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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 usi

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.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Please have a look at an X maintainers very own presentation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cQoQE_HDG8g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cQoQE_HDG8g Wayland is not a middle man as it is the compositor itself as well - it does the minimal amount of work necessary to compose the desktop. X on the other hand just transfers messages between clients and the compositor without doing any actual work (x render functions are almost never used by modern applications)
      - sprash 5y ago
        Many of the points of this talks are invalidated with the introduction of DRI3 others are still valid but Wayland is not a solution. The X server indeed "just transfers messages between clients" but so does a Wayland compositor. How else would a screen capture functionality even work. Also, the fact that GTK/QT applications don't use Xrender (GTK used to but dropped it) can not be blamed on X.
        kaba0 5y ago
        Using xrender would pretty much result in terrible performance, not allowing the extreme parallelism of GPUs. This is the fundamental problem with X, it originates from a time when GPUs were not even a thing. It had a great run, but let it sleep now. Also, DRI3 doesn’t solve the fundamental security flaw of X - which can only be solved by nesting multiple X servers into each other. At that point we would have a much uglier architecture than we have with wayland.
Macha 5y ago
> Literal years. Unless you're using hardware vendors that are hostile to FOSS. Except new GPU hardware at reasonable prices has been unobtainable for 2 years now, and AMD's new Linux friendly stance was only a couple of years before that. So there's like a 2-3 year window where you could have said "Well, you should have known to buy the FOSS friendly hardware". (Which came with other tradeoffs, AMD had uncompetitive hardware and poor GPGPU support in that time period)
- kaba0 5y ago
  Wayland works on nvidia gpus as well now, so even that is solved now.
  - 3836293648 5y ago
    It really doesn't. I tried it again just yesterday and they don't support having multiple screens on Wayland, somehow. I want to switch to Wayland, but no, NVIDIA still doesn't work yet
ttybird2 5y ago
"the code was untenable" I have seen various comments claiming that the code was very clean. "Since the late 00s, all of the window managers had already started doing compositing themselves" Most window managers don't do compositing. Also, XCB is async.

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.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Please have a look at an X maintainers very own presentation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cQoQE_HDG8g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cQoQE_HDG8g Wayland is not a middle man as it is the compositor itself as well - it does the minimal amount of work necessary to compose the desktop. X on the other hand just transfers messages between clients and the compositor without doing any actual work (x render functions are almost never used by modern applications)
    - sprash 5y ago
      Many of the points of this talks are invalidated with the introduction of DRI3 others are still valid but Wayland is not a solution. The X server indeed "just transfers messages between clients" but so does a Wayland compositor. How else would a screen capture functionality even work. Also, the fact that GTK/QT applications don't use Xrender (GTK used to but dropped it) can not be blamed on X.
      - kaba0 5y ago
        Using xrender would pretty much result in terrible performance, not allowing the extreme parallelism of GPUs. This is the fundamental problem with X, it originates from a time when GPUs were not even a thing. It had a great run, but let it sleep now. Also, DRI3 doesn’t solve the fundamental security flaw of X - which can only be solved by nesting multiple X servers into each other. At that point we would have a much uglier architecture than we have with wayland.

Macha 5y ago

> Literal years. Unless you're using hardware vendors that are hostile to FOSS. Except new GPU hardware at reasonable prices has been unobtainable for 2 years now, and AMD's new Linux friendly stance was only a couple of years before that. So there's like a 2-3 year window where you could have said "Well, you should have known to buy the FOSS friendly hardware". (Which came with other tradeoffs, AMD had uncompetitive hardware and poor GPGPU support in that time period)

kaba0 5y ago
Wayland works on nvidia gpus as well now, so even that is solved now.
- 3836293648 5y ago
  It really doesn't. I tried it again just yesterday and they don't support having multiple screens on Wayland, somehow. I want to switch to Wayland, but no, NVIDIA still doesn't work yet

ttybird2 5y ago

"the code was untenable" I have seen various comments claiming that the code was very clean. "Since the late 00s, all of the window managers had already started doing compositing themselves" Most window managers don't do compositing. Also, XCB is async.