3 ms·

It's more a lament. It used to be that no matter how crazy GNOME got, all GNOME-specific apps still worked in vague harmony with KDE apps, Motif apps, etc., bec

by amiga386 11mo ago

It's more a lament. It used to be that no matter how crazy GNOME got, all GNOME-specific apps still worked in vague harmony with KDE apps, Motif apps, etc., because the common substrate was X11, and backwards-compatibility was a key concern. Coupled with FDO trying to bring more harmony and standards (XDG), times were good. But FDO seems to have morphed into the replace-X11-with-Wayland club, or perhaps more cynically I could say Red Hat/IBM and Canonical, who are paying the Xorg / Wayland developers, want returns on their investments sooner rather than later. I despair at how unfit Wayland is to replace X11, but the big guns are going to force its adoption anyway. People who wrote X11 applications will be compelled to rewrite all their work too, or their users will have to use them in the locked down X11 emulator that can't do anything more than Wayland lets it do, which will make some X11 applications become fundamentally useless, e.g. xwd will not capture your screen. As an example of why I think this is bad, I'd highlight we're still seeing intense ideological fights on basic capabilities, today. We're rushing into replacement while even the basics aren't settled. IMO, people like Sebastian Wick don't feel the need to yield an inch to backwards compatibility, and Wayland to them is all about these greenfields that they get to control - by fighting on bug reports, or refusing to implement protocols. This is what we're all about to be dropped into.

mort96 11mo ago
> or perhaps more cynically I could say Red Hat/IBM and Canonical, who are paying the Xorg / Wayland developers, want returns on their investments sooner rather than later. Here's the weird vague conspiracy posting again. What exactly do you think Red Hat, IBM and Canonical's desired "return on investment" is with regard to Wayland, other than just a more polished desktop that works better for most people?
- amiga386 11mo ago
  Red Hat have been funding Wayland since its birth. Its main goal was not to be "more polished", but rather to ditch 30 years of backwards compatibility (which some might see as cruft), re-architect for a "modern system" (i.e. Linux-specific features), and assume it should offer better performance -- which I accept does matter, especially if you're selling OSes for laptops or tablets running on batteries. If Red Hat succeed in getting Wayland to displace X11, they gain another moat (as they already did with systemd vs initd, PulseAudio vs ALSA, and so on) Initially, Wayland was an option, unsupported. Next step was offering Wayland as a supported option alongside X11. This is the expensive part, where their release testing and support has to cover both systems simultaneously! The sooner they ditch X11 and start saying WONTFIX to bugs and glitches, the sooner they save money! I'm sure they're aware of just how much of the software they ship does / doesn't work with Wayland, because users file bug reports. At some point, they've decided that _this_ release is the cutover, Wayland is sufficient, e.g. there's only 20,000 open bugs against it compared to 80,000. I don't know the actual number or metrics they're using, but it worries me given how many things I know don't work for me, today which is why I use Xorg (not that I'm a paying Red Hat customer); they are not waiting for zero bugs and perfect compatibility with existing software before making it your only choice.
  - mort96 11mo ago
    What do you mean by a "moat"? Surely Wayland works on non-RedHat operating systems? Either your conspiracy theory makes absolutely no sense, or you're completely incapable of expressing it.
    - amiga386 11mo ago
      Snap and AppArmour work on non-Ubuntu operating systems but it's Canonical who pay for their continued development and derive the most benefit from them. If Red Hat directly employ the main developers of Wayland and/or its most popular compositors and/or KDE/GNOME developers, they can then win customers for having better support for, and for having more access to land changes into these softwares, even if they're F/OSS adopted by other distros too.
      - mort96 11mo ago
        Is your definition of "Red Hat's moat" just "things Red Hat has spent money on and made freely available to everyone"? How does that fit into any definition of a "moat"? Who are the "main developers of Wayland"? It's a set of protocols that plenty of people contribute to; people paid by Red Hat to work on GNOME, people paid by Canonical go work on GNOME, unaffiliated people who work on GNOME, unaffiliated people who work on KDE, unaffiliated people who work on wlroots and sway, people paid by various companies to work on various graphics drivers, people paid by Valve to work on SteamOS, etc etc etc. It's a process driven by consensus among implementers, not a project "developed by Red Hat".

mort96 11mo ago

> or perhaps more cynically I could say Red Hat/IBM and Canonical, who are paying the Xorg / Wayland developers, want returns on their investments sooner rather than later. Here's the weird vague conspiracy posting again. What exactly do you think Red Hat, IBM and Canonical's desired "return on investment" is with regard to Wayland, other than just a more polished desktop that works better for most people?

amiga386 11mo ago
Red Hat have been funding Wayland since its birth. Its main goal was not to be "more polished", but rather to ditch 30 years of backwards compatibility (which some might see as cruft), re-architect for a "modern system" (i.e. Linux-specific features), and assume it should offer better performance -- which I accept does matter, especially if you're selling OSes for laptops or tablets running on batteries. If Red Hat succeed in getting Wayland to displace X11, they gain another moat (as they already did with systemd vs initd, PulseAudio vs ALSA, and so on) Initially, Wayland was an option, unsupported. Next step was offering Wayland as a supported option alongside X11. This is the expensive part, where their release testing and support has to cover both systems simultaneously! The sooner they ditch X11 and start saying WONTFIX to bugs and glitches, the sooner they save money! I'm sure they're aware of just how much of the software they ship does / doesn't work with Wayland, because users file bug reports. At some point, they've decided that _this_ release is the cutover, Wayland is sufficient, e.g. there's only 20,000 open bugs against it compared to 80,000. I don't know the actual number or metrics they're using, but it worries me given how many things I know don't work for me, today which is why I use Xorg (not that I'm a paying Red Hat customer); they are not waiting for zero bugs and perfect compatibility with existing software before making it your only choice.
- mort96 11mo ago
  What do you mean by a "moat"? Surely Wayland works on non-RedHat operating systems? Either your conspiracy theory makes absolutely no sense, or you're completely incapable of expressing it.
  - amiga386 11mo ago
    Snap and AppArmour work on non-Ubuntu operating systems but it's Canonical who pay for their continued development and derive the most benefit from them. If Red Hat directly employ the main developers of Wayland and/or its most popular compositors and/or KDE/GNOME developers, they can then win customers for having better support for, and for having more access to land changes into these softwares, even if they're F/OSS adopted by other distros too.
    - mort96 11mo ago
      Is your definition of "Red Hat's moat" just "things Red Hat has spent money on and made freely available to everyone"? How does that fit into any definition of a "moat"? Who are the "main developers of Wayland"? It's a set of protocols that plenty of people contribute to; people paid by Red Hat to work on GNOME, people paid by Canonical go work on GNOME, unaffiliated people who work on GNOME, unaffiliated people who work on KDE, unaffiliated people who work on wlroots and sway, people paid by various companies to work on various graphics drivers, people paid by Valve to work on SteamOS, etc etc etc. It's a process driven by consensus among implementers, not a project "developed by Red Hat".