3 ms·

What you are seeing is a change in culture. X11 was very much a "everything is a work-in-progress" culture. Experiments were fine, clients and servers could su

What you are seeing is a change in culture. X11 was very much a "everything is a work-in-progress" culture. Experiments were fine, clients and servers could support whatever they wanted, etc, etc. Wayland is an "opinionated" culture. Everything the core devs don't like is not allowed. Everything HAS to fit into the "every frame is perfect" mantra. Which is ridiculous over-engineering and disallows a large number of perfectly acceptable (to end users) use-cases.

teawrecks 4y ago
It's not worth driving away the vast majority of potential end users to cater to a small number of hackers through, even if the hackers were there first. When it comes to wide appeal, linux suffers from paradox of choice on multiple levels. But there are a huge number of people who want the stability of windows/mac/etc without the violation of privacy, as long as they don't have to spend ANY time configuring their system to keep it working. To them, just like fixing their car, that's someone else' job/hobby that they don't have time for or get any enjoyment from. I don't see any reason why Linux can't offer that experience, but only if we have a windowing stack that is very opinionated about the user experience. Maybe it's time for an X12, but the Valves out there trying to make a competitive experience on linux for consumers will be dumping their money into Wayland.
Arnavion 4y ago
>Wayland is an "opinionated" culture. Everything the core devs don't like is not allowed. False. If your use case is so important nothing prevents you from making your own protocol and implementing client and compositor support for it. It's exactly the same as X. (Note for those unfamiliar: I'm not saying "make a replacement for Wayland". Wayland is a collection of protocols that define one or more objects and the formats of their requests / responses / events. Showing windows is part of the xdg-shell protocol, etc.)
- grandinj 4y ago
  yes, technically you can do that. But if you actually want to __use__ your extension/protocol with someone else, it needs to get accepted into various core libs and repositories. ....And then the gatekeepers step up and your problems start.
  - Arnavion 4y ago
    I already said: >>and implementing client and compositor support for it. It's exactly the same as X. And if you think the GNOME and KDE and wlroots maintainers are all in some grand conspiracy, you are either very naively mistaken or just being toxic. Given you discarded a whole body of work as "ridiculously over-engineered" while contributing nothing except whinging, I'm inclined towards the latter. Feel free to fork even one compositor and one client program to implement your amazing protocol.
    - grandinj 4y ago
      > I already said: > >>and implementing client and compositor support for it. It's exactly the same as X. Not quite the same. X11 (notably the xfree86 project which maintained things for the last decade or so), was always quite free-wheeling about allowing things. They subscribed to something similar to the linux kernels approach of "mechanism, not policy". No, I don't think there is any conspiracy. Nor do I think they are bad people. Nor do I think the whole thing is over-engineered. It's mostly pretty impressive.
kaba0 4y ago
Lol, that’s like the worst take ever. Wayland was literally made with the explicit intent of providing extensions and they are a core part of the protocol — a client app is free to query the available protocols with versions, while there was nothing similar to that under X. And really, “every frame is perfect” of a display manager managing.. frames is somehow strange? Would it be strange for a video player as well?
- grandinj 4y ago
  X11 has always had extensions. Every frame is perfect requires extreme amounts of coordination. Frequently multiple buffering, which increases latency and increases latency. All these are costs which most use-cases don't care about. Under normal conditions, with display managers that don't care, frames are extremely rarely "not perfect". And when they aren't perfect they are seldom "not perfect" for more than a single frame. This is a fine example of "the perfect is the enemy of the good"
  - kaba0 4y ago
    The reason they are often “perfect” under X is that you are quite likely to be using a compositor which adds the exact same latency, if not more (due to then Xserver itself being a useless middlemen only). Did you try viewing a full screen video on X without a compositor? Even though today’s video hardware is indeed fast enough to mask it more often than not, display technology also requires more and more resources — I am sure you will find plenty of tearing at larger than 1080p resolution and higher framerate. And come on, how is it extreme amounts of coordination? That’s like the most basic coordination there is. Especially that it can be circumvented in the rare case it is not needed — e.g. game windows in full screen can render at their heart’s content.
- account42 4y ago
  > a client app is free to query the available protocols with versions, while there was nothing similar to that under X. Wat. https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/man/man3/XQueryExtension.3.html https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/man/man3/XQueryExtens... X is full of extensions. Even extensions that the server does not need to worry about, e.g. EWMH [0] because the protocol is flexible enough to support that. [0] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-1.3.html https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-1.3.h...

teawrecks 4y ago

It's not worth driving away the vast majority of potential end users to cater to a small number of hackers through, even if the hackers were there first. When it comes to wide appeal, linux suffers from paradox of choice on multiple levels. But there are a huge number of people who want the stability of windows/mac/etc without the violation of privacy, as long as they don't have to spend ANY time configuring their system to keep it working. To them, just like fixing their car, that's someone else' job/hobby that they don't have time for or get any enjoyment from. I don't see any reason why Linux can't offer that experience, but only if we have a windowing stack that is very opinionated about the user experience. Maybe it's time for an X12, but the Valves out there trying to make a competitive experience on linux for consumers will be dumping their money into Wayland.

Arnavion 4y ago

>Wayland is an "opinionated" culture. Everything the core devs don't like is not allowed. False. If your use case is so important nothing prevents you from making your own protocol and implementing client and compositor support for it. It's exactly the same as X. (Note for those unfamiliar: I'm not saying "make a replacement for Wayland". Wayland is a collection of protocols that define one or more objects and the formats of their requests / responses / events. Showing windows is part of the xdg-shell protocol, etc.)

grandinj 4y ago
yes, technically you can do that. But if you actually want to __use__ your extension/protocol with someone else, it needs to get accepted into various core libs and repositories. ....And then the gatekeepers step up and your problems start.
- Arnavion 4y ago
  I already said: >>and implementing client and compositor support for it. It's exactly the same as X. And if you think the GNOME and KDE and wlroots maintainers are all in some grand conspiracy, you are either very naively mistaken or just being toxic. Given you discarded a whole body of work as "ridiculously over-engineered" while contributing nothing except whinging, I'm inclined towards the latter. Feel free to fork even one compositor and one client program to implement your amazing protocol.
  - grandinj 4y ago
    > I already said: > >>and implementing client and compositor support for it. It's exactly the same as X. Not quite the same. X11 (notably the xfree86 project which maintained things for the last decade or so), was always quite free-wheeling about allowing things. They subscribed to something similar to the linux kernels approach of "mechanism, not policy". No, I don't think there is any conspiracy. Nor do I think they are bad people. Nor do I think the whole thing is over-engineered. It's mostly pretty impressive.

kaba0 4y ago

Lol, that’s like the worst take ever. Wayland was literally made with the explicit intent of providing extensions and they are a core part of the protocol — a client app is free to query the available protocols with versions, while there was nothing similar to that under X. And really, “every frame is perfect” of a display manager managing.. frames is somehow strange? Would it be strange for a video player as well?

grandinj 4y ago
X11 has always had extensions. Every frame is perfect requires extreme amounts of coordination. Frequently multiple buffering, which increases latency and increases latency. All these are costs which most use-cases don't care about. Under normal conditions, with display managers that don't care, frames are extremely rarely "not perfect". And when they aren't perfect they are seldom "not perfect" for more than a single frame. This is a fine example of "the perfect is the enemy of the good"
- kaba0 4y ago
  The reason they are often “perfect” under X is that you are quite likely to be using a compositor which adds the exact same latency, if not more (due to then Xserver itself being a useless middlemen only). Did you try viewing a full screen video on X without a compositor? Even though today’s video hardware is indeed fast enough to mask it more often than not, display technology also requires more and more resources — I am sure you will find plenty of tearing at larger than 1080p resolution and higher framerate. And come on, how is it extreme amounts of coordination? That’s like the most basic coordination there is. Especially that it can be circumvented in the rare case it is not needed — e.g. game windows in full screen can render at their heart’s content.
account42 4y ago
> a client app is free to query the available protocols with versions, while there was nothing similar to that under X. Wat. https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/man/man3/XQueryExtension.3.html https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/man/man3/XQueryExtens... X is full of extensions. Even extensions that the server does not need to worry about, e.g. EWMH [0] because the protocol is flexible enough to support that. [0] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-1.3.html https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-1.3.h...