you can say it's "literally everyone" when at least one knowledgeable authority says otherwise, in addition to many other non-authority figures. I get the same feel from it as systemd and WebExtensions, where a more complicated and less capable product is forced on everyone and any arguments about its shortcomings are ignored, swept under the rug, or hand-waved.
    • bitwize 6y ago
      Part of security entails being "more complicated and less capable"; and Wayland and WebExtensions have in common that they are both secure replacements for systems that have a near-nonexistent security posture. Being simple (as if X11 is simple) and letting you do arbitrary things with it are not the dominating concerns anymore. Security and being easy for new developers to support are arguably more important. Beyond that, X11 development is moribund and Wayland has the lion's share of developer mindshare. Software is considered deficient if it does not natively support Wayland, hence the push to get support into the stragglers like Emacs and Wine. Eventually, we'll reach a point where software devs will tire of maintaining an X back end and insist their users switch to Wayland or not use their software at all. Wayland and systemd won because their developers engaged with the wider community and successfully convinced them of the advantages. In other words, better marketing. It's an iron law that if you do not have good marketing, people will not adopt what you have to offer and you will fail.
      • forgotmypw17 6y ago
        So, which one is it, better marketing or better technology? I couldn,t care less about my browser extension security model. On the other hand, not having native vertical tabs and keyboard accessibility in Firefox made it unusable for me. (No, doing it via JS injection into current page and the stupid sidebar doesn,t cut it.) The saving grace is that thanks to the miracle of FOSS, we have Devuan, Waterfox, and PaleMoon puttering along and new even better browsers to blow them away. I think the same will happen with X. There certainly seems to be a pattern of arrogant idiocy going on in the software world, however.