4 ms·

The Wayland devs don't need your sympathy. What's needed is a higher s/n ratio, and that means aggressive moderation of useless "wayland sux/x11 roolz" type com

The Wayland devs don't need your sympathy. What's needed is a higher s/n ratio, and that means aggressive moderation of useless "wayland sux/x11 roolz" type comments, which belong in the dustbin of [flagged] [dead] along with e.g. any comment that uses "woke" as a pejorative. The dead horse has been beaten enough and a decision has been made. We're a few years out from the major toolkits removing their X code paths altogether. Everybody who knows anything about how the graphics stack actually works is committed to Wayland. Nobody cares at this point if you're sticking with X11. One day, you'll wake up and find that your entire GUI environment has broken all around you.

grandinj 3y ago
Well, yes, what is needed is a solid understanding of why we are here, and what needs to be done to get to a better place. I like the Wayland devs, and their occasional failures should not overshadow their successes.
- nolist_policy 3y ago
  No what is needed is that the armchair experts shut up and start contributing to actual Wayland development. The one doing the work decides how its done.
  - grandinj 3y ago
    Well, normally that would be true. But Wayland decided to "boil the ocean" and entirely replace a stack of stuff that was working perfectly well for most people. So perhaps the onus should be on the people who decided to do that, to make sure that things keep working instead of just dumping it? An alternative design would have been to have built Wayland inside X.org and tunnel the new protocol over the existing protocol, and then migrate chunks of functionality one at a time. Which is exactly how X11 replaced X10, and X10 replaced X9, etc. But that would have been careful engineering practice, and not nearly as much fun, so I understand why it did not happen.
    - bitwize 3y ago
      > An alternative design would have been to have built Wayland inside X.org and tunnel the new protocol over the existing protocol, and then migrate chunks of functionality one at a time. This is the kind of ignorance Drew was complaining about. Wayland is a fundamentally different design that cannot simply be embedded in the X protocol; and besides which, again, nobody wants to touch the Xorg code base. Again. Every single person who knows or cares about the modern Linux graphics stack is pretty much in agreement that abandoning the X approach and starting from scratch was the correct choice. This has been explained time and time again by Drew, Daniel Stone, and others much more knowledgeable about this issue than I. Explaining it over and over again to the stubborn and ignorant is getting tiring. You want to stay on legacy, unsupported X11? Fine. Enjoy having no modern software available for your system, as toolkit and app developers remove their X code paths entirely. Red Hat is abandoning X11 already, and Red Hat IS userspace Linux.
      - grandinj 3y ago
        For starters, it is rather rude to assume how little I know about this. Leaving that aside, Drew is mis-characterising things a little. Wayland is fundamentally a different __compositor__ architecture. But the X11 system is about more than that, in fact compositors are a rather late addition to the X11 system. And the protocol architectures are actually quite similar in shape. Which is not surprising, since good ideas last, and X11 has been around for a long time and has accumulated lots of good things (along with lots of cruft too). So it would have been quite possible, but a good deal less fun, to do it differently.
        bitwize 3y ago
        > And the protocol architectures are actually quite similar in shape. Which is not surprising, since good ideas last, and X11 has been around for a long time and has accumulated lots of good things (along with lots of cruft too). With the XPresent extension, you effectively get "Wayland inside X11". It's a wonderful thing, as X engineering goes anyway, that precisely no one asked for. The whole point of the Wayland project is to get rid of all the cruft that X has accumulated over the decades. Embedding Wayland inside Xorg would defeat the whole purpose of the project. The very essence of Wayland is to start over with something new, unhindered by legacy cruft, allowing innovation in the Linux graphics space to take place. So it was decided, unanimously, by the X devs: the X team would become the Wayland team, Wayland would be the future and X would be abandonware. Anyone who wants to step up and take over maintainership of X can, but I don't see a lot of activity happening.
JackSlateur 3y ago
Can I run wayland software in windows ? No ? You mean, I must still use the so infamous yet so helpfull X11 to actually print things on my screen ? Guess I'll stick with X then ? Come back when you have a working alternative, and please stop using some magical "authority" argument : "a decision has been made" (by whom, where, when, why, with whom authority ?)
- bitwize 3y ago
  > Can I run wayland software in windows ? Yes. Wayland is the protocol by which WSL programs display on the Windows desktop. > Come back when you have a working alternative, and please stop using some magical "authority" argument : "a decision has been made" (by whom, where, when, why, with whom authority ?) By the X developers, who decided en masse to abandon X and work on Wayland instead.

grandinj 3y ago

Well, yes, what is needed is a solid understanding of why we are here, and what needs to be done to get to a better place. I like the Wayland devs, and their occasional failures should not overshadow their successes.

nolist_policy 3y ago
No what is needed is that the armchair experts shut up and start contributing to actual Wayland development. The one doing the work decides how its done.
- grandinj 3y ago
  Well, normally that would be true. But Wayland decided to "boil the ocean" and entirely replace a stack of stuff that was working perfectly well for most people. So perhaps the onus should be on the people who decided to do that, to make sure that things keep working instead of just dumping it? An alternative design would have been to have built Wayland inside X.org and tunnel the new protocol over the existing protocol, and then migrate chunks of functionality one at a time. Which is exactly how X11 replaced X10, and X10 replaced X9, etc. But that would have been careful engineering practice, and not nearly as much fun, so I understand why it did not happen.
  - bitwize 3y ago
    > An alternative design would have been to have built Wayland inside X.org and tunnel the new protocol over the existing protocol, and then migrate chunks of functionality one at a time. This is the kind of ignorance Drew was complaining about. Wayland is a fundamentally different design that cannot simply be embedded in the X protocol; and besides which, again, nobody wants to touch the Xorg code base. Again. Every single person who knows or cares about the modern Linux graphics stack is pretty much in agreement that abandoning the X approach and starting from scratch was the correct choice. This has been explained time and time again by Drew, Daniel Stone, and others much more knowledgeable about this issue than I. Explaining it over and over again to the stubborn and ignorant is getting tiring. You want to stay on legacy, unsupported X11? Fine. Enjoy having no modern software available for your system, as toolkit and app developers remove their X code paths entirely. Red Hat is abandoning X11 already, and Red Hat IS userspace Linux.
    - grandinj 3y ago
      For starters, it is rather rude to assume how little I know about this. Leaving that aside, Drew is mis-characterising things a little. Wayland is fundamentally a different __compositor__ architecture. But the X11 system is about more than that, in fact compositors are a rather late addition to the X11 system. And the protocol architectures are actually quite similar in shape. Which is not surprising, since good ideas last, and X11 has been around for a long time and has accumulated lots of good things (along with lots of cruft too). So it would have been quite possible, but a good deal less fun, to do it differently.
      - bitwize 3y ago
        > And the protocol architectures are actually quite similar in shape. Which is not surprising, since good ideas last, and X11 has been around for a long time and has accumulated lots of good things (along with lots of cruft too). With the XPresent extension, you effectively get "Wayland inside X11". It's a wonderful thing, as X engineering goes anyway, that precisely no one asked for. The whole point of the Wayland project is to get rid of all the cruft that X has accumulated over the decades. Embedding Wayland inside Xorg would defeat the whole purpose of the project. The very essence of Wayland is to start over with something new, unhindered by legacy cruft, allowing innovation in the Linux graphics space to take place. So it was decided, unanimously, by the X devs: the X team would become the Wayland team, Wayland would be the future and X would be abandonware. Anyone who wants to step up and take over maintainership of X can, but I don't see a lot of activity happening.

JackSlateur 3y ago

Can I run wayland software in windows ? No ? You mean, I must still use the so infamous yet so helpfull X11 to actually print things on my screen ? Guess I'll stick with X then ? Come back when you have a working alternative, and please stop using some magical "authority" argument : "a decision has been made" (by whom, where, when, why, with whom authority ?)

bitwize 3y ago
> Can I run wayland software in windows ? Yes. Wayland is the protocol by which WSL programs display on the Windows desktop. > Come back when you have a working alternative, and please stop using some magical "authority" argument : "a decision has been made" (by whom, where, when, why, with whom authority ?) By the X developers, who decided en masse to abandon X and work on Wayland instead.