7 ms·

Wayland has lots of problems still, and it's been being worked since what 2008. That aside it gives similar vibes to systemd. Honestly, not a fan of these user

by anfilt 3y ago

Wayland has lots of problems still, and it's been being worked since what 2008. That aside it gives similar vibes to systemd. Honestly, not a fan of these userland utilities/systems that just throw everything into the kitchen sink. It really effects the modularity of things when suddenly things start depending on them. This not to say X does not have it's own problems and I even find it a bit on the monolithic side.

kaba0 3y ago
> That aside it gives similar vibes to systemd In that it solves a hard problem well? > not a fan of these userland utilities/systems that just throw everything into the kitchen sink So I guess you dislike Xorg, then, and prefer the much more “do one thing well” approach of Wayland? Wayland is a tiny protocol only, that builds on kernel APIs to manage buffers instead of reimplementing it in userspace and it’s implementations are much more easier to reason about than the truly monolithic XOrg - which included everything from printing to whatnot.
josephg 3y ago
That might be true, but I believe the Asahi Linux team when they say they don’t have time to properly support for both xorg and wayland. It’s their prerogative as opensource developers to decide what they spend their time working on. And generally I think it’s really healthy for everyone when developers boldly refuse to take on too much. The result is more focused work and less maintainer burnout. It also clears the way for someone else to pick up the slack. If xorg support on apple silicon is important to you, you’re welcome to spearhead that work yourself. Nobody else will do it. And at a risk of sounding rude, opensource isn’t a democracy. I don’t get a say in what you work on, and you don’t get a say in what the asahi linux team works on.
- anfilt 3y ago
  Never did I say what they should or shouldn't do. Having just tried giving wayland an other try last month for the heck of it and still noticing issues. I just found it surprising how blunt they are about this topic. I like to code and code even for fun, but I definitely do understand that people only have so much time to dedicate to something.
  - chris_wot 3y ago
    No more blunt than the Devuan guys.
- incrudible 3y ago
  Do they even have time to properly support Wayland? It is also fundamentally broken, just in different ways. It is the usual FOSS problem of mobody really being responsible for anything, and nobody owing anyone anything to boot. Add to that the unnecessary complications of making it a protocol from the beginning, instead of deriving a protocol from a succesful piece of software.
  - nine_k 3y ago
    It's a non-commercial open-source effort. In it, there are no "they" (as in say SQLite), there are only "us".
- nine_k 3y ago
  So, I suppose that instead of "Stop using X.org", we should read it "If you want to use X.org, please join us and help support it better".
  - afiori 3y ago
    I think it often is more like "We have issue supporting xorg, if you want us to support xorg it is on you to find a solution to our problems; we might support you but likely wont put our resources toward it"
bitwize 3y ago
Alyssa Rosenzweig probably forgot more about graphics on Linux than you (or I) will ever know. Everyone -- everyone -- with deep expertise on how graphics works has the same advice: Forget X. Use Wayland. Period. The X developers largely stopped developing X and put all their effort into Wayland. Wayland is the future. You can either be on that train or watch all your software bitrot as new software just stops supporting X.
- anfilt 3y ago
  Predicting the future is a hard thing. It could be the future or something else might pop up that becomes the new hotness. Having seen cycles like this over and over. Some project develops over decades which included many corner cases that need covered. It then becomes difficult to work with or adapt to some newer "things" (in this case modern gpus). So people start to look at making a new project "taking" the bits they deem in important or adopting a strategy to work better with those newer things. Then after many years the project in some aspects starts to resemble a state of what it replaced. Repeat... Now maybe I should have been a little more explicit I just kinda surprised how blunt the developers of this distro are being here. Having just decided to play around with wayland again just this last month and still noticing issues. I can see plenty of reasons why people would not want to switch just yet.
- josefx 3y ago
  > Alyssa Rosenzweig probably forgot more about graphics on Linux than you (or I) will ever know. I don't give a fuck about knowledge, I want a working system and Wayland has this misfeature that it has been declared "complete" long before any DE had the chance to reinvent the X APIs it dropped. > You can either be on that train or watch all your software bitrot as new software just stops supporting X. The question is what is it going to support instead? Wayland moved most of the X features into the hands of the desktop environments on one end and graphics drivers on the other end. The gigantic fuck up with NVIDIA compatibility was already a pain in the ass, do I even want to know how many GNOME and KDE versions (just to mention the big two) will need special treatment to make things work?
  - bitwize 3y ago
panick21_ 3y ago
You are making a categorical mistake. Things can be incredibly modular and depend on each other. In reality, the more modular something is the more dependable things are on each other. Tools before systemd also depended on each other. Systemd is plenty modular, its just managed in one project. Just like BSDs. So it is modular and depends the different parts depend on each other.
- anfilt 3y ago
  Compared to X, were your display server, window manager and compositor are generally distinct processes/components. This is not normally the case on wayland normally they are developed as one unit. Like consider gnome they decided to handle everything themselves. There are some wrappers/libraries that try to make developing some things separately at least easier such as wlroots. However, just considering wlroots this is not the only library probably (the most popular probably), but if you want to switch to using something else good luck. Also the wayland team definitely has opinions about certain things and that definitely rubs some people the wrong way, but more importantly this makes some things not as easily doable in wayland.
- AnonymousPlanet 3y ago
  The categorical mistake that underlies the issues here is much bigger actually. Linux took off because different people could work on parts of it independently. That is the case because the overall architecture is modular. You can rip out nearly any part and replace it with another one if it does not suit you. These parts were developed in different projects that could be agnositic towards other projects. If you increase dependencies on very specific parts of other projects, you stop being agnostic. You lose huge amounts of velocity and you lose potential developers because setting up your project and testing is now much more complicated. If the Linux world continues to make these mistakes, Linux development will not only slow down, we will see a lot of parts rotting away.
  - fsh 3y ago
    This couldn't be further from the truth. Linux is a monolith, and famously breaks internal interfaces all the time.
sureglymop 3y ago
Generally speaking I agree with you. However, in case of systemd I think it is very modular. I think we're at a point now where it's convenience and reliability outweigh the negatives. It also brings a certain common element to different distros, making it a bit easier for people new to Linux distributions. They don't have to hyperspecialize now.
- nine_k 3y ago
  Systemd has become reasonably good by now, 13 years after the release. Same with PulseAudio, now that it has been replaced by a sane implementation in Pipewire. BTRFS still sort of has rough edges, 14 years since initial release. Red Hat take their sweet time. Asahi Linux is way younger, moves way faster, and I hope they don't share the same mentality. Also, they are much smaller, and can't spread themselves too thin. If I were an Asahi user, and cared about X.org there, I'd seriously consider helping fix issues with it somehow.
LinAGKar 3y ago
>Honestly, not a fan of these userland utilities/systems that just throw everything into the kitchen sink. Then you should love Wayland, since it explicitly keeps its slope as small as possible, unlike X11. Hence why a bunch of stuff is done separately from Wayland, e.g. screen capture.
- megous 3y ago
  How would that even work separately from wayland compositor? Compositor either has to setup writeback if hardware supports it, or do the composition in software during capture, and provide the buffers to a recording app.

by anfilt 3y ago

kaba0 3y ago

> That aside it gives similar vibes to systemd In that it solves a hard problem well? > not a fan of these userland utilities/systems that just throw everything into the kitchen sink So I guess you dislike Xorg, then, and prefer the much more “do one thing well” approach of Wayland? Wayland is a tiny protocol only, that builds on kernel APIs to manage buffers instead of reimplementing it in userspace and it’s implementations are much more easier to reason about than the truly monolithic XOrg - which included everything from printing to whatnot.

josephg 3y ago

That might be true, but I believe the Asahi Linux team when they say they don’t have time to properly support for both xorg and wayland. It’s their prerogative as opensource developers to decide what they spend their time working on. And generally I think it’s really healthy for everyone when developers boldly refuse to take on too much. The result is more focused work and less maintainer burnout. It also clears the way for someone else to pick up the slack. If xorg support on apple silicon is important to you, you’re welcome to spearhead that work yourself. Nobody else will do it. And at a risk of sounding rude, opensource isn’t a democracy. I don’t get a say in what you work on, and you don’t get a say in what the asahi linux team works on.

anfilt 3y ago
Never did I say what they should or shouldn't do. Having just tried giving wayland an other try last month for the heck of it and still noticing issues. I just found it surprising how blunt they are about this topic. I like to code and code even for fun, but I definitely do understand that people only have so much time to dedicate to something.
- chris_wot 3y ago
  No more blunt than the Devuan guys.
incrudible 3y ago
Do they even have time to properly support Wayland? It is also fundamentally broken, just in different ways. It is the usual FOSS problem of mobody really being responsible for anything, and nobody owing anyone anything to boot. Add to that the unnecessary complications of making it a protocol from the beginning, instead of deriving a protocol from a succesful piece of software.
- nine_k 3y ago
  It's a non-commercial open-source effort. In it, there are no "they" (as in say SQLite), there are only "us".
nine_k 3y ago
So, I suppose that instead of "Stop using X.org", we should read it "If you want to use X.org, please join us and help support it better".
- afiori 3y ago
  I think it often is more like "We have issue supporting xorg, if you want us to support xorg it is on you to find a solution to our problems; we might support you but likely wont put our resources toward it"

bitwize 3y ago

Alyssa Rosenzweig probably forgot more about graphics on Linux than you (or I) will ever know. Everyone -- everyone -- with deep expertise on how graphics works has the same advice: Forget X. Use Wayland. Period. The X developers largely stopped developing X and put all their effort into Wayland. Wayland is the future. You can either be on that train or watch all your software bitrot as new software just stops supporting X.

anfilt 3y ago
Predicting the future is a hard thing. It could be the future or something else might pop up that becomes the new hotness. Having seen cycles like this over and over. Some project develops over decades which included many corner cases that need covered. It then becomes difficult to work with or adapt to some newer "things" (in this case modern gpus). So people start to look at making a new project "taking" the bits they deem in important or adopting a strategy to work better with those newer things. Then after many years the project in some aspects starts to resemble a state of what it replaced. Repeat... Now maybe I should have been a little more explicit I just kinda surprised how blunt the developers of this distro are being here. Having just decided to play around with wayland again just this last month and still noticing issues. I can see plenty of reasons why people would not want to switch just yet.
josefx 3y ago
> Alyssa Rosenzweig probably forgot more about graphics on Linux than you (or I) will ever know. I don't give a fuck about knowledge, I want a working system and Wayland has this misfeature that it has been declared "complete" long before any DE had the chance to reinvent the X APIs it dropped. > You can either be on that train or watch all your software bitrot as new software just stops supporting X. The question is what is it going to support instead? Wayland moved most of the X features into the hands of the desktop environments on one end and graphics drivers on the other end. The gigantic fuck up with NVIDIA compatibility was already a pain in the ass, do I even want to know how many GNOME and KDE versions (just to mention the big two) will need special treatment to make things work?
- bitwize 3y ago

panick21_ 3y ago

You are making a categorical mistake. Things can be incredibly modular and depend on each other. In reality, the more modular something is the more dependable things are on each other. Tools before systemd also depended on each other. Systemd is plenty modular, its just managed in one project. Just like BSDs. So it is modular and depends the different parts depend on each other.

anfilt 3y ago
Compared to X, were your display server, window manager and compositor are generally distinct processes/components. This is not normally the case on wayland normally they are developed as one unit. Like consider gnome they decided to handle everything themselves. There are some wrappers/libraries that try to make developing some things separately at least easier such as wlroots. However, just considering wlroots this is not the only library probably (the most popular probably), but if you want to switch to using something else good luck. Also the wayland team definitely has opinions about certain things and that definitely rubs some people the wrong way, but more importantly this makes some things not as easily doable in wayland.
AnonymousPlanet 3y ago
The categorical mistake that underlies the issues here is much bigger actually. Linux took off because different people could work on parts of it independently. That is the case because the overall architecture is modular. You can rip out nearly any part and replace it with another one if it does not suit you. These parts were developed in different projects that could be agnositic towards other projects. If you increase dependencies on very specific parts of other projects, you stop being agnostic. You lose huge amounts of velocity and you lose potential developers because setting up your project and testing is now much more complicated. If the Linux world continues to make these mistakes, Linux development will not only slow down, we will see a lot of parts rotting away.
- fsh 3y ago
  This couldn't be further from the truth. Linux is a monolith, and famously breaks internal interfaces all the time.

sureglymop 3y ago

Generally speaking I agree with you. However, in case of systemd I think it is very modular. I think we're at a point now where it's convenience and reliability outweigh the negatives. It also brings a certain common element to different distros, making it a bit easier for people new to Linux distributions. They don't have to hyperspecialize now.

nine_k 3y ago
Systemd has become reasonably good by now, 13 years after the release. Same with PulseAudio, now that it has been replaced by a sane implementation in Pipewire. BTRFS still sort of has rough edges, 14 years since initial release. Red Hat take their sweet time. Asahi Linux is way younger, moves way faster, and I hope they don't share the same mentality. Also, they are much smaller, and can't spread themselves too thin. If I were an Asahi user, and cared about X.org there, I'd seriously consider helping fix issues with it somehow.

LinAGKar 3y ago

>Honestly, not a fan of these userland utilities/systems that just throw everything into the kitchen sink. Then you should love Wayland, since it explicitly keeps its slope as small as possible, unlike X11. Hence why a bunch of stuff is done separately from Wayland, e.g. screen capture.

megous 3y ago
How would that even work separately from wayland compositor? Compositor either has to setup writeback if hardware supports it, or do the composition in software during capture, and provide the buffers to a recording app.