6 ms·

To be completely clear I am not a Linux programmer, and I don't have the bandwidth I think to become one, this is my secondhand understanding of the situation.

• Alupis 3y ago
  Keep in mind a lot of the belly aching you read is from people miffed their X11 application needs to be updated. Basically people complaining about needing to do work to modernize. All the things will eventually be just fine. X11 is a walking zombie.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > people miffed their X11 application needs to be updated. Yes, users are very understandably miffed that things which were working are suddenly broken and somebody now has to fix it in order to return to the status quo. > things will eventually be just fine Wayland is 15 years old. At this rate it will be due for replacement before it's feature complete.
    • jorvi 3y ago
      > Yes, users are very understandably miffed that things which were working are suddenly broken and somebody now has to fix it in order to return to the status quo. You are misunderstanding. You can continue to keep using applications in X11-mode for as long as those applications maintain that code path. But many of the niceties Wayland provides, X11 won't get because it is virtually unmaintained. Or said another way, X11 is already broken and getting slightly more broken every day. And before you get angry at X11 going unmaintained, would you have expected Apple to support Carbon ad-infinitum? Look at the backwards-compatibility and new-framework-adoption-rate woes Windows has to deal with because Win32 exists and devs are lazy / expensive.
      • Alupis 3y ago
        Making it worse, the X11 developer team has publicly stated several times X11 is beyond fixing. That's why the X11 team de facto abandoned X11 and created Wayland in the first place. X11 is a complete dead end. All applications need to eventually update. Put pressure on app developers to get to it...
        • Brian_K_White 3y ago
          xorg can be an unfixable mess, and wayland can still be unfit for purpose as a replacement. Both can be true at the same time. btw, I already said something wrong, because, which wayland? It's not a thing.
          • jorvi 3y ago
            I mean, if you want accessibility support, generally straying outside of big/default projects ends up being a struggle. Like, you can complain about missing deep accessibility support in something like Bpswm or Ratpoison, but is that really fair? I'm guessing accessibility support is/will be pretty good on both Mutter (Gnome) and Kwin (KDE). Wlroots-based probably will be too with the community attention it is getting. Stray beyond that and you'll be on your own.
        • danShumway 3y ago
          The fact that X11 is a dead end (which I agree with) is why the accessibility conversation around Wayland is even more important to have. If X11 was going to be some permanent fixture at least people who rely on it for apps that are abandoned or proprietary or can't/won't be updated would have an alternative they could keep using. But while X11 isn't going away any time soon, it's also very clearly not what we want to be building on or encouraging people to use. When I criticize the state of Wayland, I'm not saying X11 is great. I don't want to be on X11, I want to use Wayland. I want the features that Wayland has. Where accessibility is concerned, we're at risk of losing a bunch of users if they lose the ability to use applications they rely on during the transition or if there aren't alternatives to help control the applications that don't get updated. This is not something where we can just say, "oh the developers are lazy." If the stuff doesn't get supported, regardless of whether it's the developers' fault or Wayland's fault, the users can't just deal with it until the ecosystem catches up. Instead, they go to Windows (or more realistically to Mac, my understanding is that Apple is kind of the gold standard if you need accessibility controls). ---- Also add to this that "developers need to modernize" minimizes just how unapproachable a lot of this stuff actually is. I don't have a good grasp of how accessibility works in X11 because the development philosophy there has been for years "let the toolkit handle it" or "don't worry about it, controllers will just do something weird to handle window placement or font sizes on their own." What are the standards for handling those problems in the future? There probably are standards, and they're probably better than what X11 was doing, but I don't feel confident that I know what they are. And there are X11 apps that are written by developers who aren't professionals and that have even less knowledge than I do about how the Linux desktop actually works. I would challenge anyone to find a good tutorial online written at a level that novice developers can understand that walks through how to make sure that a Wayland app is accessible, what changes need to be made from X11, and what the common problems or pitfalls are that developers might face. Again, wouldn't necessarily be the biggest problem in the world -- except for the fact that X11 is a dead end and Wayland is the future. And because it's the future, we really, really need to make this stuff work.
    • dylan-m 3y ago
      > things which were working are suddenly broken … > Wayland is 15 years old. So, it's not very sudden, then, is it? So much of what people see as wrong in Wayland is about slow-moving applications and driver vendors refusing to adapt; waiting until their software is actually broken before they do anything. We've had more than a decade knowing full well what is coming. I sympathize that an application you rely on is caught up in that. Nobody wanted that situation. But X11 has had a pretty good life. And unless Talon on Linux is suddenly abandoned, I really doubt those developers are going to keep hitching their wagon to X11. At some point, (probably soon now that distributors are getting serious about it), they will take a look at what's new and they will make it work with Wayland. With that said, I don't think you have to worry for a while. I doubt apps are ever going to stop working in X11 altogether. You might end up with a different desktop at some point if you're using GNOME or KDE, but that's all.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        To an end user it could easily be sudden; you install a new version of Fedora and oops your screenshot tool no longer works, and better hope the only accessibility tools you needed were built in to GNOME. > And unless Talon on Linux is suddenly abandoned, I really doubt those developers are going to keep hitching their wagon to X11. At some point, (probably soon now that distributors are getting serious about it), they will take a look at what's new and they will make it work with Wayland. That's assuming that they can make it work with Wayland, which appears rather unlikely since the API surface doesn't exist. As you say, Wayland has had more than a decade but most of that time was spent loudly proclaiming that such functionality was a security problem and had no legitimate usecases so here we are. > With that said, I don't think you have to worry for a while. I doubt apps are ever going to stop working in X11 altogether. I certainly hope I can keep using X until Wayland actually reaches feature parity, but I'm already seeing pressure on both sides; waydroid is the first[0] application to outright refuse to support X, while Asahi Linux was loudest about not wanting to support Xorg but they're hardly the only ones. I suspect I'm going to end up with a 3-layer system comprised of cage[1] running xwayland running my real graphical environment with some applications in their own little cage windows. It's a little annoying but as a break-glass option it seems to function with only slightly more papercuts than X11 programs on Xorg:\ [0] Well, first that I've noticed at least. [1] https://www.hjdskes.nl/projects/cage/ https://www.hjdskes.nl/projects/cage/