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By the time GTK5 arrives Wayland will probably be old enough to drive or maybe even drink in the US. And, as much as I hate to say it, I believe it will still n

By the time GTK5 arrives Wayland will probably be old enough to drive or maybe even drink in the US. And, as much as I hate to say it, I believe it will still not be omnipresent in the Linux desktop. I really want to see Wayland move forward and succeed, but there are so few companies injecting money on it, they get to dictate how things move. Red Hat is one of the main contributors, and they only seem to care about Gnome working on Wayland (as much as I don't like their direction, I can't really blame them for following it, it just sucks that I don't like the product they're developing). The landscape is extremely fragmented and everybody who is not on the Gnome garden will suffer a lot. I really wish some other non-Gnome-favoring company would find a reason to dump a lot more money into Wayland and help move it forward in the not-only-gnome-favorable path. This is not a thing that will move forward without full-time workers. X has always had a lot of paid people contributing to it. That is, if IBM doesn't decide to throw a bigger wrench at the problem.

pkulak 4y ago
What about all the portals built by Redhat that allow kde and wlroots to tap into screen recording, audio, and soon even key captures? I get that Redhat doesn't actively submit patches to wlroots, but they also seem to be making stuff as open as seems reasonable. As a Sway user, I haven't noticed anything that works on Gnome but not Sway, except for stuff like Zoom, which hasn't, until recently, used the portals.
- rektide 4y ago
  wlroots & kde both have their own xdg-desktop-portal-*[1][2]'s, which don't seem to be built by Red Hat. xdg-desktop-portal itself originates from Flatpak[3], which makes me think it's more like to related to Canonical/Ubuntu rather than being something RH drove. [1] https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32008412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32008412 (2 pts, 30 min ago) [2] https://github.com/KDE/xdg-desktop-portal-kde https://github.com/KDE/xdg-desktop-portal-kde [3] https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal
  - nieve 4y ago
    You're thinking of Snaps which are a Canonical thing, RedHat has been heavily into Flatpak.
    - rektide 4y ago
      Link [4] that I sent you says otherwise. You should find some links to back your position.
corrral 4y ago
> I really wish some other non-Gnome-favoring company would find a reason to dump a lot more money into Wayland and help move it forward in the not-only-gnome-favorable path. This is not a thing that will move forward without full-time workers. X has always had a lot of paid people contributing to it. My understanding is most of the work is, deliberately, not in Wayland itself. In fact if you read feature and bug discussion between users and Wayland devs, it kinda seems like Wayland doesn't do much at all and has no interest in doing more. I haven't looked into it, but wouldn't be a bit surprised if RH had a hand in that architectural decision. Definitely makes it harder to compete with Gnome.
- dyingkneepad 4y ago
  Yeah, that's the fragmentation part thing. I have no idea how to properly solve it, but I'm sure throwing lots of money at the problem would help.
- Crysstalis 4y ago
  The Wayland developers do this because they absolutely do not want to be involved in the perpetual fights between desktops. Getting into that is a lose-lose proposition. So they focus only on the small subset of things that every desktop agrees on. Users that aren't actively working on an implementation in a desktop unfortunately don't have any place in this discussion, practically they just have nothing meaningful to contribute. It's not feasible without some implementation "sponsoring" the relevant code. Piling more features into upstream Wayland to please these users is not going to help anything, the implementations will not be able to use it and it will just complicate things for no gain and create more fragmentation. This is not specifically a Wayland thing, it was also the case in the X server if you were developing a new extension, you needed to gather feedback from the WM implementations before doing anything. If you want to make it easier to develop alternatives to GNOME, it would be best to start putting more reusable features into libraries, and getting all desktops (including GNOME) to use them. That way you have a common baseline that everyone can depend on. That may seem counter-intuitive but it is the only way, libraries provide implementations and it is actually the implementations themselves that are the important part to users, not anything that upstream is doing. The simplest example is something like Mesa. All the Wayland servers want to support hardware acceleration, so they all implement the relevant extensions, and then they're able to support applications that talk using the Mesa libraries.
akira2501 4y ago
> I really want to see Wayland move forward and succeed, Honest question. Why? Or, what are you hoping will be different if this occurs as opposed to the current status quo?
- vetinari 4y ago
  Part of the puzzle: The Real Story Behind Wayland and X - Daniel Stone (linux.conf.au 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
- dyingkneepad 4y ago
  Because, despite the fact that Wayland originally underestimated the size of the problem, it is in theory a better technical solution to our modern graphics problems than X11. It is designed in a more secure way (there is more isolation between the apps, which is both a blessing and a curse), every frame is indeed perfect, and it provides a sane solution to the 'compositing' problem. It's just a shame it was made into something that is even more fragmented than X11 due to it being even less than what X11 tries to be. So much got undefined by the protocol and left as something to be solved by the Compositor, and we don't have an universal compositor. And it's not like companies are throwing money at X11 either: progress is not happening there.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    X11 is a fairly mature piece of software, though. It's been around for decades, and as usual, when things stick around for that long, it's because they work fairly well. I'm not sure what progress you'd expect to see there. I guess I don't see why software that's been around for a few years longer than I've been alive, and has never really caused me much headache needs to be replaced with software that is an immature and in many ways, a worse offering. I see people talking about screen tearing, but X11 supports vsync on most video cards, so I really don't quite get where that's coming from.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
phkahler 4y ago
Some just needs to fork gnome and make windows98 style UI. This is actually OT because this is about GTK, which is a fine toolkit even if it's not C++. It has binding for most languages.
- warning26 4y ago
  XFCE is GTK based, and so is MATE, which is actually a fork of Gnome.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    But they need to either get with Wayland or fork a modern gnome and change the UI. Forking something and keeping it in a past state isnt really as useful as some think. See OpenOffice vs LibreOffice for example.
- lproven 4y ago
  [Author of original article here] That fork of GNOME with a Win9x-style UI exists: it's called Cinnamon. It's OK and it's quite popular. It's a lot more customisable and versatile than GNOME's own GNOME-Classic or GNOME-Flashback sessions, but it's still really quite clunky compared to, say, MATE or Xfce. If GNOME-Classic or GNOME-Flashback worked a little better, so that one could rearrange panels and add/move/remove controls and so on, I suspect that there would be no need for MATE to exist. I personally find Xfce to support more of the customisations I personally want (such as a vertical taskbar with horizontal rows of components and controls) than MATE, or KDE come to that. Wayland, for me, delivers nothing I really want. I read about variable refresh rates, HiDPI support, smooth flicker-free animations and so on, but I don't actually want or need any of those things. I don't get flicker or tearing as it is, and X.11 does all I need: seamless multihead support with 3D acceleration, and so on. I frankly prefer a minimum of animations and fades and so on.

pkulak 4y ago

What about all the portals built by Redhat that allow kde and wlroots to tap into screen recording, audio, and soon even key captures? I get that Redhat doesn't actively submit patches to wlroots, but they also seem to be making stuff as open as seems reasonable. As a Sway user, I haven't noticed anything that works on Gnome but not Sway, except for stuff like Zoom, which hasn't, until recently, used the portals.

rektide 4y ago
wlroots & kde both have their own xdg-desktop-portal-*[1][2]'s, which don't seem to be built by Red Hat. xdg-desktop-portal itself originates from Flatpak[3], which makes me think it's more like to related to Canonical/Ubuntu rather than being something RH drove. [1] https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32008412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32008412 (2 pts, 30 min ago) [2] https://github.com/KDE/xdg-desktop-portal-kde https://github.com/KDE/xdg-desktop-portal-kde [3] https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal
- nieve 4y ago
  You're thinking of Snaps which are a Canonical thing, RedHat has been heavily into Flatpak.
  - rektide 4y ago
    Link [4] that I sent you says otherwise. You should find some links to back your position.

corrral 4y ago

> I really wish some other non-Gnome-favoring company would find a reason to dump a lot more money into Wayland and help move it forward in the not-only-gnome-favorable path. This is not a thing that will move forward without full-time workers. X has always had a lot of paid people contributing to it. My understanding is most of the work is, deliberately, not in Wayland itself. In fact if you read feature and bug discussion between users and Wayland devs, it kinda seems like Wayland doesn't do much at all and has no interest in doing more. I haven't looked into it, but wouldn't be a bit surprised if RH had a hand in that architectural decision. Definitely makes it harder to compete with Gnome.

dyingkneepad 4y ago
Yeah, that's the fragmentation part thing. I have no idea how to properly solve it, but I'm sure throwing lots of money at the problem would help.
Crysstalis 4y ago
The Wayland developers do this because they absolutely do not want to be involved in the perpetual fights between desktops. Getting into that is a lose-lose proposition. So they focus only on the small subset of things that every desktop agrees on. Users that aren't actively working on an implementation in a desktop unfortunately don't have any place in this discussion, practically they just have nothing meaningful to contribute. It's not feasible without some implementation "sponsoring" the relevant code. Piling more features into upstream Wayland to please these users is not going to help anything, the implementations will not be able to use it and it will just complicate things for no gain and create more fragmentation. This is not specifically a Wayland thing, it was also the case in the X server if you were developing a new extension, you needed to gather feedback from the WM implementations before doing anything. If you want to make it easier to develop alternatives to GNOME, it would be best to start putting more reusable features into libraries, and getting all desktops (including GNOME) to use them. That way you have a common baseline that everyone can depend on. That may seem counter-intuitive but it is the only way, libraries provide implementations and it is actually the implementations themselves that are the important part to users, not anything that upstream is doing. The simplest example is something like Mesa. All the Wayland servers want to support hardware acceleration, so they all implement the relevant extensions, and then they're able to support applications that talk using the Mesa libraries.

akira2501 4y ago

> I really want to see Wayland move forward and succeed, Honest question. Why? Or, what are you hoping will be different if this occurs as opposed to the current status quo?

vetinari 4y ago
Part of the puzzle: The Real Story Behind Wayland and X - Daniel Stone (linux.conf.au 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
dyingkneepad 4y ago
Because, despite the fact that Wayland originally underestimated the size of the problem, it is in theory a better technical solution to our modern graphics problems than X11. It is designed in a more secure way (there is more isolation between the apps, which is both a blessing and a curse), every frame is indeed perfect, and it provides a sane solution to the 'compositing' problem. It's just a shame it was made into something that is even more fragmented than X11 due to it being even less than what X11 tries to be. So much got undefined by the protocol and left as something to be solved by the Compositor, and we don't have an universal compositor. And it's not like companies are throwing money at X11 either: progress is not happening there.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  X11 is a fairly mature piece of software, though. It's been around for decades, and as usual, when things stick around for that long, it's because they work fairly well. I'm not sure what progress you'd expect to see there. I guess I don't see why software that's been around for a few years longer than I've been alive, and has never really caused me much headache needs to be replaced with software that is an immature and in many ways, a worse offering. I see people talking about screen tearing, but X11 supports vsync on most video cards, so I really don't quite get where that's coming from.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

phkahler 4y ago

Some just needs to fork gnome and make windows98 style UI. This is actually OT because this is about GTK, which is a fine toolkit even if it's not C++. It has binding for most languages.

warning26 4y ago
XFCE is GTK based, and so is MATE, which is actually a fork of Gnome.
- phkahler 4y ago
  But they need to either get with Wayland or fork a modern gnome and change the UI. Forking something and keeping it in a past state isnt really as useful as some think. See OpenOffice vs LibreOffice for example.
lproven 4y ago
[Author of original article here] That fork of GNOME with a Win9x-style UI exists: it's called Cinnamon. It's OK and it's quite popular. It's a lot more customisable and versatile than GNOME's own GNOME-Classic or GNOME-Flashback sessions, but it's still really quite clunky compared to, say, MATE or Xfce. If GNOME-Classic or GNOME-Flashback worked a little better, so that one could rearrange panels and add/move/remove controls and so on, I suspect that there would be no need for MATE to exist. I personally find Xfce to support more of the customisations I personally want (such as a vertical taskbar with horizontal rows of components and controls) than MATE, or KDE come to that. Wayland, for me, delivers nothing I really want. I read about variable refresh rates, HiDPI support, smooth flicker-free animations and so on, but I don't actually want or need any of those things. I don't get flicker or tearing as it is, and X.11 does all I need: seamless multihead support with 3D acceleration, and so on. I frankly prefer a minimum of animations and fades and so on.