5 ms·

I don't know much about the whole space, but from what I've read so far about Wayland, it starts to feel a lot like yet another "perpetual next-gen" tech, such

by xg15 4y ago

I don't know much about the whole space, but from what I've read so far about Wayland, it starts to feel a lot like yet another "perpetual next-gen" tech, such as IPv6, fuel cells, the Semantic Web or XHTML2 (before that one was officially declared dead at least). Like, according to the linked article, the standard is out there since 2008 - so the adoption period is already 14 years! And people are still haggling about basic stuff like color management, mouse cursors and window decorations? What exactly is the envisioned timeframe for Wayland to replace X11 as the dominant windowing system? If the standard has been promoted as the obvious next step for linux desktop environments for 14 years but still hasn't actually caught on, are we sure it really is the right direction to go?

hollerith 4y ago
I cannot say for sure that it is true, but I read (about a year ago) that about 90% of Linux users are already on Wayland. I tend to believe it because I've seen news reports as of 3 years ago saying that Xserver is no longer being maintained. The change from Xserver to an arrangement using Wayland is transparent to the Linux user (and Linux admin) and I heard that most of the major distros made the transition a few years ago. A corollary of that, if it is true, is that some of the many Linux users appearing on this site to attack Wayland are in fact (unknown to themselves) using Wayland. Specifically, the "display server" (terminology? I mean the software that talks to the graphics driver and the graphics hardware) on most distros these days uses the Wayland protocol to talk to apps. An app that have not been modified to use the Wayland protocol to talk to the display server is automatically given a "connection" (terminology?) to XWayland, whose job is to translate the X protocol to the Wayland protocol. I think `printenv XDG_SESSION_TYPE` will tell you whether you are running Wayland or the deprecated Xserver. The OP begins, "Recently we have been working on native Wayland support on Linux." What that means is that the blender app no longer needs XWayland: it can talk directly to the display server (using the Wayland protocol). There are certain advantages to that: one advantage is that you can configure all the UI elements on your screen to be scaled by an arbitrary factor without everything getting blurry. I'm using the latest MacOS to make this comment, but for over a year until a few weeks ago, I was using Linux for all my computing needs, and I went out of my way to run only apps that used the Wayland protocol to talk to the display server (because of the aforementioned ability to scale the UI without blurriness). Chrome had to be started with certain flags for it to use the Wayland protocol. To induce Emacs to speak Wayland, I had to use a special branch of the git source repo, called feature/pgtk.
- NonNefarious 4y ago
- westurner 4y ago
  Do you think Apple will ever contribute XQuartz back to the X11 / X.org open source community?
  - erincandescent 4y ago
    XQuartz has been a part of X.Org since forever https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/tree/master/hw/xquartz https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/tree/master/hw...
- throwaway09223 4y ago
  There are still a ton of bugs in Wayland, though. In particular that I noticed in the last year or so: Screensharing specific windows with zoom does not work correctly on Wayland. It only works on xorg. https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/6634039380877-Sharing-your-screen-on-Wayland https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/6634039380877-Shar... I agree a ton of people are using it without knowing, ever since it became the default option on most distros. But sharing windows in zoom is a must-have for me, so I'm still running good old xorg (and without any trouble, I might add)
  - kaba0 4y ago
    It sounds like a bug in zoom, if anything. It does work with web tech (e.g. using it from discord in a browser), so the problem is entirely with zoom bundling an older/not built with the necessary flags browser.
    - throwaway09223 4y ago
      For sure, it's an integration issue. I'm not primarily a graphics guy so I can't assign fault -- all I know is that it's the single issue that has kept me from adopting Wayland back when the defaults switched over.
LukeShu 4y ago
> Like, according to the linked article, the standard is out there since 2008 - so the adoption period is already 14 years! 2008 is when the project started. In 2012 it was sorta-usable as a new weird experimental thing, but it was absolutely not even trying for adoption yet. The first distro to make Wayland the default was Fedora 25 in 2016. So the adoption period is 6 years, not 14.
- mrighele 4y ago
  > 2008 is when the project started. In 2012 it was sorta-usable as a new weird experimental thing Four years to get out an experimental sorta usable thing seems a huge amount of time to me. Even more so if you think that many basic things (drag and drop, screenshots, ...) came years later.
  - LukeShu 4y ago
    What? 4 years to get from "I think I'm going to rethink the entire GNU/Linux graphics stack" to "usable" is amazing, especially if you consider the GPU-drivers work that was involved. And to be clear: A big part of only being "sorta" usable isn't anything to do with itself, it's that so little other software had been ported to it.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    That’s just inherent in bazaar-style of development. There is no cathedral to demand that from now on we go with this.

by xg15 4y ago

hollerith 4y ago

I cannot say for sure that it is true, but I read (about a year ago) that about 90% of Linux users are already on Wayland. I tend to believe it because I've seen news reports as of 3 years ago saying that Xserver is no longer being maintained. The change from Xserver to an arrangement using Wayland is transparent to the Linux user (and Linux admin) and I heard that most of the major distros made the transition a few years ago. A corollary of that, if it is true, is that some of the many Linux users appearing on this site to attack Wayland are in fact (unknown to themselves) using Wayland. Specifically, the "display server" (terminology? I mean the software that talks to the graphics driver and the graphics hardware) on most distros these days uses the Wayland protocol to talk to apps. An app that have not been modified to use the Wayland protocol to talk to the display server is automatically given a "connection" (terminology?) to XWayland, whose job is to translate the X protocol to the Wayland protocol. I think `printenv XDG_SESSION_TYPE` will tell you whether you are running Wayland or the deprecated Xserver. The OP begins, "Recently we have been working on native Wayland support on Linux." What that means is that the blender app no longer needs XWayland: it can talk directly to the display server (using the Wayland protocol). There are certain advantages to that: one advantage is that you can configure all the UI elements on your screen to be scaled by an arbitrary factor without everything getting blurry. I'm using the latest MacOS to make this comment, but for over a year until a few weeks ago, I was using Linux for all my computing needs, and I went out of my way to run only apps that used the Wayland protocol to talk to the display server (because of the aforementioned ability to scale the UI without blurriness). Chrome had to be started with certain flags for it to use the Wayland protocol. To induce Emacs to speak Wayland, I had to use a special branch of the git source repo, called feature/pgtk.

NonNefarious 4y ago
westurner 4y ago
Do you think Apple will ever contribute XQuartz back to the X11 / X.org open source community?
- erincandescent 4y ago
  XQuartz has been a part of X.Org since forever https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/tree/master/hw/xquartz https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/tree/master/hw...
throwaway09223 4y ago
There are still a ton of bugs in Wayland, though. In particular that I noticed in the last year or so: Screensharing specific windows with zoom does not work correctly on Wayland. It only works on xorg. https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/6634039380877-Sharing-your-screen-on-Wayland https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/6634039380877-Shar... I agree a ton of people are using it without knowing, ever since it became the default option on most distros. But sharing windows in zoom is a must-have for me, so I'm still running good old xorg (and without any trouble, I might add)
- kaba0 4y ago
  It sounds like a bug in zoom, if anything. It does work with web tech (e.g. using it from discord in a browser), so the problem is entirely with zoom bundling an older/not built with the necessary flags browser.
  - throwaway09223 4y ago
    For sure, it's an integration issue. I'm not primarily a graphics guy so I can't assign fault -- all I know is that it's the single issue that has kept me from adopting Wayland back when the defaults switched over.

LukeShu 4y ago

> Like, according to the linked article, the standard is out there since 2008 - so the adoption period is already 14 years! 2008 is when the project started. In 2012 it was sorta-usable as a new weird experimental thing, but it was absolutely not even trying for adoption yet. The first distro to make Wayland the default was Fedora 25 in 2016. So the adoption period is 6 years, not 14.

mrighele 4y ago
> 2008 is when the project started. In 2012 it was sorta-usable as a new weird experimental thing Four years to get out an experimental sorta usable thing seems a huge amount of time to me. Even more so if you think that many basic things (drag and drop, screenshots, ...) came years later.
- LukeShu 4y ago
  What? 4 years to get from "I think I'm going to rethink the entire GNU/Linux graphics stack" to "usable" is amazing, especially if you consider the GPU-drivers work that was involved. And to be clear: A big part of only being "sorta" usable isn't anything to do with itself, it's that so little other software had been ported to it.
- kaba0 4y ago
  That’s just inherent in bazaar-style of development. There is no cathedral to demand that from now on we go with this.