6 ms·

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 Wayla

by 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.
- Alupis 3y ago
  > 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 The wayland/x11 compatibility shims work and will continue to do so for a long time, for the reasons you are mentioning. Basically both will work on a Wayland system for the foreseeable future - the big change was making Wayland the default which puts the focus there instead of allowing people to mentally push that work off into the future. Wayland is prime-time, it's shipping as the default for all the big distros. It's here - time to get with it and update your codebase. Like has already been pointed out, Wayland isn't new, and this day has been coming for years. Now app developers will be compelled to finally put in the work. It's not fair to complain about Wayland when it's some app developers that are not modernizing.
  - danShumway 3y ago
    > It's not fair to complain about Wayland when it's app developers that are not modernizing. How do they modernize? Like you point out, Wayland isn't new. So, I would repeat: > 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. "Need to modernize" is worthless advice without follow-up advice about what needs to be done to modernize. How many developers building apps for Linux even know what the at-spi protocol is? ---- But more to the point: > It's not fair I'm not blaming Wayland devs. I like a lot of Wayland's approach to controls and structure, I agree with a lot of the development philosophy. This isn't about what's fair, I'm telling you that because Wayland is the future and because X11 is a dead end, if users with accessibility concerns can't use Wayland and they can't stick with X11 (which will become increasingly difficult for them to do as X11 decays more and more), they will leave the Linux ecosystem entirely because they will not be physically able to use it. It does not matter who's fault that is. Is it fair? Who cares, it's going to happen regardless if the accessibility situation doesn't improve. This is just kicking the can back and forth, blaming application developers changes nothing about the situation that people are in. If application developers need to modernize, then the question becomes "how do we make that easier for them to do and how do we encourage more of them to do it?" Because clearly the current approach of calling them lazy doesn't seem to be working.
destructionator 3y ago
100% false. Literally nothing you said here is true.

by Alupis 3y ago

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.

Alupis 3y ago
> 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 The wayland/x11 compatibility shims work and will continue to do so for a long time, for the reasons you are mentioning. Basically both will work on a Wayland system for the foreseeable future - the big change was making Wayland the default which puts the focus there instead of allowing people to mentally push that work off into the future. Wayland is prime-time, it's shipping as the default for all the big distros. It's here - time to get with it and update your codebase. Like has already been pointed out, Wayland isn't new, and this day has been coming for years. Now app developers will be compelled to finally put in the work. It's not fair to complain about Wayland when it's some app developers that are not modernizing.
- danShumway 3y ago
  > It's not fair to complain about Wayland when it's app developers that are not modernizing. How do they modernize? Like you point out, Wayland isn't new. So, I would repeat: > 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. "Need to modernize" is worthless advice without follow-up advice about what needs to be done to modernize. How many developers building apps for Linux even know what the at-spi protocol is? ---- But more to the point: > It's not fair I'm not blaming Wayland devs. I like a lot of Wayland's approach to controls and structure, I agree with a lot of the development philosophy. This isn't about what's fair, I'm telling you that because Wayland is the future and because X11 is a dead end, if users with accessibility concerns can't use Wayland and they can't stick with X11 (which will become increasingly difficult for them to do as X11 decays more and more), they will leave the Linux ecosystem entirely because they will not be physically able to use it. It does not matter who's fault that is. Is it fair? Who cares, it's going to happen regardless if the accessibility situation doesn't improve. This is just kicking the can back and forth, blaming application developers changes nothing about the situation that people are in. If application developers need to modernize, then the question becomes "how do we make that easier for them to do and how do we encourage more of them to do it?" Because clearly the current approach of calling them lazy doesn't seem to be working.

destructionator 3y ago

100% false. Literally nothing you said here is true.