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I am an outside observer but in any discussion of Wayland I always see this article referenced: https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f22

by AJRF 3y ago

I am an outside observer but in any discussion of Wayland I always see this article referenced: https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277 https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... It seems like so much stuff is broken but the devs deny it is broken? And even with that situation - every major distro is making in roads to adopting it? Is that a fair characterisation or am I off the mark?

vetinari 3y ago
It not broken. The complains on the linked gist remind me complaining, how introducing protected memory broke applications. And you couldn't read or write i/o ports directly in our app anymore, you had to go through so-called kernel! So much bloat! So I put wayland is broken, because it doesn't allow what x11 did in the same way, ideally stomping on the others into the same category. For screenshots and capture, there's an API now (controlled, user is in the control, cannot be done behind his back. Scoped also, with granularity from window to desktop). For global shortcuts, there's an API in the making.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  > For global shortcuts, there's an API in the making. This is kind of the problem, though. X11's model of 'everything can access everything' is obviously bad, but when wayland went with a more restrictive model they didn't provide a means for legitimate functionality like this. That's basically the origin of all the objection: things that worked on X11 don't work on wayland, because wayland's developers seem to be very slow to recognise and provide for things which were extremely common on X11. It's been 14 years and the API for global shortcuts is still in the making! (And I know there's DE-specific interfaces for a lot of these things. But when you tell app developers this they're either going to implement it for their DE or not bother to implement it at all, as opposed to going through each DE and working it out, especially if it's more complex to support granular permissions and so on. So then users will see that app functionality breaks on wayland, and blame wayland, somewhat fairly)
  - vetinari 3y ago
    Things "worked" by the virtue of being able to snoop on everything and inject anything; which is exactly what is wrong about the approach. On the other hand, Rome wasn't built in a day either. You want to do it right, not quickly. The final solution will be there for decades, so it better be not drag on maintenance and further development. Especially one, where the requirements are not so clear (no, register random key combo by random client isn't going to be it).
    - mrighele 3y ago
      Snooping was just the mean, not the end. Nobody is asking to be able to do that, people ask to get the same result. When you add memory protection to a system you don't just say "you cannot have process communicate", you give them the tool to do it in a safe way. > You want to do it right, not quickly. You want to do it right in reasonable time, otherwise by the time it is done it is obsolete. Given the time it took to add basic functionality, I would say that the design is not a good one. In particular I suspect that the unstated premise was that everybody would be using Gnome by now, so that offloading to Gnome all of that functionality was a smart idea. Unfortunately people stubbornly continue to use the software that they like, so now we are in this situation. > The final solution will be there for decades There is no final solution, in 40 years the needs will be quite different that those of today, so it is not easy to satisfy both. You need an architecture that can evolve with the needs.
    - rcxdude 3y ago
      Sure, but you can understand why people are not so keen on moving to an unfinished system, then? Or at least one which has not yet reached parity with its predecessor for a large proportion of its users. Remember the excel effect: each feature which was previously implemented by snooping and injection may only have a small number of users, but there are many of them and most users will use at least one of them. If you want to replace a system and not have users hate you, you need to implement all the little fiddly bits as well: my personal example is krita, which is not supporting wayland until it has support for tablets and qt has support for that, as well as color management (these aren't even things which were insecure on X11!). So for the forseeable future an app I'm unwilling to abandon is not even looking to start with wayland support until wayland has sorted itself out, and then it looks like it'll take them a few years to actually deal with it. And so it grates when I hear 'why is anyone still on X11?'
zokier 3y ago
Wayland never was intended to be drop-in replacement for X11, so it's not surprising that it isn't. It's a much smaller scoped, lower level building block, which pushes more responsibility to DEs. It's not just different implementation, it's new model where the hows, whats, and wheres of desktop are getting re-evaluated.
WJW 3y ago
> every major distro is making in roads to adopting it? The question then becomes whether you believe every major distro is part of some giant conspiracy to kill X despite them being in competition with each other and having incentives to keep supporting X if users want it, or if X may indeed have severe problems that Wayland fixes. In practice most things run absolutely fine under both Wayland and X, but some programs integrated tightly with X back in the day and for various reasons they cannot be rewritten because the devs have moved on, died, or simply because there is no budget for it. Users of those programs are quite upset that the X developers have collectively decided that putting extra effort in X is no longer worth it because its problems are effectively unfixable.
- AJRF 3y ago
  I don't think it's that deep and never suggested a conspiracy.

by AJRF 3y ago

vetinari 3y ago

It not broken. The complains on the linked gist remind me complaining, how introducing protected memory broke applications. And you couldn't read or write i/o ports directly in our app anymore, you had to go through so-called kernel! So much bloat! So I put wayland is broken, because it doesn't allow what x11 did in the same way, ideally stomping on the others into the same category. For screenshots and capture, there's an API now (controlled, user is in the control, cannot be done behind his back. Scoped also, with granularity from window to desktop). For global shortcuts, there's an API in the making.

rcxdude 3y ago
> For global shortcuts, there's an API in the making. This is kind of the problem, though. X11's model of 'everything can access everything' is obviously bad, but when wayland went with a more restrictive model they didn't provide a means for legitimate functionality like this. That's basically the origin of all the objection: things that worked on X11 don't work on wayland, because wayland's developers seem to be very slow to recognise and provide for things which were extremely common on X11. It's been 14 years and the API for global shortcuts is still in the making! (And I know there's DE-specific interfaces for a lot of these things. But when you tell app developers this they're either going to implement it for their DE or not bother to implement it at all, as opposed to going through each DE and working it out, especially if it's more complex to support granular permissions and so on. So then users will see that app functionality breaks on wayland, and blame wayland, somewhat fairly)
- vetinari 3y ago
  Things "worked" by the virtue of being able to snoop on everything and inject anything; which is exactly what is wrong about the approach. On the other hand, Rome wasn't built in a day either. You want to do it right, not quickly. The final solution will be there for decades, so it better be not drag on maintenance and further development. Especially one, where the requirements are not so clear (no, register random key combo by random client isn't going to be it).
  - mrighele 3y ago
    Snooping was just the mean, not the end. Nobody is asking to be able to do that, people ask to get the same result. When you add memory protection to a system you don't just say "you cannot have process communicate", you give them the tool to do it in a safe way. > You want to do it right, not quickly. You want to do it right in reasonable time, otherwise by the time it is done it is obsolete. Given the time it took to add basic functionality, I would say that the design is not a good one. In particular I suspect that the unstated premise was that everybody would be using Gnome by now, so that offloading to Gnome all of that functionality was a smart idea. Unfortunately people stubbornly continue to use the software that they like, so now we are in this situation. > The final solution will be there for decades There is no final solution, in 40 years the needs will be quite different that those of today, so it is not easy to satisfy both. You need an architecture that can evolve with the needs.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    Sure, but you can understand why people are not so keen on moving to an unfinished system, then? Or at least one which has not yet reached parity with its predecessor for a large proportion of its users. Remember the excel effect: each feature which was previously implemented by snooping and injection may only have a small number of users, but there are many of them and most users will use at least one of them. If you want to replace a system and not have users hate you, you need to implement all the little fiddly bits as well: my personal example is krita, which is not supporting wayland until it has support for tablets and qt has support for that, as well as color management (these aren't even things which were insecure on X11!). So for the forseeable future an app I'm unwilling to abandon is not even looking to start with wayland support until wayland has sorted itself out, and then it looks like it'll take them a few years to actually deal with it. And so it grates when I hear 'why is anyone still on X11?'

zokier 3y ago

Wayland never was intended to be drop-in replacement for X11, so it's not surprising that it isn't. It's a much smaller scoped, lower level building block, which pushes more responsibility to DEs. It's not just different implementation, it's new model where the hows, whats, and wheres of desktop are getting re-evaluated.

WJW 3y ago

> every major distro is making in roads to adopting it? The question then becomes whether you believe every major distro is part of some giant conspiracy to kill X despite them being in competition with each other and having incentives to keep supporting X if users want it, or if X may indeed have severe problems that Wayland fixes. In practice most things run absolutely fine under both Wayland and X, but some programs integrated tightly with X back in the day and for various reasons they cannot be rewritten because the devs have moved on, died, or simply because there is no budget for it. Users of those programs are quite upset that the X developers have collectively decided that putting extra effort in X is no longer worth it because its problems are effectively unfixable.

AJRF 3y ago
I don't think it's that deep and never suggested a conspiracy.