7 ms·

Or it could be part of the Wayland protocol from the get go sparing everyone of major headaches. At some point you arrive at a core functionality resembling X1

• mixedCase 6y ago
  Have you considered that maybe it was not done just to spite you and break your workflow? Or that maybe it does have something to do with having a maintainable implementation that doesn't work under assumptions that stopped being valid 20 years ago which make modern usecases extremely hard or impossible to support? And that indeed, the protocol has been growing and new standards have been in development concurrently with X.org maintenance in order to have a smooth transition? You're proposing that having everything ready from the get go would be much better, but that goes against pretty much every principle we know about designing large, complex systems, where BUFD results in huge messes that don't conform to reality, and can never do so, unlike a minimalist protocol that grows over time with careful approaches.
  • d110af5ccf 6y ago
    > in order to have a smooth transition I was with you until that bit. I like the idea of Wayland, but it simply wasn't a viable daily replacement for typical desktop activities without certain key supporting features. Unfortunately, Wayland was rather aggressively pushed as a suitable replacement long before these things had been ironed out. Predictably, breakage and community backlash resulted. Typical "real life" usage absolutely requires standardized support for screenshots and screencasts. As far as I understand things, that requires Pipewire support at both the compositor and application levels. That's only just happening now. For gaming and 3D work, did the major implementations ever standardize a protocol for a window to capture the pointer? (I assume this has been done by now.) Did an approach for handling key remapping and macros ever get standardized across implementations? (I also assume this was finally taken care of.)
    • mixedCase 6y ago
      > but it simply wasn't a viable daily replacement for typical desktop activities without certain key supporting features Well that's my point, then don't use it. It has been increasingly ready for more and more people, and it certainly needs more users to share what the pain points are, but you don't have to switch until enough progress has been made so that the transition is smooth enough for you. > was rather aggressively pushed By whom? a few distros toyed with the idea of making it the default and went back on it quickly, only now is it becoming a serious idea again and it's still a long time before X11 gets actually dropped rather than just not being the default. What is a problem which you might consider as it being "pushed" is that X as a primary system is now essentially unmaintained upstream. The people that were maintaining X11 don't feel like it's worth the royal pain in the ass, moved to developing Wayland and are passing the baton to anyone willing to handle that particular burden. > For gaming and 3D work, did the major implementations ever standardize a protocol for a window to capture the pointer? (I assume this has been done by now.) Would not be able to tell you without searching for it like you could, but I've tested games that required full screen pointer capture on Sway, Wayfire (both wlroots) and GNOME successfully. > Did an approach for handling key remapping and macros ever get standardized across implementations? Key remapping, sort of, it's just xkb which is the low-level layer X builds upon and for which you can build keyboard layouts with no decent documentation in sight. As for key bindings, everyone has their own system, which works, but just isn't portable. This is still a big omission for some usecases which can be worked around but is still a rough edge.
      • d110af5ccf 6y ago
        > a few distros toyed with the idea of making it the default and went back on it quickly As a bystander, it felt like a vocal minority was pretty aggressively underselling the shortcomings. Perhaps that's unfair but it's definitely how it came across to me. They appeared to back off a bit as a result of the community backlash, but the damage was done - many people appear to mentally associate Wayland with someone else threatening to break their system. Now we see endless threads like this one, even though Wayland itself actually seems like a really good idea to me from a technical perspective. Xorg losing maintainers is certainly a concern, but since Pipewire appears to be quickly approaching mainstream hopefully everything will work out. It's just frustrating to me that anyone ever tried to market Wayland as more than a proof of concept prior to working out such essential details (screenshots, screencasts, pointer capture, input manipulation, and a bunch of others I can't remember). I think an important takeaway is that breaking even remotely common workflows is likely to attract inordinate amounts of negative attention no matter how good your technical or circumstantial reasons are for doing so. It doesn't matter how cool the project is - most people just have no interest in hacking on their OS. > with no decent documentation in sight So it isn't just me then. I'm still using xmodmap because I never managed to figure out how to get xkb to do what I wanted.