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Personal opinion: If Linux "catches on" without dropping X11 rather quickly, it will lose all of the momentum. Xorg offers a fairly good out-of-box experience o

by jchw 3y ago

Personal opinion: If Linux "catches on" without dropping X11 rather quickly, it will lose all of the momentum. Xorg offers a fairly good out-of-box experience on many GPUs but it falls apart when you try to do things that would be considered normal on other OSes, like having displays of different DPIs, streaming 4K video via OBS, and so forth. Everybody keeps treating this issue like it's just programmers deprecating old code for fun, but the actual reality of it is that you can only like Xorg if you exist in the narrow space where it is sufficient, and while it's easy to downplay the importance of its shortcomings if you either coincidentally follow the line or if perhaps your behavior has adjusted to the limitations, it's much harder when you're having to explain it to someone who is trying to get into Linux for the first time and realizing what they have taken for granted elsewhere. Yes, a broken Wayland session won't be much better. But if the Wayland session is still not suitable for a majority of users by the time Fedora 41 ships, whatever window of opportunity exists for Linux is going to just get missed entirely.

brnt 3y ago
If you call what Xorg supports a narrow space, I'm not sure you've used Wayland. I read the exact same things about it a decade ago, and I remember that Fedora 31 (maybe 32?) defaulted to Wayland. Just as it was then: I get breakage whereas with Xorg I get none. And a trivial search reveals there are _many_ more for who Wayland creates issues or showstoppers. Once people in the Wayland sphere start to realize they'll need to cover those 1001 Xorg edge cases _on top_ of enabling the good stuff that they've done, sure, we'll be getting there. However, that interest doesn't seem to be there, counting by the #worksforme's...
- jchw 3y ago
  I have been using SwayWM for five years. My system configuration is public on Github. I have also been closely tracking the Plasma Wayland session on AMD hardware, too. Unfortunately you didn't list any of the shortcomings, just vaguely that there are breakages, but my point isn't that Wayland is perfect, it's that X11 is effectively non-viable for many people due to shortcomings that are difficult or nearly impossible to fix that nobody is working on. Meanwhile, one of the biggest showstoppers for Wayland isn't even Wayland, it's that the Linux graphics infrastructure Wayland compositors rely on isn't well-supported by the official NVIDIA driver.
  - brnt 3y ago
    I'm not going down for the umpteenth time with someone appearing to be interested in what broke, but not taking me up on my offer to help them troubleshoot (because Wayland doesn't print any helpful error codes, just freezes my desktop, on a variety of different hardware, a variety of Intel graphics too, variety of distros, all in the same way). Unfortunately you hand wave away Xorg being not an option an account of not much more than fractional scaling issues, which is pretty easily worked around in my experience, while many people happily use it daily, and have for decades. I'm not saying things can be better, I'm saying Wayland proponents are always devvy types doing same-ish things on same-ish hardware. No wonder that by now Wayland supports this well!
    - jchw 3y ago
      Funny enough I didn't mention fractional scale but heterogeneous scale factors across monitors. But frankly, I am a little offended that anyone would try to portray any Xorg scaling scheme as "working". It's a crapshoot at best, and the illusion is shattered the moment you start an app or game that doesn't carefully coordinate its scaling factor. I've tried many things, on both KDE and GNOME, and it's just not reliable. Pop!_OS has its own workarounds, too, and it's still a mess; having to log out to make scaling changes take effect reliably is a terrible experience. Dragging windows across screens and having some of them change scale and others not makes your desktop feel utterly unpredictable, it's just not going to work. Even Windows doesn't have this issue anymore! (Of course, Pop!_OS, being pragmatic, is just going to move to its own Wayland compositor and sidestep all of that non-sense.) Anyway, the true irony is that Xorg doesn't actually have especially great support for a wide range of use cases and hardware, it's more just that NVIDIA specifically holds Wayland compositors back for desktop support. I use AMD graphics and it works great. Intel graphics works, too. Raspberry Pi computers on VideoCore now run Wayfire by default and its about as smooth as it ever has been. Wayland has seen adoption across different use cases, from embedded machines to powering "Linux" features in ChromeOS and Windows, to the Steam compositor on Steam Deck. To paint it as though Wayland only supports developer desktops running Intel graphics is just silly. Anyway, yes, I am not volunteering to debug your machine, but the vast majority of complaints about what Wayland can't do aren't even correct. The common wisdom is still that Wayland can't even do screen capture when I was using it in Zoom calls two years ago, not to mention the newer developments like XWayland Video Bridge in KDE. Obviously, it sucks that people are having stability issues with this switch, but just like "Works on my machine" is not a meaningful retort to issues, "Doesn't work on my machine" is also not a good excuse to hold back the future forever. Whether Wayland compositors are ready or not, X11 is not a viable future. For many users, it's not a viable present. So, if you're not willing to debug your Linux issues, I can't blame you. But, in return, you can't blame the rest of us for continuing without debugging your personal machine issues, either.
sprash 3y ago
> Xorg offers a fairly good out-of-box experience on many GPUs but it falls apart when you try to do things that would be considered normal on other OSes You are you talking about Wayland. Wayland has no or severely lacking mechanisms for screenshots, screen sharing, positioning of windows, window management, window icons, drag and drop, ... Many of the issues are duck-taped with a clusterfuck of incompatible external protocols which turns the whole ecosystem into a complete mess. But what do you expect from a severely lacking protocol designed for digital signage and car entertainment systems that is being shoehorned into a desktop protocol. > Everybody keeps treating this issue like it's just programmers deprecating old code for fun No. It's all about funding. DARPA (=RedHat) used to fund X11, now it's funding Wayland. That's it. X11 is still to this day the better solution for Desktops, by a long shot. > while it's easy to downplay the importance of its shortcomings The only shortcomings that are consistently being downplayed are those of Wayland.
- akdev1l 3y ago
  > DARPA (=RedHat) This seems like high level tin foil hat wearing. Are there any publicly available sources that tie up DARPA, Red Hat and Xorg? I’m not even sure what to Google tbh.
  - sprash 3y ago
    Besides the point. The only reason Wayland is worked on and X11 is not worked on is funding. Not because Wayland is in any way better or something. It's clearly worse than X11 in almost every aspect.
- jchw 3y ago
  > You are you talking about Wayland. Wayland has no or severely lacking mechanisms for screenshots, screen sharing, positioning of windows, window management, window icons, drag and drop, ... > Many of the issues are duck-taped with a clusterfuck of incompatible external protocols which turns the whole ecosystem into a complete mess. As opposed to the mess of X protocols which are elegant and working great? - The X11 protocol itself is insane. Obviously any reasonable person is going to want to write an app that just uses bindings like XCB, but if you venture into the protocol from the ground up you will quickly run into weird concepts like visuals and colormaps that beckon back to the days of 256 color graphics, and protocols whose endianness depended on the host machine. - There is an input method protocol called XIM. It has not been updated or improved at all in 30 years, and nobody has ever attempted to make a successor to my knowledge. It is essentially completely useless, and thus all of the modern UI toolkits, IME buses, and input methods have to implement their own communications. It winds up being N x M, twice (once for UI toolkits to buses, and a gain for buses to input methods.) When people run into an issue and IBus or FCITX stop working, they usually just give up, because fucking with environment variables and UI toolkit plugins to try to get everything to work again is just not worth the trouble. Wayland does not have a perfect world here, but what it has is real life progress on this issue, wherein one can install Sway, fcitx5 and a GTK-4 app and everything works. - X has some core input events, but it's not enough, so there is XInput. XInput was also not enough, so there is now XInput2. XInput2 is not new but it is still not the default in many apps, like Wine's graphics tablet support or Firefox (which has XI2 code, but it's still disabled.) This is the short version, because I value my sanity. But as someone who tried using a touchscreen on Linux in 2013, I assure you I have more experience with the "robust stability" that Xorg is known for. - Inter-app communication is handled via ICCCM, which isn't an X protocol per se but more of a way of catastrophically abusing X properties, including using them as synchronization primitives for makeshift data channels. To this day, QXcb is known to have race conditions in its implementation of bulk clipboard transfers in some (thankfully rare) circumstances, and nobody has figured out what causes it. What is true is that over the years, Xorg has been improved greatly. It has hotplugging. Modeswitching has been moved to the kernel. It no longer requires root. It is no longer literally a print server. There are far less segfaults hiding in XI. However, the design issues that X ran into are basically cemented into history at this point, and that's why it is not a viable path forward. > But what do you expect from a severely lacking protocol designed for digital signage and car entertainment systems that is being shoehorned into a desktop protocol. Wayland was definitely not originally or especially designed for embedded use cases. It was explicitly developed as a successor to X11 that reflected the direction the Linux graphics stack was moving in. It was indeed developed by Redhat, but also by a prominent developer that worked on Xorg. I am aware that Weston has indeed gained some success in automotive and embedded environments, but this makes sense, it's well-suited for that. Xorg wasn't fantastic for these use cases for a variety of reasons, but Wayland offers much more flexibility for vendors. You can relatively easily extend Weston or even write your own compositor using just standard Linux graphics technology, seems pretty convenient. > No. It's all about funding. DARPA (=RedHat) used to fund X11, now it's funding Wayland. That's it. Not that this is relevant or anything but... man. No comment. > X11 is still to this day the better solution for Desktops, by a long shot. It is definitely the best solution for desktops that have the exact same set of needs they had 20 years ago. I'm not even disputing that, I'm dead serious. If your needs for a desktop haven't dramatically changed in the last couple of decades X11 is objectively better. What you are missing is that for a lot of people, it has in fact changed quite a lot, and this is legitimately holding back Linux. I'm not arguing Wayland is a beautiful and elegant design. I'm arguing that we need something that we can actually fucking improve and build the future on top of, and between X and Wayland as a base, it's not even close. It's Wayland. It has been Wayland. > The only shortcomings that are consistently being downplayed are those of Wayland. The reason why people think this is simple. When most people talk about Wayland shortcomings, they're talking about things that actually can be improved and fixed, in some cases they're being fixed right now, in others it might take time but there's paths forward. When most people talk about X11 shortcomings, they're talking about things that will never, ever be fixed. Ever. The only thing that's been entertaining to me is that X was always the bane of our existence and the butt of many Linux user's jokes in around 2004, but somehow there is amnesia. Now the impetus to move on from X11 is suddenly seen as hasty, despite the fact that it is definitely severely overdue.

by jchw 3y ago

brnt 3y ago

If you call what Xorg supports a narrow space, I'm not sure you've used Wayland. I read the exact same things about it a decade ago, and I remember that Fedora 31 (maybe 32?) defaulted to Wayland. Just as it was then: I get breakage whereas with Xorg I get none. And a trivial search reveals there are _many_ more for who Wayland creates issues or showstoppers. Once people in the Wayland sphere start to realize they'll need to cover those 1001 Xorg edge cases _on top_ of enabling the good stuff that they've done, sure, we'll be getting there. However, that interest doesn't seem to be there, counting by the #worksforme's...

jchw 3y ago
I have been using SwayWM for five years. My system configuration is public on Github. I have also been closely tracking the Plasma Wayland session on AMD hardware, too. Unfortunately you didn't list any of the shortcomings, just vaguely that there are breakages, but my point isn't that Wayland is perfect, it's that X11 is effectively non-viable for many people due to shortcomings that are difficult or nearly impossible to fix that nobody is working on. Meanwhile, one of the biggest showstoppers for Wayland isn't even Wayland, it's that the Linux graphics infrastructure Wayland compositors rely on isn't well-supported by the official NVIDIA driver.
- brnt 3y ago
  I'm not going down for the umpteenth time with someone appearing to be interested in what broke, but not taking me up on my offer to help them troubleshoot (because Wayland doesn't print any helpful error codes, just freezes my desktop, on a variety of different hardware, a variety of Intel graphics too, variety of distros, all in the same way). Unfortunately you hand wave away Xorg being not an option an account of not much more than fractional scaling issues, which is pretty easily worked around in my experience, while many people happily use it daily, and have for decades. I'm not saying things can be better, I'm saying Wayland proponents are always devvy types doing same-ish things on same-ish hardware. No wonder that by now Wayland supports this well!
  - jchw 3y ago
    Funny enough I didn't mention fractional scale but heterogeneous scale factors across monitors. But frankly, I am a little offended that anyone would try to portray any Xorg scaling scheme as "working". It's a crapshoot at best, and the illusion is shattered the moment you start an app or game that doesn't carefully coordinate its scaling factor. I've tried many things, on both KDE and GNOME, and it's just not reliable. Pop!_OS has its own workarounds, too, and it's still a mess; having to log out to make scaling changes take effect reliably is a terrible experience. Dragging windows across screens and having some of them change scale and others not makes your desktop feel utterly unpredictable, it's just not going to work. Even Windows doesn't have this issue anymore! (Of course, Pop!_OS, being pragmatic, is just going to move to its own Wayland compositor and sidestep all of that non-sense.) Anyway, the true irony is that Xorg doesn't actually have especially great support for a wide range of use cases and hardware, it's more just that NVIDIA specifically holds Wayland compositors back for desktop support. I use AMD graphics and it works great. Intel graphics works, too. Raspberry Pi computers on VideoCore now run Wayfire by default and its about as smooth as it ever has been. Wayland has seen adoption across different use cases, from embedded machines to powering "Linux" features in ChromeOS and Windows, to the Steam compositor on Steam Deck. To paint it as though Wayland only supports developer desktops running Intel graphics is just silly. Anyway, yes, I am not volunteering to debug your machine, but the vast majority of complaints about what Wayland can't do aren't even correct. The common wisdom is still that Wayland can't even do screen capture when I was using it in Zoom calls two years ago, not to mention the newer developments like XWayland Video Bridge in KDE. Obviously, it sucks that people are having stability issues with this switch, but just like "Works on my machine" is not a meaningful retort to issues, "Doesn't work on my machine" is also not a good excuse to hold back the future forever. Whether Wayland compositors are ready or not, X11 is not a viable future. For many users, it's not a viable present. So, if you're not willing to debug your Linux issues, I can't blame you. But, in return, you can't blame the rest of us for continuing without debugging your personal machine issues, either.

sprash 3y ago

> Xorg offers a fairly good out-of-box experience on many GPUs but it falls apart when you try to do things that would be considered normal on other OSes You are you talking about Wayland. Wayland has no or severely lacking mechanisms for screenshots, screen sharing, positioning of windows, window management, window icons, drag and drop, ... Many of the issues are duck-taped with a clusterfuck of incompatible external protocols which turns the whole ecosystem into a complete mess. But what do you expect from a severely lacking protocol designed for digital signage and car entertainment systems that is being shoehorned into a desktop protocol. > Everybody keeps treating this issue like it's just programmers deprecating old code for fun No. It's all about funding. DARPA (=RedHat) used to fund X11, now it's funding Wayland. That's it. X11 is still to this day the better solution for Desktops, by a long shot. > while it's easy to downplay the importance of its shortcomings The only shortcomings that are consistently being downplayed are those of Wayland.

akdev1l 3y ago
> DARPA (=RedHat) This seems like high level tin foil hat wearing. Are there any publicly available sources that tie up DARPA, Red Hat and Xorg? I’m not even sure what to Google tbh.
- sprash 3y ago
  Besides the point. The only reason Wayland is worked on and X11 is not worked on is funding. Not because Wayland is in any way better or something. It's clearly worse than X11 in almost every aspect.
jchw 3y ago
> You are you talking about Wayland. Wayland has no or severely lacking mechanisms for screenshots, screen sharing, positioning of windows, window management, window icons, drag and drop, ... > Many of the issues are duck-taped with a clusterfuck of incompatible external protocols which turns the whole ecosystem into a complete mess. As opposed to the mess of X protocols which are elegant and working great? - The X11 protocol itself is insane. Obviously any reasonable person is going to want to write an app that just uses bindings like XCB, but if you venture into the protocol from the ground up you will quickly run into weird concepts like visuals and colormaps that beckon back to the days of 256 color graphics, and protocols whose endianness depended on the host machine. - There is an input method protocol called XIM. It has not been updated or improved at all in 30 years, and nobody has ever attempted to make a successor to my knowledge. It is essentially completely useless, and thus all of the modern UI toolkits, IME buses, and input methods have to implement their own communications. It winds up being N x M, twice (once for UI toolkits to buses, and a gain for buses to input methods.) When people run into an issue and IBus or FCITX stop working, they usually just give up, because fucking with environment variables and UI toolkit plugins to try to get everything to work again is just not worth the trouble. Wayland does not have a perfect world here, but what it has is real life progress on this issue, wherein one can install Sway, fcitx5 and a GTK-4 app and everything works. - X has some core input events, but it's not enough, so there is XInput. XInput was also not enough, so there is now XInput2. XInput2 is not new but it is still not the default in many apps, like Wine's graphics tablet support or Firefox (which has XI2 code, but it's still disabled.) This is the short version, because I value my sanity. But as someone who tried using a touchscreen on Linux in 2013, I assure you I have more experience with the "robust stability" that Xorg is known for. - Inter-app communication is handled via ICCCM, which isn't an X protocol per se but more of a way of catastrophically abusing X properties, including using them as synchronization primitives for makeshift data channels. To this day, QXcb is known to have race conditions in its implementation of bulk clipboard transfers in some (thankfully rare) circumstances, and nobody has figured out what causes it. What is true is that over the years, Xorg has been improved greatly. It has hotplugging. Modeswitching has been moved to the kernel. It no longer requires root. It is no longer literally a print server. There are far less segfaults hiding in XI. However, the design issues that X ran into are basically cemented into history at this point, and that's why it is not a viable path forward. > But what do you expect from a severely lacking protocol designed for digital signage and car entertainment systems that is being shoehorned into a desktop protocol. Wayland was definitely not originally or especially designed for embedded use cases. It was explicitly developed as a successor to X11 that reflected the direction the Linux graphics stack was moving in. It was indeed developed by Redhat, but also by a prominent developer that worked on Xorg. I am aware that Weston has indeed gained some success in automotive and embedded environments, but this makes sense, it's well-suited for that. Xorg wasn't fantastic for these use cases for a variety of reasons, but Wayland offers much more flexibility for vendors. You can relatively easily extend Weston or even write your own compositor using just standard Linux graphics technology, seems pretty convenient. > No. It's all about funding. DARPA (=RedHat) used to fund X11, now it's funding Wayland. That's it. Not that this is relevant or anything but... man. No comment. > X11 is still to this day the better solution for Desktops, by a long shot. It is definitely the best solution for desktops that have the exact same set of needs they had 20 years ago. I'm not even disputing that, I'm dead serious. If your needs for a desktop haven't dramatically changed in the last couple of decades X11 is objectively better. What you are missing is that for a lot of people, it has in fact changed quite a lot, and this is legitimately holding back Linux. I'm not arguing Wayland is a beautiful and elegant design. I'm arguing that we need something that we can actually fucking improve and build the future on top of, and between X and Wayland as a base, it's not even close. It's Wayland. It has been Wayland. > The only shortcomings that are consistently being downplayed are those of Wayland. The reason why people think this is simple. When most people talk about Wayland shortcomings, they're talking about things that actually can be improved and fixed, in some cases they're being fixed right now, in others it might take time but there's paths forward. When most people talk about X11 shortcomings, they're talking about things that will never, ever be fixed. Ever. The only thing that's been entertaining to me is that X was always the bane of our existence and the butt of many Linux user's jokes in around 2004, but somehow there is amnesia. Now the impetus to move on from X11 is suddenly seen as hasty, despite the fact that it is definitely severely overdue.