5 ms·

Initial release of X was June 1984, and Wayland was first released in 2008 -- so it won't be until 2032 that Wayland is the same age. When people complain about

by jzb 2y ago

Initial release of X was June 1984, and Wayland was first released in 2008 -- so it won't be until 2032 that Wayland is the same age. When people complain about Wayland being mediocre or "as good as X was" what they often mean is "Wayland doesn't support $very_specific_feature" or "my video card vendor's proprietary drivers aren't well-tested with Wayland and it makes me sad". Approximately 99.999% of those complaints are uttered by people who 1) are not doing the work, 2) are not interested or capable of doing the work, and 3) do not understand or refuse to acknowledge that the Wayland and X developers are _mostly the same folks_ and they _do not want to work on X11 anymore_. I don't really have a stake in this argument, except I'm bone-tired of seeing people whine about Wayland when they're using software somebody else gave them for free. There are enough Wayland whiners that, by now, they could've banded together and started maintaining / improving X and (if their complaints and theories were correct) left Wayland behind. Strangely -- even though X is open source and eminently forkable (we know this, because XFree86 -> X.org) it gathers dust and none of its proponents are doing anything towards its upkeep. When someone shows up with "Wayland isn't as good as X, so here is my modernized fork of X anyone can use" -- I'll be quite interested.

arp242 2y ago
The core Wayland and X.org don't exist in a vacuum. I have written a lot of code over the years that works only on X, as have many others. I have not directly contributed to the X.org server, but have to the "wider X ecosystem". I will have to rewrite some of that. This is the case for many people.
- jzb 2y ago
  "I have not directly contributed to the X.org server, but have to the "wider X ecosystem". I will have to rewrite some of that. This is the case for many people." This is a fair point, but the quality of Wayland isn't really at issue for this -- Wayland could be much better than X by all accounts and it would still require you to rewrite software for it. (Assuming XWayland doesn't suit your needs, anyway.)
  - robinsonb5 2y ago
    Yes, but motivation and enthusiasm are important when it comes to spare time projects done by hobbyists. You're far more likely to get people to expend the requisite time and effort if it's indisputable that the end result will be worth it.
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    > it would still require you to rewrite software for it As I understand, most complex apps in the 2020s are using something like Gtk or Qt. These already have Wayland rendering backends. (I assume other widget toolkits have done the same.) Unless your GUI directly uses Xt or Xlib, I don't think that any rewrite is required. Do I misunderstand your point?
    - eadmund 2y ago
      A good part of why so may of us are cautious about Wayland is precisely that one or more of the things we rely on doesn’t support it. For example, my window manager doesn’t. I use that window manager every single day, and there is nothing out there which works the way it does. It’s a vital part of my workflow. Does Wayland support the entire Xcompose system or an equally powerful alternative? Wayland does genuinely sound interesting, if flaky and half-baked (it reminds me of systemd in that way). Certainly, the world doesn’t owe me a port of my window manager. But if the Wayland transition forces me to use GNOME then my life will be worse.
      - throwaway2037 2y ago
        > if flaky and half-baked (it reminds me of systemd in that way) In 2025, is systemd still considered "flaky and half-baked"? As I understand, the "init.d war" was lost; systemd is the clear winner on Linux and continues to improve. That said, lots of good developers died on that hill.
  - account42 2y ago
    Strongly disagree. For operating system components backwards compatibility should always be a primary and non-negotiable goal. If the backwards compatibility isn't 100% transparent that's a quality issue.
lmm 2y ago
> There are enough Wayland whiners that, by now, they could've banded together and started maintaining / improving X and (if their complaints and theories were correct) left Wayland behind. They already have. X is already more full-featured and stable than Wayland (yes it is missing certain niche features that Wayland has). Sometimes the most important thing you can do with a piece of software is not screw around with it.
- braiamp 2y ago
  And yet, X is as flawed as it can be. There's a problem with global shortcuts, that Xorg only fires an event on keyup/key release, rather than on first match on keypress. That is a protocol limitation, and fixing it means breaking a bunch of stuff. The complains about wayland are of that nature, but at least they are fixable.
  - goosedragons 2y ago
    Are they fixable? One of my beefs with Wayland is that every compositor handles things differently. How GNOME's does some setting is different from how KDE's is different from Sway's. There's no guarantee they've even implemented the setting either. In X11 you can always globally configure something for any WM the same way. Wayland by design you can't. It's not fixable. I think it was a really poor decision to do a protocol and just made an OS where things are often too fragmented even more fragmented.
  - lmm 2y ago
    > The complains about wayland are of that nature, but at least they are fixable. Eh maybe. Ultimately you can never be sure something is possible without doing it. I'm pragmatic here, if and when Wayland offers me a better experience than X then I'll use it. I just resent distros etc. pushing me towards it when it's currently a downgrade.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> When people complain about Wayland being mediocre or "as good as X was" what they often mean is "Wayland doesn't support $very_specific_feature" or "my video card vendor's proprietary drivers aren't well-tested with Wayland and it makes me sad". ...Yes? Wayland being a regression in terms of features and bugginess is kinda a sticking point. > Approximately 99.999% of those complaints are uttered by people who 1) are not doing the work, 2) are not interested or capable of doing the work, and 3) do not understand or refuse to acknowledge that the Wayland and X developers are _mostly the same folks_ and they _do not want to work on X11 anymore_. If X works for someone and Wayland doesn't, none of that matters. It doesn't matter how much you insult X users, it won't make their usecases invalid or make Wayland good enough. > I don't really have a stake in this argument, except I'm bone-tired of seeing people whine about Wayland when they're using software somebody else gave them for free. It cuts both ways: Users aren't entitled to free work, and developers aren't entitled to their work being well-regarded. Giving software away for free has never meant that people can't point out its problems.
- bluGill 2y ago
  X also isn't wrking for some. If you care about tearing for instance x doesn't work.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    True; also various scaling problems, and its security situation. We're in an unfortunate situation where no option has everything. If you want to say "Wayland is better for what I need", or "Xorg is better for what I need", or even "Arcan is better for what I need", then that is 100% legitimate. I'm also cool with "the current problems with (X|Wayland|Arcan) are..." because that's constructive and useful for trying to improve them. It's only pretending that one doesn't have faults or insulting its users/proponents that I mind.
  - Ballas 2y ago
    I haven't seen any tearing in X in at least 5 years - with nvidia, nouveau and intel drivers. I don't think I'm doing anything special to achieve this, so your comment seems like a strange assertion to me? I agree that X11 has some faults, and I really want Wayland to work, but everytime I try it, something ends up being broken.
piotr-yuxuan 2y ago
I enjoy reading the whinging around Wayland by people who feel so entitled and so outraged. Every time they never fail to remind me of a previous coworker who was always using the same tactics: « this breaks my existing workflow, I will not adapt, I am all for trying new things but only if they are very exactly equal to what I already know and then what's the point, this is not how I have always worked the past ten years and I will not bulge ». Not talking about the technical points of the whole X/Wayland considerations here, but a group of people in such debate is always as vocal as they'll do nothing and put unreasonably high expectations on other people to listen to them and have no choice but to agree. The fact that X.org's core team initiated Wayland and stopped X.org development is disregarded: these people Will Be Right against literally everything, they can't be reasoned. My previous coworker was fired for gross incompetence in the end yet he never acknowledged anything wrong. He always knew better than literally the whole world that bash scripts run manually where superior to Terraform for the whole company's infrastructure. Yes, he was that stupid. I guess this is why he ended lying like hell on his LinkedIn profile, concealing he had had four employers in four years. Seeing technical debates with such poor quality is worrying. If people with quantitative minds fail to entertain a fact-based discussion, how can we expect our political life to acknowledge there is only one reality and stop lying? Before you voice your outrage, here are some facts that won't dis-exist just because you disagree with them: - https://www.phoronix.com/review/x_wayland_situation https://www.phoronix.com/review/x_wayland_situation - https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server.html https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server...
mcv 2y ago
> Approximately 99.999% of those complaints are uttered by people who 1) are not doing the work, 2) are not interested or capable of doing the work, and Are you saying that Wayland is only for developers? Are people not allowed to complain when The New Thing turns out to be less good than the supposedly Obsolete Thing? > 3) do not understand or refuse to acknowledge that the Wayland and X developers are _mostly the same folks_ and they _do not want to work on X11 anymore_. I'm fully aware of that. I understand X11 has its limitations, and some of the goals of Wayland sound very appropriate for the modern PC environment, but if after 16 years, there are still many situations where Wayland does worse than X, that's not a great sign, and it will make people continue to use X.
eadmund 2y ago
> what they often mean is "Wayland doesn't support $very_specific_feature" My primary complaint with Wayland is that it is a textbook example of Brooks’s second-system effect. It forsook backwards compatibility (yes, there’s an X11 server but to my knowledge there is no way to just run Wayland and one’s X11 desktop environment). > Strangely -- even though X is open source and eminently forkable (we know this, because XFree86 -> X.org) it gathers dust and none of its proponents are doing anything towards its upkeep. I suspect that is because the X/Wayland guys have sucked all the oxygen out of that particular room. A newbie shows up and is told that X.org is legacy and he shouldn’t work on it, so … he doesn’t. And of course X.org really is a bit of a disaster due to being written in C.
thomastjeffery 2y ago
People complain about the things they care about. Wayland made some huge design changes, and those changes all have pros and cons. How do we tend to communicate about pros and cons? By complaining. It sucks that Xorg's accessibility features are so baked-in that you must be compatible with them; because that demand can become a wall of assumptions. It sucks that Wayland leaves 100% of accessibility to the compositor; because that creates a lot of redundant work, and the best implementations get siloed into plasma or gnome, creating multiple smaller instances of the tight integration that made UX less flexible to begin with. Using Xorg, you can run an incredibly lightweight window manager that never even thought about managing keymaps, adjusting mouse acceleration, setting the display resolution, etc., because that's not it's job. I can get absolutely everything I want from i3wm on Xorg... except fractional scaling. So far, it looks like plasma is the only one that has really figured that one out, and I still get a tiny pointer sometimes. The best thing about free software is that we can choose how it works. The more tightly integrated the pieces are, the fewer choices are available. Fewer choices results in more complaining. Wayland may be the most significant instance of this pattern in Linux history. The second most significant instance was already present: Desktop Environments. The biggest source of complaints I have is that the best aspects of plasma are trapped inside KDE. If you want the best Wayland compositor out there, you have to have it wrapped in an entire full-featured Desktop Environment. --- Complaining is the best thing about Linux, so long as it's able to drive real change. The more stubborn and inflexible a system (and whoever designs it) is, the more disconnected complaints become. That's the real problem that deserves our attention.
justin66 2y ago
> Approximately 99.999% of those complaints are uttered by people who 1) are not doing the work, 2) are not interested or capable of doing the work, and 3) do not understand or refuse to acknowledge that the Wayland and X developers are _mostly the same folks_ and they _do not want to work on X11 anymore_. It's clarifying if you simply say "users."

by jzb 2y ago

arp242 2y ago

The core Wayland and X.org don't exist in a vacuum. I have written a lot of code over the years that works only on X, as have many others. I have not directly contributed to the X.org server, but have to the "wider X ecosystem". I will have to rewrite some of that. This is the case for many people.

jzb 2y ago
"I have not directly contributed to the X.org server, but have to the "wider X ecosystem". I will have to rewrite some of that. This is the case for many people." This is a fair point, but the quality of Wayland isn't really at issue for this -- Wayland could be much better than X by all accounts and it would still require you to rewrite software for it. (Assuming XWayland doesn't suit your needs, anyway.)
- robinsonb5 2y ago
  Yes, but motivation and enthusiasm are important when it comes to spare time projects done by hobbyists. You're far more likely to get people to expend the requisite time and effort if it's indisputable that the end result will be worth it.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  > it would still require you to rewrite software for it As I understand, most complex apps in the 2020s are using something like Gtk or Qt. These already have Wayland rendering backends. (I assume other widget toolkits have done the same.) Unless your GUI directly uses Xt or Xlib, I don't think that any rewrite is required. Do I misunderstand your point?
  - eadmund 2y ago
    A good part of why so may of us are cautious about Wayland is precisely that one or more of the things we rely on doesn’t support it. For example, my window manager doesn’t. I use that window manager every single day, and there is nothing out there which works the way it does. It’s a vital part of my workflow. Does Wayland support the entire Xcompose system or an equally powerful alternative? Wayland does genuinely sound interesting, if flaky and half-baked (it reminds me of systemd in that way). Certainly, the world doesn’t owe me a port of my window manager. But if the Wayland transition forces me to use GNOME then my life will be worse.
    - throwaway2037 2y ago
      > if flaky and half-baked (it reminds me of systemd in that way) In 2025, is systemd still considered "flaky and half-baked"? As I understand, the "init.d war" was lost; systemd is the clear winner on Linux and continues to improve. That said, lots of good developers died on that hill.
- account42 2y ago
  Strongly disagree. For operating system components backwards compatibility should always be a primary and non-negotiable goal. If the backwards compatibility isn't 100% transparent that's a quality issue.

lmm 2y ago

> There are enough Wayland whiners that, by now, they could've banded together and started maintaining / improving X and (if their complaints and theories were correct) left Wayland behind. They already have. X is already more full-featured and stable than Wayland (yes it is missing certain niche features that Wayland has). Sometimes the most important thing you can do with a piece of software is not screw around with it.

braiamp 2y ago
And yet, X is as flawed as it can be. There's a problem with global shortcuts, that Xorg only fires an event on keyup/key release, rather than on first match on keypress. That is a protocol limitation, and fixing it means breaking a bunch of stuff. The complains about wayland are of that nature, but at least they are fixable.
- goosedragons 2y ago
  Are they fixable? One of my beefs with Wayland is that every compositor handles things differently. How GNOME's does some setting is different from how KDE's is different from Sway's. There's no guarantee they've even implemented the setting either. In X11 you can always globally configure something for any WM the same way. Wayland by design you can't. It's not fixable. I think it was a really poor decision to do a protocol and just made an OS where things are often too fragmented even more fragmented.
- lmm 2y ago
  > The complains about wayland are of that nature, but at least they are fixable. Eh maybe. Ultimately you can never be sure something is possible without doing it. I'm pragmatic here, if and when Wayland offers me a better experience than X then I'll use it. I just resent distros etc. pushing me towards it when it's currently a downgrade.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago

> When people complain about Wayland being mediocre or "as good as X was" what they often mean is "Wayland doesn't support $very_specific_feature" or "my video card vendor's proprietary drivers aren't well-tested with Wayland and it makes me sad". ...Yes? Wayland being a regression in terms of features and bugginess is kinda a sticking point. > Approximately 99.999% of those complaints are uttered by people who 1) are not doing the work, 2) are not interested or capable of doing the work, and 3) do not understand or refuse to acknowledge that the Wayland and X developers are _mostly the same folks_ and they _do not want to work on X11 anymore_. If X works for someone and Wayland doesn't, none of that matters. It doesn't matter how much you insult X users, it won't make their usecases invalid or make Wayland good enough. > I don't really have a stake in this argument, except I'm bone-tired of seeing people whine about Wayland when they're using software somebody else gave them for free. It cuts both ways: Users aren't entitled to free work, and developers aren't entitled to their work being well-regarded. Giving software away for free has never meant that people can't point out its problems.

bluGill 2y ago
X also isn't wrking for some. If you care about tearing for instance x doesn't work.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  True; also various scaling problems, and its security situation. We're in an unfortunate situation where no option has everything. If you want to say "Wayland is better for what I need", or "Xorg is better for what I need", or even "Arcan is better for what I need", then that is 100% legitimate. I'm also cool with "the current problems with (X|Wayland|Arcan) are..." because that's constructive and useful for trying to improve them. It's only pretending that one doesn't have faults or insulting its users/proponents that I mind.
- Ballas 2y ago
  I haven't seen any tearing in X in at least 5 years - with nvidia, nouveau and intel drivers. I don't think I'm doing anything special to achieve this, so your comment seems like a strange assertion to me? I agree that X11 has some faults, and I really want Wayland to work, but everytime I try it, something ends up being broken.

piotr-yuxuan 2y ago

I enjoy reading the whinging around Wayland by people who feel so entitled and so outraged. Every time they never fail to remind me of a previous coworker who was always using the same tactics: « this breaks my existing workflow, I will not adapt, I am all for trying new things but only if they are very exactly equal to what I already know and then what's the point, this is not how I have always worked the past ten years and I will not bulge ». Not talking about the technical points of the whole X/Wayland considerations here, but a group of people in such debate is always as vocal as they'll do nothing and put unreasonably high expectations on other people to listen to them and have no choice but to agree. The fact that X.org's core team initiated Wayland and stopped X.org development is disregarded: these people Will Be Right against literally everything, they can't be reasoned. My previous coworker was fired for gross incompetence in the end yet he never acknowledged anything wrong. He always knew better than literally the whole world that bash scripts run manually where superior to Terraform for the whole company's infrastructure. Yes, he was that stupid. I guess this is why he ended lying like hell on his LinkedIn profile, concealing he had had four employers in four years. Seeing technical debates with such poor quality is worrying. If people with quantitative minds fail to entertain a fact-based discussion, how can we expect our political life to acknowledge there is only one reality and stop lying? Before you voice your outrage, here are some facts that won't dis-exist just because you disagree with them: - https://www.phoronix.com/review/x_wayland_situation https://www.phoronix.com/review/x_wayland_situation - https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server.html https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server...

mcv 2y ago

> Approximately 99.999% of those complaints are uttered by people who 1) are not doing the work, 2) are not interested or capable of doing the work, and Are you saying that Wayland is only for developers? Are people not allowed to complain when The New Thing turns out to be less good than the supposedly Obsolete Thing? > 3) do not understand or refuse to acknowledge that the Wayland and X developers are _mostly the same folks_ and they _do not want to work on X11 anymore_. I'm fully aware of that. I understand X11 has its limitations, and some of the goals of Wayland sound very appropriate for the modern PC environment, but if after 16 years, there are still many situations where Wayland does worse than X, that's not a great sign, and it will make people continue to use X.

eadmund 2y ago

> what they often mean is "Wayland doesn't support $very_specific_feature" My primary complaint with Wayland is that it is a textbook example of Brooks’s second-system effect. It forsook backwards compatibility (yes, there’s an X11 server but to my knowledge there is no way to just run Wayland and one’s X11 desktop environment). > Strangely -- even though X is open source and eminently forkable (we know this, because XFree86 -> X.org) it gathers dust and none of its proponents are doing anything towards its upkeep. I suspect that is because the X/Wayland guys have sucked all the oxygen out of that particular room. A newbie shows up and is told that X.org is legacy and he shouldn’t work on it, so … he doesn’t. And of course X.org really is a bit of a disaster due to being written in C.

thomastjeffery 2y ago

People complain about the things they care about. Wayland made some huge design changes, and those changes all have pros and cons. How do we tend to communicate about pros and cons? By complaining. It sucks that Xorg's accessibility features are so baked-in that you must be compatible with them; because that demand can become a wall of assumptions. It sucks that Wayland leaves 100% of accessibility to the compositor; because that creates a lot of redundant work, and the best implementations get siloed into plasma or gnome, creating multiple smaller instances of the tight integration that made UX less flexible to begin with. Using Xorg, you can run an incredibly lightweight window manager that never even thought about managing keymaps, adjusting mouse acceleration, setting the display resolution, etc., because that's not it's job. I can get absolutely everything I want from i3wm on Xorg... except fractional scaling. So far, it looks like plasma is the only one that has really figured that one out, and I still get a tiny pointer sometimes. The best thing about free software is that we can choose how it works. The more tightly integrated the pieces are, the fewer choices are available. Fewer choices results in more complaining. Wayland may be the most significant instance of this pattern in Linux history. The second most significant instance was already present: Desktop Environments. The biggest source of complaints I have is that the best aspects of plasma are trapped inside KDE. If you want the best Wayland compositor out there, you have to have it wrapped in an entire full-featured Desktop Environment. --- Complaining is the best thing about Linux, so long as it's able to drive real change. The more stubborn and inflexible a system (and whoever designs it) is, the more disconnected complaints become. That's the real problem that deserves our attention.

justin66 2y ago

> Approximately 99.999% of those complaints are uttered by people who 1) are not doing the work, 2) are not interested or capable of doing the work, and 3) do not understand or refuse to acknowledge that the Wayland and X developers are _mostly the same folks_ and they _do not want to work on X11 anymore_. It's clarifying if you simply say "users."