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To the section about lack of features, highlighting screen sharing: I completely ran into this and it soured me on Wayland even more (than my experience with Pu

by onli 3y ago

To the section about lack of features, highlighting screen sharing: I completely ran into this and it soured me on Wayland even more (than my experience with Pulseaudio did before for big desktop changes). On an upgrade, Ubuntu switched to Wayland as default with the Gnome DE, which I used at the time. I didn't even notice, until it was next meeting time where I was supposed to hold a presentation for the big boss. Sharing my screen from the browser - completely stayed black. I was humiliating, frankly. And completely the fault of Wayland. I won't trust that project ever.

topaz0 3y ago
One of the frustrating parts of this discourse is that people come to it assuming all the responsibilities fall in the same rough "bins" that they used to, and place their blame accordingly. Wayland made the explicit choice that information about other applications should be inaccessible by default, and that it is the compositor's responsibility to give access in particular cases when appropriate. Your distro decided to switch Gnome to default-to-wayland when it didn't yet have screensharing protocols in place or your videoconferencing software didn't yet support those protocols. You can argue that those protocols should be built in to wayland and backward compatible with the ones from X if you like, that's a perfectly coherent view. But the fact is that they aren't, and the gnome devs knew that all along, so blaming wayland that that functionality wasn't ready is really misunderstanding the issue.
- onli 3y ago
  Oh, you are not wrong. It's perfectly valid to also blame Gnome and Ubuntu for this. The Wayland session should not have been the default in either project before such a basic functionality was working. Still, the result is the same: I will move to Wayland only when there is absolutely no other choice, as I don't trust the project, or at least not the people pushing the project. Same as with systemd and Pulseaudio, both never got a place on my main system (and Pulseaudio definitely won't, now that Pipewire is here). Btw, it wasn't special videoconferencing software, it was something like Zoom or Teams in the browser, so completely standard functionality.
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  It is at least 90% the fault of the Wayland devs and community for not making it obscenely clear that they only replace ~30% of the functionality of X, and if people try to replace X with Wayland they lose the remaining ~70% of functionality. Pretty much everyone I know that knows about Wayland assumes that it is a "drop-in" replacement.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > people come to it assuming all the responsibilities fall in the same rough "bins" that they used to, and place their blame accordingly. This is fair, though, isn't it? Wayland is being sold as an X replacement, after all. Expecting it to have the same responsibilities/capabilities is not unreasonable if you're looking at it from that standpoint.
  - topaz0 3y ago
    I don't think it's fair. Maybe the communication has been poor to the broader community, but to anybody interested in the technical consequences I think it's always been clear that a big part of the point of superseding X was that X had taken on a set of responsibilities that didn't make sense to put together (in the view of the Wayland developers). "Wayland is being sold as an X replacement" is a drastic oversimplification that you might take away if you're in the habit of reading just the headline and first paragraph of blog posts about it.
Ckirby 3y ago
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by onli 3y ago

topaz0 3y ago

One of the frustrating parts of this discourse is that people come to it assuming all the responsibilities fall in the same rough "bins" that they used to, and place their blame accordingly. Wayland made the explicit choice that information about other applications should be inaccessible by default, and that it is the compositor's responsibility to give access in particular cases when appropriate. Your distro decided to switch Gnome to default-to-wayland when it didn't yet have screensharing protocols in place or your videoconferencing software didn't yet support those protocols. You can argue that those protocols should be built in to wayland and backward compatible with the ones from X if you like, that's a perfectly coherent view. But the fact is that they aren't, and the gnome devs knew that all along, so blaming wayland that that functionality wasn't ready is really misunderstanding the issue.

onli 3y ago
Oh, you are not wrong. It's perfectly valid to also blame Gnome and Ubuntu for this. The Wayland session should not have been the default in either project before such a basic functionality was working. Still, the result is the same: I will move to Wayland only when there is absolutely no other choice, as I don't trust the project, or at least not the people pushing the project. Same as with systemd and Pulseaudio, both never got a place on my main system (and Pulseaudio definitely won't, now that Pipewire is here). Btw, it wasn't special videoconferencing software, it was something like Zoom or Teams in the browser, so completely standard functionality.
Ferret7446 3y ago
It is at least 90% the fault of the Wayland devs and community for not making it obscenely clear that they only replace ~30% of the functionality of X, and if people try to replace X with Wayland they lose the remaining ~70% of functionality. Pretty much everyone I know that knows about Wayland assumes that it is a "drop-in" replacement.
JohnFen 3y ago
> people come to it assuming all the responsibilities fall in the same rough "bins" that they used to, and place their blame accordingly. This is fair, though, isn't it? Wayland is being sold as an X replacement, after all. Expecting it to have the same responsibilities/capabilities is not unreasonable if you're looking at it from that standpoint.
- topaz0 3y ago
  I don't think it's fair. Maybe the communication has been poor to the broader community, but to anybody interested in the technical consequences I think it's always been clear that a big part of the point of superseding X was that X had taken on a set of responsibilities that didn't make sense to put together (in the view of the Wayland developers). "Wayland is being sold as an X replacement" is a drastic oversimplification that you might take away if you're in the habit of reading just the headline and first paragraph of blog posts about it.

Ckirby 3y ago

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