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Wayland protocol will celebrate its 15th birthday later this month. TFA is great news, but something isn't right here. I really start to think that the X11->W

Wayland protocol will celebrate its 15th birthday later this month. TFA is great news, but something isn't right here. I really start to think that the X11->Wayland migration is a bigger clusterfuck than Python2->3 was - even if we consider that a compositor migration is much bigger task than Python migration.

School-Cotton 3y ago
Python 3 at least worked immediately. Wayland still has tons of issues.
- j16sdiz 3y ago
  For GNOME user, it is starting to become usable recently Not so luck for non-GNOME user
  - gryn 3y ago
    Wayland on sway has been a smooth sailing for me, the only thing that made be go back was barriers KVM not working and not finding an open source alternative that works for both Linux and windows.
  - bogwog 3y ago
    I’ve been using it with KDE on my laptop and desktop (which has an Nvidia GPU). The laptop is flawless, and the desktop only has minor issues with display configuration (order and/or resolution) getting messed up sometimes when waking from sleep. I’m pretty sure that’s an Nvidia driver bug. Anyways, it is 100% usable. To say otherwise suggests you haven’t actually tried using it within the past 2 years (at least)
    - coderedart 3y ago
      > Anyways, it is 100% usable. To say otherwise suggests you haven’t actually tried using it within the past 2 years (at least) IDK why, but the way you say it really annoys me. Like disregarding people's experiences because you have not faced the same issues. Anyway, I try to shift to plasma wayland atleast every month. But there's always these weird graphical issues on nvidia (desktop) that ruin my experience, so i switch back to my x11 session. Even KDE has a page detailing the various problems in wayland https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  Lots of libraries were missing or broken for Python 3 for many years. If anything, it was far less usable than Wayland.
  - apelapan 3y ago
    My experience was that Python3 became a meaningful upgrade over Python2 around the 3.5 release. That was less than seven years of transition! I've been happy with Wayland for most of my Linux desktopping since 2018, so that was a ten year transition from first release to full adoption on my part.
    - dontlaugh 3y ago
      It depends on your constraints. I remember still not being able to transition some projects well after 3.7 was released.
      - apelapan 3y ago
        Of course, there is a long tail of things that can't/won't migrate. I still see Python2.7 production code on a semi-regular basis (not network exposed, but very much at the core of critical business processes of major enterprises). And I'm sure we'll have X11 desktops around for various purposes ten years from now.
- the8472 3y ago
  Wayland has a pretty deep issue that loss of the compositor socket is treated as fatal and kills the client application. And when the IPC socket buffer is full that's leads to a close (so it is one of those fatal errors). So any latency spike in the event loop of the client process can lead to a process kill. The GTK implementation even calls _exit() which means atexit handlers won't trigger and save-on-exit or crash reporters won't run. So with wayland lag gets "upgraded" to hard process kills. That's a pretty crazy design choice. X11 handles momentarily unresponsive processes far more gracefully. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/159 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/159 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144
  - Arnavion 3y ago
    This is not a wayland (the protocol) issue. It's a client issue. In fact Qt6 was recently in the news here for having fixed it in their client code, by simply reconnecting when the wayland socket closes instead of crashing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37480331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37480331 (Their main justification is to be resilient to server restarts, but from the client's perspective the two are the same.) You're welcome to try and convince GTK devs to do the same.
  - twic 3y ago
    Wayland is like systemd all over again. We had something ancient and crufty which just about worked, but was a genuine obstacle to progress. A group of crazy people got together and designed a replacement. Everyone else pointed out that the design was crazy. The designers carried on anyway. And now the crazy project is the only game in town.
    - uecker 3y ago
      Well perceived as ancient and crufty. I do not think there is any genuine obstacle to progress. But the thing is not just that some crazy people got together and implemented something we could all use or not, the problem with both systemd and Wayland is that it comes with all the propaganda that this is the future and nothing else, that everything else is "ancient and crufty", "unfixable", and "broken". This is clearly meant to demoralize everybody interested in alternatives. For example, there was no really good reason for Debian to force the systemd decision. That an entire distribution spawned from frustration about this decision clearly shows that there is enough interest and man power to maintain alternatives. Let's hope some people step up for X as well.
esarbe 3y ago
Wayland is more than a compositor protocol. It's a whole suite of replacement protocols for all the functionality that X used to offer. And it takes time to replace an established protocol. Especially when you need to provide a feature-complete fallback for all the applications that are never going to do the switch. For me that transition has been pain free. First I heard that X is going to be retired, then I saw some development note popping up here and there and then one day I was offered to log in to a Wayland session instead of a X session. I never experienced any problems I could directly attribute to Wayland. I don't know why Wayland gets so much hate. To me it feels very much like the systemd hate: I don't know why this needs to change; I was happy after all. I don't want to learn about a new thing, so I'm angry.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > I don't know why Wayland gets so much hate. To me it feels very much like the systemd hate: I don't know why this needs to change; I was happy after all. I don't want to learn about a new thing, so I'm angry. Yes, it's a very similar situation; in both cases people are really fond of pretending that the only reason you could possibly object is that you hate change just because, while ignoring the actual regressions that it's causing. For instance, Wayland does not support (and probably never will support) some accessibility tools that make my life much easier (because the desktop must be secured against programmatic manipulation).
  - uecker 3y ago
    I use X remoting every day. Being told that I do not need it and it would not work anyway, is what makes me angry. Then I hate that decades of protocol compatibility are broken, which i think is sad and stupid. Finally, I saw people had issues with Wayland (screen sharing etc). Then - after 15 years of development - being somewhat usable also does not convince me that it is so much simpler because of an superior design. Regarding design, I think the monolithic design is inferior. Finally, I never found the technical arguments terrible convincing (such as that an unused old line drawing API in X somehow holds modern clients back - obviously this is BS.).
  - esarbe 3y ago

School-Cotton 3y ago

Python 3 at least worked immediately. Wayland still has tons of issues.

j16sdiz 3y ago
For GNOME user, it is starting to become usable recently Not so luck for non-GNOME user
- gryn 3y ago
  Wayland on sway has been a smooth sailing for me, the only thing that made be go back was barriers KVM not working and not finding an open source alternative that works for both Linux and windows.
- bogwog 3y ago
  I’ve been using it with KDE on my laptop and desktop (which has an Nvidia GPU). The laptop is flawless, and the desktop only has minor issues with display configuration (order and/or resolution) getting messed up sometimes when waking from sleep. I’m pretty sure that’s an Nvidia driver bug. Anyways, it is 100% usable. To say otherwise suggests you haven’t actually tried using it within the past 2 years (at least)
  - coderedart 3y ago
    > Anyways, it is 100% usable. To say otherwise suggests you haven’t actually tried using it within the past 2 years (at least) IDK why, but the way you say it really annoys me. Like disregarding people's experiences because you have not faced the same issues. Anyway, I try to shift to plasma wayland atleast every month. But there's always these weird graphical issues on nvidia (desktop) that ruin my experience, so i switch back to my x11 session. Even KDE has a page detailing the various problems in wayland https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers
dontlaugh 3y ago
Lots of libraries were missing or broken for Python 3 for many years. If anything, it was far less usable than Wayland.
- apelapan 3y ago
  My experience was that Python3 became a meaningful upgrade over Python2 around the 3.5 release. That was less than seven years of transition! I've been happy with Wayland for most of my Linux desktopping since 2018, so that was a ten year transition from first release to full adoption on my part.
  - dontlaugh 3y ago
    It depends on your constraints. I remember still not being able to transition some projects well after 3.7 was released.
    - apelapan 3y ago
      Of course, there is a long tail of things that can't/won't migrate. I still see Python2.7 production code on a semi-regular basis (not network exposed, but very much at the core of critical business processes of major enterprises). And I'm sure we'll have X11 desktops around for various purposes ten years from now.
the8472 3y ago
Wayland has a pretty deep issue that loss of the compositor socket is treated as fatal and kills the client application. And when the IPC socket buffer is full that's leads to a close (so it is one of those fatal errors). So any latency spike in the event loop of the client process can lead to a process kill. The GTK implementation even calls _exit() which means atexit handlers won't trigger and save-on-exit or crash reporters won't run. So with wayland lag gets "upgraded" to hard process kills. That's a pretty crazy design choice. X11 handles momentarily unresponsive processes far more gracefully. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/159 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/159 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144
- Arnavion 3y ago
  This is not a wayland (the protocol) issue. It's a client issue. In fact Qt6 was recently in the news here for having fixed it in their client code, by simply reconnecting when the wayland socket closes instead of crashing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37480331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37480331 (Their main justification is to be resilient to server restarts, but from the client's perspective the two are the same.) You're welcome to try and convince GTK devs to do the same.
- twic 3y ago
  Wayland is like systemd all over again. We had something ancient and crufty which just about worked, but was a genuine obstacle to progress. A group of crazy people got together and designed a replacement. Everyone else pointed out that the design was crazy. The designers carried on anyway. And now the crazy project is the only game in town.
  - uecker 3y ago
    Well perceived as ancient and crufty. I do not think there is any genuine obstacle to progress. But the thing is not just that some crazy people got together and implemented something we could all use or not, the problem with both systemd and Wayland is that it comes with all the propaganda that this is the future and nothing else, that everything else is "ancient and crufty", "unfixable", and "broken". This is clearly meant to demoralize everybody interested in alternatives. For example, there was no really good reason for Debian to force the systemd decision. That an entire distribution spawned from frustration about this decision clearly shows that there is enough interest and man power to maintain alternatives. Let's hope some people step up for X as well.

esarbe 3y ago

Wayland is more than a compositor protocol. It's a whole suite of replacement protocols for all the functionality that X used to offer. And it takes time to replace an established protocol. Especially when you need to provide a feature-complete fallback for all the applications that are never going to do the switch. For me that transition has been pain free. First I heard that X is going to be retired, then I saw some development note popping up here and there and then one day I was offered to log in to a Wayland session instead of a X session. I never experienced any problems I could directly attribute to Wayland. I don't know why Wayland gets so much hate. To me it feels very much like the systemd hate: I don't know why this needs to change; I was happy after all. I don't want to learn about a new thing, so I'm angry.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> I don't know why Wayland gets so much hate. To me it feels very much like the systemd hate: I don't know why this needs to change; I was happy after all. I don't want to learn about a new thing, so I'm angry. Yes, it's a very similar situation; in both cases people are really fond of pretending that the only reason you could possibly object is that you hate change just because, while ignoring the actual regressions that it's causing. For instance, Wayland does not support (and probably never will support) some accessibility tools that make my life much easier (because the desktop must be secured against programmatic manipulation).
- uecker 3y ago
  I use X remoting every day. Being told that I do not need it and it would not work anyway, is what makes me angry. Then I hate that decades of protocol compatibility are broken, which i think is sad and stupid. Finally, I saw people had issues with Wayland (screen sharing etc). Then - after 15 years of development - being somewhat usable also does not convince me that it is so much simpler because of an superior design. Regarding design, I think the monolithic design is inferior. Finally, I never found the technical arguments terrible convincing (such as that an unused old line drawing API in X somehow holds modern clients back - obviously this is BS.).
- esarbe 3y ago