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> I've been thinking about ditching Windows as my primary OS for some years, but Wayland has been really detrimental to the Linux desktop. Over a decade later a

• LorenDB 1y ago
  Not directly Wayland specific, but vaxry (Hyprland guy) is trying to get up a new standards body to replace Freedesktop.org. That could possibly accelerate the coming of a major shift around compositors.
  • inftech 1y ago
    Can you provide the source, please?
    • LorenDB 1y ago
      https://xcancel.com/vaxryy/status/1934931695498559631 https://xcancel.com/vaxryy/status/1934931695498559631 Also see this thread where Vaxry lays out his gripes with Freedesktop.org: https://xcancel.com/vaxryy/status/1934721645115224431 https://xcancel.com/vaxryy/status/1934721645115224431
  • DrillShopper 1y ago
    > vaxry (Hyprland guy) Too bad Hyprland's community sucks
    • ChocolateGod 1y ago
      It's the only wayland display server to have a community.
    • wpm 1y ago
      Then don’t hang out there?
      • DrillShopper 1y ago
        I don't? That doesn't change the fact that it's awful.
    • rowanG077 1y ago
      Why does it suck? I run hyprland but I'm not really involves with the community. The times I did have contact they were helpful and super quick with solutions. Like literally the issue is fixed in a day.
      • 0points 1y ago
        Mainly because vaxry is a toxic political crusader bashing on rust and other topics, which brings in other toxic political crusaders to his community.
• dsr_ 1y ago
  To draw a possibly inapt analogy: it was clear at a certain point that CVS, the king of versioning systems, was going to be replaced. It also seemed clear that any successful contender would seamlessly import from CVS, but not necessarily from any of the unsuccessful contenders, so it made sense to wait and let everyone else fight it out. (And the winner appeared to be subversion, for a couple of years, and then git came along and won decisively -- with support for importing from subversion.) I have been assuming that Wayland would pull itself together or else someone would build a competitor that does everything X11 can do, but also backwards and in heels and doing a creditable job at running X applications. Somehow neither of these has happened yet. I am fond of the idea of arcan -- arcan-fe.com -- being that winner, but there doesn't seem to be much traction.
  • ur-whale 1y ago
    Very apt analogy. Wayland is indeed the subversion of window systems, can't wait for it to die and be replaced by a window system equivalent of git.
    • ahartmetz 1y ago
      Wayland isn't bad or limited by design. It's just too little. If you just made all the necessary extensions for desktop use and made them mandatory (possibly in a single implementation like Xorg), you'd have a solution.
      • ur-whale 1y ago
        > It's just too little. The X11 ecosystem might be very rich, but it's been 17 years since the Wayland project inception. Just saying.
        • ahartmetz 1y ago
          Sure it's a problem, but more of a social one. Wayland's creator was weirdly opposed (that was the net effect anyway) to adding features, and the freedestop.org setup is better, but not good.
• tannhaeuser 1y ago
  > Win32 My thoughts exactly given the progress wine/proton is making; pretty much the only success story for Linux on the mainstream "desktop" (handheld) for over ten years. Though I'm not sure about the underlying infrastructure of SteamOS (Arch-based) and/or Bazzite (fedora-based); could well be Wayland raising its ugly head there, and I just don't see a new generation of developers or sponsors willing to invest into it.
  • pjmlp 1y ago
    Which will only work as Windows XP Win32 is good enough for whatever people are doing, Valve is willing to sponsor the work, and Microsoft doesn't decide to do something that changes that. Like when then went down into netbooks, first blow was the cheap Windows XP licenses, followed by tablets wiping the remaining ones, as OEMs found a better deal selling tablets, keyboards and covers than keeping netbooks arounds, while pivoting such designs into the expensive ultra-light laptops segment. Microsoft only needs to use their weight as one of the biggest publishers in the market, one of the top three console vendors, and biggest gaming OS on desktop systems and game tournaments.
    • tannhaeuser 1y ago
      Yeah you've got a point. What's the lesser evil though when the alternative is overconfident over-motivated junior devs refactoring stuff for the sake of it while breaking apps, not realising their work should be to support the precious few FOSS desktop apps we have that won't come back with no new ones in sight either, leading us into know how monopolisation. That attitude is showing right here with Wayland apologists getting defensive as in nothing wrong with Wayland, it's just a new "platform" lol. Same thing with programming language fetishists which is just a means to an end. The problem is that the next generation of developers want to have their fun and educational experience reinventing stuff, too; and who wants to blame them when that's just what the previous gen did.
      • gf000 1y ago
        This is just malicious, ignorant and plain falss towards the Wayland developers (which is by the way a very diverse group), whom are by all chance waay more experienced than you are. Also, fails to take into account that X has plenty of objective design failures, which is to be expected given GPUs didn't exist at the time of its invention.
• zppln 1y ago
  > out of their system I spent some time last year digging around in Wayland and I've got to admit that I was surprised to learn that there really isn't anything really there. Like, there is no "system". I had read that "it's a protocol" but I hadn't fully internalized it. I'm honestly a bit surprised anyone has adopted it. It almost feels like a scam. :) When I checked you couldn't even get your window decorated without an extension (that Gnome decided to not support so you have to bring your own decorator there?).
  • IshKebab 1y ago
    Yeah I think the fundamental mistake they made was trying to standardise a display protocol without a display server. They changed it so that everyone who previously just wrote a window manager now had to write an entire display server. The open source community just doesn't have that much manpower.
    • jchw 1y ago
      > They changed it so that everyone who previously just wrote a window manager now had to write an entire display server. Not entirely true. Now if you want to share the "display server" bits you can plug in a library like wlroots or Smithay. The real issue, if any, is that most of those bits are not standardized; or at least, only the libwayland part. Of course, that's not even the entire story either. When X11 servers were basically entire operating systems that ran as root, implemented print servers and directly touched /dev/mem, only a lunatic would want to maintain multiple of them... but now on Linux and even some BSDs, you can fall back to GBM/DRM/KMS/libinput/etc. for most of your "hardware" needs, the OS is doing the OS things. Wayland is also just simpler than X11; The current day cleaned-up X.org is still around 5x larger by SLOC and much more complex than wlroots. So how come GNOME and KDE both built their own display server? Well really, they didn't; they took their existing compositors they had for X11 anyway and grew Wayland server limbs out of them. In practice retrofitting Wayland into existing compositors is still hard, but if you already have written a compositor and window manager it's still probably easier than writing a new one from scratch. And for KWin, I believe they're also making use of Qt's Wayland compositor infrastructure, too. Something that took me a long time to understand is that people are just unhappy no matter what. Not that all of their points are invalid, just, it's often not even really about that; the specific points are often just the obvious weak spots, like the classic "Wayland can't screen capture" meme (totally fair point, but persisted so long that some people still don't know it hasn't been an issue for years.) This right here is just another one of those. Notice that when many Linux distros unified towards a singular init system, systemd, people came out with pitchforks. Were they all spouting incorrect nonsense? Well, blah blah UNIX philosophy, but largely no, there were plenty of valid complaints about systemd and what it meant for the Linux ecosystem, but it wasn't really about that. Same with Wayland! Wayland did the exact opposite, and defined a set of protocols anyone could implement, allowing you to choose your compositor. Seeing as people hated what systemd did and wanted to preserve "choice" in the Linux world, you'd expect that people would like what Wayland did, but instead everyone is just pissed about fragmentation now. You can pick apart that argument and try to figure out why it's wrong or and invalid comparison and I'm not going to try to fight anyone on that. You can also say that the argument is made by different people and maybe that's true too (though personally I believe "people who hated systemd" and "people who hate Wayland" forms more of a circle than a venn diagram.) Even if it is, the outcome is the same: you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. What I do know is that desktops on X11 stagnated with the same sorts of problems they always had and with Wayland a lot of that got unblocked. X11 will probably be in the same crappy state it's in today and Wayland will continue iterating and improving over time. I'm sure there will be a lot of pain along the way, and I agree it isn't always pretty, but it is what it is. Software isn't a beauty contest, and there's a good reason why "elegant" stuff rarely wins in the long run.
• const_cast 1y ago
  I disagree, features are added to Wayland constantly and we're getting more and more highly supported protocols by the day. We can already do 95% of what you can do on X on major implementations - screen sharing, global hotkeys, file pickers, etc. Yes, these things were designed out of Wayland, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't exist. It means the developers decided we probably shouldn't shove them into the display server. So we just put them somewhere else, and that seems to be working fine. The situation can only improve, truly.
  • hakfoo 1y ago
    The whole "95% support on major implementations" thing is still a hurdle. Wayland ends up railroading users into GNOME and KDE, with virtually everything else being in some way second-class. In X11, I can still use all the same core features whether I run a full KDE desktop, Window Maker and a few dockapps, or a stack of xterms that I manually position with --geometry. It does astonish me how Wayland missed obvious killer angles when they decided to reinvent X11. People would have been excited by "Here's a rich native toolkit so all the new software will look and work and theme consistently"-- a well-known and directly user-facing friction point, so how did they miss that?
    • const_cast 1y ago
      GNOME and KDE are the most complete implementations, yes, but that's just a function of developer time. Keep in mind that's better than what we had with X - which had 1 implementation, that couldn't be touched with a ten foot pole because of how fragile said implementation was. > "Here's a rich native toolkit so all the new software will look and work and theme consistently"-- a well-known and directly user-facing friction point, so how did they miss that? The problem is that application toolkits are a step above window managers and compositors. That's really an application developers choice, not a desktop's choice. Developers want to use Electron, and there's nothing we can do about that. We can get consistently themed apps... if everyone hops on Qt. Which they won't because C++ is evil. People want to shove HTML and CSS into their music player and theme it like they do a website, so here we are. This isn't a solved problem on any platform, even really really locked down ones like iOS. Half my iOS apps are web views which don't follow the look and feel of iOS and have inconsistent behavior as compared to the system. And iOS is the best about this honestly - it's, like, way worse on Windows which has half a dozen competing toolkits from Microsoft alone.
• gf000 1y ago
  There is nothing Wayland "designed out" of their system. It's a fully extendible design which has a very minimal core, instead of bundling a printer and whatnot into the display server. This makes it feasible for car entertainment systems that only want to display bitmaps, but is easily extended to any future use case. There are a bunch of actually standard extensions now, implemented across all desktop Wayland servers, so many of these criticisms are moot.
  • jenadine 1y ago
    Maybe Wayland is extensible, but if the main desktop compositor (i.e. Gnome) don't implement these, it is as much as useless. And it seems that Gnome very much "designed out" some features such as window positioning, window icon, and so on. (We're talking about user's desktop, not custom car entertainment compositor)
  • rcxdude 1y ago
    The main issue is GNOME, really. They are keen to pare down the functionality offered to users and app developers, and so will block standardization of extensions that try to bring wayland up to feature parity, and even if they do get standardised, they will refuse to implement it. Which basically means many developers and users don't want to play ball with wayland at all, and the network effects are fairly strong (devs will not bother with the effort of making something work as best it can on wayland if users still happy to use X11, and users won't switch to wayland if their apps don't work or work less well). (Why does GNOME still matter? They've got the most developer resources of basically any group in the linux desktop space, and a large part of the market share because they're the default on a few of the larger distros)
• lotharcable 1y ago
  Wayland devs and Xorg X11 devs are by and large the same group of people. So nothing you said really makes a lot of sense. There are lots of display technologies out there for Linux besides X11 and Wayland. There was Mir from Canoncial, which is now dead. The project moved to using Wayland. There was Freon from Google's ChromeOS that was announced in 2015 to replace X11 for ChromeOS, but it is dead. They are moving to using Wayland. There was DirectFB, which has been supplanted by DirectFB2. They have been plugging away doing their own thing since time immemorial. Directfb2 even has Vulkan support now. Good luck getting KiCAD working on that. And there is Surfaceflinger from Android. Which is actively developed and widely used. None of these things would allow to do what people are complaining about what they are not allowed to do in Wayland . > There's too many things people want to do that Wayland designed out of their system. eye rolls
• happymellon 1y ago
  Its similar to the CVS analogy given below, however I would liken it to Pulse Audio. We know we have needed to "fix" the audio subsystems for a while, and Pulse fixed a lot of problems but by the time it came along what were problems had moved on. Pulse ended up with other issues, and not actually doing everything we actually needed so it was eventually replaced with Pipewire. I'm not sure if Systemd falls enough into the same pattern, but I'm sure something better will emerge in the next few years.
  • s1gsegv 1y ago
    The more I dig into systemd the more I like how it works. Are there still problems popping up with systemd? Anecdotally, I had a couple user-facing problems that were caused by PulseAudio but never systemd actually being broken.
    • happymellon 1y ago
      No I've never had any issues with it. It is so much faster and better for me and my usecases that I don't grasp any of the arguments. But I also never had any issues with Pulse so I don't ever want to discount other peoples experiences.
  • ahartmetz 1y ago
    Systemd seems fine as an init system at this point, most of its gratuitous replacements for other system services are still garbage.
• michaelmrose 1y ago
  It won't be win32 because it just isn't on Linux and there is no reason for it to be. Wheres game compatibility is great with proton in between apps are not with installation sucking, mostly replicating better native apps, and updated versions which are common and continuous in apps as it isn't in games usually leading to breakage.
• phendrenad2 1y ago
  > The future is likely a third system I don't know about that. I've always been skeptical of the "X11 can't be fixed" claims, nobody has ever been able to explain that one technically, it's always "I read it somewhere" or "Trust me bro the code is bad (and I read that somewhere)". With XLibre, maybe there's life left in X11.