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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, R

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 You want to do it right in reasonable time, otherwise by the time it is done it is obsolete.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?'
- vetinari 3y ago
  It is never finished; there's always something missing. It took X almost 4 decades to get where it is and during the ride it was abandoned as a mess. It was never finished either. We see also arguing that something is missing, while it was there for years (like screenshots and capture), or nitpicking on global shortcuts. Global shortcuts are so incredibly long tail feature, so pointing it out is actually a a good thing. It means that Wayland is already here and nobody can find anything better or more important to point out (if it were up to me, I would agree with you on color management, but that is something that X never really had). App support is something entirely different; apps like Krita can run under Xwayland just fine and transition on their own schedule.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    The "it's actually already there" effect is usually either one of two things: either poor communication, or poor rollout of actual support amongst apps. Both of those are hindered by a slow standardisation process. And I do wonder what makes you think global shortcuts are a long-tail feature: they're extremely commonly used! And app support is 100% key: it doesn't matter if wayland supports something if the apps don't actually use 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?'

vetinari 3y ago
It is never finished; there's always something missing. It took X almost 4 decades to get where it is and during the ride it was abandoned as a mess. It was never finished either. We see also arguing that something is missing, while it was there for years (like screenshots and capture), or nitpicking on global shortcuts. Global shortcuts are so incredibly long tail feature, so pointing it out is actually a a good thing. It means that Wayland is already here and nobody can find anything better or more important to point out (if it were up to me, I would agree with you on color management, but that is something that X never really had). App support is something entirely different; apps like Krita can run under Xwayland just fine and transition on their own schedule.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  The "it's actually already there" effect is usually either one of two things: either poor communication, or poor rollout of actual support amongst apps. Both of those are hindered by a slow standardisation process. And I do wonder what makes you think global shortcuts are a long-tail feature: they're extremely commonly used! And app support is 100% key: it doesn't matter if wayland supports something if the apps don't actually use it!