4 ms·

TL,DR Us Wayland skeptics were always right. Again -- I know I'm old, but it still boggles my mind how accepting LINUX people became of breaking backward comp

by jrm4 2y ago

TL,DR Us Wayland skeptics were always right. Again -- I know I'm old, but it still boggles my mind how accepting LINUX people became of breaking backward compatibility in this situation. Like, the opposite of that was our whole thing.

bsder 2y ago
It doesn't matter who was right. It doesn't matter how wrong or broken Wayland is. It does matter who is willing to work on code. And no one is willing to do the work on the X11 codebase that it needs. That's it. Plain and simple. Forking X11 and assuming Vulkan while throwing out everything else is probably pretty doable and would result in a 90% codebase reduction. However, nobody is willing to sling the code to make it happen.
- self_awareness 2y ago
  The problem is I guess that Xorg, a project nobody is working on, still works better than a project that is on full throttle, full of zealots, evangelists, programmers, designers, thinkers, philosophers. That says a lot about the state of those two projects.
  - bmicraft 2y ago
    All that really says about these projects it what's already plainly obvious: X11 is an old project and Wayland hasn't caught up yet for every minor thing you might want it to do. X11 has more than 40 years of development behind it, it isn't easy to catch up to all the features that have been built into and on top of X in the about 8 years (at most) Wayland has been getting the majority of attention.
    - self_awareness 2y ago
      > "you might want it to do" This is my problem with Wayland zealots. First and foremost I want it to display windows on my laptop and my desktop and not freeze my computer on start. Then, I would like to have more than 10 frames per second when it'll finally start. Is that too much to ask? Wayland doesn't deliver these two points on my setup. Should I change my hardware to match your hardware? Wayland development is already in progress for 15 years. And it sill fails to provide basic screen displaying capabilities. I have nothing against the technology, just against the people running the show. I think Canonical has made a mistake to cancel Mir.
    - fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
      It's not about coders. It is about the Wayland spec itself missing features that the maintainers of the spec are bike shedding over, for example, color management and HDR. >8 years (at most) Wayland has been getting the majority of attention. Color management on Wayland has been discussed for over 10 years by now.[0] In fact this proposal contains code to implement color management! So it is not about code. It is about bikeshedding the spec. [0] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2014-March/013951.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2014-Ma...
- j16sdiz 2y ago
  The good old X11 without Vulkan work good enough for me, despite all the shortcomings. You are right that we can't force wayland dev work on x11 -- all I ask is don't push their new work as default.
- ElectroBuffoon 2y ago
  Current Xorg has Glamor, using OpenGL to accelerate the 2D ops of X11. There is also Zink, OpenGL-over-Vulkan for the rare case of Vulkan without native OpenGL. OTOH, there are people willing to add support for old hardware that probably can't run Vulkan, or even OpenGL, and sometimes they manage to upstream that code. With your "bsder" nick, the following example seems relevant. https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/x_org_on_netbsd_the https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/x_org_on_netbsd_the [search "PowerPC"] Some old X11 coders still work on it, or make suggestions to improve it. https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2024-April/061644.html https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2024-April/061644.html https://keithp.com/x-ideas/ https://keithp.com/x-ideas/ But such initiatives lack the "new shiny bling" factor, which seems to be a must nowadays to be a "success". It's the curse of "mostly done, mostly maintenance" projects in a world where breaking ground looks better in a CV than polishing and oiling the machinery others crafted.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  On the contrary, who's willing to work on it isn't what matters either. What matters is whether the code actually does what people need it to do. Now you might very reasonably assume that having devs willing to work on Wayland would lead to that, and that nobody wanting to work on Xorg would cause it to stop working, but in reality that's just not true; Wayland has been preferred by the devs for 16 years and in 2024 is still behind Xorg in meaningful ways. They're finally close, but as someone who keeps looking for ways to make Wayland work it just isn't there. > Forking X11 and assuming Vulkan while throwing out everything else is probably pretty doable and would result in a 90% codebase reduction. However, nobody is willing to sling the code to make it happen. The easy way is to move to just using rootful XWayland, which lets you use the fancy new backend while keeping everything else the same. IMHO they really should have implemented that first, moved everyone to the new backend, and then if they really had to push pure Wayland do that after.
  - bsder 2y ago
    > On the contrary, who's willing to work on it isn't what matters either. What matters is whether the code actually does what people need it to do. That code doesn't write itself. It needs someone motivated to write it. As someone who reverse engineered a video card and wrote an entire X11 driver almost 3 decades ago, I get this painfully. If I wanted it done, I had to do it myself. Both X11 and Wayland have some fundamentally wrong architectural choices. The problem is that both X11 and Wayland are sufficiently "good enough" that the activation energy to get traction above either of them is huge. It's a gigantic pile of grunt work until you get to the fun stuff, and nobody who isn't paid money by a company can muster the motivation to overcome it. And people paid by companies are going to solve the problems they are being paid to solve and not much else. Open source, in general, is having a problem with being stuck in "local minima". Lots of things are good enough to gain sufficient social traction that replacing them with something better is ferociously difficult. (package managers, git, dynamic libraries ... I can go on and on and on ...) It's part of the reason why I don't try to interfere with the "Rewrite It In Rust(tm)" brigade even when I think it's a silly idea. It is now a bigger problem to corral the motivation to do something in open source than gaining the technical skill to do it.
  - 2y ago
j16sdiz 2y ago
That's basically the same everything that pottery guy touch: push something look better 90% of time; promise to fix the remaining 10% later (with a bunch of fanboi yelling why those 10% does not matter); push the 90% product as default; declare success and have the remaining 10% sit for 10+ years unfixed

by jrm4 2y ago

bsder 2y ago

It doesn't matter who was right. It doesn't matter how wrong or broken Wayland is. It does matter who is willing to work on code. And no one is willing to do the work on the X11 codebase that it needs. That's it. Plain and simple. Forking X11 and assuming Vulkan while throwing out everything else is probably pretty doable and would result in a 90% codebase reduction. However, nobody is willing to sling the code to make it happen.

self_awareness 2y ago
The problem is I guess that Xorg, a project nobody is working on, still works better than a project that is on full throttle, full of zealots, evangelists, programmers, designers, thinkers, philosophers. That says a lot about the state of those two projects.
- bmicraft 2y ago
  All that really says about these projects it what's already plainly obvious: X11 is an old project and Wayland hasn't caught up yet for every minor thing you might want it to do. X11 has more than 40 years of development behind it, it isn't easy to catch up to all the features that have been built into and on top of X in the about 8 years (at most) Wayland has been getting the majority of attention.
  - self_awareness 2y ago
    > "you might want it to do" This is my problem with Wayland zealots. First and foremost I want it to display windows on my laptop and my desktop and not freeze my computer on start. Then, I would like to have more than 10 frames per second when it'll finally start. Is that too much to ask? Wayland doesn't deliver these two points on my setup. Should I change my hardware to match your hardware? Wayland development is already in progress for 15 years. And it sill fails to provide basic screen displaying capabilities. I have nothing against the technology, just against the people running the show. I think Canonical has made a mistake to cancel Mir.
  - fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
    It's not about coders. It is about the Wayland spec itself missing features that the maintainers of the spec are bike shedding over, for example, color management and HDR. >8 years (at most) Wayland has been getting the majority of attention. Color management on Wayland has been discussed for over 10 years by now.[0] In fact this proposal contains code to implement color management! So it is not about code. It is about bikeshedding the spec. [0] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2014-March/013951.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2014-Ma...
j16sdiz 2y ago
The good old X11 without Vulkan work good enough for me, despite all the shortcomings. You are right that we can't force wayland dev work on x11 -- all I ask is don't push their new work as default.
ElectroBuffoon 2y ago
Current Xorg has Glamor, using OpenGL to accelerate the 2D ops of X11. There is also Zink, OpenGL-over-Vulkan for the rare case of Vulkan without native OpenGL. OTOH, there are people willing to add support for old hardware that probably can't run Vulkan, or even OpenGL, and sometimes they manage to upstream that code. With your "bsder" nick, the following example seems relevant. https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/x_org_on_netbsd_the https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/x_org_on_netbsd_the [search "PowerPC"] Some old X11 coders still work on it, or make suggestions to improve it. https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2024-April/061644.html https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2024-April/061644.html https://keithp.com/x-ideas/ https://keithp.com/x-ideas/ But such initiatives lack the "new shiny bling" factor, which seems to be a must nowadays to be a "success". It's the curse of "mostly done, mostly maintenance" projects in a world where breaking ground looks better in a CV than polishing and oiling the machinery others crafted.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
On the contrary, who's willing to work on it isn't what matters either. What matters is whether the code actually does what people need it to do. Now you might very reasonably assume that having devs willing to work on Wayland would lead to that, and that nobody wanting to work on Xorg would cause it to stop working, but in reality that's just not true; Wayland has been preferred by the devs for 16 years and in 2024 is still behind Xorg in meaningful ways. They're finally close, but as someone who keeps looking for ways to make Wayland work it just isn't there. > Forking X11 and assuming Vulkan while throwing out everything else is probably pretty doable and would result in a 90% codebase reduction. However, nobody is willing to sling the code to make it happen. The easy way is to move to just using rootful XWayland, which lets you use the fancy new backend while keeping everything else the same. IMHO they really should have implemented that first, moved everyone to the new backend, and then if they really had to push pure Wayland do that after.
- bsder 2y ago
  > On the contrary, who's willing to work on it isn't what matters either. What matters is whether the code actually does what people need it to do. That code doesn't write itself. It needs someone motivated to write it. As someone who reverse engineered a video card and wrote an entire X11 driver almost 3 decades ago, I get this painfully. If I wanted it done, I had to do it myself. Both X11 and Wayland have some fundamentally wrong architectural choices. The problem is that both X11 and Wayland are sufficiently "good enough" that the activation energy to get traction above either of them is huge. It's a gigantic pile of grunt work until you get to the fun stuff, and nobody who isn't paid money by a company can muster the motivation to overcome it. And people paid by companies are going to solve the problems they are being paid to solve and not much else. Open source, in general, is having a problem with being stuck in "local minima". Lots of things are good enough to gain sufficient social traction that replacing them with something better is ferociously difficult. (package managers, git, dynamic libraries ... I can go on and on and on ...) It's part of the reason why I don't try to interfere with the "Rewrite It In Rust(tm)" brigade even when I think it's a silly idea. It is now a bigger problem to corral the motivation to do something in open source than gaining the technical skill to do it.
- 2y ago

j16sdiz 2y ago

That's basically the same everything that pottery guy touch: push something look better 90% of time; promise to fix the remaining 10% later (with a bunch of fanboi yelling why those 10% does not matter); push the 90% product as default; declare success and have the remaining 10% sit for 10+ years unfixed