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I’m not a fan of Wayland or a detractor of X. I’m not personally invested in either of them. I couldn’t care less what’s pushing pixels at my screen as long as

I’m not a fan of Wayland or a detractor of X. I’m not personally invested in either of them. I couldn’t care less what’s pushing pixels at my screen as long as it works. That said, what you need to know about Wayland is that the X.org devs mostly migrated to it en masse because they said X had hit an evolutionary dead end and couldn’t be dragged into the present, by the design of it. These were the people who were already maintaining X and presumably liked it. I doubt there were a lot of haters in that crowd. It’s not like someone invented Wayland and shoved the X devs out of the way. The X devs largely became Wayland devs because they believe it’s the better path forward. I don’t really know how I could argue against them.

msgodel 1y ago
It looks to me like there are quite a few more basic features fundamentally incompatible with Wayland's architecture than X's. Maybe X has issues but Wayland is still a regression.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  That seems at odds with what the people who wrote both of them believe.
  - wink 1y ago
    But that doesn't make it necessarily untrue for the person you replied to. People have different requirements and I heard tons of stories of "this doesn't work, that doesn't work". It's been slowly improving, but many people also just got burnt because of early hype. I don't remember any specific wayland problem in my personal recent history, but it took years to get there.
    - msgodel 1y ago
      It's not just the hype, it's the "you're holding it wrong" gaslighting. I have zero tolerance for that sort of thing these days. At this point I'll use kernel virtual terminals before I use Wayland.
  - qcnguy 1y ago
    But they aren't the authority on whether things actually work or not. Reality is. It's very common for developers to want to toss everything out and rewrite even to the detriment of the product, business or users. It's also very common for the rewrite to go wrong and end up worse than an incremental improvement path would have been. It's so common it's got a name: Second System Syndrome. Is Wayland the result of SSS? I don't use it, but it sounds like maybe it is. If it is then "the X developers said it's cool" isn't a very compelling answer. In commercial organizations developers are routinely blocked from doing pointless rewrites or gigantic refactors because a certain type of developer will happily screw everything up chasing utopian dreams of a tech debt free platform whilst the userbase rots on the vine. And very often, there were better and less disruptive ways to get to the desired destination.
- wmf 1y ago
  All that stuff has been fixed (but some of it was fixed pretty recently).
  - viraptor 1y ago
    Push-to-talk / global shortcuts still don't work. Not everything's fixed.
ants_everywhere 1y ago
In case anyone is unaware, X and Wayland are developed by the same group (freedesktop.org) - https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver - https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland It's not just that developers migrated to a new project. Wayland is essentially the successor to X and is developed by the same group. (That doesn't mean there aren't still lots of bugs and sharp corners.)
- Lockal 1y ago
  Not sure how "hosted on the same domain" transforms into "developed by the same group". I've seen many independent small github projects that were transferred to freedesktop, how they banned Hyprland, etc. They also host a variety of topics (and even more in mailing lists, from systemd to libreoffice), not just desktop-related, managed by different teams.
II2II 1y ago
> I couldn’t care less what’s pushing pixels at my screen as long as it works. I didn't know or care what was pushing the pixels on my Debian install, since it works. Being Debian, it could go either way: some of the desktop environments are committed to Wayland while other desktop configurations only work under X. (Incidentally, I checked. My setup uses Wayland.) > It’s not like someone invented Wayland and shoved the X devs out of the way. They sure make it sound as though X application developers are being shoved out of the way. I don't understand their argument though. Most modern software is built upon libraries that support either Wayland or X (assuming it has a GUI), so they should be blissfully ignorant of whether their application is running under Wayland or X. Most of the outliers are older programs that are built on top of libraries that haven't been updated for Wayland, but most of those programs will work under Wayland assuming that xwayland is installed. Again, there is no reason for the developer to concern themselves with the distinction between Wayland and X. That only applies to a relatively small subset of outliers that are interacting with X or the compositor directly. But you're not going to escape that problem, because you're either doing something unique or you are doing something you shouldn't be doing.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- josephcsible 1y ago
  > Most modern software is built upon libraries that support either Wayland or X (assuming it has a GUI), so they should be blissfully ignorant of whether their application is running under Wayland or X. Most of the outliers are older programs that are built on top of libraries that haven't been updated for Wayland, but most of those programs will work under Wayland assuming that xwayland is installed. That's true of software that just receives input from the keyboard and mouse and sends output to the screen, but for anything that does more advanced stuff than that, e.g., xrdp, there's often either no way at all to do so in Wayland, or doing so requires custom code for every DE instead of being able to write it once and having it work everywhere.
BergAndCo 1y ago
[dead]

msgodel 1y ago

It looks to me like there are quite a few more basic features fundamentally incompatible with Wayland's architecture than X's. Maybe X has issues but Wayland is still a regression.

kstrauser 1y ago
That seems at odds with what the people who wrote both of them believe.
- wink 1y ago
  But that doesn't make it necessarily untrue for the person you replied to. People have different requirements and I heard tons of stories of "this doesn't work, that doesn't work". It's been slowly improving, but many people also just got burnt because of early hype. I don't remember any specific wayland problem in my personal recent history, but it took years to get there.
  - msgodel 1y ago
    It's not just the hype, it's the "you're holding it wrong" gaslighting. I have zero tolerance for that sort of thing these days. At this point I'll use kernel virtual terminals before I use Wayland.
- qcnguy 1y ago
  But they aren't the authority on whether things actually work or not. Reality is. It's very common for developers to want to toss everything out and rewrite even to the detriment of the product, business or users. It's also very common for the rewrite to go wrong and end up worse than an incremental improvement path would have been. It's so common it's got a name: Second System Syndrome. Is Wayland the result of SSS? I don't use it, but it sounds like maybe it is. If it is then "the X developers said it's cool" isn't a very compelling answer. In commercial organizations developers are routinely blocked from doing pointless rewrites or gigantic refactors because a certain type of developer will happily screw everything up chasing utopian dreams of a tech debt free platform whilst the userbase rots on the vine. And very often, there were better and less disruptive ways to get to the desired destination.
wmf 1y ago
All that stuff has been fixed (but some of it was fixed pretty recently).
- viraptor 1y ago
  Push-to-talk / global shortcuts still don't work. Not everything's fixed.

ants_everywhere 1y ago

In case anyone is unaware, X and Wayland are developed by the same group (freedesktop.org) - https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver - https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland It's not just that developers migrated to a new project. Wayland is essentially the successor to X and is developed by the same group. (That doesn't mean there aren't still lots of bugs and sharp corners.)

Lockal 1y ago
Not sure how "hosted on the same domain" transforms into "developed by the same group". I've seen many independent small github projects that were transferred to freedesktop, how they banned Hyprland, etc. They also host a variety of topics (and even more in mailing lists, from systemd to libreoffice), not just desktop-related, managed by different teams.

II2II 1y ago

> I couldn’t care less what’s pushing pixels at my screen as long as it works. I didn't know or care what was pushing the pixels on my Debian install, since it works. Being Debian, it could go either way: some of the desktop environments are committed to Wayland while other desktop configurations only work under X. (Incidentally, I checked. My setup uses Wayland.) > It’s not like someone invented Wayland and shoved the X devs out of the way. They sure make it sound as though X application developers are being shoved out of the way. I don't understand their argument though. Most modern software is built upon libraries that support either Wayland or X (assuming it has a GUI), so they should be blissfully ignorant of whether their application is running under Wayland or X. Most of the outliers are older programs that are built on top of libraries that haven't been updated for Wayland, but most of those programs will work under Wayland assuming that xwayland is installed. Again, there is no reason for the developer to concern themselves with the distinction between Wayland and X. That only applies to a relatively small subset of outliers that are interacting with X or the compositor directly. But you're not going to escape that problem, because you're either doing something unique or you are doing something you shouldn't be doing.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
josephcsible 1y ago
> Most modern software is built upon libraries that support either Wayland or X (assuming it has a GUI), so they should be blissfully ignorant of whether their application is running under Wayland or X. Most of the outliers are older programs that are built on top of libraries that haven't been updated for Wayland, but most of those programs will work under Wayland assuming that xwayland is installed. That's true of software that just receives input from the keyboard and mouse and sends output to the screen, but for anything that does more advanced stuff than that, e.g., xrdp, there's often either no way at all to do so in Wayland, or doing so requires custom code for every DE instead of being able to write it once and having it work everywhere.

BergAndCo 1y ago

[dead]