8 ms·

How old is Wayland? I'll be reading a dream of spring in my grave at this rate. I understand I'm complaining about free things, but this is a forced change fo

How old is Wayland? I'll be reading a dream of spring in my grave at this rate. I understand I'm complaining about free things, but this is a forced change for the worse for so long. Wayland adoption should have been predicated on a near universal superiority in all input and display requirements. Intel and AMD and Nvidia and Arm makers should be all in on a viable desktop Linux as a consortium. Governments should be doing the same because a secure Linux desktop is actually possible. It is the fastest path to showcasing their CPUs and 3d bling, advanced vector /computer hardware. Wayland simply came at a time to further the delay of the Linux desktop, at a time when Windows was attempting to kill Windows with its horrid tiles and Apple staunchly refused a half billion in extra market cap by offering osx on general x86.

dralley 2y ago
Wayland is a protocol. The problems people complain about are generally implementation details specific to GNOME or KDE or (in general) one particular implementation. There's rarely any such thing as "universal superiority", usually you're making a tradeoff. In the case of X vs Wayland it's usually latency vs. tearing. Personally I'm happy with Wayland because there was a time when watching certain videos with certain media players on Linux was incredibly painful because of how blatant and obtrusive the tearing was. Watching the same video under Wayland worked fine. Early automobiles didn't have "universal superiority" to horses, but that wasn't an inhibitor to adoption.
- bpfrh 2y ago
  I mean most of the things are the fault of a badly designed or non existent protocols: -Problems with non western input systems -Accessibility -Remote control(took around 2 years to be stable I think?) -Bad color management Then there's the things that did work in x11 but not in wayland: -Bad support for keymapping(the input library says keymapping should be implemented by the compositor, gnome says not in scope, so we have a regression) -bad nvidia support for the first two years? three years? While these things are compositor/hw vendor faults, the rush to use wayland and nearly every distro making it as default, forced major regressions and wayland kinda promised to improve the x11 based experience.
  - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
    Yes, and to the parents point it was a CHANGE in protocol. I get there was cruft in x. But the moment selected was a barrier to Linux desktop adoption precisely when the greatest opportunity in decades was present. And the desktop was reimplemented. Now in this period kde and gnome both decided to do rewrites, Ubuntu did their own desktop, got it up to snuff, and abandoned it. The lunacy wasn't just Wayland. If we are complaining the gnome compositor sucks... I mean , should that be the goddamn reference implementation? What percent of desktops are gnome, 80% at least? If the gnome composting ready for primetime, then Wayland isn't ready for primetime.
    - vincent-manis 2y ago
      >If the gnome composting ready for primetime, then Wayland isn't ready for primetime. I use Sway, which uses a different compos[i]tor than Gnome. I would like to see similar results for wlroots, Sway's compositor, though I'm not actually interested enough to do the experiment (I guess that would be comparing Sway with i3). Cursor lag in Sway is not enough to bother me. I have on occasion used Gnome on the same machine(s), and never been bothered by lag. As others have pointed out, Wayland is a protocol, not a compositor.
      - tankenmate 2y ago
        "As others have pointed out, Wayland is a protocol, not a compositor." But the Wayland protocol requires a compositor, so here we are.
        vincent-manis 2y ago
        I have no idea of the difference(s) in performance between wlroots and Gnome's compositor. Protocols do not have performance, implementations do. If someone can prove that the Wayland protocol, on a certain set of tasks, and in a certain environment, has a better or worse performance than the X11 protocol, then it might be possible to make abstract comparisons on protocol. Given that Gnome runs on both X and Wayland, it might be interesting to hear from the Gnome authors on the performance differences.
- bawolff 2y ago
  > Wayland is a protocol. The problems people complain about are generally implementation details specific to GNOME or KDE or (in general) one particular implementation. I feel like at some point this is a cop-out. Wayland is a protocol but its also a "system" involving many components. If the product as a whole doesn't work well then its still a failure regardless of which component's fault it is. Its a little like responding to someone saying we haven't reached the year of linux on the desktop by saying: well actually linux is just the kernel and its been ready for the desktop for ages. Technically true but also missing the point.
  - washadjeffmad 2y ago
    Wayland. Solving yesterday's problems, tomorrow.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      unlike x which couldn't solve yesterdays problems.
      - Qwertious 2y ago
        X is fine, most of the problems people bring up are niche and minor. Meanwhile, Wayland induces problems of its own, like breaking all sorts of accessibility systems and multi-window X applications with no solution in sight.
        throwaway2037 2y ago
        > multi-window X applications I believe you. Can you share an example? To be clear, I'm pretty sure this can be done with Gtk and Qt, but maybe you are talking about older apps written directly in Xlib or Xt?
        aragilar 2y ago
        It's not the toolkit (as they work on X11 and other OSes with the existing toolkits), it's Wayland that's the issue (there are a series of Wayland protocols to implement this, but they are being blocked).
- o11c 2y ago
  "Wayland is a protocol" is exactly the problem. Protocols suck; they just mean multiplying the possibility of bugs. A standard implementation is far more valuable any day. With X11, it was simple: everybody used Xfree86 (or eventually the Xorg fork, but forks are not reimplementations) and libX11 (later libxcb was shimmed underneath with careful planning). The WM was bespoke, but it was small, nonintrusive, and out of the critical path, so bugs in it were neither numerous nor disastrous. But today, with Wayland, there is no plan. And there is no limit to the bugs, which must get patched time and time again every time they are implemented.
  - dralley 2y ago
    X had garbage handling of multiple monitors and especially multiple monitors with different DPIs, and there was "no plan" to deal with that either. Nobody wanted to work on the X codebase anymore. The architecture bore no resemblance to the way any other part of the desktop stack (or hardware) works.
    - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
      Most of the garbage aspect is because toolkits refuse to support multiple monitors on DPI with X11 with the argument that "Wayland is just around the corner", for decades now. For example Qt does per-monitor DPI just fine on X11; it's just that the way to specify/override the DPI values just sucks (an environment variable). This stupid decision is going to chase us until the end of times since Xwayland will have no standardized way to tell its clients about per-display DPI.
      - ChocolateGod 2y ago
        It's not useful if you have to specify a scaling factor before the application has started, when the application can move monitors. This is something feasible on Wayland, X draws one large wide screen display.
        AshamedCaptain 2y ago
- hulitu 2y ago
  > there was a time when watching certain videos with certain media players on Linux was incredibly painful because of how blatant and obtrusive the tearing was It was because of the crap LCD monitors (5 to 20 ms GtG) and how they are driven. The problem persists today. The (Wayland) solution was to render and display a complete frame at a time without taking into account the timings involved in hardware (you always have a good static image, but you have to wait). I tried Tails (comes with some Wayland compositor) on a laptop. The GUI performance was terrible with only a Tor browser open and one tab. If you do not care about hardware, you will, sooner or later, run into problems. Not everybody has your shiny 240 Hz monitor.
- account42 2y ago
  Tearing hasn't been a thing under X.Org for me since the introduction of Option "TearFree".
n144q 2y ago
> Wayland simply came at a time to further the delay of the Linux desktop I can't tell if you are serious or not.
- paulddraper 2y ago
  Serious
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
> How old is Wayland? About 16 years old, for comparison, X is 40.
- hulitu 2y ago
  Hm, X works fine since 20 years. Wayland is still a protocol after 16. /s
yencabulator 2y ago
You're arguing against Wayland, but for a more secure Linux desktop? I recommend you spend more time getting to know the X11 protocol then, because it has plenty of design decisions that simply cannot be secured. The same people who used to develop XFree86 designed Wayland to fix things that could not be fixed in the scope of X11.
- wmanley 2y ago
  > the X11 protocol [...] has plenty of design decisions that simply cannot be secured. I've been hearing this for over a decade now. I don't get it. Just because xorg currently makes different clients aware of each other and broadcasts keypresses and mouse movements to all clients and allows screen capturing doesn't mean it has to. You could essentially give every application the impression that they are the only thing running. It might seem difficult to implement, but compare it to the effort that has gone into wayland across the whole ecosystem. Maybe that was the point - motivating people to work on X was too difficult, and the wayland approach manages to diffuse the work out to more people. I was really bullish on Wayland 10 years ago. Not so much any more. In retrospect it seems like a failure in technical leadership.
  - uecker 2y ago
    X always had the capability to isolate clients, but it is not used it would need some work which nobody does because of Wayland.
    - welterde 2y ago
      Some aspects of the client isolation are used by default when doing X11 forwarding via SSH. A remote keylogger will not work for instance.
  - yencabulator 2y ago
    It'll be challenging to even figure out which one of the things connecting to $DISPLAY is the real window manager. Good luck on your lonely[1] journey! [1]: The people who actually developed Xorg are now working on various Wayland-related things.
prmoustache 2y ago
>but this is a forced change for the worse for so long Can you explain who is forced to do what in that context?
- bashkiddie 2y ago
  AMD states that bugs only get fixed for Wayland. Coincidentally I have got a graphics driver that likes crashing on OpenGL (AMD Ryzen 7 7840U w/ Radeon 780M Graphics)
BrenBarn 2y ago
> Wayland adoption should have been predicated on a near universal superiority in all input and display requirements. Totally agree. The people saying "Wayland is a protocol" miss the point. Wayland is a protocol, but Wayland adoption means implementing stuff that uses that protocol, and then pushing it onto users. Measure twice, cut once. Look before you leap. All that kind of thing. Get it working FIRST, then release it.
- bluGill 2y ago
  You have to releaseethings like this in parts because it needs too many external people to do things to make it useful. Managing those parts is something nobody has figured out and so people live you end up using it before it is ready for your use and then complaining.
  - BrenBarn 2y ago
    When I say "release" I mean "release to users". You can release stuff to other developers, no problem. But it should all come with large warnings saying "This is not for daily use". The failure is when distros like Fedora start not only shipping it, but then saying they're going to drop the working alternative before Wayland is actually ready to do everything that X does. (Also, I don't use Wayland. I mean I tried it out but don't see any real benefit so I don't use it regularly.)
  - hulitu 2y ago
    > You have to releaseethings like this in parts because it needs too many external people to do things to make it useful. 30 years ago X came with a server and some clients. Why it is so hard to do this, for wayland, today ?
  - account42 2y ago
    This would be best solved by maintaining support for old protocols instead of reinventing the wheel. There is no chicken/egg problem when you have proper backwards compatibility.
bsder 2y ago
> I understand I'm complaining about free things, but this is a forced change for the worse for so long. Then write code. Asahi Lina has demonstrated that a single person can write the appropriate shims to make things work. Vulkan being effectively universally available on all the Linux graphics cards means that you have the hardest layer of abstraction to the GPU taken care of. A single or small number of people could write a layer that sits above Wayland and X11 and does it right. However, no one has.
Vilian 2y ago
>How old is Wayland? This argument don't make sense because Wayland started as a hobby and not to replace x11, was after it got traction, other people/companies started contributing that it matter
cosmic_cheese 2y ago
I don’t really agree, because I think there’s something of a chicken-and-egg effect here. With complex projects like these that have to work well on such a wide array of hardware and configurations, lots of real world usage is required to achieve any level of refinement. Without widespread adoption, Wayland likely would have been stuck in experimental/toy status for much longer than it will as things are going currently.

dralley 2y ago

Wayland is a protocol. The problems people complain about are generally implementation details specific to GNOME or KDE or (in general) one particular implementation. There's rarely any such thing as "universal superiority", usually you're making a tradeoff. In the case of X vs Wayland it's usually latency vs. tearing. Personally I'm happy with Wayland because there was a time when watching certain videos with certain media players on Linux was incredibly painful because of how blatant and obtrusive the tearing was. Watching the same video under Wayland worked fine. Early automobiles didn't have "universal superiority" to horses, but that wasn't an inhibitor to adoption.

bpfrh 2y ago
I mean most of the things are the fault of a badly designed or non existent protocols: -Problems with non western input systems -Accessibility -Remote control(took around 2 years to be stable I think?) -Bad color management Then there's the things that did work in x11 but not in wayland: -Bad support for keymapping(the input library says keymapping should be implemented by the compositor, gnome says not in scope, so we have a regression) -bad nvidia support for the first two years? three years? While these things are compositor/hw vendor faults, the rush to use wayland and nearly every distro making it as default, forced major regressions and wayland kinda promised to improve the x11 based experience.
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  Yes, and to the parents point it was a CHANGE in protocol. I get there was cruft in x. But the moment selected was a barrier to Linux desktop adoption precisely when the greatest opportunity in decades was present. And the desktop was reimplemented. Now in this period kde and gnome both decided to do rewrites, Ubuntu did their own desktop, got it up to snuff, and abandoned it. The lunacy wasn't just Wayland. If we are complaining the gnome compositor sucks... I mean , should that be the goddamn reference implementation? What percent of desktops are gnome, 80% at least? If the gnome composting ready for primetime, then Wayland isn't ready for primetime.
  - vincent-manis 2y ago
    >If the gnome composting ready for primetime, then Wayland isn't ready for primetime. I use Sway, which uses a different compos[i]tor than Gnome. I would like to see similar results for wlroots, Sway's compositor, though I'm not actually interested enough to do the experiment (I guess that would be comparing Sway with i3). Cursor lag in Sway is not enough to bother me. I have on occasion used Gnome on the same machine(s), and never been bothered by lag. As others have pointed out, Wayland is a protocol, not a compositor.
    - tankenmate 2y ago
      "As others have pointed out, Wayland is a protocol, not a compositor." But the Wayland protocol requires a compositor, so here we are.
      - vincent-manis 2y ago
        I have no idea of the difference(s) in performance between wlroots and Gnome's compositor. Protocols do not have performance, implementations do. If someone can prove that the Wayland protocol, on a certain set of tasks, and in a certain environment, has a better or worse performance than the X11 protocol, then it might be possible to make abstract comparisons on protocol. Given that Gnome runs on both X and Wayland, it might be interesting to hear from the Gnome authors on the performance differences.
bawolff 2y ago
> Wayland is a protocol. The problems people complain about are generally implementation details specific to GNOME or KDE or (in general) one particular implementation. I feel like at some point this is a cop-out. Wayland is a protocol but its also a "system" involving many components. If the product as a whole doesn't work well then its still a failure regardless of which component's fault it is. Its a little like responding to someone saying we haven't reached the year of linux on the desktop by saying: well actually linux is just the kernel and its been ready for the desktop for ages. Technically true but also missing the point.
- washadjeffmad 2y ago
  Wayland. Solving yesterday's problems, tomorrow.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    unlike x which couldn't solve yesterdays problems.
    - Qwertious 2y ago
      X is fine, most of the problems people bring up are niche and minor. Meanwhile, Wayland induces problems of its own, like breaking all sorts of accessibility systems and multi-window X applications with no solution in sight.
      - throwaway2037 2y ago
        > multi-window X applications I believe you. Can you share an example? To be clear, I'm pretty sure this can be done with Gtk and Qt, but maybe you are talking about older apps written directly in Xlib or Xt?
        aragilar 2y ago
        It's not the toolkit (as they work on X11 and other OSes with the existing toolkits), it's Wayland that's the issue (there are a series of Wayland protocols to implement this, but they are being blocked).
o11c 2y ago
"Wayland is a protocol" is exactly the problem. Protocols suck; they just mean multiplying the possibility of bugs. A standard implementation is far more valuable any day. With X11, it was simple: everybody used Xfree86 (or eventually the Xorg fork, but forks are not reimplementations) and libX11 (later libxcb was shimmed underneath with careful planning). The WM was bespoke, but it was small, nonintrusive, and out of the critical path, so bugs in it were neither numerous nor disastrous. But today, with Wayland, there is no plan. And there is no limit to the bugs, which must get patched time and time again every time they are implemented.
- dralley 2y ago
  X had garbage handling of multiple monitors and especially multiple monitors with different DPIs, and there was "no plan" to deal with that either. Nobody wanted to work on the X codebase anymore. The architecture bore no resemblance to the way any other part of the desktop stack (or hardware) works.
  - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
    Most of the garbage aspect is because toolkits refuse to support multiple monitors on DPI with X11 with the argument that "Wayland is just around the corner", for decades now. For example Qt does per-monitor DPI just fine on X11; it's just that the way to specify/override the DPI values just sucks (an environment variable). This stupid decision is going to chase us until the end of times since Xwayland will have no standardized way to tell its clients about per-display DPI.
    - ChocolateGod 2y ago
      It's not useful if you have to specify a scaling factor before the application has started, when the application can move monitors. This is something feasible on Wayland, X draws one large wide screen display.
      - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
hulitu 2y ago
> there was a time when watching certain videos with certain media players on Linux was incredibly painful because of how blatant and obtrusive the tearing was It was because of the crap LCD monitors (5 to 20 ms GtG) and how they are driven. The problem persists today. The (Wayland) solution was to render and display a complete frame at a time without taking into account the timings involved in hardware (you always have a good static image, but you have to wait). I tried Tails (comes with some Wayland compositor) on a laptop. The GUI performance was terrible with only a Tor browser open and one tab. If you do not care about hardware, you will, sooner or later, run into problems. Not everybody has your shiny 240 Hz monitor.
account42 2y ago
Tearing hasn't been a thing under X.Org for me since the introduction of Option "TearFree".

n144q 2y ago

> Wayland simply came at a time to further the delay of the Linux desktop I can't tell if you are serious or not.

paulddraper 2y ago
Serious

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

> How old is Wayland? About 16 years old, for comparison, X is 40.

hulitu 2y ago
Hm, X works fine since 20 years. Wayland is still a protocol after 16. /s

yencabulator 2y ago

You're arguing against Wayland, but for a more secure Linux desktop? I recommend you spend more time getting to know the X11 protocol then, because it has plenty of design decisions that simply cannot be secured. The same people who used to develop XFree86 designed Wayland to fix things that could not be fixed in the scope of X11.

wmanley 2y ago
> the X11 protocol [...] has plenty of design decisions that simply cannot be secured. I've been hearing this for over a decade now. I don't get it. Just because xorg currently makes different clients aware of each other and broadcasts keypresses and mouse movements to all clients and allows screen capturing doesn't mean it has to. You could essentially give every application the impression that they are the only thing running. It might seem difficult to implement, but compare it to the effort that has gone into wayland across the whole ecosystem. Maybe that was the point - motivating people to work on X was too difficult, and the wayland approach manages to diffuse the work out to more people. I was really bullish on Wayland 10 years ago. Not so much any more. In retrospect it seems like a failure in technical leadership.
- uecker 2y ago
  X always had the capability to isolate clients, but it is not used it would need some work which nobody does because of Wayland.
  - welterde 2y ago
    Some aspects of the client isolation are used by default when doing X11 forwarding via SSH. A remote keylogger will not work for instance.
- yencabulator 2y ago
  It'll be challenging to even figure out which one of the things connecting to $DISPLAY is the real window manager. Good luck on your lonely[1] journey! [1]: The people who actually developed Xorg are now working on various Wayland-related things.

prmoustache 2y ago

>but this is a forced change for the worse for so long Can you explain who is forced to do what in that context?

bashkiddie 2y ago
AMD states that bugs only get fixed for Wayland. Coincidentally I have got a graphics driver that likes crashing on OpenGL (AMD Ryzen 7 7840U w/ Radeon 780M Graphics)

BrenBarn 2y ago

> Wayland adoption should have been predicated on a near universal superiority in all input and display requirements. Totally agree. The people saying "Wayland is a protocol" miss the point. Wayland is a protocol, but Wayland adoption means implementing stuff that uses that protocol, and then pushing it onto users. Measure twice, cut once. Look before you leap. All that kind of thing. Get it working FIRST, then release it.

bluGill 2y ago
You have to releaseethings like this in parts because it needs too many external people to do things to make it useful. Managing those parts is something nobody has figured out and so people live you end up using it before it is ready for your use and then complaining.
- BrenBarn 2y ago
  When I say "release" I mean "release to users". You can release stuff to other developers, no problem. But it should all come with large warnings saying "This is not for daily use". The failure is when distros like Fedora start not only shipping it, but then saying they're going to drop the working alternative before Wayland is actually ready to do everything that X does. (Also, I don't use Wayland. I mean I tried it out but don't see any real benefit so I don't use it regularly.)
- hulitu 2y ago
  > You have to releaseethings like this in parts because it needs too many external people to do things to make it useful. 30 years ago X came with a server and some clients. Why it is so hard to do this, for wayland, today ?
- account42 2y ago
  This would be best solved by maintaining support for old protocols instead of reinventing the wheel. There is no chicken/egg problem when you have proper backwards compatibility.

bsder 2y ago

> I understand I'm complaining about free things, but this is a forced change for the worse for so long. Then write code. Asahi Lina has demonstrated that a single person can write the appropriate shims to make things work. Vulkan being effectively universally available on all the Linux graphics cards means that you have the hardest layer of abstraction to the GPU taken care of. A single or small number of people could write a layer that sits above Wayland and X11 and does it right. However, no one has.

Vilian 2y ago

>How old is Wayland? This argument don't make sense because Wayland started as a hobby and not to replace x11, was after it got traction, other people/companies started contributing that it matter

cosmic_cheese 2y ago

I don’t really agree, because I think there’s something of a chicken-and-egg effect here. With complex projects like these that have to work well on such a wide array of hardware and configurations, lots of real world usage is required to achieve any level of refinement. Without widespread adoption, Wayland likely would have been stuck in experimental/toy status for much longer than it will as things are going currently.