4 ms·

That is fine. X11 needed fresh start. But they also failed to learn any lessons from X, just assuming "if X11 did it it must've been a bad idea, let's do it dif

That is fine. X11 needed fresh start. But they also failed to learn any lessons from X, just assuming "if X11 did it it must've been a bad idea, let's do it differently". X11 did chalk many lines of abstractions in absolutely the right places, it's just the implementation was crufty in places, and just not designed for modern hardware in some other places, while wayland just tried to kick as much as possible to the WM side, making it so instead one place where those things need a bunch of code (the display system/its plugins), now every WM have to repeat that work and (more importantly) add incompatibilities because of that

000ooo000 8mo ago
>now every WM have to repeat that work wlroots?
- hakfoo 8mo ago
  wlroots is self-described as "about 60,000 lines of code you were going to write anyway." It's also a moving target and you'll probably have to retool when wlroots updates. That seems like a huge burden to carry around, considering that a minimal X11 window manager can be a few thousand lines of code and probably still compiles after 15 years.
- wmf 8mo ago
  wlroots came pretty late so there was a lot of code duplication between Weston/GNOME/KDE before that.
  - roryirvine 8mo ago
    I think that's actually the biggest real criticism that can reasonably be made about Wayland: they ought to have produced something like wlroots from the start. Weston was only ever intended to be an example, and its monolithic nature meant that it wasn't particularly useful as a platform on which others could build (and this was even more true early on, before libweston). As a result, GNOME and KDE both did their own implementations - and from that seed grew a host of complaints about things not working in one or the other, when on xorg they had worked more or less the same. The lack of a common entry point for "plumbing" also hurt, and can probably take much of the blame for the initial pain that many faced when first moving to a wayland-based DE. But, of course, that's only obvious in retrospect. I don't think it was at all clear at the time those decisions were being made originally - in other words, it was a mistake rather than malice.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8mo ago
  That helps, but you still have to - at a bare minimum - wire up all the functionality. My pet example is trying out a new wlroots compositor and discovering that it has no way to change keyboard layout because it doesn't use that code from the library yet.
JoshTriplett 8mo ago
> But they also failed to learn any lessons from X Why do you believe that the developers of X failed to learn lessons from X when developing the replacement of X? Perhaps they learned lessons from X and decided to build it differently as a result?
- MBCook 8mo ago
  Which is exactly what they did, as I understand it. For example Wayland supports far more than just “generic computer screen”. I’ve heard it was designed to be able to handle systems either multiple very different displays. Like maybe a normal screen and an e-paper display. I remember reading an article that mentioned the mess of screens in current cars would actually fit Wayland well. Anyway, turns out computers really didn’t do that. We’re all still using one or more monitors that are mostly the same, with a couple of common aspect ratios. Maybe they’ll be proven right. Maybe it’ll just be some extra stuff in the code forever. Of course one of the ways you find out that you did something wrong was by doing it. So many comments online seem to just assume that the developers should’ve had the foresight to know everything they did that people don’t like or care about was wrong. I feel real sympathy for both the developers and people with serious accessibility issues it has been a problem for. But “beat up on Wayland” is practically a meme. An easy way to score points without looking at the big picture of how we got here.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 8mo ago
    > For example Wayland supports far more than just “generic computer screen”. I’ve heard it was designed to be able to handle systems either multiple very different displays. Like maybe a normal screen and an e-paper display. The other common example is that wayland is well-suited to AR/VR 3D compositing, and X... isn't. > I remember reading an article that mentioned the mess of screens in current cars would actually fit Wayland well. It had better be well suited to cars, seeing as how it was significantly made for and by car companies. (I hear, at least; I'm told that it was significantly pushed forward precisely by companies developing automotive displays)

000ooo000 8mo ago

>now every WM have to repeat that work wlroots?

hakfoo 8mo ago
wlroots is self-described as "about 60,000 lines of code you were going to write anyway." It's also a moving target and you'll probably have to retool when wlroots updates. That seems like a huge burden to carry around, considering that a minimal X11 window manager can be a few thousand lines of code and probably still compiles after 15 years.
wmf 8mo ago
wlroots came pretty late so there was a lot of code duplication between Weston/GNOME/KDE before that.
- roryirvine 8mo ago
  I think that's actually the biggest real criticism that can reasonably be made about Wayland: they ought to have produced something like wlroots from the start. Weston was only ever intended to be an example, and its monolithic nature meant that it wasn't particularly useful as a platform on which others could build (and this was even more true early on, before libweston). As a result, GNOME and KDE both did their own implementations - and from that seed grew a host of complaints about things not working in one or the other, when on xorg they had worked more or less the same. The lack of a common entry point for "plumbing" also hurt, and can probably take much of the blame for the initial pain that many faced when first moving to a wayland-based DE. But, of course, that's only obvious in retrospect. I don't think it was at all clear at the time those decisions were being made originally - in other words, it was a mistake rather than malice.
yjftsjthsd-h 8mo ago
That helps, but you still have to - at a bare minimum - wire up all the functionality. My pet example is trying out a new wlroots compositor and discovering that it has no way to change keyboard layout because it doesn't use that code from the library yet.

JoshTriplett 8mo ago

> But they also failed to learn any lessons from X Why do you believe that the developers of X failed to learn lessons from X when developing the replacement of X? Perhaps they learned lessons from X and decided to build it differently as a result?

MBCook 8mo ago
Which is exactly what they did, as I understand it. For example Wayland supports far more than just “generic computer screen”. I’ve heard it was designed to be able to handle systems either multiple very different displays. Like maybe a normal screen and an e-paper display. I remember reading an article that mentioned the mess of screens in current cars would actually fit Wayland well. Anyway, turns out computers really didn’t do that. We’re all still using one or more monitors that are mostly the same, with a couple of common aspect ratios. Maybe they’ll be proven right. Maybe it’ll just be some extra stuff in the code forever. Of course one of the ways you find out that you did something wrong was by doing it. So many comments online seem to just assume that the developers should’ve had the foresight to know everything they did that people don’t like or care about was wrong. I feel real sympathy for both the developers and people with serious accessibility issues it has been a problem for. But “beat up on Wayland” is practically a meme. An easy way to score points without looking at the big picture of how we got here.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8mo ago
  > For example Wayland supports far more than just “generic computer screen”. I’ve heard it was designed to be able to handle systems either multiple very different displays. Like maybe a normal screen and an e-paper display. The other common example is that wayland is well-suited to AR/VR 3D compositing, and X... isn't. > I remember reading an article that mentioned the mess of screens in current cars would actually fit Wayland well. It had better be well suited to cars, seeing as how it was significantly made for and by car companies. (I hear, at least; I'm told that it was significantly pushed forward precisely by companies developing automotive displays)