4 ms·

can someone explain what is going on here? i know what wine is, it's a thing that lets you play windows games on linux or macos, but what is wayland?

Topgamer7 4y ago
Linux gui applications historically have used X11 for desktop window management (think how your windows layer on top of each other). Wayland is a new ecosystem that aims to take over for X11 (as X11 was developed in mind with a lot of functionality that many do not care about, and just want a desktop environment). But it's a controversial effort, and Wayland still doesn't support a lot of the functionality even from the desktop perspective. Wine is not something that lets you (just) play games, it is effectively a re-implementation of windows low level apis, on top of linux. It lets you call the dlls, and kernel functions, effectively running windows applications in linux. The wine community is opinionated, and effectively weren't going to support Wayland; because it has some shortcomings in terms of api surface or ways that wayland handles things. Someone decided to try to support wayland anyway.
- kaba0 4y ago
  > X11 for desktop window management (think how your windows layer on top of each other) That’s not really the primary job of these protocols - they are primarily about interfacing with GUI apps and displaying their content — compositing those contents on top of each other in one way or another is the job of a window manager, which can be in-built, or separate from the display server. > Wayland still doesn't support a lot of the functionality even from the desktop perspective This has been less and less true. Plenty, or even most distros ship with wayland by default and people don’t even realize it. Under gnome which is arguably the most complete implementation I really have a hard time listing things that don’t work.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  It’s less a shortcoming of the wayland api, and more that they didn’t want to implement bad ideas in the protocol with the only use case being windows api compatibility.
jrm4 4y ago
Honestly, most people shouldn't even much have to know what Wayland is, and the fact that we're even talking about it is a testament to how badly it was done. It's the thing that makes graphics on the screen, i.e. why you're not looking at a terminal. For some reason, the decision was made to drastically revamp it in such a way that trying to switch caused a lot of problems. This is like a TEN YEAR OLD deal.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  These days it’s pretty much done and finished. Xwayland works fairly well to the point you almost couldn’t tell. The only issue with wayland usage currently is apps in the xwayland compatibility layer are lacking the new features wayland adds like dpi scaling across screens. I’m very happy that wayland + pipewire + flatpak now gives us basic security practices like apps having to ask permission to record the mic/screen/webcam vs the state of things in X where being able to draw a window also grants full access to everything.
  - jrm4 4y ago
    Mostly fail to see the value in the specific thing you're saying; essentially this is the sort of thing that e.g. free/open source ought to take care of regardless. As in, this is "taken care of" when you agree to install the application; is there any serious reason to believe that security against an "installed application" from a repo benefits from this rather fine grained permission as opposed to what is already in place? And of course the real issue is usually just "the web browser" which, hey, all bets are off.

Topgamer7 4y ago

Linux gui applications historically have used X11 for desktop window management (think how your windows layer on top of each other). Wayland is a new ecosystem that aims to take over for X11 (as X11 was developed in mind with a lot of functionality that many do not care about, and just want a desktop environment). But it's a controversial effort, and Wayland still doesn't support a lot of the functionality even from the desktop perspective. Wine is not something that lets you (just) play games, it is effectively a re-implementation of windows low level apis, on top of linux. It lets you call the dlls, and kernel functions, effectively running windows applications in linux. The wine community is opinionated, and effectively weren't going to support Wayland; because it has some shortcomings in terms of api surface or ways that wayland handles things. Someone decided to try to support wayland anyway.

kaba0 4y ago
> X11 for desktop window management (think how your windows layer on top of each other) That’s not really the primary job of these protocols - they are primarily about interfacing with GUI apps and displaying their content — compositing those contents on top of each other in one way or another is the job of a window manager, which can be in-built, or separate from the display server. > Wayland still doesn't support a lot of the functionality even from the desktop perspective This has been less and less true. Plenty, or even most distros ship with wayland by default and people don’t even realize it. Under gnome which is arguably the most complete implementation I really have a hard time listing things that don’t work.
Gigachad 4y ago
It’s less a shortcoming of the wayland api, and more that they didn’t want to implement bad ideas in the protocol with the only use case being windows api compatibility.

jrm4 4y ago

Honestly, most people shouldn't even much have to know what Wayland is, and the fact that we're even talking about it is a testament to how badly it was done. It's the thing that makes graphics on the screen, i.e. why you're not looking at a terminal. For some reason, the decision was made to drastically revamp it in such a way that trying to switch caused a lot of problems. This is like a TEN YEAR OLD deal.

Gigachad 4y ago
These days it’s pretty much done and finished. Xwayland works fairly well to the point you almost couldn’t tell. The only issue with wayland usage currently is apps in the xwayland compatibility layer are lacking the new features wayland adds like dpi scaling across screens. I’m very happy that wayland + pipewire + flatpak now gives us basic security practices like apps having to ask permission to record the mic/screen/webcam vs the state of things in X where being able to draw a window also grants full access to everything.
- jrm4 4y ago
  Mostly fail to see the value in the specific thing you're saying; essentially this is the sort of thing that e.g. free/open source ought to take care of regardless. As in, this is "taken care of" when you agree to install the application; is there any serious reason to believe that security against an "installed application" from a repo benefits from this rather fine grained permission as opposed to what is already in place? And of course the real issue is usually just "the web browser" which, hey, all bets are off.