9 ms·

Quoting @stenzek > But Wayland is just broken, and everyone would rather sit around arguing with each other instead of actually addressing the design flaws. >

by reisse 3y ago

Quoting @stenzek > But Wayland is just broken, and everyone would rather sit around arguing with each other instead of actually addressing the design flaws. > It's not the first time such a proposal has been put forward. Something that developers need for their applications to work properly on WL (particularly multi-window applications), and it gets vetoed. Every other OS manages this fine. But apparently we're in the wrong for not conforming to some warped view of how applications should be, despite our applications working fine on every other platform. This is so damn true. Wayland lacks a Linus-style BDFL saying that the kern... the compositor is for applications, and not the other way around. We won't have nice things until Wayland maintainers stop thinking about what their end users must or must not do, and start closing feature gaps with X and compositors/window managers on other OSes. Right now they're reinventing the wheel while making it square.

caslon 3y ago
Wayland already works, and is great for a lot of use cases; it's the default on distributions like Fedora, and has been for a while. It has nice things. For 90% of users, it's better than X in most ways that matter. Similar, but much less catastrophic, to how Android isn't great for blind users, or people who want to do low-latency audio production, Wayland is actually great for most users, despite not appealing to extremely niche use cases. It's objectively better for most real-time use cases. I exclusively use X11 because of an extremely niche use case, and I can admit that Wayland is perfectly fine for 99% of things anyone wants to do with a computer. It's not a square wheel at all.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > Wayland already works, and is great for a lot of use cases; it's the default on distributions like Fedora, and has been for a while. It has nice things. For 90% of users, it's better than X in most ways that matter. > I exclusively use X11 because of an extremely niche use case, and I can admit that Wayland is perfectly fine for 99% I am also married with a nice girl, but the girl next door, looks much better. /s
- LordShredda 3y ago
  It's the 1% that makes Wayland awful. If it's such a small part, then why not support it anyways? If it's a security issue, let kde/gnome break it in their own ways.
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  > For 90% of users, it's better than X in most ways that matter What ways specifically?
- brnt 3y ago
  > For 90% of users, it's better than X in most ways that matter. I sincerely doubt this. The project hasn't organised much in the way of receiving user reports, and anyone with a negative one has experienced various levels of hostility: you are usually suspected of user error. The distro's that have switched also target devs/enthusiasts, who tend to have a particular subset of all possible hardware which leads to biased impressions. I think many don't quite understand that much of the hairyness in Xorg is necessary: it's the hardware that dictates the requirement of those 1001 little workaround. A clean slate doesn't mean the slate can stay clean: you either choose to support all of those unperfect devices, device-combos, user requests, or, and that seems to be what happened, you focus on a narrow happy path (for the kind of people the devs themselves see) and leave it at that. I don't mins that, but I do mind anyone arguing Wayland should be or is going to replace anything; look at the negative user reports. It's nowhere near there.
- tommiegannert 3y ago
  > Wayland already works, and is great for a lot of use cases; > I exclusively use X11 because of an extremely niche use case, and I can admit that Wayland is perfectly fine for 99% of things anyone wants to do with a computer. It's not a square wheel at all. This had me thinking about digital NIMBYism. Suggest others do one thing, while you do the opposite, because your reasons make sense. You still haven't addressed PCSX2's, or anyone else's, concrete reasons.
  - caslon 3y ago
    I use X11 because I wrote a terrible usermode hack a decade ago for a niche (<2000 units) piece of hardware that gives incorrect EDID information and needs a handshake to turn itself on, and haven't tried to port my hack to the post-kms world yet. It is the definition of a legacy hack, and one I'm hoping to rid my systems of the second I get a decent vacation. I've used Wayland before; it's great. Most people aren't gamers; everything PCSX2 wants to do is something that 99% of people do not care about; for the majority non-gamer software, allowing a window to manage absolute position is pointless, or even bad. Apps shouldn't be able to force CSD if the user doesn't want it; GNOME is respecting user preference (and that's not a Wayland thing). Even so, it still works with XWayland. For Wayland users, there is no service disruption. Aside from people who dislike XWayland, anyway. Proprietary NVIDIA drivers being broken is an NVIDIA thing. Swapchains causing segfaults happened any time you used direct rendering from like 470 to 525, even on X11. They don't make great Linux drivers.
frio 3y ago
Honestly at this stage, this stuff starts to feel like FUD. Every computer I use -- work laptop, personal desktop, personal laptop -- uses Wayland at this stage. Two are on Sway, one's on KDE. I cannot think of any show-stopping bugs I've encountered for... years. It was a lot more rough 3 years ago when I first switched over (because the laptop I had then was HiDPI, but the screen I attached it to was standard, and X was _horrible_ across these two screens) -- but these days, it all just goes. I'm sure the process of hashing things out with the various committees is slow and laborious, but for a relatively normal set of desktop needs -- browser, IDEs, games, some photography work (albeit without having done any colour profile management, I know that's missing -- but my gear/monitors aren't up to that really anyway), it's fine.
- starkparker 3y ago
  It can be simultaneously true that Wayland can be viable, and that Wayland's foundation is still broken and lacking. Same as X11. I think the frustration for devs is having to support _both_ broken platforms; at least X11's failures and shortcomings are known and mostly unchanging. Wayland keeps breaking new things downstream in the process of adding features or resolving problems. But this: > for a relatively normal set of desktop needs The problem is that there's no such thing on desktop. There are _commonalities_ between many users, but even in just the web browser space there are app-side hacks and workarounds just to get about 90% of the functionality that browsers expect on other platforms. Even in your list, most desktop users don't need an IDE or do photography work. Many don't need "games", and "games" itself is such a broad category of things, each of which presents new and exciting Wayland wrinkles and limitations to ram face-first into. Hell, I can't run KDE on F39 without a constantly running XWayland recording bridge for desktop commonalities that use or require screen sharing (Zoom, Discord, etc.). And most of the issues might start with the Wayland project, but they're exacerbated by Qt and GNOME problems, whether it's doing little to nothing and holding back every dependent app (Qt) or constantly coming up with new and exciting ways to break or deviate from the protocol (GNOME). Those bottlenecks aren't new, but they're magnified by Wayland's slow-moving chaos, and drawn into relief by X11 Just Working because the hacks and garbage workarounds are damn near 40 years old.
- OmarAssadi 3y ago

by reisse 3y ago

caslon 3y ago

Wayland already works, and is great for a lot of use cases; it's the default on distributions like Fedora, and has been for a while. It has nice things. For 90% of users, it's better than X in most ways that matter. Similar, but much less catastrophic, to how Android isn't great for blind users, or people who want to do low-latency audio production, Wayland is actually great for most users, despite not appealing to extremely niche use cases. It's objectively better for most real-time use cases. I exclusively use X11 because of an extremely niche use case, and I can admit that Wayland is perfectly fine for 99% of things anyone wants to do with a computer. It's not a square wheel at all.

hulitu 3y ago
> Wayland already works, and is great for a lot of use cases; it's the default on distributions like Fedora, and has been for a while. It has nice things. For 90% of users, it's better than X in most ways that matter. > I exclusively use X11 because of an extremely niche use case, and I can admit that Wayland is perfectly fine for 99% I am also married with a nice girl, but the girl next door, looks much better. /s
LordShredda 3y ago
It's the 1% that makes Wayland awful. If it's such a small part, then why not support it anyways? If it's a security issue, let kde/gnome break it in their own ways.
phendrenad2 3y ago
> For 90% of users, it's better than X in most ways that matter What ways specifically?
brnt 3y ago
> For 90% of users, it's better than X in most ways that matter. I sincerely doubt this. The project hasn't organised much in the way of receiving user reports, and anyone with a negative one has experienced various levels of hostility: you are usually suspected of user error. The distro's that have switched also target devs/enthusiasts, who tend to have a particular subset of all possible hardware which leads to biased impressions. I think many don't quite understand that much of the hairyness in Xorg is necessary: it's the hardware that dictates the requirement of those 1001 little workaround. A clean slate doesn't mean the slate can stay clean: you either choose to support all of those unperfect devices, device-combos, user requests, or, and that seems to be what happened, you focus on a narrow happy path (for the kind of people the devs themselves see) and leave it at that. I don't mins that, but I do mind anyone arguing Wayland should be or is going to replace anything; look at the negative user reports. It's nowhere near there.
tommiegannert 3y ago
> Wayland already works, and is great for a lot of use cases; > I exclusively use X11 because of an extremely niche use case, and I can admit that Wayland is perfectly fine for 99% of things anyone wants to do with a computer. It's not a square wheel at all. This had me thinking about digital NIMBYism. Suggest others do one thing, while you do the opposite, because your reasons make sense. You still haven't addressed PCSX2's, or anyone else's, concrete reasons.
- caslon 3y ago
  I use X11 because I wrote a terrible usermode hack a decade ago for a niche (<2000 units) piece of hardware that gives incorrect EDID information and needs a handshake to turn itself on, and haven't tried to port my hack to the post-kms world yet. It is the definition of a legacy hack, and one I'm hoping to rid my systems of the second I get a decent vacation. I've used Wayland before; it's great. Most people aren't gamers; everything PCSX2 wants to do is something that 99% of people do not care about; for the majority non-gamer software, allowing a window to manage absolute position is pointless, or even bad. Apps shouldn't be able to force CSD if the user doesn't want it; GNOME is respecting user preference (and that's not a Wayland thing). Even so, it still works with XWayland. For Wayland users, there is no service disruption. Aside from people who dislike XWayland, anyway. Proprietary NVIDIA drivers being broken is an NVIDIA thing. Swapchains causing segfaults happened any time you used direct rendering from like 470 to 525, even on X11. They don't make great Linux drivers.

frio 3y ago

Honestly at this stage, this stuff starts to feel like FUD. Every computer I use -- work laptop, personal desktop, personal laptop -- uses Wayland at this stage. Two are on Sway, one's on KDE. I cannot think of any show-stopping bugs I've encountered for... years. It was a lot more rough 3 years ago when I first switched over (because the laptop I had then was HiDPI, but the screen I attached it to was standard, and X was _horrible_ across these two screens) -- but these days, it all just goes. I'm sure the process of hashing things out with the various committees is slow and laborious, but for a relatively normal set of desktop needs -- browser, IDEs, games, some photography work (albeit without having done any colour profile management, I know that's missing -- but my gear/monitors aren't up to that really anyway), it's fine.

starkparker 3y ago
It can be simultaneously true that Wayland can be viable, and that Wayland's foundation is still broken and lacking. Same as X11. I think the frustration for devs is having to support _both_ broken platforms; at least X11's failures and shortcomings are known and mostly unchanging. Wayland keeps breaking new things downstream in the process of adding features or resolving problems. But this: > for a relatively normal set of desktop needs The problem is that there's no such thing on desktop. There are _commonalities_ between many users, but even in just the web browser space there are app-side hacks and workarounds just to get about 90% of the functionality that browsers expect on other platforms. Even in your list, most desktop users don't need an IDE or do photography work. Many don't need "games", and "games" itself is such a broad category of things, each of which presents new and exciting Wayland wrinkles and limitations to ram face-first into. Hell, I can't run KDE on F39 without a constantly running XWayland recording bridge for desktop commonalities that use or require screen sharing (Zoom, Discord, etc.). And most of the issues might start with the Wayland project, but they're exacerbated by Qt and GNOME problems, whether it's doing little to nothing and holding back every dependent app (Qt) or constantly coming up with new and exciting ways to break or deviate from the protocol (GNOME). Those bottlenecks aren't new, but they're magnified by Wayland's slow-moving chaos, and drawn into relief by X11 Just Working because the hacks and garbage workarounds are damn near 40 years old.
OmarAssadi 3y ago