4 ms·

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 re

by 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
  Thanks for providing some context. I still don't get one point though; Nobody is taking X away. You can still run any DE and any application on X if you want to. You're not being restricted in your ability to run applications, quite the contrary; your are being given more options. So even if your use-case is not yet fully supported on Wayland, why hat on it? No one is taking anything away. But yeah; ever since Sun stopped founding it, the accessibility situation on Linux has been dire.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > You can still run any DE and any application on X if you want to. That's unfortunately incorrect; so far Waydroid is the only program I've hit that explicitly requires Wayland, but I expect the list to grow with time. > So even if your use-case is not yet fully supported on Wayland, why hat on it? No one is taking anything away. Because it's abundantly clear that a noticeable set of devs and maintainers would really like to take it away, or at least refuse to support it (if there's a difference); see ex. https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110354541574112092 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110354541574112092 where the lead dev on Asahi Linux seems ready to drop Xorg completely until someone points out a11y problems with Wayland, or https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-40-KDE-Plasma-6-Plan https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-40-KDE-Plasma-6-Plan for Fedora looking to drop KDE+X11.
VancouverMan 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. Perhaps you haven't experienced it yourself, but systemd and Wayland have both caused a lot of unjustifiable problems for a lot of people. That's where the widespread displeasure with them comes from. It has nothing to do with dealing with change itself or learning something new. If systemd and Wayland had brought me some tangible benefits, without also bringing me significant pain, then I'd be perfectly happy adopting them like I frequently do for other new-to-me software that makes my life better. Unfortunately, that's not reality. For example, I've had to deal with far too many Linux installations that no longer boot thanks to systemd (or one of its many components) unexpectedly breaking in one way or another, often after what should be routine updates. I've never had any success with the Wayland implementations I've tried, either. They've performed horribly on the computers of mine that I've tried them on, to the point of being pretty much unusable. A default installation of X on the same Linux installations works much better and is completely usable, however. Based on all of the mailing list emails, forum postings, chat logs, bug reports, articles, and other online material that I've seen while trying to sort out such problems with systemd or Wayland, it's clear to me that I'm not the only one experiencing such troubles. Even if I hadn't experienced such problems, neither systemd nor Wayland would benefit me in any meaningful way. At best, they're merely replacing what I've already been using for years or even decades, rather than improving upon them.
- pas 3y ago
  systemd brought me a lot of benefits (both as a power user and as a sysadmin), I'm not that much in the know with regards to X vs Wayland, but nowadays stock Ubuntu with Gnome on AMD uses Wayland and dual 4K monitors with hi-dpi scaling and 60Hz and 120Hz works. the more important thing is ... not a lot of people stepped up to maintain the old ways. if they are so superior, why isn't there a big group doing it? ... that said, yes, systemd is crap, it's an endless pile of C instead of the previous [ba]sh bonanza, but it works, and it does a lot of things, and the maintainers are active and doing a lot of good things. plus it's finally standardized across distros. and any talk about Wayland or X is completely irrelevant as the bugs that frustrate users are not in the protocols, all of them are in the implementations. I, like many starry eyed nix users, motivated to grow the bazaar [had many attempts at contributing] by opening issues, reporting bugs, trying to debug stuff, using beta/dev/nightly/canary/RC stuff ... but it did not make much of a difference. there's just not enough dev bandwidth to deal with even trivial stuff. I mean it's sometimes* after wake up it's impossible to interact with the Gnome lockscreen with the keyboard unless first clicking on it with the mouse, on Xfce sometimes after opening the lid the screen is visible, and on KDE ... well, on KDE I don't even know what bug I tried to report, but no, fuck Bugzilla. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/3135 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/4858 [something solved] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=251935 [on xfce just uninstall "light locker"] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingScreenLocking#Known_bugs [it's just madness] ... and of course I could go on. And why these problems happen? Because the stack is ossified as fuck, because complexity is through the roof (due to hardware frontrunning the whole show by a (?) decade), and because OS developers being, well, folks who in their infinite wisdom stick to C and C++ and even introducing JS to the stack. (And many people remember when Ballmer-peak Microsoft tried to move to something memory safe, but couldn't... because "it was too hard". Yeah, just hacking everything together somehow is always the smart solution.)

by esarbe 3y ago

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
Thanks for providing some context. I still don't get one point though; Nobody is taking X away. You can still run any DE and any application on X if you want to. You're not being restricted in your ability to run applications, quite the contrary; your are being given more options. So even if your use-case is not yet fully supported on Wayland, why hat on it? No one is taking anything away. But yeah; ever since Sun stopped founding it, the accessibility situation on Linux has been dire.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > You can still run any DE and any application on X if you want to. That's unfortunately incorrect; so far Waydroid is the only program I've hit that explicitly requires Wayland, but I expect the list to grow with time. > So even if your use-case is not yet fully supported on Wayland, why hat on it? No one is taking anything away. Because it's abundantly clear that a noticeable set of devs and maintainers would really like to take it away, or at least refuse to support it (if there's a difference); see ex. https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110354541574112092 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110354541574112092 where the lead dev on Asahi Linux seems ready to drop Xorg completely until someone points out a11y problems with Wayland, or https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-40-KDE-Plasma-6-Plan https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-40-KDE-Plasma-6-Plan for Fedora looking to drop KDE+X11.

VancouverMan 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. Perhaps you haven't experienced it yourself, but systemd and Wayland have both caused a lot of unjustifiable problems for a lot of people. That's where the widespread displeasure with them comes from. It has nothing to do with dealing with change itself or learning something new. If systemd and Wayland had brought me some tangible benefits, without also bringing me significant pain, then I'd be perfectly happy adopting them like I frequently do for other new-to-me software that makes my life better. Unfortunately, that's not reality. For example, I've had to deal with far too many Linux installations that no longer boot thanks to systemd (or one of its many components) unexpectedly breaking in one way or another, often after what should be routine updates. I've never had any success with the Wayland implementations I've tried, either. They've performed horribly on the computers of mine that I've tried them on, to the point of being pretty much unusable. A default installation of X on the same Linux installations works much better and is completely usable, however. Based on all of the mailing list emails, forum postings, chat logs, bug reports, articles, and other online material that I've seen while trying to sort out such problems with systemd or Wayland, it's clear to me that I'm not the only one experiencing such troubles. Even if I hadn't experienced such problems, neither systemd nor Wayland would benefit me in any meaningful way. At best, they're merely replacing what I've already been using for years or even decades, rather than improving upon them.

pas 3y ago
systemd brought me a lot of benefits (both as a power user and as a sysadmin), I'm not that much in the know with regards to X vs Wayland, but nowadays stock Ubuntu with Gnome on AMD uses Wayland and dual 4K monitors with hi-dpi scaling and 60Hz and 120Hz works. the more important thing is ... not a lot of people stepped up to maintain the old ways. if they are so superior, why isn't there a big group doing it? ... that said, yes, systemd is crap, it's an endless pile of C instead of the previous [ba]sh bonanza, but it works, and it does a lot of things, and the maintainers are active and doing a lot of good things. plus it's finally standardized across distros. and any talk about Wayland or X is completely irrelevant as the bugs that frustrate users are not in the protocols, all of them are in the implementations. I, like many starry eyed nix users, motivated to grow the bazaar [had many attempts at contributing] by opening issues, reporting bugs, trying to debug stuff, using beta/dev/nightly/canary/RC stuff ... but it did not make much of a difference. there's just not enough dev bandwidth to deal with even trivial stuff. I mean it's sometimes* after wake up it's impossible to interact with the Gnome lockscreen with the keyboard unless first clicking on it with the mouse, on Xfce sometimes after opening the lid the screen is visible, and on KDE ... well, on KDE I don't even know what bug I tried to report, but no, fuck Bugzilla. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/3135 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/4858 [something solved] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=251935 [on xfce just uninstall "light locker"] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingScreenLocking#Known_bugs [it's just madness] ... and of course I could go on. And why these problems happen? Because the stack is ossified as fuck, because complexity is through the roof (due to hardware frontrunning the whole show by a (?) decade), and because OS developers being, well, folks who in their infinite wisdom stick to C and C++ and even introducing JS to the stack. (And many people remember when Ballmer-peak Microsoft tried to move to something memory safe, but couldn't... because "it was too hard". Yeah, just hacking everything together somehow is always the smart solution.)