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Alyssa Rosenzweig probably forgot more about graphics on Linux than you (or I) will ever know. Everyone -- everyone -- with deep expertise on how graphics work

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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
  The problem is, most of the people fulminating about X being deprecated know somewhere between jack and squat about how graphics actually works now and why X is holding us back due to the enormous impedance mismatch between it and modern graphics stacks. Those with expertise in this area have chosen Wayland. If Wayland isn't doing it for you, make it better. File bug reports, write some code. Just realize that there is an active, interested community surrounding Wayland, not so much for X anymore.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - josefx 4y ago
    And the people ranting about graphics forget that X is a lot more than that.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Wayland is not declared completed, it has versioned protocols. Anything deemed worthy enough and on which this bazaar style of governance can agree on will be added to a newer version/extension. Wayland implementations only depend on the kernel’s abstractions for video cards/buffers. Blame only NVIDIA that they were unable to support the kernel for so long. Xorg just had a hacked userspace support for nvidia cards via a binary proprietary patch — is that really the tooling you would want to use?
Shorel 4y ago
Dear future Wayland thingie: Stop closing all my apps if you have an error. Then I will consider using it. So far all the software I use runs in X.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  If X crashes or is killed it closes everything too
  - Shorel 4y ago
    No it doesn't, that's the point. The X server is restarted, my apps are still open.
  - incrudible 4y ago
    They must have never experienced Xorg crashing. Neither have I. That speaks for Xorg. It has been over a decade and I keep finding myself disabling Wayland still. That said, Linux is not my primary driver, I just can not be bothered.
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    Since 94 or 95 I've never seen it happen once, multiple different *nix no less. Even in the hand-edit modelines days, even then I never saw X itself crash if it started at all.
    - bitwize 4y ago
      I've seen it crash a few times, typically when I'm running a flaky video driver, like Matrox Millennium in the old days or nouveau more recently. Modern Windows, by contrast, knows how to restart a crashed video driver, without the clients even knowing anything has happened.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      So wayland implementations can also get to exactly this stability level with time. In fact, I don’t remember any crashes from the past 3 years from continuous usage.
megous 4y ago
X are just userland APIs/protocols. Wayland is also just another set of userland APIs/protocols. It's an implementation detail users don't care about. Users care about being able to complete tasks. For that they need good documentation, plenty of examples online, good availability of flexible software tools, and a good bonus is non-fragmented ecosystem for the basis of the system they're configuring/extending ... Wayland compositor kitchen sink approach is kinda working against easy adoption here. It's like now there are 8 different Xorg servers each with different bugs protocol feature support, configuration mechanisms, and driver compatibility issues.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Welcome to the bazaar vs cathedral. Linux doesn’t have a cathedral, and none of its benefits/disadvantages either. One “benefit” of the cathedral approach would be dictatorial control of the project, which could share resources better - apple can just say that this framework/whatever is deprecated in the next version and that’s it. Linux’s model is nothing like that.

anfilt 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
The problem is, most of the people fulminating about X being deprecated know somewhere between jack and squat about how graphics actually works now and why X is holding us back due to the enormous impedance mismatch between it and modern graphics stacks. Those with expertise in this area have chosen Wayland. If Wayland isn't doing it for you, make it better. File bug reports, write some code. Just realize that there is an active, interested community surrounding Wayland, not so much for X anymore.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- josefx 4y ago
  And the people ranting about graphics forget that X is a lot more than that.
kaba0 4y ago
Wayland is not declared completed, it has versioned protocols. Anything deemed worthy enough and on which this bazaar style of governance can agree on will be added to a newer version/extension. Wayland implementations only depend on the kernel’s abstractions for video cards/buffers. Blame only NVIDIA that they were unable to support the kernel for so long. Xorg just had a hacked userspace support for nvidia cards via a binary proprietary patch — is that really the tooling you would want to use?

Shorel 4y ago

Dear future Wayland thingie: Stop closing all my apps if you have an error. Then I will consider using it. So far all the software I use runs in X.

charcircuit 4y ago
If X crashes or is killed it closes everything too
- Shorel 4y ago
  No it doesn't, that's the point. The X server is restarted, my apps are still open.
- incrudible 4y ago
  They must have never experienced Xorg crashing. Neither have I. That speaks for Xorg. It has been over a decade and I keep finding myself disabling Wayland still. That said, Linux is not my primary driver, I just can not be bothered.
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  Since 94 or 95 I've never seen it happen once, multiple different *nix no less. Even in the hand-edit modelines days, even then I never saw X itself crash if it started at all.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    I've seen it crash a few times, typically when I'm running a flaky video driver, like Matrox Millennium in the old days or nouveau more recently. Modern Windows, by contrast, knows how to restart a crashed video driver, without the clients even knowing anything has happened.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    So wayland implementations can also get to exactly this stability level with time. In fact, I don’t remember any crashes from the past 3 years from continuous usage.

megous 4y ago

X are just userland APIs/protocols. Wayland is also just another set of userland APIs/protocols. It's an implementation detail users don't care about. Users care about being able to complete tasks. For that they need good documentation, plenty of examples online, good availability of flexible software tools, and a good bonus is non-fragmented ecosystem for the basis of the system they're configuring/extending ... Wayland compositor kitchen sink approach is kinda working against easy adoption here. It's like now there are 8 different Xorg servers each with different bugs protocol feature support, configuration mechanisms, and driver compatibility issues.

kaba0 4y ago
Welcome to the bazaar vs cathedral. Linux doesn’t have a cathedral, and none of its benefits/disadvantages either. One “benefit” of the cathedral approach would be dictatorial control of the project, which could share resources better - apple can just say that this framework/whatever is deprecated in the next version and that’s it. Linux’s model is nothing like that.