2 ms·

> For those who switched in the past few years: Has Wayland given you trouble? No, since I'm on Mint, and thus still on X11. I keep hearing about Wayland prob

by Telaneo 9mo ago

> For those who switched in the past few years: Has Wayland given you trouble? No, since I'm on Mint, and thus still on X11. I keep hearing about Wayland problems, and I pray they don't reach me when Mint switches; that the relevant problems will have been fixed by them time Mint does switch.

SchemaLoad 9mo ago
Wayland has been pretty much a solved problem for a while now. Most distros have been shipping it by default for many years now.
- Telaneo 9mo ago
  The fact that I keep hearing people have issues because it's now the default doesn't fill me with confidence. It's probably a minority of people having these issues, and I imagine the problems with screensharing and the like are gone by this point, but accessibility tools which need access to everything X gave them are never going to be compatible without being completely rewritten with Wayland in mind. I'm also not filled with confidence by posts like this[1], which confirm that Wayland was still deeply broken in many ways just in 2024. Two years is not a short amount of time, but given it took Wayland 10+ years to be anywhere close to usable for desktop usage, I'm not placing my bets on the pace having gone up so fast that long-standing issues are solved yet. That post takes somewhat of an extreme position, but kernel of truth is that it breaks a lot of things, many of which apparently still aren't solved. This post[2] has a better outlook I believe. I.e. that things are broken today (since it is for accessibility), but that there is real potential and that it can be fixed. It just has to be done. Shame that doing that is hard and that accessibility ends up taking a back seat. [1] https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277 https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... [2] https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love-me-back-post-4-wayland-is-growing-up-and-now-we-dont-have-a-choice/ https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-d...
  - SchemaLoad 9mo ago
    I had a look at that gist, and the majority of it is a result of the responsibility of wayland being smaller. xorg was dumping ground for a lot of functionality it shouldn't have been responsible for, so the majority of those Xs on the list are things that very much do work on a Linux system on wayland, just in theory you could build a wayland spec compliant DE which doesn't have them, but if you just install Gnome/KDE, it will all work. For all the noise about the "unix philosophy" and systemd being too all encompassing, Wayland went the other way and people still aren't happy.
    - Telaneo 9mo ago
      The exact reasons for it not working doesn't matter. It's the 'not working' part that's annoying people when it comes to Wayland. If X worked, and then Wayland doesn't, no matter how small the way in which it doesn't work, it's still a valid reason to not be a fan. I'm yet to see someone complain about systemd and Wayland in the same comment, or even comment chain for that matter, which does scan, given how they have diametrically opposed philosophies to things. The Venn diagram of people who dislike and Wayland and systemd are probably not quite two separate circles, but I can't imagine the overlap is very large. I actually like systemd a fair bit, since it seems to do its job pretty well. I've seen people have problems with it, but most of the opposition to it are on philosophical grounds rather than about matters of functionality, whereas with Wayland, the opposite is the case.
      - SchemaLoad 9mo ago
        That's the thing though, this stuff does actually work, if you just install debian or whatever it works. The complaint here is that the projects or layers that implement the features have changed. It would be like if Linux used to include a bundled web browser in the kernel and they decided to split it off in to a user space app which comes preinstalled on the distro. And then people complain because now the kernel doesn't have a web browser and in theory a distro could exist which doesn't have one. Xorg was bloated with a kitchen sink of features which have now been broken out into separate projects which are still included out of the box when you install a normal non minified distro.

by Telaneo 9mo ago

SchemaLoad 9mo ago

Wayland has been pretty much a solved problem for a while now. Most distros have been shipping it by default for many years now.

Telaneo 9mo ago
The fact that I keep hearing people have issues because it's now the default doesn't fill me with confidence. It's probably a minority of people having these issues, and I imagine the problems with screensharing and the like are gone by this point, but accessibility tools which need access to everything X gave them are never going to be compatible without being completely rewritten with Wayland in mind. I'm also not filled with confidence by posts like this[1], which confirm that Wayland was still deeply broken in many ways just in 2024. Two years is not a short amount of time, but given it took Wayland 10+ years to be anywhere close to usable for desktop usage, I'm not placing my bets on the pace having gone up so fast that long-standing issues are solved yet. That post takes somewhat of an extreme position, but kernel of truth is that it breaks a lot of things, many of which apparently still aren't solved. This post[2] has a better outlook I believe. I.e. that things are broken today (since it is for accessibility), but that there is real potential and that it can be fixed. It just has to be done. Shame that doing that is hard and that accessibility ends up taking a back seat. [1] https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277 https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... [2] https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love-me-back-post-4-wayland-is-growing-up-and-now-we-dont-have-a-choice/ https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-d...
- SchemaLoad 9mo ago
  I had a look at that gist, and the majority of it is a result of the responsibility of wayland being smaller. xorg was dumping ground for a lot of functionality it shouldn't have been responsible for, so the majority of those Xs on the list are things that very much do work on a Linux system on wayland, just in theory you could build a wayland spec compliant DE which doesn't have them, but if you just install Gnome/KDE, it will all work. For all the noise about the "unix philosophy" and systemd being too all encompassing, Wayland went the other way and people still aren't happy.
  - Telaneo 9mo ago
    The exact reasons for it not working doesn't matter. It's the 'not working' part that's annoying people when it comes to Wayland. If X worked, and then Wayland doesn't, no matter how small the way in which it doesn't work, it's still a valid reason to not be a fan. I'm yet to see someone complain about systemd and Wayland in the same comment, or even comment chain for that matter, which does scan, given how they have diametrically opposed philosophies to things. The Venn diagram of people who dislike and Wayland and systemd are probably not quite two separate circles, but I can't imagine the overlap is very large. I actually like systemd a fair bit, since it seems to do its job pretty well. I've seen people have problems with it, but most of the opposition to it are on philosophical grounds rather than about matters of functionality, whereas with Wayland, the opposite is the case.
    - SchemaLoad 9mo ago
      That's the thing though, this stuff does actually work, if you just install debian or whatever it works. The complaint here is that the projects or layers that implement the features have changed. It would be like if Linux used to include a bundled web browser in the kernel and they decided to split it off in to a user space app which comes preinstalled on the distro. And then people complain because now the kernel doesn't have a web browser and in theory a distro could exist which doesn't have one. Xorg was bloated with a kitchen sink of features which have now been broken out into separate projects which are still included out of the box when you install a normal non minified distro.