7 ms·

I really hope wayland doesn't become to x11 what IPV6 is to ipv4. Because after so many years, a lot of the ecosystem hasn't moved, or is even not compatible w

I really hope wayland doesn't become to x11 what IPV6 is to ipv4. Because after so many years, a lot of the ecosystem hasn't moved, or is even not compatible with it. Good multi display support is missing, and some games don't render well. I want it to succeed, and the project has been progressing non-stop, but it does show how much time and energy such an endeavor takes. I was expecting to be able to use it for years and years. See also: BTRFS

iqanq 5y ago
btrfs is a drop-in replacement. Nothing changes for the user when they switch to it. With Wayland many basic features are missing even today. (Yes I know someone will explain here that everything works. Don't make me laugh)
- krageon 5y ago
  > Nothing changes for the user when they switch to it. You must perform regular maintenance on btrfs or it will quite simply break. This is a huge departure from for example ext4, which is (to the end user at least) hassle free.
  - byhemechi 5y ago
    this is not my experience, btrfs has been just as stable as ext4 and zfs for me. maybe i've just been lucky?
    - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
      Ext4 is transparent for me, but I can confirm BTRFS to have failed me several times. n = 1 of course.
    - pizza234 5y ago
      I'm not sure about the "maintenance" part, however, my experience was: - a few years ago, one system would suddently not boot (due to btrfs); this happened twice - nowadays, on one system, background scrub doesn't start This is anecdata of course, but I've never had a good impression overall. I don't see any reason to use btrfs rather than ZFS, considering that Ubuntu and derivatives are starting to add builtin support.
    - krageon 5y ago
      It is a technical certainty AFAICT. If this has not impacted you, it will some day :) Scripts for actually doing so can be found f.e. here: https://github.com/kdave/btrfsmaintenance https://github.com/kdave/btrfsmaintenance
- eptcyka 5y ago
  BTRFS is a great solution to the problem of having data be accessible reliably. I've had issues with Wayland, and I've also had issues with X, but I've been using Gnome's Wayland session for 4 years now. More so than actual window manager issues, I've been experiencing issues with my GPU drivers. FOSS software has never been without it's operational issues. I don't understand what's up with this prejudice towards Wayland. You do understand, that it's the X developers themselves that advocated for Wayland (besides designing and developing it), don't you? X originates in the 80s and it's not a design that stands the test of time. Since the late 00s, all of the window managers had already started doing compositing themselves, circumventing all of the nice layers of the X protocol and just copying pixel buffers around, the interface with X itself is blocking, vertical sync is impossible, security is a joke, the code was untenable. I understand that in as heterogenous software ecosystem as desktop Linux, any large fundamental change will be ugly because there is no shared release cycle and there is no platform, so one can't just change everything overnight, but as far as I can tell, Wayland has been usable for quite a while now. Literal years. Unless you're using hardware vendors that are hostile to FOSS.
  - sprash 5y ago
    > X originates in the 80s and it's not a design that stands the test of time. Actually the fact that X11 can be used today despite the fact that we went through several cycles of vastly changing GPU hardware shows that it absolutely has stood the test of time.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Ncurses apps can also display GUIs for a long time now, but it doesn’t mean that they are actually good solutions. The X server became a pretty useless middle man between clients and the compositor. And the vastly changed GPU hardware is the reason we should prefer a superior solution - we no longer draw as we did 3 decades ago, so we should cut out the middle man.
      - sprash 5y ago
        > Ncurses apps can also display GUIs Terminal applications stood the test of time as well. For everything that is not graphical in nature they are indeed good solutions. > The X server became a pretty useless middle man between clients and the compositor. X is a middle man but far from useless. Just as Wayland is a middle man as well. And looking at the protocol actual access to GPU memory is more opaque on Wayland than on X11 and as such to me Wayland is a more intrusive middleman. If you want to "cut out the middle man" you have to use DRM directly.
sprash 5y ago
> but it does show how much time and energy such an endeavor takes. The reason it takes so much time is not that is requires a lot of "energy" or that the problem in general is particular hard to solve. Wayland is fundamentally flawed at the concept level and the only way for it to get to a usable state is to turn it essentially into another X. Combine this with general stubbornness of all involved parties and the extreme hesitancy to standardize essential things you get a recipe for disaster.
- headsoup 5y ago
  This is what I don't get. Wayland seems not to have started with solving some of the X11 problems first but on a strong framework, it seems to just be reinventing the wheel and hoping to catch up and fix the problems somewhere along the way. So users just wait for that moment and X11 works 'fine' for the majority in the meantime.
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    Why do you say that? What even gives you the credentials to make a claim like that?
    - lamp987 5y ago
      >What even gives you the credentials to make a claim like that? This is a fallacy.
      - scrollaway 5y ago
        wtf? it's absolutely not, when making wild claims about the inner workings of a project in a field where very few people are competent. If I start making wild claims about cardiology, you'd be correct to ask me for some credentials.
        headsoup 5y ago
        What credentials do I need to state and opinion on how it seems to have evolved? I'm not stating a scientific truth. And yes, it is the fallacy of credentialism to attempt to use that as a measure of authority to make a statement. I could be a kernel developer of 20 years experience and have been terrible for all of them.
christophilus 5y ago
I don’t think Wayland will fail. I’ve been running it for about a year now (since Fedora 34). It’s been mostly smooth sailing, and a big quality of life improvement, with only a few drawbacks. (Screensharing does not work for all windows, such as my terminal.)
- funcDropShadow 5y ago
  Could you explain the benefits of switching to Wayland that you experienced?
  - kevincox 5y ago
    - Top quality high and mixed resolution support. - Tear free rendering and capturing. - (Small) improved performance. - Games are much better behaved. I can reliably window, maximize and full-screen them. They also never mess with the display resolution. - Seems to have less windows (especially hover tool tips) just hanging around. I guess the compositor can close these at the right time under Wayland. - Proper secure screen locking. (I think GNOME + GDM can do something safe on X but most display managers + lock screens can't cooperate well enough to manage this.) Honestly it is nothing major (except the mixed dpi stuff) but a nice step up. And if the X devs say that X is unmaintainable and this is going to lead to many improvements and be able to be maintained for the next age of displays on Linux I'm happy to make the switch now that it is the default and I am not aware of any problems for my workflow.
    - funcDropShadow 5y ago
      Thanks, I get all the arguments from the developers and that it should be better in principle in the long run. But I need screen sharing, screen shots, and of course xsnow ;-)
      - kevincox 5y ago
        Screen sharing and screenshots have been working perfectly for me (in fact screenshots are actually better with multi-monitors than X because they don't mess up the off-screen space). No comment about xsnow ;) I think screenshots work out-of the box for most compositors and screenshot tools but depending on your distro you may need to configure xdg-desktop-portal for screen recording. On my distro (NixOS) this seems to work on GNOME with no additional config. For NixOS configuring GNOME which uses Wayland by default (if your GPU supports it) is just: services.xserver = { enable = true; displayManager.gdm.enable = true; desktopManager.gnome.enable = true; }; I'm not aware of any major issues with this and in my experience provides a better experience than using X.
vbezhenar 5y ago
> Good multi display support is missing I'm using Gnome 40/Fedora 34 with laptop and attached 4K display. Gnome apps works absolutely fine. Some non-gnome apps do not re-scale when moved between displays and that's the only issue that I've found. Also I run Factorio absolutely fine. No idea about other games, though.
brnt 5y ago
BTRFS has stabilized outside of niche configurations like RAID5/6. With Wayland common hard- and software combos are still cause for lockups and the like. I can't get it to not crash an various bog standard all-Intel hardware, for no apparent reason. The internet is full of such (recent) reports.

iqanq 5y ago

btrfs is a drop-in replacement. Nothing changes for the user when they switch to it. With Wayland many basic features are missing even today. (Yes I know someone will explain here that everything works. Don't make me laugh)

krageon 5y ago
> Nothing changes for the user when they switch to it. You must perform regular maintenance on btrfs or it will quite simply break. This is a huge departure from for example ext4, which is (to the end user at least) hassle free.
- byhemechi 5y ago
  this is not my experience, btrfs has been just as stable as ext4 and zfs for me. maybe i've just been lucky?
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    Ext4 is transparent for me, but I can confirm BTRFS to have failed me several times. n = 1 of course.
  - pizza234 5y ago
    I'm not sure about the "maintenance" part, however, my experience was: - a few years ago, one system would suddently not boot (due to btrfs); this happened twice - nowadays, on one system, background scrub doesn't start This is anecdata of course, but I've never had a good impression overall. I don't see any reason to use btrfs rather than ZFS, considering that Ubuntu and derivatives are starting to add builtin support.
  - krageon 5y ago
    It is a technical certainty AFAICT. If this has not impacted you, it will some day :) Scripts for actually doing so can be found f.e. here: https://github.com/kdave/btrfsmaintenance https://github.com/kdave/btrfsmaintenance
eptcyka 5y ago
BTRFS is a great solution to the problem of having data be accessible reliably. I've had issues with Wayland, and I've also had issues with X, but I've been using Gnome's Wayland session for 4 years now. More so than actual window manager issues, I've been experiencing issues with my GPU drivers. FOSS software has never been without it's operational issues. I don't understand what's up with this prejudice towards Wayland. You do understand, that it's the X developers themselves that advocated for Wayland (besides designing and developing it), don't you? X originates in the 80s and it's not a design that stands the test of time. Since the late 00s, all of the window managers had already started doing compositing themselves, circumventing all of the nice layers of the X protocol and just copying pixel buffers around, the interface with X itself is blocking, vertical sync is impossible, security is a joke, the code was untenable. I understand that in as heterogenous software ecosystem as desktop Linux, any large fundamental change will be ugly because there is no shared release cycle and there is no platform, so one can't just change everything overnight, but as far as I can tell, Wayland has been usable for quite a while now. Literal years. Unless you're using hardware vendors that are hostile to FOSS.
- sprash 5y ago
  > X originates in the 80s and it's not a design that stands the test of time. Actually the fact that X11 can be used today despite the fact that we went through several cycles of vastly changing GPU hardware shows that it absolutely has stood the test of time.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Ncurses apps can also display GUIs for a long time now, but it doesn’t mean that they are actually good solutions. The X server became a pretty useless middle man between clients and the compositor. And the vastly changed GPU hardware is the reason we should prefer a superior solution - we no longer draw as we did 3 decades ago, so we should cut out the middle man.
    - sprash 5y ago
      > Ncurses apps can also display GUIs Terminal applications stood the test of time as well. For everything that is not graphical in nature they are indeed good solutions. > The X server became a pretty useless middle man between clients and the compositor. X is a middle man but far from useless. Just as Wayland is a middle man as well. And looking at the protocol actual access to GPU memory is more opaque on Wayland than on X11 and as such to me Wayland is a more intrusive middleman. If you want to "cut out the middle man" you have to use DRM directly.

sprash 5y ago

> but it does show how much time and energy such an endeavor takes. The reason it takes so much time is not that is requires a lot of "energy" or that the problem in general is particular hard to solve. Wayland is fundamentally flawed at the concept level and the only way for it to get to a usable state is to turn it essentially into another X. Combine this with general stubbornness of all involved parties and the extreme hesitancy to standardize essential things you get a recipe for disaster.

headsoup 5y ago
This is what I don't get. Wayland seems not to have started with solving some of the X11 problems first but on a strong framework, it seems to just be reinventing the wheel and hoping to catch up and fix the problems somewhere along the way. So users just wait for that moment and X11 works 'fine' for the majority in the meantime.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  Why do you say that? What even gives you the credentials to make a claim like that?
  - lamp987 5y ago
    >What even gives you the credentials to make a claim like that? This is a fallacy.
    - scrollaway 5y ago
      wtf? it's absolutely not, when making wild claims about the inner workings of a project in a field where very few people are competent. If I start making wild claims about cardiology, you'd be correct to ask me for some credentials.
      - headsoup 5y ago
        What credentials do I need to state and opinion on how it seems to have evolved? I'm not stating a scientific truth. And yes, it is the fallacy of credentialism to attempt to use that as a measure of authority to make a statement. I could be a kernel developer of 20 years experience and have been terrible for all of them.

christophilus 5y ago

I don’t think Wayland will fail. I’ve been running it for about a year now (since Fedora 34). It’s been mostly smooth sailing, and a big quality of life improvement, with only a few drawbacks. (Screensharing does not work for all windows, such as my terminal.)

funcDropShadow 5y ago
Could you explain the benefits of switching to Wayland that you experienced?
- kevincox 5y ago
  - Top quality high and mixed resolution support. - Tear free rendering and capturing. - (Small) improved performance. - Games are much better behaved. I can reliably window, maximize and full-screen them. They also never mess with the display resolution. - Seems to have less windows (especially hover tool tips) just hanging around. I guess the compositor can close these at the right time under Wayland. - Proper secure screen locking. (I think GNOME + GDM can do something safe on X but most display managers + lock screens can't cooperate well enough to manage this.) Honestly it is nothing major (except the mixed dpi stuff) but a nice step up. And if the X devs say that X is unmaintainable and this is going to lead to many improvements and be able to be maintained for the next age of displays on Linux I'm happy to make the switch now that it is the default and I am not aware of any problems for my workflow.
  - funcDropShadow 5y ago
    Thanks, I get all the arguments from the developers and that it should be better in principle in the long run. But I need screen sharing, screen shots, and of course xsnow ;-)
    - kevincox 5y ago
      Screen sharing and screenshots have been working perfectly for me (in fact screenshots are actually better with multi-monitors than X because they don't mess up the off-screen space). No comment about xsnow ;) I think screenshots work out-of the box for most compositors and screenshot tools but depending on your distro you may need to configure xdg-desktop-portal for screen recording. On my distro (NixOS) this seems to work on GNOME with no additional config. For NixOS configuring GNOME which uses Wayland by default (if your GPU supports it) is just: services.xserver = { enable = true; displayManager.gdm.enable = true; desktopManager.gnome.enable = true; }; I'm not aware of any major issues with this and in my experience provides a better experience than using X.

vbezhenar 5y ago

> Good multi display support is missing I'm using Gnome 40/Fedora 34 with laptop and attached 4K display. Gnome apps works absolutely fine. Some non-gnome apps do not re-scale when moved between displays and that's the only issue that I've found. Also I run Factorio absolutely fine. No idea about other games, though.

brnt 5y ago

BTRFS has stabilized outside of niche configurations like RAID5/6. With Wayland common hard- and software combos are still cause for lockups and the like. I can't get it to not crash an various bog standard all-Intel hardware, for no apparent reason. The internet is full of such (recent) reports.