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Has Wayland adoption really been so slow because of technical reasons, or because of its developers and advocates observably abysmal social skills? Edit: I kno

by User23 3y ago

Has Wayland adoption really been so slow because of technical reasons, or because of its developers and advocates observably abysmal social skills? Edit: I know that could kind of sound incendiary, but let's consider the facts. We're talking about a project that has been competing with a dead competitor for 15 years and is still struggling to get mainstream acceptance. There's something seriously dysfunctional going on.

XorNot 3y ago
I'm not using it because Cinnamon doesn't support it. When it does I guess I'll switch. Although the egl requirement has proven troublesome the times I've dipped my toes in, previously: if I have an NVIDIA or AMD GPU in my machine, I do expect to not get told it's unsupported.
- bezier-curve 3y ago
  It's been a few years since I've worked with the cinnamon team, but their 2019 sentiment was basically "ignore Wayland and hope it dies".
  - bb88 3y ago
    I don't know. I'm willing to give them another 10 to 15 years.
dralley 3y ago
You're missing the most obvious reason. Wayland adoption has been slow because nobody cares that much about the Linux desktop because it's not profitable, so it's at best a hobby project of a couple of dozen people. It's hard to make sweeping changes with such a group. A lot of the work has actually been done by companies like Red Hat and Collabora and Igalia doing drive-by enablement work on a bunch of open source projects. That manifests in a bunch of different ways. Lots of desktop software is still using the likes of Gtk 2 and obviously won't get Wayland support without being ported first. Desktop Environments like XFCE and Cinnamon are, again, basically hobby projects and re-architecting them for Wayland is a big ask for non-professional maintainers. And then you have stuff like Zoom and other Electron apps that take their time adopting Wayland simply because Linux was always an afterthought to them anyway.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  This sort of thing makes Wayland less defensible to me then - why fragment the user and developer base even further?
  - dralley 3y ago
    Because Xorg is broken and Xwayland works well enough as a translation layer to tide everyone over even if it's not ideal.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    You are free to develop an X11 subset that is easier to maintain and convince existing Xorg users to switch to your subset.
    - Qwertious 3y ago
      Arcan ( arcan-fe.com ) looks like it could fill that niche, but its developer has gone out of his way to avoid attention and is primarily focused on getting the core protocol right, rather than trying to drive adoption. I'm personally hoping that, come ~2025, Arcan v1.0 is released, the WM crowd largely switches to Arcan-based systems, and Wayland becomes the new JACK (with X being the new ALSA, I guess?).
bsder 3y ago
Mostly technical. But, I'll try to be a bit charitable. 1) A lot of architectural decisions that made sense in 2008 are less optimal today. Everything language-wise was C/C++ while today lots of different languages want to interface to your display system. The input system was completely hamstrung--things like gestures and multi-touch and things like that just weren't in anybody's brain yet. (Wayland started just after the first iPhone was introduced). And RT_PREEMPT still isn't a thing for Linux while both Windows and macOS underwent major surgery to allow real-time paths for things like audio and interaction. 2) Desktop composition semantics are not exactly easy to define. Windows has certain definitions, but even it falls back to pure CPU software rendering in a lot of cases. 3) Weak support from graphics card companies Windows relies on a LOT of driver hacks so everything goes through the compositor on really fast paths. That's a lot of work that nobody really has the bandwidth to do on Linux.
phone8675309 3y ago
No wide support for nVidia binary drivers either
- saxonww 3y ago
  FWIW I don't think this is an issue anymore, nVidia began implementing the necessary APIs - it was more a situation of nVidia not supporting Wayland, not the other way around - a couple of years ago. https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/181159/en-us/ https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/181159/en...
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    >it was more a situation of nVidia not supporting Wayland, not the other way around - a couple of years ago. Do not forget the era where compositors were choosing not to support an open standard of the EGL_KHR_stream extension. Instead they preferred a proprietary solution using Mesa's GBM API.
    - Bu9818 3y ago
      For good, functionality-related reasons at the time[0], and everyone in the Wayland space had been using the mesa library except nvidia with their own proprietary libgl. [0]: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/490#issuecomment-471745501 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/490#issuecomment-47174...
      - charcircuit 3y ago
        >For good, functionality-related reasons at the time Having it work surely is better than those drawbacks. Things can be improved and iterated on over time. Wayland adoption was damaged by this. >and everyone in the Wayland space had been using the mesa library They chose to make themselves compatible with a single graphics driver. GBM ended up having to be rearchitected so that Nvidia could create a backend for end.
resonious 3y ago
I think it is a little of both, and this issue might be a pretty good example: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 Basically, the GNOME devs refuse to provide default window decorations (title bars, etc), forcing all Wayland app devs to draw their own title bars and "X" buttons for their windows. This is a bit silly since some desktop envs do provide default decorations, and 99% of the time you probably want your app to have native-looking title bars. So now we have 1) ugly window decorations on some apps because that's "according to the Wayland spec", and 2) windows with no decorations at all, but only when running on GNOME. End result is ugly inconsistency that makes it very hard to compete with the likes of macOS and Windows on a visual level. And it's all due to a mixture of human stubbornness and arguably an architectural blunder on Wayland's part (but maybe mostly the former, to further your point...)
saxonww 3y ago
Maybe a dead competitor, but one that 15 years ago still had a 25 year head start.

by User23 3y ago

XorNot 3y ago

I'm not using it because Cinnamon doesn't support it. When it does I guess I'll switch. Although the egl requirement has proven troublesome the times I've dipped my toes in, previously: if I have an NVIDIA or AMD GPU in my machine, I do expect to not get told it's unsupported.

bezier-curve 3y ago
It's been a few years since I've worked with the cinnamon team, but their 2019 sentiment was basically "ignore Wayland and hope it dies".
- bb88 3y ago
  I don't know. I'm willing to give them another 10 to 15 years.

dralley 3y ago

You're missing the most obvious reason. Wayland adoption has been slow because nobody cares that much about the Linux desktop because it's not profitable, so it's at best a hobby project of a couple of dozen people. It's hard to make sweeping changes with such a group. A lot of the work has actually been done by companies like Red Hat and Collabora and Igalia doing drive-by enablement work on a bunch of open source projects. That manifests in a bunch of different ways. Lots of desktop software is still using the likes of Gtk 2 and obviously won't get Wayland support without being ported first. Desktop Environments like XFCE and Cinnamon are, again, basically hobby projects and re-architecting them for Wayland is a big ask for non-professional maintainers. And then you have stuff like Zoom and other Electron apps that take their time adopting Wayland simply because Linux was always an afterthought to them anyway.

phone8675309 3y ago
This sort of thing makes Wayland less defensible to me then - why fragment the user and developer base even further?
- dralley 3y ago
  Because Xorg is broken and Xwayland works well enough as a translation layer to tide everyone over even if it's not ideal.
- imtringued 3y ago
  You are free to develop an X11 subset that is easier to maintain and convince existing Xorg users to switch to your subset.
  - Qwertious 3y ago
    Arcan ( arcan-fe.com ) looks like it could fill that niche, but its developer has gone out of his way to avoid attention and is primarily focused on getting the core protocol right, rather than trying to drive adoption. I'm personally hoping that, come ~2025, Arcan v1.0 is released, the WM crowd largely switches to Arcan-based systems, and Wayland becomes the new JACK (with X being the new ALSA, I guess?).

bsder 3y ago

Mostly technical. But, I'll try to be a bit charitable. 1) A lot of architectural decisions that made sense in 2008 are less optimal today. Everything language-wise was C/C++ while today lots of different languages want to interface to your display system. The input system was completely hamstrung--things like gestures and multi-touch and things like that just weren't in anybody's brain yet. (Wayland started just after the first iPhone was introduced). And RT_PREEMPT still isn't a thing for Linux while both Windows and macOS underwent major surgery to allow real-time paths for things like audio and interaction. 2) Desktop composition semantics are not exactly easy to define. Windows has certain definitions, but even it falls back to pure CPU software rendering in a lot of cases. 3) Weak support from graphics card companies Windows relies on a LOT of driver hacks so everything goes through the compositor on really fast paths. That's a lot of work that nobody really has the bandwidth to do on Linux.

phone8675309 3y ago

No wide support for nVidia binary drivers either

saxonww 3y ago
FWIW I don't think this is an issue anymore, nVidia began implementing the necessary APIs - it was more a situation of nVidia not supporting Wayland, not the other way around - a couple of years ago. https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/181159/en-us/ https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/181159/en...
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >it was more a situation of nVidia not supporting Wayland, not the other way around - a couple of years ago. Do not forget the era where compositors were choosing not to support an open standard of the EGL_KHR_stream extension. Instead they preferred a proprietary solution using Mesa's GBM API.
  - Bu9818 3y ago
    For good, functionality-related reasons at the time[0], and everyone in the Wayland space had been using the mesa library except nvidia with their own proprietary libgl. [0]: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/490#issuecomment-471745501 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/490#issuecomment-47174...
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      >For good, functionality-related reasons at the time Having it work surely is better than those drawbacks. Things can be improved and iterated on over time. Wayland adoption was damaged by this. >and everyone in the Wayland space had been using the mesa library They chose to make themselves compatible with a single graphics driver. GBM ended up having to be rearchitected so that Nvidia could create a backend for end.

resonious 3y ago

I think it is a little of both, and this issue might be a pretty good example: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 Basically, the GNOME devs refuse to provide default window decorations (title bars, etc), forcing all Wayland app devs to draw their own title bars and "X" buttons for their windows. This is a bit silly since some desktop envs do provide default decorations, and 99% of the time you probably want your app to have native-looking title bars. So now we have 1) ugly window decorations on some apps because that's "according to the Wayland spec", and 2) windows with no decorations at all, but only when running on GNOME. End result is ugly inconsistency that makes it very hard to compete with the likes of macOS and Windows on a visual level. And it's all due to a mixture of human stubbornness and arguably an architectural blunder on Wayland's part (but maybe mostly the former, to further your point...)

saxonww 3y ago

Maybe a dead competitor, but one that 15 years ago still had a 25 year head start.