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> What is relevant is that, presumably, Windows and Mac and X11 users of Kicad use this functionality. Windows and Mac and X11 users do not praise KiCAD for it
by jchw 1y ago
> What is relevant is that, presumably, Windows and Mac and X11 users of Kicad use this functionality.
Windows and Mac and X11 users do not praise KiCAD for its ability to absolutely position the cursor. Windows and Mac and X11 users praise KiCAD for having a nice UX. You can definitely implement features like infinite panning in today's Wayland compositors, you just can't do it by absolutely setting the cursor position.
> The onus is on the Wayland team to justify the decision to take away a feature currently in use, not on the user base to justify switching to another system.
This is a genuinely cancerous mentality. When you design a new API, "the old API had a function that does this" is not a valid justification. If you can't find another justification for why the function should exist, it means that it shouldn't. That's what designing from first principle looks like. I have actual reasons why the old functionality (getting/setting the absolute cursor position) is not an API that I want, too, but that's not even the point. API functionality should be able to stand on its own and justify itself. If you can't start on a completely clean slate, why even bother trying to design a new API in the first place?
It doesn't matter if Windows, macOS, X11, Haiku, BeOS, SkyOS and TempleOS all provide this functionality, that's not a good justification, that is just argumentum ad populum. It is a useful API primitive, because it can be used to implement other useful things, and a ubiquitous API primitive, but that doesn't mean it's a good API primitive. On the contrary, most of these desktop systems were designed a long time ago, and now modern OSes are actually having to come up with ways to carefully limit a lot of these sorts of very powerful legacy APIs because they can lead to security and privacy issues. As an end user and computer owner, I don't want random applications running on my desktop to be able to get or set the absolute cursor position on screen, especially when the window is not focused. And if I don't want that, then the next obvious question is, does something like KiCAD truly need that? Of course not. Applications need primitives that can implement the controls and UI that they want, but you don't just get to decide what those primitives are, as an application. As an application, you get to deal with the primitives that you're given, because by definition, that's literally the job of an application developer. And when those primitives prove insufficient to implement some UI, then we can discuss how to fix it, but the answer isn't "this old API just let me get/set the global cursor position so can I have that?" And if you don't like some system you don't have to support it. But Apple is a complete and utter dickhole to application developers, requiring all kinds of dumb signing bullshit and pushing users to huge proprietary APIs like Metal, and yet open source projects are happy to sink plenty of developer hours (and often money) into it anyways, even though its desktop marketshare is only somewhat more impressive than Linux anyway. So forgive me if I don't shed a tear because it required a bit more work to do something in Wayland than it did elsewhere.
And yes, I know: you can come up with an application that really truly actually does need this. There are a handful, like automation software, or a remote desktop server. Actually though, pretty much all of the modern Wayland desktops support being able to get or set the absolute cursor position for that use case, it's just that it will usually require a permission prompt, at least the first time you use it. (There are some exceptions. wlroots/SwayWM doesn't require a permission prompt for this, the functionality is exposed as long as applications are not sandboxed.)
Application developers have developed this sense of ownership over the desktop that has become very annoying. No. I want my desktop environment to act as the owner of my desktop, the same way I want my window manager to control the management and positioning of my windows. Your applications just get to live in that world, the way that web pages get to live in a web browser.
Love it or don't, Wayland exposing higher level APIs for things that used to be implemented by application developers using lower level APIs is a step in the right direction for higher quality desktops and for user's control over their own desktops.
- lelanthran 1y ago> Windows and Mac and X11 users do not praise KiCAD for its ability to absolutely position the cursor. What does praising have to do with it? After all, I use my television remote mainly to control the volume, but I have never praised the ability to control the volume. > When you design a new API, "the old API had a function that does this" is not a valid justification. That is not the justification I, and others, gave; it's essentially a strawman that pops up in every single Wayland conversation. The justification is "Windows, Mac and X11 allow this feature." At that point, the onus is on the Wayland devs to justify why they are removing a feature found in every mainstream desktop OS. > It doesn't matter if Windows, macOS, X11, Haiku, BeOS, SkyOS and TempleOS all provide this functionality, that's not a good justification, that is just argumentum ad populum. Well ... yes? What's wrong with that? What's wrong with the argument "All the competitors provide this"?
- jchw 1y ago> At that point, the onus is on the Wayland devs to justify why they are removing a feature found in every mainstream desktop OS. You actually haven't come up with any good reason to justify this, you've just repeated it as fact for some reason. And what's weird is, there's no point in doing this. Like, I can understand doing this maybe earlier, when there was possibly a question if Wayland would succeed; at that point, the proponents, designeds and developers of Wayland and Wayland software had something to prove. But guess what? It's over. There's no more fight for Wayland to prove itself. Wayland is, for now, here to stay. We are done with that part of things. Nothing will literally stop someone from using X.Org, anymore than you are stopped from doing anything with your own computer, but the Linux world is largely moving on. Application developers are largely moving on. Toolkit developers are largely moving on. Desktop environments are largely moving on. Distributions are largely moving on. And nobody in this process is losing immense sleep over wxWidgets or KiCAD not having complete parity because it's not a big deal. We genuinely have more important things to worry about. So framing this fight with whatever basis you personally feel appropriate is a waste of my time and a waste of your time. If your best justification is 'everyone else was doing it in 1999', you can pipe it to /dev/null and save us all some time. We don't care. So no, the onus is absolutely on you to justify this. You can't decide where the onus belongs because you're literally not in a position to do so, the Wayland project, for all of its faults, has largely succeeded and doesn't need to justify itself in this fashion anymore. All modern desktop systems supported silently querying and setting the absolute position of the cursor... Before Wayland. Wayland became a modern desktop system that doesn't, so now not all modern desktop systems support that. And if a commercial vendor ever decides to design a new desktop system from scratch, you can bet all of the hairs on your ass it will have nearly the exact same limitations.