3 ms·

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 stag

by 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
It's been mostly fine for me as well, but that has only been the case because of things like Xwayland; there are a large number of styles of program that are either really difficult reimplement or simply can't work without it. Multi-window programs, for example, are difficult to get working directly on Wayland. The issue has been brought up several times [1][2]. And it's not a particularly uncommon UI-style. For example, most video production software I've worked with allows you to popout certain components into separate windows so that you can, for example, have your timeline, which may have many tracks taking up lots of vertical space, on a separate monitor from the preview viewport. This is a really nice feature. And the lack of its presence is one of the things I really dislike about DaVinci Resolve, despite it being an otherwise great tool with some of the best, if not the best, colorgrading utilities. This isn't something unique and niche to video production either, though; lots of photo editing, audio production, 3D modelling, CAD software, and other scientific/engineering applications have similar UI. Wayland makes it difficult, though, because there isn't a good way to request or suggest the kind of positioning these programs need [1]. Anyway, that said, I, too, have lived with a mostly Wayland desktop for a few years without too many issues, even as someone who doesn't have the most "typical" workflows or needs. So, to an extent, I think you're not wrong; the idea that Wayland is *entirely* unusable is, obviously, not true. But again, key point, *mostly* Wayland; without Xwayland or similar, I think it'd be genuinely unusable for me and likely many others. While the compatibility layers genenerally work well, and in many ways, still provide many of the benefits of Wayland, like security, I don't think it's unreasonable to want a better, native way to deal with some of these issues so that people can drop the additional legacy abstraction. --- [1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/247 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m... [2]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/72 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i... Related: - https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/10065 https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/10065 - https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/8692 https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/8692 --- EDIT: I think it's also worth noting that just because /our/ Wayland experiences haven't been too bad doesn't mean that its the case for everyone. As I, and several others, mentioned in other comments, there are several implementations of Wayland compositors, for example. Our particular choice of components/desktop environments might be fine, but others may be more broken or intentionally lacking support for useful/semi-necessary "optional" extensions to the protocol. It'd be one thing to intentionally pick a bad implementation as a user and then complain about it. But sometimes, people aren't aware they're using Wayland in the first place, let alone which compositor they're using. As a developer, even if you don't care for a particular implementation, unless you do as PCSX2 did, you'll still likely need to think about everyone elses' quirks as well, because too many of your users will also be users of whatever is most problematic -- e.g., GNOME is very popular and also has/had been one of the more annoying ones.
FengLengshun 3y ago
> Honestly at this stage, this stuff starts to feel like FUD. I understand how you feel, now that I use Wayland everywhere myself. But I still remember when some things I used has issues and I have a whole list of a dozen of them. Even now, using Wayland involves a LOT of compromise on my part. I'd have to stop my anger at CSD and issues with Global Menu a lot out of tiredness (still annoying - I have to run OBS in xwayland temporarily to access its remux menu). I have to contend with not having unattended remote desktop for my Linux devices. And I have to manually change how I set up fcitx5 instead of just setting it up in three lines in Home-Manager. It's full of annoyances, but I'm tolerating it. Others... probably just don't have the patience, especially the devs who are supposed to fix these things for their app when they just want to focus on other things (especially multiplatform devs).

by frio 3y ago

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

It's been mostly fine for me as well, but that has only been the case because of things like Xwayland; there are a large number of styles of program that are either really difficult reimplement or simply can't work without it. Multi-window programs, for example, are difficult to get working directly on Wayland. The issue has been brought up several times [1][2]. And it's not a particularly uncommon UI-style. For example, most video production software I've worked with allows you to popout certain components into separate windows so that you can, for example, have your timeline, which may have many tracks taking up lots of vertical space, on a separate monitor from the preview viewport. This is a really nice feature. And the lack of its presence is one of the things I really dislike about DaVinci Resolve, despite it being an otherwise great tool with some of the best, if not the best, colorgrading utilities. This isn't something unique and niche to video production either, though; lots of photo editing, audio production, 3D modelling, CAD software, and other scientific/engineering applications have similar UI. Wayland makes it difficult, though, because there isn't a good way to request or suggest the kind of positioning these programs need [1]. Anyway, that said, I, too, have lived with a mostly Wayland desktop for a few years without too many issues, even as someone who doesn't have the most "typical" workflows or needs. So, to an extent, I think you're not wrong; the idea that Wayland is *entirely* unusable is, obviously, not true. But again, key point, *mostly* Wayland; without Xwayland or similar, I think it'd be genuinely unusable for me and likely many others. While the compatibility layers genenerally work well, and in many ways, still provide many of the benefits of Wayland, like security, I don't think it's unreasonable to want a better, native way to deal with some of these issues so that people can drop the additional legacy abstraction. --- [1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/247 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m... [2]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/72 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i... Related: - https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/10065 https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/10065 - https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/8692 https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/8692 --- EDIT: I think it's also worth noting that just because /our/ Wayland experiences haven't been too bad doesn't mean that its the case for everyone. As I, and several others, mentioned in other comments, there are several implementations of Wayland compositors, for example. Our particular choice of components/desktop environments might be fine, but others may be more broken or intentionally lacking support for useful/semi-necessary "optional" extensions to the protocol. It'd be one thing to intentionally pick a bad implementation as a user and then complain about it. But sometimes, people aren't aware they're using Wayland in the first place, let alone which compositor they're using. As a developer, even if you don't care for a particular implementation, unless you do as PCSX2 did, you'll still likely need to think about everyone elses' quirks as well, because too many of your users will also be users of whatever is most problematic -- e.g., GNOME is very popular and also has/had been one of the more annoying ones.

FengLengshun 3y ago

> Honestly at this stage, this stuff starts to feel like FUD. I understand how you feel, now that I use Wayland everywhere myself. But I still remember when some things I used has issues and I have a whole list of a dozen of them. Even now, using Wayland involves a LOT of compromise on my part. I'd have to stop my anger at CSD and issues with Global Menu a lot out of tiredness (still annoying - I have to run OBS in xwayland temporarily to access its remux menu). I have to contend with not having unattended remote desktop for my Linux devices. And I have to manually change how I set up fcitx5 instead of just setting it up in three lines in Home-Manager. It's full of annoyances, but I'm tolerating it. Others... probably just don't have the patience, especially the devs who are supposed to fix these things for their app when they just want to focus on other things (especially multiplatform devs).