3 ms·

Wayland unfortunately is a mess that is hard to implement so we get a balkanized situation where not only everything often boils down to Big Important Process i

by p_l 2y ago

Wayland unfortunately is a mess that is hard to implement so we get a balkanized situation where not only everything often boils down to Big Important Process in the middle (that actually integrates more things than X.Org used to), the set of features it supports are way more balkanized and most importantly, specific to that one Big Important Process as they can't be viably separated out. And even then you have to deal with a mix because you have to work through two different unsynced possibly broken in weird ways connections (Wayland + D-Bus). This results in how last week I couldn't screenshare under Wayland, and had zero chances to figure it out - and to make it worse since I had some important state and no time to play with reboots, I couldn't fix it.

kaba0 2y ago
XOrg was predominantly used as a useless middleman between a compositor and a window manager communicating with each other. Just because the wayland compositor is “one big important process” doesn’t mean that the whole architecture is more complicated. Multiple IPCs make the whole stuff way more complex, there is a reason why we have a big monolith as browsers and not some `curl | htmlRender | jsInterpreter` Rube Goldberg machine — the unix philosophy is not the pan ultimate design, it works in some cases and is utterly broken in others.
- p_l 2y ago
  X11 != the lowest common denominator implementation of X11. Nor was everyone using it with big heavy compositors (honestly, the only reason I used a compositor for years was intel removing sync circuitry from their iGPUs). And Wayland did not stop requiring multiple IPCs, in fact it mandates them as several features require passing data by secondary channels, not just for Portals et al - some don't even have any described way to reliably pass the information that I have seen (like how to pass around cookie to let one application activate window of another? Or maybe the spec is such a mess that I'm looking at completely wrong place when I tried to fix ability to reliably switch between applications without extending compositor). And yes, the architecture is more complicated in practice, otherwise it might have reached parity with what X11 did after as many years - like input method support. Unfortunately it's so broken that you have multiple versions of it in practice, it requires extra IPC in practice, and at least in my experience just does not work.

by p_l 2y ago

kaba0 2y ago

XOrg was predominantly used as a useless middleman between a compositor and a window manager communicating with each other. Just because the wayland compositor is “one big important process” doesn’t mean that the whole architecture is more complicated. Multiple IPCs make the whole stuff way more complex, there is a reason why we have a big monolith as browsers and not some `curl | htmlRender | jsInterpreter` Rube Goldberg machine — the unix philosophy is not the pan ultimate design, it works in some cases and is utterly broken in others.

p_l 2y ago
X11 != the lowest common denominator implementation of X11. Nor was everyone using it with big heavy compositors (honestly, the only reason I used a compositor for years was intel removing sync circuitry from their iGPUs). And Wayland did not stop requiring multiple IPCs, in fact it mandates them as several features require passing data by secondary channels, not just for Portals et al - some don't even have any described way to reliably pass the information that I have seen (like how to pass around cookie to let one application activate window of another? Or maybe the spec is such a mess that I'm looking at completely wrong place when I tried to fix ability to reliably switch between applications without extending compositor). And yes, the architecture is more complicated in practice, otherwise it might have reached parity with what X11 did after as many years - like input method support. Unfortunately it's so broken that you have multiple versions of it in practice, it requires extra IPC in practice, and at least in my experience just does not work.