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Please, please, please don’t require Wayland yet. It’s still not ready for prime time. Consider that it may not be appropriate to require it ever. Rather tha

Please, please, please don’t require Wayland yet. It’s still not ready for prime time. Consider that it may not be appropriate to require it ever. Rather than just implementing the window manager protocol, as X does, Wayland requires its compositors to implement a huge amount of functionality. It is going to reduce the ability for small window manager to innovate, and make the Linux desktop less interesting. Maybe at some point there will be a decent way for non-C, independent window managers to coexist with Wayland. But I don’t believe we’re there yet. It’s just not ready.

tapoxi 3y ago
The Xorg team is now developing Wayland, there's no future for Xorg. For independent, smaller compositors the Sway team has developed wlroots, a library that brings most of the requirements of a compositor: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/
- eadmund 3y ago
  The problem with wlroots is giant C library. A nice thing about X is that it is feasible to use directly from non-C languages such as Common Lisp.
LorenDB 3y ago
Nobody's requiring Wayland. You can still daily-drive X just fine if you want to use i3 or some other WM. This discussion is about defaulting to Wayland. This move makes sense, because Wayland is the way forward, and contrary to your statements, it's perfectly ready for prime time. If you want to switch to a WM, it doesn't make a big difference whether your distro shipped with X or Wayland; for the normie user who is going to use the default option, setting Wayland as the default is a smart move.
- eadmund 3y ago
  > Nobody's requiring Wayland. Yet. Defaulting to it is one step on the path towards removing support for X and independent window managers forever. I deeply, deeply care about running an independent window manager. A minimal X window manager is a page of code: https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm/blob/master/tinywm.c https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm/blob/master/tinywm.c (yes, plus xlib); a minimal Wayland compositor is tens of thousands of lines of code. > contrary to your statements, it's perfectly ready for prime time These comments are full of folks mentioning issues. Wayland does not support my window manager; thus it is demonstrably not ready for prime time for me. > Wayland is the way forward It may actually be. I’m not as opposed to Wayland as I may sound! But do you understand how you and other Wayland advocates sound — like advocates? ‘Wayland is the way forward’; ‘there's no future for Xorg’; these things are arguably true, but they are also rather cruel to say (a bit like ‘inevitably you and everyone will die’: it really is true, but it’s also not at all a nice thing to say). I do think that Wayland or something very like it may be the way forward, but it needs to be an evolution, not a revolution. I know that the party line is that that’s not possible, but I suspect that rather than not possible it is just very hard. It’s always easier to greenfield, and it is always hell to be 100% backwards compatible. But that’s what it needs to be.
E39M5S62 3y ago
What is your argument for why it's not ready for prime time?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  It is perhaps worth pointing out that most of the rest of this comment section is people either saying how great it is that this progress is being made... or describing all the fun little ways that Wayland still breaks things for them. I suppose it depends on what you mean by ready for prime time, but "still breaks things" seems like a defensible position.
  - infamouscow 3y ago
    The Wayland maintainers also maintained X and have been saying they need help for over a decade. Nobody stepped up.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      I don't see the connection? It's perfectly possible for X to have been an awful mess internally and Wayland to be buggy and feature incomplete for users; neither of those claims contradicts the other
      - infamouscow 3y ago
        Since nobody wants to maintain Xorg anymore, every new CVE puts pressure on distros to also drop support.
        yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        Okay? Even taken at face value, that still doesn't seem relevant; no amount of X code rot, vulnerabilities, or lack of new features will make Wayland stop being buggy or give it the features it didn't pick up in the first 13 years of its existence. I'm not arguing how bad Xorg is internally, I'm telling you that to users Wayland is still worse. Well, for a noticeable fraction of users; the users who aren't affected by the bugs or missing features seem happy.
zamalek 3y ago
Fedora is a bleeding edge distro, it is definitely the wrong choice if you care about ongoing support for legacy software.

tapoxi 3y ago

The Xorg team is now developing Wayland, there's no future for Xorg. For independent, smaller compositors the Sway team has developed wlroots, a library that brings most of the requirements of a compositor: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/

eadmund 3y ago
The problem with wlroots is giant C library. A nice thing about X is that it is feasible to use directly from non-C languages such as Common Lisp.

LorenDB 3y ago

Nobody's requiring Wayland. You can still daily-drive X just fine if you want to use i3 or some other WM. This discussion is about defaulting to Wayland. This move makes sense, because Wayland is the way forward, and contrary to your statements, it's perfectly ready for prime time. If you want to switch to a WM, it doesn't make a big difference whether your distro shipped with X or Wayland; for the normie user who is going to use the default option, setting Wayland as the default is a smart move.

eadmund 3y ago
> Nobody's requiring Wayland. Yet. Defaulting to it is one step on the path towards removing support for X and independent window managers forever. I deeply, deeply care about running an independent window manager. A minimal X window manager is a page of code: https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm/blob/master/tinywm.c https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm/blob/master/tinywm.c (yes, plus xlib); a minimal Wayland compositor is tens of thousands of lines of code. > contrary to your statements, it's perfectly ready for prime time These comments are full of folks mentioning issues. Wayland does not support my window manager; thus it is demonstrably not ready for prime time for me. > Wayland is the way forward It may actually be. I’m not as opposed to Wayland as I may sound! But do you understand how you and other Wayland advocates sound — like advocates? ‘Wayland is the way forward’; ‘there's no future for Xorg’; these things are arguably true, but they are also rather cruel to say (a bit like ‘inevitably you and everyone will die’: it really is true, but it’s also not at all a nice thing to say). I do think that Wayland or something very like it may be the way forward, but it needs to be an evolution, not a revolution. I know that the party line is that that’s not possible, but I suspect that rather than not possible it is just very hard. It’s always easier to greenfield, and it is always hell to be 100% backwards compatible. But that’s what it needs to be.

E39M5S62 3y ago

What is your argument for why it's not ready for prime time?

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
It is perhaps worth pointing out that most of the rest of this comment section is people either saying how great it is that this progress is being made... or describing all the fun little ways that Wayland still breaks things for them. I suppose it depends on what you mean by ready for prime time, but "still breaks things" seems like a defensible position.
- infamouscow 3y ago
  The Wayland maintainers also maintained X and have been saying they need help for over a decade. Nobody stepped up.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    I don't see the connection? It's perfectly possible for X to have been an awful mess internally and Wayland to be buggy and feature incomplete for users; neither of those claims contradicts the other
    - infamouscow 3y ago
      Since nobody wants to maintain Xorg anymore, every new CVE puts pressure on distros to also drop support.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        Okay? Even taken at face value, that still doesn't seem relevant; no amount of X code rot, vulnerabilities, or lack of new features will make Wayland stop being buggy or give it the features it didn't pick up in the first 13 years of its existence. I'm not arguing how bad Xorg is internally, I'm telling you that to users Wayland is still worse. Well, for a noticeable fraction of users; the users who aren't affected by the bugs or missing features seem happy.

zamalek 3y ago

Fedora is a bleeding edge distro, it is definitely the wrong choice if you care about ongoing support for legacy software.