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Most desktop Linuxes are changing and deprecating APIs way too fast for the usual glacial development flow of a big commercial software company. The fact that

Most desktop Linuxes are changing and deprecating APIs way too fast for the usual glacial development flow of a big commercial software company. The fact that apparently the API for Wayland/Flatpak screen recording is less than 5 years old and it still does not work on X11 desktops does not inspire a lot of confidence, either. However, desktop video calls and screencasting is one area where I think the free and open source alternatives are up to the task.

jatone 5y ago
flat out incorrect in this case. this has nothing to do with a deprecated API. they just decided to abuse one API when there was an API available for their use case available. x11 is no long maintained expecting an modern API to support it is foolish.
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  Was Pipewire even on distros by the time they decided to "abuse the one API" ? Even I have had to resort to abusing the one API, and it was just for taking the values of a couple pixels on the screen. Everything else is just too slow, requires setting up way too much infrastructure (e.g. PipeWire! a H264 encoder!), or has been fixed "last year" or some other uselessly recent date. X11 is no longer maintained is also flat-out wrong, and I'm willing to bet, it's still the most used option (since even on the distros which use Wayland, in-place updates do not usually turn it on). The fact that today's screencast API does not even bother to implement support for the most used window server out there does not inspire confidence, either.
  - onli 5y ago
    > Was Pipewire even on distros by the time they decided to "abuse the one API"? No. Pipewire only arrived on the most unstable distros end of last year. It's in no way available for all, and not a common standard (yet). And you are right, wayland in general is not the norm yet. I'd even say it's likely to never replace X11 completely, given its shortcomings and X11's stability.
    - boudin 5y ago
      Pipewire has been there for more than that, I've been using it for a few years now. You might be mistaken with the audio part of it (that replaces Pulseaudio and Jack).
      - onli 5y ago
        It's possible I did not notice the non-audio part was already in the wayland-enabling distros before, if that was the case.
        boudin 5y ago
        It was definitely available in distros like arch and gentoo. Fedora as well when then switched to wayland by default. More conservative distro might not have included it though, but they are on X11 by default so it's not needed in the first place.
    - bitwize 5y ago
      X11 is moribund. Part of why is because literally everyone who was working on it in a major way, possibly excepting Keith Packard, eventually considered it a dead end and jumped ship to Wayland.
      - Filligree 5y ago
        Regardless, if I want to do something as simple as running a Minecraft client, I need to run X11 or else live with about 20 FPS. If the old thing is broken, and the new thing isn't ready yet, then what are we supposed to do? Use Windows I suppose.
        hughesjj 5y ago
        Back to the TTY like Lord Stallman intended
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        moribund, stable, I don't care what you call it; X11 actually works consistently, which remains more than Wayland can say
  - jatone 5y ago
    x11 is no longer maintained. you're thinking of xwayland, which is the only thing getting releases these days. but that is built on wayland. gnome shell has had some version of the screencast API for 8 years now. pipewire is irrelevant to the discussion. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/blame/main/data/dbus-interfaces/org.gnome.Shell.Screencast.xml https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/blame/main/data... the first commit for the desktop portal (which is the end result of the gnome api above) for wlr was in 2018. https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/commit/4e091184edcc43e12c4a5a1f2e0edf1650c69ea2 https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/commit/4e... 2 years before the 2020 date in the article. so in short: in 2020 zoom abused a gnome only api to implement desktop sharing, when a proper gnome only desktop sharing api already existed for ~8 years. which was the precursor to the current desktop portal stuff and you're trying to blame wayland for the problem.
    - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
      1. X11 is definitely maintained, unless you are thinking of XFree86. Xorg's last release 2 weeks ago. Many LTS distros containing it are preparing releases with it _right now_ and they will also be supporting it for at least one decade, probably way more. I would bet that Wayland will become unsupported way before (at least some implementation of) X11 does. 2. This entire article is about avoiding the Gnome private API. The only other alternative, the XDG/portal API, uses Pipewire. It's literally the only alternative even if you don't use Flatpak. EDIT: Your "2018" link is also not showing the screencast portal API. And I am not blaming Wayland; I am blaming the distros who switch to it and as a consequence BROKE user programs.
      - jatone 5y ago
        1. no its not, no security fixes or new features are being developed, its entirely on life support: the changes are to just keep it limping along while distros finish transitions to wayland. https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2022-January/060861.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2022-January/060... 2. the article is about them abusing a gnome only API when alternatives existed that would have worked better. WLR had its first commits for its desktop portal api in 2018, gnome has had some form of the desktop portal api for 8 years now. if you're going to use a DE only API at least use the right fucking one.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > x11 is no long maintained expecting an modern API to support it is foolish. Xorg is mostly unmaintained, but still extremely popular, and expecting things to work on it is completely reasonable.
  - jatone 5y ago
    I didn't say it was unreasonable to expect x11 to work. I said it was unreasonable to expect a modern API to jump through hoops to work on x11. x11 works fine as is, and will continue to do so through xwayland. but don't expect new apis to give a rats ass about x11.
boudin 5y ago
At the same time, it's because they don't care much. I'm quite sure that if Microsoft or Apple would change the way screen-sharing works between version of their OS, Zoom wouldn't wait 2 years to look at it. I understand it's not as much market share, but it does make Zoom look really poor in tech companies where using Linux is more common. It's also quite shameful for a company where the main thing they do is video conference and screen sharing, it's not like it's a small side feature. Also you make it sounds like it changes every other day, but that's not the case. Screen sharing in wayland has been stable for a while now and it's adopted by all major compositors (mutter, kwin, wlroots). As you mentioned, it's pretty well supported by a lot of open source software other than Zoom, so there's plenty of implementation examples they can go through as well.
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  Even stuff such as OBS Studio was significantly slower on Wayland than on X11, at least until the efforts done _last year_ (e.g. https://feaneron.com/2021/03/30/obs-studio-on-wayland/ https://feaneron.com/2021/03/30/obs-studio-on-wayland/ ) . Single-Window support for screencast API is also only a couple years old! Before that it would just error out, even if the D-Bus interface was there ( https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/blob/b2b5ede150e7dd42361b9f9b7eccc056c188155c/src/screencast.c#L319 https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/blob/b2b5e... ). That's why I say that it just moves way too fast for the glacial speed that commercial houses normally have. For at least 2 years (thinking 2016-2018) some distros were even shipping Wayland _without_ an actual working screen capture API. How do you even support those ?
  - boudin 5y ago
    We're not talking about supporting things years ago though, we're talking about supporting it now which is a few years after, when it's been stable and supported across the whole ecosystem for a quite a while. That's their job, providing multi-platform video-conferencing and screen sharing. If they can't do that they could chose to drop their app and try to build a decent web version instead because this thing is quite an horror show as well. Screen sharing works well in Chromium and Firefox.
jrm4 5y ago
If it is generally true that the bulk of the folks working on this space in Linux genuinely believe that Wayland is the "future" and X needs to be deprecated, they really need to put up or shut up. I'm not aware of what's going on behind the scenes, but it's painfully obvious that someone was entirely too confident on this whole deal. It's just very surprising considering how well Linus' philosophy of "never break things backwards" holds up over time, and that the Wayland people appear to have nearly entirely missed this.

jatone 5y ago

flat out incorrect in this case. this has nothing to do with a deprecated API. they just decided to abuse one API when there was an API available for their use case available. x11 is no long maintained expecting an modern API to support it is foolish.

AshamedCaptain 5y ago
Was Pipewire even on distros by the time they decided to "abuse the one API" ? Even I have had to resort to abusing the one API, and it was just for taking the values of a couple pixels on the screen. Everything else is just too slow, requires setting up way too much infrastructure (e.g. PipeWire! a H264 encoder!), or has been fixed "last year" or some other uselessly recent date. X11 is no longer maintained is also flat-out wrong, and I'm willing to bet, it's still the most used option (since even on the distros which use Wayland, in-place updates do not usually turn it on). The fact that today's screencast API does not even bother to implement support for the most used window server out there does not inspire confidence, either.
- onli 5y ago
  > Was Pipewire even on distros by the time they decided to "abuse the one API"? No. Pipewire only arrived on the most unstable distros end of last year. It's in no way available for all, and not a common standard (yet). And you are right, wayland in general is not the norm yet. I'd even say it's likely to never replace X11 completely, given its shortcomings and X11's stability.
  - boudin 5y ago
    Pipewire has been there for more than that, I've been using it for a few years now. You might be mistaken with the audio part of it (that replaces Pulseaudio and Jack).
    - onli 5y ago
      It's possible I did not notice the non-audio part was already in the wayland-enabling distros before, if that was the case.
      - boudin 5y ago
        It was definitely available in distros like arch and gentoo. Fedora as well when then switched to wayland by default. More conservative distro might not have included it though, but they are on X11 by default so it's not needed in the first place.
  - bitwize 5y ago
    X11 is moribund. Part of why is because literally everyone who was working on it in a major way, possibly excepting Keith Packard, eventually considered it a dead end and jumped ship to Wayland.
    - Filligree 5y ago
      Regardless, if I want to do something as simple as running a Minecraft client, I need to run X11 or else live with about 20 FPS. If the old thing is broken, and the new thing isn't ready yet, then what are we supposed to do? Use Windows I suppose.
      - hughesjj 5y ago
        Back to the TTY like Lord Stallman intended
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      moribund, stable, I don't care what you call it; X11 actually works consistently, which remains more than Wayland can say
- jatone 5y ago
  x11 is no longer maintained. you're thinking of xwayland, which is the only thing getting releases these days. but that is built on wayland. gnome shell has had some version of the screencast API for 8 years now. pipewire is irrelevant to the discussion. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/blame/main/data/dbus-interfaces/org.gnome.Shell.Screencast.xml https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/blame/main/data... the first commit for the desktop portal (which is the end result of the gnome api above) for wlr was in 2018. https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/commit/4e091184edcc43e12c4a5a1f2e0edf1650c69ea2 https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/commit/4e... 2 years before the 2020 date in the article. so in short: in 2020 zoom abused a gnome only api to implement desktop sharing, when a proper gnome only desktop sharing api already existed for ~8 years. which was the precursor to the current desktop portal stuff and you're trying to blame wayland for the problem.
  - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
    1. X11 is definitely maintained, unless you are thinking of XFree86. Xorg's last release 2 weeks ago. Many LTS distros containing it are preparing releases with it _right now_ and they will also be supporting it for at least one decade, probably way more. I would bet that Wayland will become unsupported way before (at least some implementation of) X11 does. 2. This entire article is about avoiding the Gnome private API. The only other alternative, the XDG/portal API, uses Pipewire. It's literally the only alternative even if you don't use Flatpak. EDIT: Your "2018" link is also not showing the screencast portal API. And I am not blaming Wayland; I am blaming the distros who switch to it and as a consequence BROKE user programs.
    - jatone 5y ago
      1. no its not, no security fixes or new features are being developed, its entirely on life support: the changes are to just keep it limping along while distros finish transitions to wayland. https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2022-January/060861.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2022-January/060... 2. the article is about them abusing a gnome only API when alternatives existed that would have worked better. WLR had its first commits for its desktop portal api in 2018, gnome has had some form of the desktop portal api for 8 years now. if you're going to use a DE only API at least use the right fucking one.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> x11 is no long maintained expecting an modern API to support it is foolish. Xorg is mostly unmaintained, but still extremely popular, and expecting things to work on it is completely reasonable.
- jatone 5y ago
  I didn't say it was unreasonable to expect x11 to work. I said it was unreasonable to expect a modern API to jump through hoops to work on x11. x11 works fine as is, and will continue to do so through xwayland. but don't expect new apis to give a rats ass about x11.

boudin 5y ago

At the same time, it's because they don't care much. I'm quite sure that if Microsoft or Apple would change the way screen-sharing works between version of their OS, Zoom wouldn't wait 2 years to look at it. I understand it's not as much market share, but it does make Zoom look really poor in tech companies where using Linux is more common. It's also quite shameful for a company where the main thing they do is video conference and screen sharing, it's not like it's a small side feature. Also you make it sounds like it changes every other day, but that's not the case. Screen sharing in wayland has been stable for a while now and it's adopted by all major compositors (mutter, kwin, wlroots). As you mentioned, it's pretty well supported by a lot of open source software other than Zoom, so there's plenty of implementation examples they can go through as well.

AshamedCaptain 5y ago
Even stuff such as OBS Studio was significantly slower on Wayland than on X11, at least until the efforts done _last year_ (e.g. https://feaneron.com/2021/03/30/obs-studio-on-wayland/ https://feaneron.com/2021/03/30/obs-studio-on-wayland/ ) . Single-Window support for screencast API is also only a couple years old! Before that it would just error out, even if the D-Bus interface was there ( https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/blob/b2b5ede150e7dd42361b9f9b7eccc056c188155c/src/screencast.c#L319 https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/blob/b2b5e... ). That's why I say that it just moves way too fast for the glacial speed that commercial houses normally have. For at least 2 years (thinking 2016-2018) some distros were even shipping Wayland _without_ an actual working screen capture API. How do you even support those ?
- boudin 5y ago
  We're not talking about supporting things years ago though, we're talking about supporting it now which is a few years after, when it's been stable and supported across the whole ecosystem for a quite a while. That's their job, providing multi-platform video-conferencing and screen sharing. If they can't do that they could chose to drop their app and try to build a decent web version instead because this thing is quite an horror show as well. Screen sharing works well in Chromium and Firefox.

jrm4 5y ago

If it is generally true that the bulk of the folks working on this space in Linux genuinely believe that Wayland is the "future" and X needs to be deprecated, they really need to put up or shut up. I'm not aware of what's going on behind the scenes, but it's painfully obvious that someone was entirely too confident on this whole deal. It's just very surprising considering how well Linus' philosophy of "never break things backwards" holds up over time, and that the Wayland people appear to have nearly entirely missed this.