4 ms·

Buggier or not - it's too late to think X11 is the alternative. It's not. Wayland is going to get better for whatever is needed. X11 is absolutely not the way

by shmerl 3y ago

Buggier or not - it's too late to think X11 is the alternative. It's not. Wayland is going to get better for whatever is needed. X11 is absolutely not the way to go.

GuB-42 3y ago
The question is "when?". Wayland is 15 years old, it already had a lot of time to "get better". So today, in most cases, I'd say X11 is still the way to go, it just works better. When Wayland will get better and apps start supporting Wayland more than they support X11, it will be the time to switch, but at the glacial pace Wayland advances, chances are that your current system will be obsolete when it will happen. It is still a good idea to consider Wayland support for your own apps and have at least a test machine running it, but doesn't mean writing apps designed to work with X11 like this one is a wasted effort. X11 is here to stay, for a while at least.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Further, it's not even clear that this kind of program is practically possible on Wayland. At best, that's yet another new protocol someone would need to invent that only some compositors would implement.
  - shmerl 3y ago
    > Further, it's not even clear that this kind of program is practically possible on Wayland. It's pretty clear. But some are too stuck up to even research it or be part of shaping it. Which is common among legacy vendors who very rarely even care to communicate with Wayland developers about their needs. Those who aren't stuck up deal with it just fine (OBS Studio for example).
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      Lol - it's "stuck up" to prefer software that works? If you want people to switch, it'd help to actually cover their use cases. Showing up to proclaim software "obsolete" when the supposed replacement literally doesn't support the features in use, then... what, claiming we're bad people for not contributing to Wayland? is the cultural part of why people don't like Wayland. (In a distant second place behind the technical reasons people don't like it, which boils down to missing features and present bugs.)
      - shmerl 3y ago
        Stuck up means they don't care to collaborate. If they don't, how would anyone know about their specific needs? Those who don't have this dinosaur mentality do work with Wayland developers and their needs are addressed faster. Others learn the hard way but also usually like to complain that "things don't work".
        t0b1 3y ago
        Maybe people don‘t because they see, for example, Valve (a billion dollar company) struggling to get GNOME to implement drm-leasing for VR headsets. IIRC they‘ve been at it for multiple years, too. Or maybe it‘s because the compositor developers are not exactly concerned about ease of development. To quote a GNOME dev[0] about support for the aforementioned drm-leasing protocol: > I honestly don't have a problem with forcing clients to implement the portal if they want to work on mutter. I wouldn‘t blame the people who choose to simply not engage with that process, especially those who work on these things in their free time. [0]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/2759 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/2759
  - jrm4 3y ago
    This was the question I came to ask. I've been a Wayland avoider because for me there was nothing "broken" to be fixed. Occasionally, I've enjoying playing around with window management and hacking with WMs, using stuff like this and/or xdotool and wmctrl. I was curious as to what this might be like in Wayland-land? Do tools like this even exist?
    - shmerl 3y ago
      Yes: https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        >> Occasionally, I've enjoying playing around with window management and hacking with WMs, using stuff like this and/or xdotool and wmctrl. Ydotool readme: > Currently implemented command(s): > type - Type a string > key - Press keys > mousemove - Move mouse pointer to absolute position > click - Click on mouse buttons So... No.
        shmerl 3y ago
        For what xdotool does - pretty much a substitute. For anything else you need a compositor specific tool. KWin scripts or something might work for KDE: https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/kwin/ https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/kwin/
        yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        > For what xdotool does - pretty much a substitute. No; for just the input functions, and that only if you're not using `--window`, it's a substitute. But xdotool is a lot more than that. > For anything else you need a compositor specific tool. Yes, exactly. For the things that were asked for, your best hope is do see if your particular compositor deigned to provide the API surface, and then if it did, write something that uses those non-portable APIs to do what you want.
- shmerl 3y ago
  > The question is "when? I'd say within this year already. Some major parts like explicit sync are being merged already. And all future work (like HDR) will only go to Wayland. Not to X11. So this claim that X11 is a viable option is a fallacy.
  - arp242 3y ago
    It works. Therefore, it's viable. It's my computer. I decide what's "the way to go" or "viable" there. None of your business. No one is forcing you or anyone to use it. This is clearly a "I wrote it because it's useful for me, I put it online for whom it may concern"-type of project. You need to calm your tits and stop shitting all over people's hobby projects.
    - shmerl 3y ago
      You can decide whatever you want. Being stuck with unsupported case (X11) you support yourself is "viable" as long as support yourself is something you can do.
      - arp242 3y ago
        It's not "unsupported". That's just not true.
- bitwize 3y ago
  > The question is "when?". Wayland is 15 years old, it already had a lot of time to "get better". So today, in most cases, I'd say X11 is still the way to go, it just works better. If you run more than one monitor with different DPI, Wayland is the only choice. If you want to do HDR, Wayland will be the only choice. > When Wayland will get better and apps start supporting Wayland more than they support X11, it will be the time to switch, but at the glacial pace Wayland advances, chances are that your current system will be obsolete when it will happen. Toolkit developers are already considering removing their X11 code paths. All of the effort is going into Wayland. The best time to switch was a few years ago. The second best time to switch is now.
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    I tried Wayland (Fedora 39) on two screens and the experience was so terrible and full of bugs I gave up after less than a day. New windows open at random locations and screens no matter what's focused, UI scaling of a window is sometimes wrong for its screen, at least once an hour the screens just go blank for a couple seconds etc. For me it's definitely not usable yet, let alone the "only choice" > All of the effort is going into Wayland Yes, because it's still work in progress. And at some point in the future that effort will have paid off, but that's not now and definitely not a few years ago.
    - bitwize 3y ago
      > Yes, because it's still work in progress. And because the X11 maintainers decided that Wayland is the way forward and X11 will simply not get new display features like HDR.
      - alpaca128 3y ago
        What I care about are the existing features. Bugs don't look any better in HDR. I'm sure it'll all be fixed sooner or later but until then it's a downgrade for me, and I just don't get this "best time to switch" sentiment about an unfinished component that a user shouldn't even need to know about.
      - 3y ago
DonHopkins 3y ago
X11 was absolutely not the way to go since the day it was released on 15 September 1987, but that never stopped it.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  The difference is that back then there were people actually developing it, the Wayland core team is basically the developers left in the GNU/Linux ecosystem that still care about GUIs, most of them former X contributors. There isn't anyone left standing to care for X11 development, only vocal users.

by shmerl 3y ago

Buggier or not - it's too late to think X11 is the alternative. It's not. Wayland is going to get better for whatever is needed. X11 is absolutely not the way to go.

GuB-42 3y ago

The question is "when?". Wayland is 15 years old, it already had a lot of time to "get better". So today, in most cases, I'd say X11 is still the way to go, it just works better. When Wayland will get better and apps start supporting Wayland more than they support X11, it will be the time to switch, but at the glacial pace Wayland advances, chances are that your current system will be obsolete when it will happen. It is still a good idea to consider Wayland support for your own apps and have at least a test machine running it, but doesn't mean writing apps designed to work with X11 like this one is a wasted effort. X11 is here to stay, for a while at least.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Further, it's not even clear that this kind of program is practically possible on Wayland. At best, that's yet another new protocol someone would need to invent that only some compositors would implement.
- shmerl 3y ago
  > Further, it's not even clear that this kind of program is practically possible on Wayland. It's pretty clear. But some are too stuck up to even research it or be part of shaping it. Which is common among legacy vendors who very rarely even care to communicate with Wayland developers about their needs. Those who aren't stuck up deal with it just fine (OBS Studio for example).
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Lol - it's "stuck up" to prefer software that works? If you want people to switch, it'd help to actually cover their use cases. Showing up to proclaim software "obsolete" when the supposed replacement literally doesn't support the features in use, then... what, claiming we're bad people for not contributing to Wayland? is the cultural part of why people don't like Wayland. (In a distant second place behind the technical reasons people don't like it, which boils down to missing features and present bugs.)
    - shmerl 3y ago
      Stuck up means they don't care to collaborate. If they don't, how would anyone know about their specific needs? Those who don't have this dinosaur mentality do work with Wayland developers and their needs are addressed faster. Others learn the hard way but also usually like to complain that "things don't work".
      - t0b1 3y ago
        Maybe people don‘t because they see, for example, Valve (a billion dollar company) struggling to get GNOME to implement drm-leasing for VR headsets. IIRC they‘ve been at it for multiple years, too. Or maybe it‘s because the compositor developers are not exactly concerned about ease of development. To quote a GNOME dev[0] about support for the aforementioned drm-leasing protocol: > I honestly don't have a problem with forcing clients to implement the portal if they want to work on mutter. I wouldn‘t blame the people who choose to simply not engage with that process, especially those who work on these things in their free time. [0]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/2759 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/2759
- jrm4 3y ago
  This was the question I came to ask. I've been a Wayland avoider because for me there was nothing "broken" to be fixed. Occasionally, I've enjoying playing around with window management and hacking with WMs, using stuff like this and/or xdotool and wmctrl. I was curious as to what this might be like in Wayland-land? Do tools like this even exist?
  - shmerl 3y ago
    Yes: https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      >> Occasionally, I've enjoying playing around with window management and hacking with WMs, using stuff like this and/or xdotool and wmctrl. Ydotool readme: > Currently implemented command(s): > type - Type a string > key - Press keys > mousemove - Move mouse pointer to absolute position > click - Click on mouse buttons So... No.
      - shmerl 3y ago
        For what xdotool does - pretty much a substitute. For anything else you need a compositor specific tool. KWin scripts or something might work for KDE: https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/kwin/ https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/kwin/
        yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        > For what xdotool does - pretty much a substitute. No; for just the input functions, and that only if you're not using `--window`, it's a substitute. But xdotool is a lot more than that. > For anything else you need a compositor specific tool. Yes, exactly. For the things that were asked for, your best hope is do see if your particular compositor deigned to provide the API surface, and then if it did, write something that uses those non-portable APIs to do what you want.
shmerl 3y ago
> The question is "when? I'd say within this year already. Some major parts like explicit sync are being merged already. And all future work (like HDR) will only go to Wayland. Not to X11. So this claim that X11 is a viable option is a fallacy.
- arp242 3y ago
  It works. Therefore, it's viable. It's my computer. I decide what's "the way to go" or "viable" there. None of your business. No one is forcing you or anyone to use it. This is clearly a "I wrote it because it's useful for me, I put it online for whom it may concern"-type of project. You need to calm your tits and stop shitting all over people's hobby projects.
  - shmerl 3y ago
    You can decide whatever you want. Being stuck with unsupported case (X11) you support yourself is "viable" as long as support yourself is something you can do.
    - arp242 3y ago
      It's not "unsupported". That's just not true.
bitwize 3y ago
> The question is "when?". Wayland is 15 years old, it already had a lot of time to "get better". So today, in most cases, I'd say X11 is still the way to go, it just works better. If you run more than one monitor with different DPI, Wayland is the only choice. If you want to do HDR, Wayland will be the only choice. > When Wayland will get better and apps start supporting Wayland more than they support X11, it will be the time to switch, but at the glacial pace Wayland advances, chances are that your current system will be obsolete when it will happen. Toolkit developers are already considering removing their X11 code paths. All of the effort is going into Wayland. The best time to switch was a few years ago. The second best time to switch is now.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  I tried Wayland (Fedora 39) on two screens and the experience was so terrible and full of bugs I gave up after less than a day. New windows open at random locations and screens no matter what's focused, UI scaling of a window is sometimes wrong for its screen, at least once an hour the screens just go blank for a couple seconds etc. For me it's definitely not usable yet, let alone the "only choice" > All of the effort is going into Wayland Yes, because it's still work in progress. And at some point in the future that effort will have paid off, but that's not now and definitely not a few years ago.
  - bitwize 3y ago
    > Yes, because it's still work in progress. And because the X11 maintainers decided that Wayland is the way forward and X11 will simply not get new display features like HDR.
    - alpaca128 3y ago
      What I care about are the existing features. Bugs don't look any better in HDR. I'm sure it'll all be fixed sooner or later but until then it's a downgrade for me, and I just don't get this "best time to switch" sentiment about an unfinished component that a user shouldn't even need to know about.
    - 3y ago

DonHopkins 3y ago

X11 was absolutely not the way to go since the day it was released on 15 September 1987, but that never stopped it.

pjmlp 3y ago
The difference is that back then there were people actually developing it, the Wayland core team is basically the developers left in the GNU/Linux ecosystem that still care about GUIs, most of them former X contributors. There isn't anyone left standing to care for X11 development, only vocal users.