4 ms·

I read this yesterday wanted to raise awareness for it - https://nocoffei.com/?p=451 https://nocoffei.com/?p=451 It describes the regression in accessibility s

by suby 4mo ago

I read this yesterday wanted to raise awareness for it - https://nocoffei.com/?p=451 https://nocoffei.com/?p=451 It describes the regression in accessibility software for Linux from x11 to Wayland. Unfortunately, judging by the pace of protocols being accepted, I think we're years out from having a solution. The most notable thing not working is Talon, which is a voice input system that lets you insert speech to text, manipulate windows, call scripts, etc, all via voice. It's software that works on Windows, MacOS, and x11, but not Wayland. I think unfortunately right now the best bet is to, if you need the software, stick with X11 for as long as possible. An environment like i3 will probably be maintained for decades to come. Alternatively it might make sense to build some type of bespoke solution on top of a specific wayland stack, like re implementing what you get of talon in a kde plugin or via sway IPC. This seems viable to me but an incredible amount of work. For people that need this, having to be a developer and build your own tooling in order to use your computer... it's not a future of Linux I'm particularly excited about. I don't want to leave people who need accessibility software behind, and I don't think any security justifications are actually real roadblocks which would prevent being able to serve these people. We have a coordination problem. It's less of a technical issue and more of an issue of getting people to agree on protocols which would let software like Talon work against the entire ecosystem. I am happy the ecosystem is moving to Wayland, I think we're going end up in a better place. Wayland does solve some real problems for me (x11 screen tearing / frame pacing issues on Nvidia). I'm happy that KDE exists, it's great software.

nvme0n1p1 4mo ago
I've paid for Talon beta access for years. I'm a heavy Talon+Cursorless user, and I'm dreading this move by KDE. Ultimately I think this mostly confirms the danger of using closed source software (Talon). I have some personal accessibility tooling that works just fine on Wayland. It's KDE specific but it really wasn't hard to get working. And uinput works on a level below the compositor, so X11/Wayland are irrelevant. My stuff is written in Rust, just like Talon. I'm sure it would take me an afternoon or less to copy it over to Talon... but the dev just isn't interested. I don't know why he's so dramatic about Wayland when there are people actively trying to help contribute. If you try to talk about Wayland on the official Slack, there's an autoresponder telling you to shut up about it. If this were open source, I or someone could just fork it and move on with my life. Now I'm sure I could use Ghidra and hack the binary to add support, but I'm not excited about becoming dependent on software where the developer is actively hostile to my interests. It reminds me of the blog post from yesterday about the guy who hates his insulin pump. I'm still a Talon user but I hate it now. I guess I'll be forced to move to XFCE soon? Where is everyone else moving to?
- suby 4mo ago
  I also think it's unfortunate that Talon is closed source. You see this even in the support practices adopted, where all support is routed through a slack chatroom which doesn't let you view history older than I want to say a few months but might be wrong on the length of time. The author seems to want to force all support requests to go directly through him, presumably because it increases his income if he can create a direct connection with his users. He's created an incredible piece of software, and that's entirely within his prerogative to do this, especially because him being able to work on it full time leads to more work going into the system. He's made the world a better place so I'm not trying to criticize too harshly. But it's also super unfortunate right, because now if I run into an issue with Talon I am unlikely to find a search result of someone else who has solved it, but rather I have to interact with the creator of the software in a silo'd manner that will not be useful to anyone else other than me. Tthreatening to remove x11 support entirely (as the article alleges) is also unhinged, yes. We're in a situation in which the best accessibility software is being threatened to be removed from a working platform because the author is (justifiably) frustrated with support requests that he cannot fix because of the transition to Wayland. I expect that sooner or later we're going to get a better solution to accessibility than Talon, I'm not sure exactly how but probably using local LLM's in a heavy way.
  - lunixbochs 4mo ago
    Hi, I'm the developer of Talon. It's possible to do the simple compositor specific hacks from Talon's scripting system to give yourself partial Wayland support at roughly the quality I'd be able to provide myself, and I know of a couple efforts to do this. The tentative plan for "dropping support for X11" is just to do one more public Linux X11 release, stop there, leave it available to download, and make it very clear what to expect when you download for Linux or run on Wayland. I plan to continue supporting X11 on the paid version indefinitely. Most requests relating to Wayland on the Slack have not been offers to help, and way too many have ended up being unpleasant conversations. I have a standing offer to reconsider my stance if someone can show the vast majority of the necessary APIs are available and well supported without compositor specific hacks. For some of the other points above, consider me disappointed but not surprised.
tuna74 4mo ago
"Alternatively it might make sense to build some type of bespoke solution on top of a specific wayland stack, like re implementing what you get of talon in a kde plugin or via sway IPC. This seems viable to me but an incredible amount of work." I think that is the only way forward. There is no "Linux desktop". There is KDE, Gnome etc. and if you want to do "system utilities" you have to target one of those.
- setopt 4mo ago
  The point though is that there used to be a «Linux desktop» you could target before the Wayland transition. Fragmentation of an already small market segment is unfortunate.
  - chadgpt3 4mo ago
    It's KDE now. GNOME is the penguin that went to the mountains while KDE largely tries to be compatible with things that aren't KDE.
    - setopt 4mo ago
      Sure. I use KDE myself. I actually like the Gnome default UI/UX more, but I'm really not fond of their "our way or the highway" approach when it comes to customization and interoperability. KDE feels more in line with the true FOSS "spirit", and after a bit of customization, fits my needs better than Gnome.
  - tuna74 4mo ago
    There was not really for system utilities. Apps, sure, but not system utilities.
    - setopt 4mo ago
      What do you refer to as system utilities? All the stuff now subsumed by SystemD?
      - 4mo ago
cwillu 4mo ago
Screentearing has been solved on x11 for a decade; if nvidia don't support TearFree in the driver, that's an nvidia issue, not an X11 issue.
- amlib 4mo ago
  Until you connect a second monitor.
  - cwillu 4mo ago
    I have three monitors, works fine for me.
  - jolmg 4mo ago
    Have had 4 1440p monitors connected at once for some time. Haven't had tearing issues.
  - account42 4mo ago
    Nope, no tearing here with multiple monitors.
    - ChocolateGod 4mo ago
      Try run them at different refresh rates.
cmxch 4mo ago
It’ll be a better place when Wayland (and by extension Gnome/KDE) stops becoming a cargo cult hell bent on destroying X11/Xlibre.
- bayindirh 4mo ago
  X11 is not dying because of Wayland, it's dying because it became an unmaintainable code mountain over the years since it has been tried to be converted to something which is not designed for in the first place. ...and I'm saying that as a person who likes X11.
  - LtWorf 4mo ago
    There is a maintained fork of Xorg that is banned by several distributions.
  - chadgpt3 4mo ago
    That's Xorg. X11 is dying because Xorg is dying and Xorg is dying because all its developers quit and went to Wayland. There's Xlibre too but it's a shitshow. Any one of us here could continue Xorg maintenance but we're not.
    - MarsIronPI 4mo ago
      I think Phoenix[0] is a promising project: it's an X11 server written from the ground up, with security and legacy feature removal in mind. It's basically what Wayland should have been IMO. We didn't need a new protocol, at most we needed a new implementation of X11. https://git.dec05eba.com/phoenix https://git.dec05eba.com/phoenix
account42 4mo ago
It's not just accessibility software but really any customization. Like always the people making the decision to break compatibility and benefiting by being able to work on the cool new thing don't even pay a fraction of the pain inflicted by it.
- mx7zysuj4xew 4mo ago
  [flagged]
- chadgpt3 4mo ago
  The web solved this decades ago by removing customizability. That's why all your extensions can do is add context menu items and toolbar buttons at the right side, and mess with the page itself.

by suby 4mo ago

nvme0n1p1 4mo ago

I've paid for Talon beta access for years. I'm a heavy Talon+Cursorless user, and I'm dreading this move by KDE. Ultimately I think this mostly confirms the danger of using closed source software (Talon). I have some personal accessibility tooling that works just fine on Wayland. It's KDE specific but it really wasn't hard to get working. And uinput works on a level below the compositor, so X11/Wayland are irrelevant. My stuff is written in Rust, just like Talon. I'm sure it would take me an afternoon or less to copy it over to Talon... but the dev just isn't interested. I don't know why he's so dramatic about Wayland when there are people actively trying to help contribute. If you try to talk about Wayland on the official Slack, there's an autoresponder telling you to shut up about it. If this were open source, I or someone could just fork it and move on with my life. Now I'm sure I could use Ghidra and hack the binary to add support, but I'm not excited about becoming dependent on software where the developer is actively hostile to my interests. It reminds me of the blog post from yesterday about the guy who hates his insulin pump. I'm still a Talon user but I hate it now. I guess I'll be forced to move to XFCE soon? Where is everyone else moving to?

suby 4mo ago
I also think it's unfortunate that Talon is closed source. You see this even in the support practices adopted, where all support is routed through a slack chatroom which doesn't let you view history older than I want to say a few months but might be wrong on the length of time. The author seems to want to force all support requests to go directly through him, presumably because it increases his income if he can create a direct connection with his users. He's created an incredible piece of software, and that's entirely within his prerogative to do this, especially because him being able to work on it full time leads to more work going into the system. He's made the world a better place so I'm not trying to criticize too harshly. But it's also super unfortunate right, because now if I run into an issue with Talon I am unlikely to find a search result of someone else who has solved it, but rather I have to interact with the creator of the software in a silo'd manner that will not be useful to anyone else other than me. Tthreatening to remove x11 support entirely (as the article alleges) is also unhinged, yes. We're in a situation in which the best accessibility software is being threatened to be removed from a working platform because the author is (justifiably) frustrated with support requests that he cannot fix because of the transition to Wayland. I expect that sooner or later we're going to get a better solution to accessibility than Talon, I'm not sure exactly how but probably using local LLM's in a heavy way.
- lunixbochs 4mo ago
  Hi, I'm the developer of Talon. It's possible to do the simple compositor specific hacks from Talon's scripting system to give yourself partial Wayland support at roughly the quality I'd be able to provide myself, and I know of a couple efforts to do this. The tentative plan for "dropping support for X11" is just to do one more public Linux X11 release, stop there, leave it available to download, and make it very clear what to expect when you download for Linux or run on Wayland. I plan to continue supporting X11 on the paid version indefinitely. Most requests relating to Wayland on the Slack have not been offers to help, and way too many have ended up being unpleasant conversations. I have a standing offer to reconsider my stance if someone can show the vast majority of the necessary APIs are available and well supported without compositor specific hacks. For some of the other points above, consider me disappointed but not surprised.

tuna74 4mo ago

"Alternatively it might make sense to build some type of bespoke solution on top of a specific wayland stack, like re implementing what you get of talon in a kde plugin or via sway IPC. This seems viable to me but an incredible amount of work." I think that is the only way forward. There is no "Linux desktop". There is KDE, Gnome etc. and if you want to do "system utilities" you have to target one of those.

setopt 4mo ago
The point though is that there used to be a «Linux desktop» you could target before the Wayland transition. Fragmentation of an already small market segment is unfortunate.
- chadgpt3 4mo ago
  It's KDE now. GNOME is the penguin that went to the mountains while KDE largely tries to be compatible with things that aren't KDE.
  - setopt 4mo ago
    Sure. I use KDE myself. I actually like the Gnome default UI/UX more, but I'm really not fond of their "our way or the highway" approach when it comes to customization and interoperability. KDE feels more in line with the true FOSS "spirit", and after a bit of customization, fits my needs better than Gnome.
- tuna74 4mo ago
  There was not really for system utilities. Apps, sure, but not system utilities.
  - setopt 4mo ago
    What do you refer to as system utilities? All the stuff now subsumed by SystemD?
    - 4mo ago

cwillu 4mo ago

Screentearing has been solved on x11 for a decade; if nvidia don't support TearFree in the driver, that's an nvidia issue, not an X11 issue.

amlib 4mo ago
Until you connect a second monitor.
- cwillu 4mo ago
  I have three monitors, works fine for me.
- jolmg 4mo ago
  Have had 4 1440p monitors connected at once for some time. Haven't had tearing issues.
- account42 4mo ago
  Nope, no tearing here with multiple monitors.
  - ChocolateGod 4mo ago
    Try run them at different refresh rates.

cmxch 4mo ago

It’ll be a better place when Wayland (and by extension Gnome/KDE) stops becoming a cargo cult hell bent on destroying X11/Xlibre.

bayindirh 4mo ago
X11 is not dying because of Wayland, it's dying because it became an unmaintainable code mountain over the years since it has been tried to be converted to something which is not designed for in the first place. ...and I'm saying that as a person who likes X11.
- LtWorf 4mo ago
  There is a maintained fork of Xorg that is banned by several distributions.
- chadgpt3 4mo ago
  That's Xorg. X11 is dying because Xorg is dying and Xorg is dying because all its developers quit and went to Wayland. There's Xlibre too but it's a shitshow. Any one of us here could continue Xorg maintenance but we're not.
  - MarsIronPI 4mo ago
    I think Phoenix[0] is a promising project: it's an X11 server written from the ground up, with security and legacy feature removal in mind. It's basically what Wayland should have been IMO. We didn't need a new protocol, at most we needed a new implementation of X11. https://git.dec05eba.com/phoenix https://git.dec05eba.com/phoenix

account42 4mo ago

It's not just accessibility software but really any customization. Like always the people making the decision to break compatibility and benefiting by being able to work on the cool new thing don't even pay a fraction of the pain inflicted by it.

mx7zysuj4xew 4mo ago
[flagged]
chadgpt3 4mo ago
The web solved this decades ago by removing customizability. That's why all your extensions can do is add context menu items and toolbar buttons at the right side, and mess with the page itself.