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There wasn't a need to have 10s of different wayland compositors. There is not a need to endlessly bikeshed over extentions instead of delivering user value. Th

There wasn't a need to have 10s of different wayland compositors. There is not a need to endlessly bikeshed over extentions instead of delivering user value. These are failures of leadership in driving the replacement of X. Just compare this to Windows and how they made this rearchitecture of making their compositor more modern without splitting into 10s of compositors and breaking a ton of apps.

bryanlarsen 1y ago
"Failures of leadership" implies that leadership actually exists. Does it?
- resonious 1y ago
  Right, this is basically peoples' hobby projects. Nobody is incentivized to "lead" the Wayland project.
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago
    Actually, that'd probably be a better outcome. But as it is, Red Hat & Ubuntu et al pay people to work on Wayland and those people follow corporate priorities rather than centralized priorities.
    - wmf 1y ago
      I think Red Hat wants a working desktop but I don't think they have strong official opinions on how to get there. I think individual people are responsible for the GNOME/Wayland/Freedesktop messes.
jemmyw 1y ago
Here you're just comparing proprietary closed source development to open source development. In the proprietary version the goal is to improve a product. The OSS goals are much harder to pin down and can be different person to person, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a goal of "make it so that other devs can make their own compositors easily" and therefore you're describing an obvious success. Short term this might be a far slower and worse approach. It's not clear that's the case long term though, making things easier to try out different ideas and then finding a winning compositor project could be better than being stuck with one.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  Perhaps proprietary closed source development is better for making operating systems. Is it a coincidence that Google was able to scale Linux to billions of devices while open source development ones weren't? Open source development should take some lessons if they want to be successful and not aggrevate developers writing apps for your platform like what happened in the article, forcing them to do extra work. If development for X is ceasing now, there isn't time to experiment on finding the true successor.
  - davidsainez 1y ago
    Access to virtually infinite cash had more to do with Android's success than the source being proprietary.
  - linguae 1y ago
    I think the hard part about the Linux desktop ecosystem and its development pattern is the cobbled-up-parts nature of the system, where different teams and individuals work on different subsystems with no higher leadership directing how all of these parts should be assembled to create a cohesive whole. We have a situation where GUI applications depended on X.org, yet the X.org developers didn't want to work on X.org any more. If the desktop Linux ecosystem were more like FreeBSD in the sense that FreeBSD has control over both the kernel and its bundled userland, there'd be a clearer transition away from X.org since X.org would have been owned by the overall Linux project. However, that's not how development in the Linux ecosystem works, and what we ended up with is a very messy, dragged-out transition from X to Wayland, complete with competing compositors. Bazaar-style development seems to work for command-line tools, but I don't think it works well for a coherent desktop experience. We've had so much fragmentation, from KDE/Qt vs GNOME/GTK, to now X11 vs Wayland. Even X11 itself didn't come from the bazaar, but rather from MIT, DEC, and IBM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System).
  - jemmyw 1y ago
    > Perhaps proprietary closed source development is better Perhaps... > Open source development should take some lessons if they want to be successful A lot of people who write the gui stuff for Linux do it because they want to. Success is not necessarily the same metric as a company making a product. There are companies working within the space and I doubt the licensing really makes much difference to the outcome (i.e. your Google example) > If development for X is ceasing now, there isn't time to experiment on finding the true successor. Why? Again, the people working on it because they want to don't need to do anything, they can experiment. Someone can still fix up issues in X. Some companies will fund the development of things that are important to them. You make it sound like the oss community should be acting like one entity to achieve something, but there is no overarching goal nor a reason for there to be one. People will continue pulling in different directions.
kmeisthax 1y ago
Windows gets to completely rearchitecture their compositor because they only provide one stable ABI to get pixels on the screen: link to USER32.DLL, create the necessary objects to represent a window of your application's class, then create and pump a message queue for it. It's ancient, but it works, and more specifically will never change. Even the higher level toolkits Windows ships ultimately are creating USER windows, and USER has been the only UI ABI since version 1. macOS is the same way, except Carbon (a light modification to the procedural Toolbox API) and Cocoa (the Mac's first OOP toolkit) were "toll-free bridged" to each other rather than, say, writing Cocoa in terms of Carbon. In contrast, X11 is a protocol anyone can implement and speak. There is no blessed library that you must use. No, Xlib doesn't count. Servers have to take their clients as they come. And Wayland, while very much deliberately stripped down from X, still retains this property of "the demarc point is a protocol" while every proprietary OS (and Android) went with "the demarc point is a library".
gf000 1y ago
How can you compare the Cathedral with a bazaar? This is not a technical difference at all. Apple/Microsoft can do whatever they want, just break compatibility at any point and everyone else wanting to have their programs supported on their platform will adapt. Meanwhile for Linux network effect has a much bigger role to play, you can't tell anyone else what to do, but protocols can only emerge from working together. Also, I wouldn't bring up Microsoft's display stack as a positive example at all.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  User experience and developer experience for an OS are real things. It's easy to make a bad experience, people have to actually care about being able to deliver a good experience. Even if you can't tell people what to do, it should be possible to align on something that can deliver a good experience for users and developers. >This is not a technical difference at all. Which is why I said it was a problem with leadership than with the technical merrits.
- flohofwoe 1y ago
  > Apple/Microsoft can do whatever they want Those two are worlds apart when it comes to backward compatibility. > Also, I wouldn't bring up Microsoft's display stack as a positive example at all. Why not? It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, and has been since the late 90s. There's tons of fundamental improvements since then, but they're all under the hood without affecting user-facing features. I'd say the Windows display stack modernization is an excellent example of how it should be done (a real shame though that Microsoft is actively ruining Windows by adding user-hostile features on top of the pretty good technical base).

bryanlarsen 1y ago

"Failures of leadership" implies that leadership actually exists. Does it?

resonious 1y ago
Right, this is basically peoples' hobby projects. Nobody is incentivized to "lead" the Wayland project.
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  Actually, that'd probably be a better outcome. But as it is, Red Hat & Ubuntu et al pay people to work on Wayland and those people follow corporate priorities rather than centralized priorities.
  - wmf 1y ago
    I think Red Hat wants a working desktop but I don't think they have strong official opinions on how to get there. I think individual people are responsible for the GNOME/Wayland/Freedesktop messes.

jemmyw 1y ago

Here you're just comparing proprietary closed source development to open source development. In the proprietary version the goal is to improve a product. The OSS goals are much harder to pin down and can be different person to person, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a goal of "make it so that other devs can make their own compositors easily" and therefore you're describing an obvious success. Short term this might be a far slower and worse approach. It's not clear that's the case long term though, making things easier to try out different ideas and then finding a winning compositor project could be better than being stuck with one.

charcircuit 1y ago
Perhaps proprietary closed source development is better for making operating systems. Is it a coincidence that Google was able to scale Linux to billions of devices while open source development ones weren't? Open source development should take some lessons if they want to be successful and not aggrevate developers writing apps for your platform like what happened in the article, forcing them to do extra work. If development for X is ceasing now, there isn't time to experiment on finding the true successor.
- davidsainez 1y ago
  Access to virtually infinite cash had more to do with Android's success than the source being proprietary.
- linguae 1y ago
  I think the hard part about the Linux desktop ecosystem and its development pattern is the cobbled-up-parts nature of the system, where different teams and individuals work on different subsystems with no higher leadership directing how all of these parts should be assembled to create a cohesive whole. We have a situation where GUI applications depended on X.org, yet the X.org developers didn't want to work on X.org any more. If the desktop Linux ecosystem were more like FreeBSD in the sense that FreeBSD has control over both the kernel and its bundled userland, there'd be a clearer transition away from X.org since X.org would have been owned by the overall Linux project. However, that's not how development in the Linux ecosystem works, and what we ended up with is a very messy, dragged-out transition from X to Wayland, complete with competing compositors. Bazaar-style development seems to work for command-line tools, but I don't think it works well for a coherent desktop experience. We've had so much fragmentation, from KDE/Qt vs GNOME/GTK, to now X11 vs Wayland. Even X11 itself didn't come from the bazaar, but rather from MIT, DEC, and IBM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System).
- jemmyw 1y ago
  > Perhaps proprietary closed source development is better Perhaps... > Open source development should take some lessons if they want to be successful A lot of people who write the gui stuff for Linux do it because they want to. Success is not necessarily the same metric as a company making a product. There are companies working within the space and I doubt the licensing really makes much difference to the outcome (i.e. your Google example) > If development for X is ceasing now, there isn't time to experiment on finding the true successor. Why? Again, the people working on it because they want to don't need to do anything, they can experiment. Someone can still fix up issues in X. Some companies will fund the development of things that are important to them. You make it sound like the oss community should be acting like one entity to achieve something, but there is no overarching goal nor a reason for there to be one. People will continue pulling in different directions.

kmeisthax 1y ago

Windows gets to completely rearchitecture their compositor because they only provide one stable ABI to get pixels on the screen: link to USER32.DLL, create the necessary objects to represent a window of your application's class, then create and pump a message queue for it. It's ancient, but it works, and more specifically will never change. Even the higher level toolkits Windows ships ultimately are creating USER windows, and USER has been the only UI ABI since version 1. macOS is the same way, except Carbon (a light modification to the procedural Toolbox API) and Cocoa (the Mac's first OOP toolkit) were "toll-free bridged" to each other rather than, say, writing Cocoa in terms of Carbon. In contrast, X11 is a protocol anyone can implement and speak. There is no blessed library that you must use. No, Xlib doesn't count. Servers have to take their clients as they come. And Wayland, while very much deliberately stripped down from X, still retains this property of "the demarc point is a protocol" while every proprietary OS (and Android) went with "the demarc point is a library".

gf000 1y ago

How can you compare the Cathedral with a bazaar? This is not a technical difference at all. Apple/Microsoft can do whatever they want, just break compatibility at any point and everyone else wanting to have their programs supported on their platform will adapt. Meanwhile for Linux network effect has a much bigger role to play, you can't tell anyone else what to do, but protocols can only emerge from working together. Also, I wouldn't bring up Microsoft's display stack as a positive example at all.

charcircuit 1y ago
User experience and developer experience for an OS are real things. It's easy to make a bad experience, people have to actually care about being able to deliver a good experience. Even if you can't tell people what to do, it should be possible to align on something that can deliver a good experience for users and developers. >This is not a technical difference at all. Which is why I said it was a problem with leadership than with the technical merrits.
flohofwoe 1y ago
> Apple/Microsoft can do whatever they want Those two are worlds apart when it comes to backward compatibility. > Also, I wouldn't bring up Microsoft's display stack as a positive example at all. Why not? It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, and has been since the late 90s. There's tons of fundamental improvements since then, but they're all under the hood without affecting user-facing features. I'd say the Windows display stack modernization is an excellent example of how it should be done (a real shame though that Microsoft is actively ruining Windows by adding user-hostile features on top of the pretty good technical base).