3 ms·

I am not a fan of Wayland. I've not really bought the value proposition; and see also: https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277 https

I am not a fan of Wayland. I've not really bought the value proposition; and see also: https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277 https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... what's more - this seems like yet another RedHat/IBM project which destroys variety and flexibility in favor of their problematic choices, often with a degradation of functionality. systemd, Wayland, GNOME - and of course nothing would run on BSDes, heavens forbid. With X11 seeing renewed, independent work via https://xlibre.net https://xlibre.net - why not embrace _that_ rather than go down the crooked Wayland path?

ChocolateGod 2mo ago
HDR, VRR, Mixed refresh rate/DPI displays, Zero-copy video acceleration, support for tiled GPUs Yeh... we should totally keep to X11.... especially when toolkits start to drop support.
- panzi 2mo ago
  None of that matters if you don't have a HDR monitor, only have one monitor, and when absolute basics of window management are somehow broken under KDE Wayland. Why that even has anything to do with Wayland I don't know. I just know that it all works perfectly when I use KDE X11. Maybe other DEs/WMs have better Wayland implementations, I don't know.
  - fuomag9 2mo ago
    Multiple monitors care about this :)
  - prmoustache 2mo ago
    Issue is not wayland but KDE from what I understand here
    - panzi 2mo ago
      Yeah, but it works under KDE+X11. Wayland it the thing that changes. I think KDE has it's own Wayland implementation? kwin_wayland is what is broken, probably. Why they broke it when porting it from X11 I don't know. But the effect is the same: Can't use it as of now.
      - prmoustache 2mo ago
        You can't condemn a protocol because there are bad or buggy implementations. HTML5 was not shitty because internet explorer was a shitty browser.
        panzi 2mo ago
        I don't condemn the protocol. I specifically mention the buggy implementation. I say that I use X11 because KDE's Wayland implementation is so buggy. I want to use KDE. KDE was perfect for me before Wayland. I don't criticize Wayland here, I criticize KDE Wayland. And I'm worried because very soon KDE will delete X11 support.
        einpoklum 2mo ago
        But you can condemn the organization and people pushing for the deprecation and abandonment of another protocol, when the alternative one (Wayland) has nowhere near the level and quality of support and breadth of capabilities as the existing one. GP puts the blame on KDE - and it would be partially their responsibility if they were to drop X11, for sure, but the underlying initiative is RedHat/IBM's.
        ChocolateGod 2mo ago
        What is Wayland as a protocol missing?
  - ChocolateGod 2mo ago
    > None of that matters if you don't have a HDR monitor, only have one monitor, and when absolute basics of window management are somehow broken under KDE Wayland So you think we should have one protocol for people who have HDR etc and another for those that don't?
  - preg_match 2mo ago
    I use KDE and have for 10+ years. In my experience, kwin is the most stable and performant it's ever been. I don't notice anything at all, ever. Under X, it was common to get stuttering, tears, and dropped frames. Not anymore. I mean I run 2 204hz 1440p monitors. And it's perfect, always. I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's clear that basics of window management are not universally broken under Wayland. It works well for me and has for a couple of years.
  - esseph 2mo ago
    Gnome /Wayland on Fedora44. No issues to report. AMD, but previously NVIDIA 4060.
- simoncion 2mo ago
  > HDR... Yep. Sucks. It's the only thing I miss about gaming on Windows. Hopefully xlibre will be adding that in. > ...VRR, Mixed refresh rate/DPI displays, Zero-copy video acceleration... I know that the first two work fine on xorg [0]. It's not entirely clear what you're talking about with the third, but I know that xorg supports compositor bypass for windows so that programs can interact with the graphics card without the windowing system getting in the way. Like, I think this is a thing people were talking about working on back when Compiz and its wobbly windows was new and exciting. If that isn't what you mean by your third thing, perhaps you'd be interested in specifying what video acceleration mechanism xorg doesn't have? > ...support for tiled GPUs. Doesn't that only matter for Apple Silicon(TM) machines, and maybe some ARM machines with integrated graphics? If folks want that, it's "just" a matter of writing the drivers to make it happen and getting them into an xorg fork. Can you show me a feature or features of xorg that makes it impossible.. other than FDO's tactical neglect? EDIT: Actually, I dimly recall some old hardware that I think was supported by DRM that did tiled rendering. Maybe it was some PowerVR stuff? If my memory isn't failing me, then there's the counter to claims that it's impossible for xorg to support. :P [0] Source: Me having these work just fine for quite a long time now on my personal machines that run xorg.
  - ChocolateGod 2mo ago
    > Hopefully xlibre will be adding that in. You will also need toolkits/games to add support for any additional protocol, which I doubt they will. > It's not entirely clear what you're talking about with the third Zero-copy video means you can play vides in web pages hardware accelerated and have no copy of the video frame required to send it to the display. This saves a lot of power. > it's "just" a matter of writing the drivers to make it happen and getting them into an xorg fork Compositing with Xorgs model and applying any kind of screen effect would be extremely painful on tiling GPU because of how the screen is passed back and fourth to the compositor. Given compositing in Wayland compositors is passive, it does not have that issue. Notice how Wayland on the RPi had performance that it simply couldn't gain under Xorg. > Me having these work just fine for quite a long time now on my personal machines that run xorg Good for you. But we have modern hardware and demands that simply Xorg doesn't meet and the protocol is archaic that adding support isn't worth it.
- Kim_Bruning 2mo ago
  Wish I could use it, I really tried! I have some HDR screens I want to actually run HDR on. But KDE Plasma + Wayland keep crashing out on me.
  - esseph 2mo ago
    Which distro?
    - Kim_Bruning 2mo ago
      Nixos unstable atm fwiw, which you'd expect would pick up fixes early. But my particular setup with displayport DPMS stuff keeps going wrong, and there's a bunch of WONTFIX under KDE afaict.
      - esseph 2mo ago
        Ehhh I know people love that and swear by it, and maybe it's fine, but I wouldn't expect it to have great integration and a solid, reliable, desktop experience on nixos.
        Kim_Bruning 2mo ago
        KDE/X11 is rock solid, at least
- einpoklum 2mo ago
  > especially when toolkits start to drop support. Which toolkits are dropping support for X11? AFAICR, few toolkits support Wayland (even though the two major ones, GTK and Qt, do).
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
CursedSilicon 2mo ago
Given who founded Xlibre (Metux) has some...interesting history (he was banned from the X.org project due to poor code quality and practices [1]) I would say no Metux himself also has some "fascinating" takes as archived from other projects such as the LKML [1] and Devuan [2] mailing lists [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/work_items/1797 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/work_items/179... [2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/10/957 https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/10/957 [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20190404153507/https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20181010.191925.ee1331b6.en.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190404153507/https://lists.dyn...
- S-E-P 2mo ago
  Ah yes, "he doesn't agree with me, therefore he must be [insane|incapable|inept]" argument tied in with some nothing burger about Metux pushing code that could break things. While I'm over here having to move to Xorg as Wayland breaks my applications about once every two months. Breaking changes, poor code quality, LLMs, or maybe it's just that the devs of Wayland were more motivated by their own personal needs/wants then the Xorg users. I can never get back the hours I lost troubleshooting graphics drivers only to realize that Wayland claimed it should work, but doesn't. I'll take whatever Metux gives me if it works, or from anyone else for that matter.
  - kelnos 2mo ago
    Not the person you're replying to, but years ago Metux used to send PRs to a different project that I maintain. He was difficult to work with, insisted that his way was the right way when I wanted something else, and his code quality was usually middling at best. Some of his PRs were of the annoying "tidy this up" form, where it felt like someone who just wanted more commits in a repo and lines in `git blame`. I hope his xlibre project is successful, but my opinion of the project is certainly tainted by my past interactions with him.
    - S-E-P 2mo ago
      I don't doubt you. I think it's a good way to look at it. I appreciate what he's trying to do with Xlibre but I would never work in that environment with or without him. As I said to the other guy I just hope this is better than what we have and I'll take about anything at this rate. I don't care to deal with people on that level anymore, which is why I stopped developing OSS over 10 years ago; everyone has their opinions about the code, if they can't solve that they fight over politics to "justify" forking and the downward spiral ever goes downward.
guywithahat 2mo ago
I kind of wonder that too, I'm fine using wayland but it seemed like a huge user hassle for not many benefits (namely independent screen scaling which xlibre now supports). It's a shame xlibre didn't come around sooner, after years of pain wayland support has gotten a lot better, to the point I can more or less use either without issue.
- bmacho 2mo ago
  > It's a shame xlibre didn't come around sooner Xorg team had accepted Enrico's patches then did not release them. Classic saboteur handbook stuff
  - guywithahat 2mo ago
    There were years where, to my understanding, they were deliberately not accepting features or patches to push Wayland, which is kind of frustrating, because it misses the point of a competitive ecosystem. Like on one hand if they're deliberately sabotaging Xorg for Wayland it implies Wayland must actually be a lot better, but on the flip side if Linus had sabotaged linux in favor of seL4 we'd all be worse off, even though kernel engineers often regard microkernels as a "better architecture".
seiferteric 2mo ago
i like the idea of wayland but i agree about the loss of flexibility. they seem very concerned about security and make screen sharing very complex now if you stray from the accepted path. systemd complicates this further with logind seat management etc. as a result our companies dev servers where we run a bunch of simultaneous VNCs and independent mate desktop sessions can really only work with X11 for now. There is a way to do it with nested cgroups running n number of systemd instances etc but its a pain and then we would have to use gnomes built in rdp thing which we dont want to use… anyway i actually vibe coded a way to get it working with wayland in containers with a dummy kernel video driver, my own fake logind etc. etc. etc. it was a harrowing experience but fun.
- kelnos 2mo ago
  > i agree about the loss of flexibility The maintainer of Phoenix puts it very well[0]: > The main issue with Wayland is not a technical one but in its philosophy. X11 is "mechanism over policy" while Wayland is "policy over mechanism". [0] https://git.dec05eba.com/phoenix/about/ https://git.dec05eba.com/phoenix/about/
prmoustache 2mo ago
> and of course nothing would run on BSDes A number of wayland compositors are available in at least freebsd and openbsd (haven't checked on netbsd and dragonflybsd). Wayland is only a protocol. Whoever wants to support it can.
- kelnos 2mo ago
  > Wayland is only a protocol. Whoever wants to support it can. I'm kinda tired of this line that I see everywhere. The bottom line is that most people develop for Linux, and don't consider the BSDs, and so things end up broken, or not working at all. The popular libraries for writing Wayland compositors consider Linux first, and BSD support is bolted on later. The end result is that it's just more work for everyone. X11 could have been fixed, it's just no one wanted to do so in time to head off the Wayland work. XLibre and Phoenix might have ended up working out if they'd been started 10-15 years ago, but Wayland has too much momentum now, for better or worse. (Source: I am a Wayland compositor maintainer who would love it if his stuff would work on the BSDs, but I don't have the time or energy to install a BSD and test and fix.)
  - prmoustache 2mo ago
    > The popular libraries for writing Wayland compositors consider Linux first, and BSD support is bolted on later. BSD devs can fork/write libraries too if they choose to or decide to not implement wayland which is valid too. I din't see anyone complaining that xorg or xlibre is providing source that build and work for haiku, redox for example. My understanding is that both projects have to maintain their own patchsets to make it work.
gucci-on-fleek 2mo ago
> which destroys variety and flexibility That's probably the worst argument that you could make against Wayland: there has only ever been a single X11 server in common use on the Linux desktop (first XFree86, now X.Org), but there are tons of independent Wayland "server" implementations (Weston, Mutter, KWin, wlroots, etc.) [0]. Lots of these are written in completely different languages and implement different extensions from each other, so there's way more variety and flexibility with Wayland than with X11. The more common criticism that I've heard is that Wayland's variety and flexibility is actually bad, because it makes it harder to add extensions (since you need to implement it in multiple different projects, and not just the single X.Org codebase), and it means that applications potentially have to test against multiple implementations. (I don't necessarily agree with this criticism myself, but it's still a valid complaint.) > and of course nothing would run on BSDes FreeBSD [1] and OpenBSD [2] both have Wayland support. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_display_servers#Wayland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_display_servers#Waylan... [1]: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ [2]: https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html#running-wayland https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html#running-wayland
- seiferteric 2mo ago
  I think the flexibility issues is more that you can't easily do things that used to be trivial. Try to spin up a bunch of headless wayland gnome sessions with VNC on a modern linux distro running on a server, it basically can't be done. This was trivial in the past, you just launched an X11 server for each one and handed it to VNC and you were done.
- hakfoo 2mo ago
  The hard part is knowing where to draw the line between relatively stable infrastructure items that don't benefit from duplication, and flexible items that are likely to benefit from specialization and competition. X11 made the right choice in putting graphics drivers in the "stable infrastructure" stuff and display toolkits and window managers in the "specialize and compete" section. I'm sort of pleased about that we're finally trying to replicate this division with the River ecosystem, building a standard compositor that we can plug in different actual window management logic into it, but that makes River itself a huge single point of failure-- if it has a bum release or fails to keep up with trends and extensions, it takes down a lot of the ecosystem, but perhaps not enough to be a five-alarm fire the way Xorg or XF86 back in the day would have been.
bitwize 2mo ago
So here's the thing about X11. Nobody wants to work on it. Keith Packard and Alan Coopersmith, maybe, but the younger devs—those knowledgeable about graphics and GPUs anyway—no. There's no path forward for X11. It's a dead end. Even Xwayland is just barely supported it seems. It was only intended as a compatibility layer for legacy applications. How long is such legacy support intended to continue? A decade? Two decades? The major toolkits now have Wayland code paths, and that's where the focus is. By 2030 their X code paths will be removed altogether. Xwayland itself is probably slated for deprecation and removal also. Xlibre is a joke, maintained by an incompetent nazi.
dismalaf 2mo ago
> course nothing would run on BSDes Ummmm, Wayland runs on FreeBSD... https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/
- einpoklum 2mo ago
  Great, I can run Compiz Fusion replacement, yay.

ChocolateGod 2mo ago

HDR, VRR, Mixed refresh rate/DPI displays, Zero-copy video acceleration, support for tiled GPUs Yeh... we should totally keep to X11.... especially when toolkits start to drop support.

panzi 2mo ago
None of that matters if you don't have a HDR monitor, only have one monitor, and when absolute basics of window management are somehow broken under KDE Wayland. Why that even has anything to do with Wayland I don't know. I just know that it all works perfectly when I use KDE X11. Maybe other DEs/WMs have better Wayland implementations, I don't know.
- fuomag9 2mo ago
  Multiple monitors care about this :)
- prmoustache 2mo ago
  Issue is not wayland but KDE from what I understand here
  - panzi 2mo ago
    Yeah, but it works under KDE+X11. Wayland it the thing that changes. I think KDE has it's own Wayland implementation? kwin_wayland is what is broken, probably. Why they broke it when porting it from X11 I don't know. But the effect is the same: Can't use it as of now.
    - prmoustache 2mo ago
      You can't condemn a protocol because there are bad or buggy implementations. HTML5 was not shitty because internet explorer was a shitty browser.
      - panzi 2mo ago
        I don't condemn the protocol. I specifically mention the buggy implementation. I say that I use X11 because KDE's Wayland implementation is so buggy. I want to use KDE. KDE was perfect for me before Wayland. I don't criticize Wayland here, I criticize KDE Wayland. And I'm worried because very soon KDE will delete X11 support.
      - einpoklum 2mo ago
        But you can condemn the organization and people pushing for the deprecation and abandonment of another protocol, when the alternative one (Wayland) has nowhere near the level and quality of support and breadth of capabilities as the existing one. GP puts the blame on KDE - and it would be partially their responsibility if they were to drop X11, for sure, but the underlying initiative is RedHat/IBM's.
        ChocolateGod 2mo ago
        What is Wayland as a protocol missing?
- ChocolateGod 2mo ago
  > None of that matters if you don't have a HDR monitor, only have one monitor, and when absolute basics of window management are somehow broken under KDE Wayland So you think we should have one protocol for people who have HDR etc and another for those that don't?
- preg_match 2mo ago
  I use KDE and have for 10+ years. In my experience, kwin is the most stable and performant it's ever been. I don't notice anything at all, ever. Under X, it was common to get stuttering, tears, and dropped frames. Not anymore. I mean I run 2 204hz 1440p monitors. And it's perfect, always. I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's clear that basics of window management are not universally broken under Wayland. It works well for me and has for a couple of years.
- esseph 2mo ago
  Gnome /Wayland on Fedora44. No issues to report. AMD, but previously NVIDIA 4060.
simoncion 2mo ago
> HDR... Yep. Sucks. It's the only thing I miss about gaming on Windows. Hopefully xlibre will be adding that in. > ...VRR, Mixed refresh rate/DPI displays, Zero-copy video acceleration... I know that the first two work fine on xorg [0]. It's not entirely clear what you're talking about with the third, but I know that xorg supports compositor bypass for windows so that programs can interact with the graphics card without the windowing system getting in the way. Like, I think this is a thing people were talking about working on back when Compiz and its wobbly windows was new and exciting. If that isn't what you mean by your third thing, perhaps you'd be interested in specifying what video acceleration mechanism xorg doesn't have? > ...support for tiled GPUs. Doesn't that only matter for Apple Silicon(TM) machines, and maybe some ARM machines with integrated graphics? If folks want that, it's "just" a matter of writing the drivers to make it happen and getting them into an xorg fork. Can you show me a feature or features of xorg that makes it impossible.. other than FDO's tactical neglect? EDIT: Actually, I dimly recall some old hardware that I think was supported by DRM that did tiled rendering. Maybe it was some PowerVR stuff? If my memory isn't failing me, then there's the counter to claims that it's impossible for xorg to support. :P [0] Source: Me having these work just fine for quite a long time now on my personal machines that run xorg.
- ChocolateGod 2mo ago
  > Hopefully xlibre will be adding that in. You will also need toolkits/games to add support for any additional protocol, which I doubt they will. > It's not entirely clear what you're talking about with the third Zero-copy video means you can play vides in web pages hardware accelerated and have no copy of the video frame required to send it to the display. This saves a lot of power. > it's "just" a matter of writing the drivers to make it happen and getting them into an xorg fork Compositing with Xorgs model and applying any kind of screen effect would be extremely painful on tiling GPU because of how the screen is passed back and fourth to the compositor. Given compositing in Wayland compositors is passive, it does not have that issue. Notice how Wayland on the RPi had performance that it simply couldn't gain under Xorg. > Me having these work just fine for quite a long time now on my personal machines that run xorg Good for you. But we have modern hardware and demands that simply Xorg doesn't meet and the protocol is archaic that adding support isn't worth it.
Kim_Bruning 2mo ago
Wish I could use it, I really tried! I have some HDR screens I want to actually run HDR on. But KDE Plasma + Wayland keep crashing out on me.
- esseph 2mo ago
  Which distro?
  - Kim_Bruning 2mo ago
    Nixos unstable atm fwiw, which you'd expect would pick up fixes early. But my particular setup with displayport DPMS stuff keeps going wrong, and there's a bunch of WONTFIX under KDE afaict.
    - esseph 2mo ago
      Ehhh I know people love that and swear by it, and maybe it's fine, but I wouldn't expect it to have great integration and a solid, reliable, desktop experience on nixos.
      - Kim_Bruning 2mo ago
        KDE/X11 is rock solid, at least
einpoklum 2mo ago
> especially when toolkits start to drop support. Which toolkits are dropping support for X11? AFAICR, few toolkits support Wayland (even though the two major ones, GTK and Qt, do).

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

CursedSilicon 2mo ago

Given who founded Xlibre (Metux) has some...interesting history (he was banned from the X.org project due to poor code quality and practices [1]) I would say no Metux himself also has some "fascinating" takes as archived from other projects such as the LKML [1] and Devuan [2] mailing lists [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/work_items/1797 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/work_items/179... [2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/10/957 https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/10/957 [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20190404153507/https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20181010.191925.ee1331b6.en.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190404153507/https://lists.dyn...

S-E-P 2mo ago
Ah yes, "he doesn't agree with me, therefore he must be [insane|incapable|inept]" argument tied in with some nothing burger about Metux pushing code that could break things. While I'm over here having to move to Xorg as Wayland breaks my applications about once every two months. Breaking changes, poor code quality, LLMs, or maybe it's just that the devs of Wayland were more motivated by their own personal needs/wants then the Xorg users. I can never get back the hours I lost troubleshooting graphics drivers only to realize that Wayland claimed it should work, but doesn't. I'll take whatever Metux gives me if it works, or from anyone else for that matter.
- kelnos 2mo ago
  Not the person you're replying to, but years ago Metux used to send PRs to a different project that I maintain. He was difficult to work with, insisted that his way was the right way when I wanted something else, and his code quality was usually middling at best. Some of his PRs were of the annoying "tidy this up" form, where it felt like someone who just wanted more commits in a repo and lines in `git blame`. I hope his xlibre project is successful, but my opinion of the project is certainly tainted by my past interactions with him.
  - S-E-P 2mo ago
    I don't doubt you. I think it's a good way to look at it. I appreciate what he's trying to do with Xlibre but I would never work in that environment with or without him. As I said to the other guy I just hope this is better than what we have and I'll take about anything at this rate. I don't care to deal with people on that level anymore, which is why I stopped developing OSS over 10 years ago; everyone has their opinions about the code, if they can't solve that they fight over politics to "justify" forking and the downward spiral ever goes downward.

guywithahat 2mo ago

I kind of wonder that too, I'm fine using wayland but it seemed like a huge user hassle for not many benefits (namely independent screen scaling which xlibre now supports). It's a shame xlibre didn't come around sooner, after years of pain wayland support has gotten a lot better, to the point I can more or less use either without issue.

bmacho 2mo ago
> It's a shame xlibre didn't come around sooner Xorg team had accepted Enrico's patches then did not release them. Classic saboteur handbook stuff
- guywithahat 2mo ago
  There were years where, to my understanding, they were deliberately not accepting features or patches to push Wayland, which is kind of frustrating, because it misses the point of a competitive ecosystem. Like on one hand if they're deliberately sabotaging Xorg for Wayland it implies Wayland must actually be a lot better, but on the flip side if Linus had sabotaged linux in favor of seL4 we'd all be worse off, even though kernel engineers often regard microkernels as a "better architecture".

seiferteric 2mo ago

i like the idea of wayland but i agree about the loss of flexibility. they seem very concerned about security and make screen sharing very complex now if you stray from the accepted path. systemd complicates this further with logind seat management etc. as a result our companies dev servers where we run a bunch of simultaneous VNCs and independent mate desktop sessions can really only work with X11 for now. There is a way to do it with nested cgroups running n number of systemd instances etc but its a pain and then we would have to use gnomes built in rdp thing which we dont want to use… anyway i actually vibe coded a way to get it working with wayland in containers with a dummy kernel video driver, my own fake logind etc. etc. etc. it was a harrowing experience but fun.

kelnos 2mo ago
> i agree about the loss of flexibility The maintainer of Phoenix puts it very well[0]: > The main issue with Wayland is not a technical one but in its philosophy. X11 is "mechanism over policy" while Wayland is "policy over mechanism". [0] https://git.dec05eba.com/phoenix/about/ https://git.dec05eba.com/phoenix/about/

prmoustache 2mo ago

> and of course nothing would run on BSDes A number of wayland compositors are available in at least freebsd and openbsd (haven't checked on netbsd and dragonflybsd). Wayland is only a protocol. Whoever wants to support it can.

kelnos 2mo ago
> Wayland is only a protocol. Whoever wants to support it can. I'm kinda tired of this line that I see everywhere. The bottom line is that most people develop for Linux, and don't consider the BSDs, and so things end up broken, or not working at all. The popular libraries for writing Wayland compositors consider Linux first, and BSD support is bolted on later. The end result is that it's just more work for everyone. X11 could have been fixed, it's just no one wanted to do so in time to head off the Wayland work. XLibre and Phoenix might have ended up working out if they'd been started 10-15 years ago, but Wayland has too much momentum now, for better or worse. (Source: I am a Wayland compositor maintainer who would love it if his stuff would work on the BSDs, but I don't have the time or energy to install a BSD and test and fix.)
- prmoustache 2mo ago
  > The popular libraries for writing Wayland compositors consider Linux first, and BSD support is bolted on later. BSD devs can fork/write libraries too if they choose to or decide to not implement wayland which is valid too. I din't see anyone complaining that xorg or xlibre is providing source that build and work for haiku, redox for example. My understanding is that both projects have to maintain their own patchsets to make it work.

gucci-on-fleek 2mo ago

> which destroys variety and flexibility That's probably the worst argument that you could make against Wayland: there has only ever been a single X11 server in common use on the Linux desktop (first XFree86, now X.Org), but there are tons of independent Wayland "server" implementations (Weston, Mutter, KWin, wlroots, etc.) [0]. Lots of these are written in completely different languages and implement different extensions from each other, so there's way more variety and flexibility with Wayland than with X11. The more common criticism that I've heard is that Wayland's variety and flexibility is actually bad, because it makes it harder to add extensions (since you need to implement it in multiple different projects, and not just the single X.Org codebase), and it means that applications potentially have to test against multiple implementations. (I don't necessarily agree with this criticism myself, but it's still a valid complaint.) > and of course nothing would run on BSDes FreeBSD [1] and OpenBSD [2] both have Wayland support. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_display_servers#Wayland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_display_servers#Waylan... [1]: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ [2]: https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html#running-wayland https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html#running-wayland

seiferteric 2mo ago
I think the flexibility issues is more that you can't easily do things that used to be trivial. Try to spin up a bunch of headless wayland gnome sessions with VNC on a modern linux distro running on a server, it basically can't be done. This was trivial in the past, you just launched an X11 server for each one and handed it to VNC and you were done.
hakfoo 2mo ago
The hard part is knowing where to draw the line between relatively stable infrastructure items that don't benefit from duplication, and flexible items that are likely to benefit from specialization and competition. X11 made the right choice in putting graphics drivers in the "stable infrastructure" stuff and display toolkits and window managers in the "specialize and compete" section. I'm sort of pleased about that we're finally trying to replicate this division with the River ecosystem, building a standard compositor that we can plug in different actual window management logic into it, but that makes River itself a huge single point of failure-- if it has a bum release or fails to keep up with trends and extensions, it takes down a lot of the ecosystem, but perhaps not enough to be a five-alarm fire the way Xorg or XF86 back in the day would have been.

bitwize 2mo ago

So here's the thing about X11. Nobody wants to work on it. Keith Packard and Alan Coopersmith, maybe, but the younger devs—those knowledgeable about graphics and GPUs anyway—no. There's no path forward for X11. It's a dead end. Even Xwayland is just barely supported it seems. It was only intended as a compatibility layer for legacy applications. How long is such legacy support intended to continue? A decade? Two decades? The major toolkits now have Wayland code paths, and that's where the focus is. By 2030 their X code paths will be removed altogether. Xwayland itself is probably slated for deprecation and removal also. Xlibre is a joke, maintained by an incompetent nazi.

dismalaf 2mo ago

> course nothing would run on BSDes Ummmm, Wayland runs on FreeBSD... https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/

einpoklum 2mo ago
Great, I can run Compiz Fusion replacement, yay.