43 ms·

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

by 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.
- bmacho 1y ago
  > > "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. OTOH most toolkits are themeable on global and application level. It is certainly possible for a working group to provide consistent themes for applications. E.g. my favorite theme is Adwaita dark[0] from ~Ubuntu 14, and it is possible to tell gtk/qt/tk/fltk/.. to look like this on a global level, and if some applications look bad due to icons or something, then fix them. It's just nobody is doing that. And I agree, I don't see how could've been this a killer application for Wayland, this should be accomplished with distributing config files, and not somewhere near the display protocol. [0] : https://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu+adwaita+dark&udm=2 https://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu+adwaita+dark&udm=2
  - const_cast 1y ago
    The landscape was quite different in 2014. I know, I was there, and Linux desktops have been getting less themable since because application technologies are going off the rails. KDE today is still fairly themable if you stick to Qt apps and GTK 3 apps. But if you use a dozen frameworks then yeah, that's not themable anymore. Which really sucks but it is what it is. And, honestly, it's not that bad. It's much, much worse on some other platforms.
gf000 1y ago
> It does astonish me how Wayland missed obvious killer angles when they decided to reinvent X11. [..] rich native toolkit What does a toolkit have to do with a display server?! Especially in this age and year when pretty much no one writes native UIs anymore? Like, android, which is by far the most popular OS by user count has a huge proportion of web apps - apps are fundamentally driven by network effects, so the tiny user count a new Linux contender could muster up would be a rounding error.
- hakfoo 1y ago
  If you asked people "what are your pain points with the current Unix GUI ecosystem?", in the early 2000s when this was being first discussed, this would have been a popular answer. This was decades before the "let's make everything a stupid webpage in an Electron box" movement, but you were likely running some GTK and Qt apps and probably even some Motif or Xaw stragglers, on a single desktop most days. Yes, they could have said "out of scope" and moved on. TBH, I wonder if that's part of how we ended up where we are. There probably needed to be clear documentation at the right moments of "this is what we don't include, this is why, and this is how we recommend you do it outside the system."

by hakfoo 1y ago

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.

bmacho 1y ago
> > "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. OTOH most toolkits are themeable on global and application level. It is certainly possible for a working group to provide consistent themes for applications. E.g. my favorite theme is Adwaita dark[0] from ~Ubuntu 14, and it is possible to tell gtk/qt/tk/fltk/.. to look like this on a global level, and if some applications look bad due to icons or something, then fix them. It's just nobody is doing that. And I agree, I don't see how could've been this a killer application for Wayland, this should be accomplished with distributing config files, and not somewhere near the display protocol. [0] : https://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu+adwaita+dark&udm=2 https://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu+adwaita+dark&udm=2
- const_cast 1y ago
  The landscape was quite different in 2014. I know, I was there, and Linux desktops have been getting less themable since because application technologies are going off the rails. KDE today is still fairly themable if you stick to Qt apps and GTK 3 apps. But if you use a dozen frameworks then yeah, that's not themable anymore. Which really sucks but it is what it is. And, honestly, it's not that bad. It's much, much worse on some other platforms.

gf000 1y ago

> It does astonish me how Wayland missed obvious killer angles when they decided to reinvent X11. [..] rich native toolkit What does a toolkit have to do with a display server?! Especially in this age and year when pretty much no one writes native UIs anymore? Like, android, which is by far the most popular OS by user count has a huge proportion of web apps - apps are fundamentally driven by network effects, so the tiny user count a new Linux contender could muster up would be a rounding error.

hakfoo 1y ago
If you asked people "what are your pain points with the current Unix GUI ecosystem?", in the early 2000s when this was being first discussed, this would have been a popular answer. This was decades before the "let's make everything a stupid webpage in an Electron box" movement, but you were likely running some GTK and Qt apps and probably even some Motif or Xaw stragglers, on a single desktop most days. Yes, they could have said "out of scope" and moved on. TBH, I wonder if that's part of how we ended up where we are. There probably needed to be clear documentation at the right moments of "this is what we don't include, this is why, and this is how we recommend you do it outside the system."