11 ms·

Long time Linux (and therefore X11) user here. I'm not much of a programmer, more of a techy end user. I have read of the supposed benefits of Wayland, but fro

by jrm4 6y ago

Long time Linux (and therefore X11) user here. I'm not much of a programmer, more of a techy end user. I have read of the supposed benefits of Wayland, but from what I can percieve, the cons (too numerous to mention, but mostly breaking a billion useful things that X has had for some time) seem to out weigh the pro. Yes, the pro. Fractional scaling. I don't like actively cheering for something to fail, but I really don't get it. X11 is in no way broken enough to justify such a huge change, and I'm concerned that the KDEs and Gnomes of the world are going to ramrod the thing through regardless.

infoseek12 6y ago
The main thing that has me cheering Wayland on is that it seems like the only, really viable, path forward for the Linux desktop environment. The developers of X11, and more or less the rest of the Linux community, decided that X11 wasn’t the best path to take into the future. So X11 is treated like a legacy technology. It will keep getting patched and will be supported for the foreseeable future but it’s hard to see anyone wanting to invest a lot of effort innovating and moving the tech forward when everyone agrees there’s no future in it. I’m not aware of any frameworks that are really competing with Wayland for the next generation. There will be stumbling blocks as with any new technology, especially one that interrelates with so many systems but Waylands core architecture seems to be solid. Personally, I’m still using I3 and don’t see many immediate benefits to switching over to Sway (the Wayland fork of I3). I am cheering Wayland on though and making the switch is somewhere on my todo list. What other path forward is there for desktop Linux?
- inclemnet 6y ago
  > Sway (the Wayland fork of I3) Minor clarification: Sway is an i3-compatible wayland compositor written from scratch, not a fork.
DoctorNick 6y ago
X11 is a security nightmare. It is absolutely broken enough to justify a huge change.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  Installing random software off the internet or from a market that developers have direct access to poison is a security nightmare that isn't much fixed by wayland.
  - kaba0 6y ago
    Allowing smoking between barrels of gunpowder is different than in an open space. Wayland is a necessary part of security, but not sufficient.
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      Unless you are using different vms for isolation it's all open barrels of gunpowder all the time.
      - kaba0 6y ago
        I agree with you in general, but even if you use jailed apps in X, they can keylog. It can be solved with nested X sessions, but that would only add yet another hacky patch.
    - jude- 6y ago
      It's security theater. If I can run a process on your machine under your user account, you can bet I can keylog you, X11 or no.
      - kaba0 6y ago
        Try it. You can’t unless you’ve found some exploit in a given wayland compositor. Linux only grants permission to keyboard/mouse events to root or to display “owner”, which is the one who requested it on a given tty.
        jude- 6y ago
        Here are a few ways off the top of my head that don't require exploiting Wayland or gaining access to the `input` group (or whatever group owns the /dev/input/* events), using nothing more than a local shell under your user account: * Using ptrace(2) to hook into your running processes and grabbing key data that way * Adding a LD_PRELOAD around your application launcher (via your .bashrc or some other auto-exec script) to have it intercept key events for your application * Downloading and mounting a FUSE filesystem image with the /dev/input device nodes owned by your user ID instead of root. * Use one of the multitude of privilege-escalation CVEs on the Linux desktop to gain root, and keylog you that way [1]. Come back when you understand the problem. [1] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=linux+privilege+scalation https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=linux+privi...
zaxcellent 6y ago
The issue is X11 as we know it has no developers left. If nobody is around to maintain it, the world will move on, no ramrod necessary. More info: https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server.html https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server...
- sprash 6y ago
  There are plenty of developers left. It is just release management refuses to make new releases.
  - zaxcellent 6y ago
    I suppose that theory is possible. A proxy for developer availability might be to check the primary mailing list of xorg for the full month of march: https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2021-March/thread.html https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2021-March/thread.ht.... There wasn't much directly related to xorg-xserver itself. As a point of comparison, here is March for QEMU: https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2021-03/threads.html https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2021-03/thr...
    - sprash 6y ago
      After years of misleading propaganda about how X11 is "deprecated" now I would expect no less. Besides maybe the main communication channel for development is somewhere else.
      - taway098123 6y ago
        Most developer activity related to Linux graphics is in dri-devel, it's been like this for quite a while. The X development channels have been mostly dead outside of discussion of XWayland. I doubt you'll see anyone starting any major new features in X.
        pantalaimon 6y ago
dijit 6y ago
Fractional scaling is kind of the most visible thing today. But to be clear, there’s a lot of benefits to wayland. Mostly the issues could be hacked around. But let’s be absolutely clear with this: it is hacking around the issue. Problem: tearing, solvable with double buffering, maybe. Problem: Xorg runs as root, solvable, there’s ways of making your user have direct control of the frame buffer device. Problem: Xorg is a network system, and a porous one, meaning it’s possible to intercept keystrokes from any running program. Solvable by running a mini X11 instance for each program. Problem: Xorg is a network system, meaning it is very inefficient. (Imagine using TCP to talk to your SSD) Problem: Xorg needs to be backwards compatible, so it can’t dig much into hardware features. Especially as the client may not be on the same machine as the server. Overall, wayland is a good clean slate, it’s been in development a long time. X11 has major warts and they are hard to clear out.
- _jal 6y ago
  I find it personally a bit hilarious - Wayland has been Going To Be Great Soon for over a decade. I've never even had a reason to want to run it. But I'm sure it'll be great, any day now.
  - toun 6y ago
    I find Wayland is great already for my usage, and has been for the last two years. If Xorg works for you and Wayland doesn't, that's perfectly fine too.
    - _jal 6y ago
      Don't get me wrong - I would love to not deal with certain X warts. (I see substantially fewer warts than other people do, but that's just me.) It just seems Wayland's combination of technical requirements and political entanglements make it a sort of Zeno's Project, doomed to asymptotically approach peoples' expectations and desires, but never reach them.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >I find it personally a bit hilarious - Wayland has been Going To Be Great Soon for over a decade. So? The same has been the case for desktop Linux in general, for 2 decades.
devwastaken 6y ago
There are reasons, many times those reasons are obvious to whomever is actually implimenting the changes but not to others outside of it. The reasons have been highlighted hundreds of times and unless there's actual arguments against those reasons the discussion of "I don't like wayland" is a distractive circle that ignores the content of the original post.
edflsafoiewq 6y ago
It's an old story. A conservative rewrite, that amends those things experience has shown were mistakes but were always retained for compatibility, is rare, since the impulse to rewrite is revolutionary in nature. A rewrite is treated as an opportunity to remake the world in a new image (with a new set of mistakes to uncover).
- turminal 6y ago
  The problem here is that a lot of stuff X does relies on horribly unsafe (mis)features of X. And of course wayland had to break compatibility with those things.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    If the user wants to do X which involves increased danger to the user giving users a way to tell the system that app X has the privilege of doing X but not allowing all applications to do X is potentially viable but telling users you don't need to do X anymore is a much harder sale. It needn't be a prompt users will quickly be prompted to click yes to it could easily be an option in settings or at communicated at install time.
- Qwertious 6y ago
  AIUI rewriting X wouldn't be much use anyway, because the problem is mostly in the protocol not the actual codebase implementing the protocol.
aduitsis 6y ago
The fact that XWayland's "performance should be roughly on-par with native X11" probably solidifies rather than weakens the position of X11 as the de facto display protocol. If everything that uses X11 today can be used on top of XWayland without any modification and without performance loss, this means that a lot of pressure stemming from the need to switch to speaking Wayland instead of X11 is lifted in a certain sense. Or am I missing something?
coldtea 6y ago
First of all, nobody cared to hack on X/Xorg. The project was seriously understaffed. Second, it ended a pile of hacks upon hacks. Those two reasons have to be added on top of the other benefits of Wayland (or any other modern re-arch of X).
dkersten 6y ago
> mostly breaking a billion useful things that X has had for some time This is always the case when there is some widely used legacy tech, but it shouldn't stop us from trying to move forward, or we'll never get better things. I've personally switched to using wayland on my main laptop and am very happy with it. I was using X before and was getting incredibly bad screen tearing when using i3, I tried every recommendation I could find (double buffering, running a compositor, etc) and nothing helped, but Sway on wayland fixed it for me and its been running flawlessly for the last 9 months. I have no plans of going back to X anytime. The only thing I use X for is playing Windows games with Proton (which this HW acceleration change might even fix, if the laptop had an nvidia gpu, but alas, it does not).
- sprash 6y ago
  > but it shouldn't stop us from trying to move forward, Wayland means moving backwards. It has the complete wrong philosophy and abstractions. If "sway" runs flawlessly for you you are not doing much with your computer at all. I can't work without my fine tuned synaptics driver configuration and without my over the years grown and perfected scripts using xdotool, dmenu, xsel, xcape, xcalib and many other tiny but useful x-tools.
  - dkersten 6y ago
    So because it doesn't work for your workflow of scripts that rely on X, wayland is a step backwards and I must not be using my computer for much? Get over yourself. > fine tuned synaptics driver configuration My touchpad, touchscreen and apple magic trackpad work great for me, so this isn't a problem for me.
    - sprash 6y ago
      Wayland is power-user hostile. If all you do is watching cat videos all day long Wayland will be great for you.
      - dkersten 6y ago
kaba0 6y ago
> X11 is in no way broken enough to justify such a huge change And why do you think you have sufficient knowledge on the topic to assume that? I do assume you have not read the source code of the X server, isn’t it a bit “cocky” to state such a statement, which is in opposition to what the actual X maintainers say, who actually created wayland? It’s not like a project from nothing, it was created with the shortcomings of X in mind.
- destructionator 6y ago
  > in opposition to what the actual X maintainers say, who actually created wayland? [citation needed]
  - kaba0 6y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ
    - destructionator 6y ago
      First off, a 45 minute long video isn't much of a citation. Where, exactly, are you citing? Secondly, this isn't the first time I've had people point to this same video. It doesn't actually say what you claim it says. It says the creator of Wayland worked on X (though actually his core focus was DRI2, which btw, is not X), and the one individual speaker in that video worked on X a long time ago (specifically his focus was on keyboard input). Their claim is more "X is redundant" than "X is hopeless". They're wrong, of course, the video makes absurd claims like "nobody uses core X11". Maybe they don't since they work in niches, but in the real world, plenty of people do... and that's the part of the X server nobody actually complains about. Even Wayland are perfectly OK with that part! (See retaining it in XWayland. When these wayland devs complain about Xorg their focus is usually on the driver side. Well, hate to break it to them, drivers are always ugly. See the link we're commenting on, if Wayland actually works on all the devices Xorg works on, it'll be just as ugly.)
      - 6y ago
ohthehugemanate 6y ago
2 year wayland (sway) user here. Every time anything is posted here about wayland, I read about some people's crazy issues. Karma brings them all out of the woodwork, I guess. If message boards like HN are where you're getting this impression, just beware of sample bias. Remember that everyone on Fedora and/or KDE has been running wayland for literal years. That is a lot of users, and not enough complaints to make them consider reverting. Fwiw here's my counter anecdata: I'm on arch with swaywm, meaning my system is in no way "out of the box". I have gone back to X from time to time, and... it drives me crazy. Everything is blurry, it takes an hour off my battery time, and it FEELS laggy and unresponsive. Oh, and the experience of installing anything involves 5 extra packages (automatically included, at least) to work around X stuff. God help you if you want to configure an input method; it goes through AT LEAST 2 layers. For some input methods (touchscreens, i'm looking at you), you have brittle hacks like one layer is just reading the debug log of another. Anyway every settings change you make requires restarting your whole WM, and probably fiddling with several 3rd party tools to understand and make it easier... no thanks. Even when I could only screen share between xwayland apps, and I really tried to go back, I couldn't stomach it. The wayland experience for me is just so much better across so many dimensions. I can only imagine what it's like for my friends who use OOTB setups and aren't even aware they're on Wayland.
kllrnohj 6y ago
> X11 is in no way broken enough to justify such a huge change Oh it absolutely is. The entire design of X11 is broken and a barrier to how applications & drivers actually work. There's a reason that literally everyone else switched away from an X11-style model to a Wayland-style one. That is, MacOS, Windows & Android are all Wayland-style compositor designs. This was the major transition that Microsoft did from Windows XP to Windows Vista. This is part of the reason that things like video playback in browsers on Linux is just awful. What browsers (or really any modern UI stack) want is just a system compositor that speaks buffers and transactions. Transactions are important to synchronize composition changes and content changes - for example, when you scroll a webpage with a video in it. It's better for power if the video is in a system composition layer, as then it can use a hardware overlay plane instead of being GPU composited (reduces power consumption). But then you need the browsers updated rendering of the scroll position to be synchronized with that composition update. This type of capability is standard on all major platforms at this point. You can do this everywhere, except on X11. Possibly doable with extensions, but at that point your "extensions" are "completely change everything about the base X11 design & promises" as X11's base design & promises specifically don't provide anything like this. X11's fundamental design is completely wrong & backwards. That's why a clean slate is necessary. Yes this migration is painful (see Windows Vista), but if it was actually pushed it would be a short term pain and the ecosystem would come out the other side healthier than it started (see Windows 7)

by jrm4 6y ago

infoseek12 6y ago

The main thing that has me cheering Wayland on is that it seems like the only, really viable, path forward for the Linux desktop environment. The developers of X11, and more or less the rest of the Linux community, decided that X11 wasn’t the best path to take into the future. So X11 is treated like a legacy technology. It will keep getting patched and will be supported for the foreseeable future but it’s hard to see anyone wanting to invest a lot of effort innovating and moving the tech forward when everyone agrees there’s no future in it. I’m not aware of any frameworks that are really competing with Wayland for the next generation. There will be stumbling blocks as with any new technology, especially one that interrelates with so many systems but Waylands core architecture seems to be solid. Personally, I’m still using I3 and don’t see many immediate benefits to switching over to Sway (the Wayland fork of I3). I am cheering Wayland on though and making the switch is somewhere on my todo list. What other path forward is there for desktop Linux?

inclemnet 6y ago
> Sway (the Wayland fork of I3) Minor clarification: Sway is an i3-compatible wayland compositor written from scratch, not a fork.

DoctorNick 6y ago

X11 is a security nightmare. It is absolutely broken enough to justify a huge change.

michaelmrose 6y ago
Installing random software off the internet or from a market that developers have direct access to poison is a security nightmare that isn't much fixed by wayland.
- kaba0 6y ago
  Allowing smoking between barrels of gunpowder is different than in an open space. Wayland is a necessary part of security, but not sufficient.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    Unless you are using different vms for isolation it's all open barrels of gunpowder all the time.
    - kaba0 6y ago
      I agree with you in general, but even if you use jailed apps in X, they can keylog. It can be solved with nested X sessions, but that would only add yet another hacky patch.
  - jude- 6y ago
    It's security theater. If I can run a process on your machine under your user account, you can bet I can keylog you, X11 or no.
    - kaba0 6y ago
      Try it. You can’t unless you’ve found some exploit in a given wayland compositor. Linux only grants permission to keyboard/mouse events to root or to display “owner”, which is the one who requested it on a given tty.
      - jude- 6y ago
        Here are a few ways off the top of my head that don't require exploiting Wayland or gaining access to the `input` group (or whatever group owns the /dev/input/* events), using nothing more than a local shell under your user account: * Using ptrace(2) to hook into your running processes and grabbing key data that way * Adding a LD_PRELOAD around your application launcher (via your .bashrc or some other auto-exec script) to have it intercept key events for your application * Downloading and mounting a FUSE filesystem image with the /dev/input device nodes owned by your user ID instead of root. * Use one of the multitude of privilege-escalation CVEs on the Linux desktop to gain root, and keylog you that way [1]. Come back when you understand the problem. [1] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=linux+privilege+scalation https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=linux+privi...

zaxcellent 6y ago

The issue is X11 as we know it has no developers left. If nobody is around to maintain it, the world will move on, no ramrod necessary. More info: https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server.html https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server...

sprash 6y ago
There are plenty of developers left. It is just release management refuses to make new releases.
- zaxcellent 6y ago
  I suppose that theory is possible. A proxy for developer availability might be to check the primary mailing list of xorg for the full month of march: https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2021-March/thread.html https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2021-March/thread.ht.... There wasn't much directly related to xorg-xserver itself. As a point of comparison, here is March for QEMU: https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2021-03/threads.html https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2021-03/thr...
  - sprash 6y ago
    After years of misleading propaganda about how X11 is "deprecated" now I would expect no less. Besides maybe the main communication channel for development is somewhere else.
    - taway098123 6y ago
      Most developer activity related to Linux graphics is in dri-devel, it's been like this for quite a while. The X development channels have been mostly dead outside of discussion of XWayland. I doubt you'll see anyone starting any major new features in X.
      - pantalaimon 6y ago

dijit 6y ago

Fractional scaling is kind of the most visible thing today. But to be clear, there’s a lot of benefits to wayland. Mostly the issues could be hacked around. But let’s be absolutely clear with this: it is hacking around the issue. Problem: tearing, solvable with double buffering, maybe. Problem: Xorg runs as root, solvable, there’s ways of making your user have direct control of the frame buffer device. Problem: Xorg is a network system, and a porous one, meaning it’s possible to intercept keystrokes from any running program. Solvable by running a mini X11 instance for each program. Problem: Xorg is a network system, meaning it is very inefficient. (Imagine using TCP to talk to your SSD) Problem: Xorg needs to be backwards compatible, so it can’t dig much into hardware features. Especially as the client may not be on the same machine as the server. Overall, wayland is a good clean slate, it’s been in development a long time. X11 has major warts and they are hard to clear out.

_jal 6y ago
I find it personally a bit hilarious - Wayland has been Going To Be Great Soon for over a decade. I've never even had a reason to want to run it. But I'm sure it'll be great, any day now.
- toun 6y ago
  I find Wayland is great already for my usage, and has been for the last two years. If Xorg works for you and Wayland doesn't, that's perfectly fine too.
  - _jal 6y ago
    Don't get me wrong - I would love to not deal with certain X warts. (I see substantially fewer warts than other people do, but that's just me.) It just seems Wayland's combination of technical requirements and political entanglements make it a sort of Zeno's Project, doomed to asymptotically approach peoples' expectations and desires, but never reach them.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >I find it personally a bit hilarious - Wayland has been Going To Be Great Soon for over a decade. So? The same has been the case for desktop Linux in general, for 2 decades.

devwastaken 6y ago

There are reasons, many times those reasons are obvious to whomever is actually implimenting the changes but not to others outside of it. The reasons have been highlighted hundreds of times and unless there's actual arguments against those reasons the discussion of "I don't like wayland" is a distractive circle that ignores the content of the original post.

edflsafoiewq 6y ago

It's an old story. A conservative rewrite, that amends those things experience has shown were mistakes but were always retained for compatibility, is rare, since the impulse to rewrite is revolutionary in nature. A rewrite is treated as an opportunity to remake the world in a new image (with a new set of mistakes to uncover).

turminal 6y ago
The problem here is that a lot of stuff X does relies on horribly unsafe (mis)features of X. And of course wayland had to break compatibility with those things.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  If the user wants to do X which involves increased danger to the user giving users a way to tell the system that app X has the privilege of doing X but not allowing all applications to do X is potentially viable but telling users you don't need to do X anymore is a much harder sale. It needn't be a prompt users will quickly be prompted to click yes to it could easily be an option in settings or at communicated at install time.
Qwertious 6y ago
AIUI rewriting X wouldn't be much use anyway, because the problem is mostly in the protocol not the actual codebase implementing the protocol.

aduitsis 6y ago

The fact that XWayland's "performance should be roughly on-par with native X11" probably solidifies rather than weakens the position of X11 as the de facto display protocol. If everything that uses X11 today can be used on top of XWayland without any modification and without performance loss, this means that a lot of pressure stemming from the need to switch to speaking Wayland instead of X11 is lifted in a certain sense. Or am I missing something?

coldtea 6y ago

First of all, nobody cared to hack on X/Xorg. The project was seriously understaffed. Second, it ended a pile of hacks upon hacks. Those two reasons have to be added on top of the other benefits of Wayland (or any other modern re-arch of X).

dkersten 6y ago

> mostly breaking a billion useful things that X has had for some time This is always the case when there is some widely used legacy tech, but it shouldn't stop us from trying to move forward, or we'll never get better things. I've personally switched to using wayland on my main laptop and am very happy with it. I was using X before and was getting incredibly bad screen tearing when using i3, I tried every recommendation I could find (double buffering, running a compositor, etc) and nothing helped, but Sway on wayland fixed it for me and its been running flawlessly for the last 9 months. I have no plans of going back to X anytime. The only thing I use X for is playing Windows games with Proton (which this HW acceleration change might even fix, if the laptop had an nvidia gpu, but alas, it does not).

sprash 6y ago
> but it shouldn't stop us from trying to move forward, Wayland means moving backwards. It has the complete wrong philosophy and abstractions. If "sway" runs flawlessly for you you are not doing much with your computer at all. I can't work without my fine tuned synaptics driver configuration and without my over the years grown and perfected scripts using xdotool, dmenu, xsel, xcape, xcalib and many other tiny but useful x-tools.
- dkersten 6y ago
  So because it doesn't work for your workflow of scripts that rely on X, wayland is a step backwards and I must not be using my computer for much? Get over yourself. > fine tuned synaptics driver configuration My touchpad, touchscreen and apple magic trackpad work great for me, so this isn't a problem for me.
  - sprash 6y ago
    Wayland is power-user hostile. If all you do is watching cat videos all day long Wayland will be great for you.
    - dkersten 6y ago

kaba0 6y ago

> X11 is in no way broken enough to justify such a huge change And why do you think you have sufficient knowledge on the topic to assume that? I do assume you have not read the source code of the X server, isn’t it a bit “cocky” to state such a statement, which is in opposition to what the actual X maintainers say, who actually created wayland? It’s not like a project from nothing, it was created with the shortcomings of X in mind.

destructionator 6y ago
> in opposition to what the actual X maintainers say, who actually created wayland? [citation needed]
- kaba0 6y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ
  - destructionator 6y ago
    First off, a 45 minute long video isn't much of a citation. Where, exactly, are you citing? Secondly, this isn't the first time I've had people point to this same video. It doesn't actually say what you claim it says. It says the creator of Wayland worked on X (though actually his core focus was DRI2, which btw, is not X), and the one individual speaker in that video worked on X a long time ago (specifically his focus was on keyboard input). Their claim is more "X is redundant" than "X is hopeless". They're wrong, of course, the video makes absurd claims like "nobody uses core X11". Maybe they don't since they work in niches, but in the real world, plenty of people do... and that's the part of the X server nobody actually complains about. Even Wayland are perfectly OK with that part! (See retaining it in XWayland. When these wayland devs complain about Xorg their focus is usually on the driver side. Well, hate to break it to them, drivers are always ugly. See the link we're commenting on, if Wayland actually works on all the devices Xorg works on, it'll be just as ugly.)
    - 6y ago

ohthehugemanate 6y ago

2 year wayland (sway) user here. Every time anything is posted here about wayland, I read about some people's crazy issues. Karma brings them all out of the woodwork, I guess. If message boards like HN are where you're getting this impression, just beware of sample bias. Remember that everyone on Fedora and/or KDE has been running wayland for literal years. That is a lot of users, and not enough complaints to make them consider reverting. Fwiw here's my counter anecdata: I'm on arch with swaywm, meaning my system is in no way "out of the box". I have gone back to X from time to time, and... it drives me crazy. Everything is blurry, it takes an hour off my battery time, and it FEELS laggy and unresponsive. Oh, and the experience of installing anything involves 5 extra packages (automatically included, at least) to work around X stuff. God help you if you want to configure an input method; it goes through AT LEAST 2 layers. For some input methods (touchscreens, i'm looking at you), you have brittle hacks like one layer is just reading the debug log of another. Anyway every settings change you make requires restarting your whole WM, and probably fiddling with several 3rd party tools to understand and make it easier... no thanks. Even when I could only screen share between xwayland apps, and I really tried to go back, I couldn't stomach it. The wayland experience for me is just so much better across so many dimensions. I can only imagine what it's like for my friends who use OOTB setups and aren't even aware they're on Wayland.

kllrnohj 6y ago

> X11 is in no way broken enough to justify such a huge change Oh it absolutely is. The entire design of X11 is broken and a barrier to how applications & drivers actually work. There's a reason that literally everyone else switched away from an X11-style model to a Wayland-style one. That is, MacOS, Windows & Android are all Wayland-style compositor designs. This was the major transition that Microsoft did from Windows XP to Windows Vista. This is part of the reason that things like video playback in browsers on Linux is just awful. What browsers (or really any modern UI stack) want is just a system compositor that speaks buffers and transactions. Transactions are important to synchronize composition changes and content changes - for example, when you scroll a webpage with a video in it. It's better for power if the video is in a system composition layer, as then it can use a hardware overlay plane instead of being GPU composited (reduces power consumption). But then you need the browsers updated rendering of the scroll position to be synchronized with that composition update. This type of capability is standard on all major platforms at this point. You can do this everywhere, except on X11. Possibly doable with extensions, but at that point your "extensions" are "completely change everything about the base X11 design & promises" as X11's base design & promises specifically don't provide anything like this. X11's fundamental design is completely wrong & backwards. That's why a clean slate is necessary. Yes this migration is painful (see Windows Vista), but if it was actually pushed it would be a short term pain and the ecosystem would come out the other side healthier than it started (see Windows 7)