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With a project as user/dev hostile as wayland, it's much better to be a 'last mover' than first. For the life of me, I'll never understand how wayland got trac

With a project as user/dev hostile as wayland, it's much better to be a 'last mover' than first. For the life of me, I'll never understand how wayland got traction with the community. 'Hey guys, we decided to implement a display server from scratch! We broke a ton of existing functionality and made a ton of low level stuff that X used to handle the responsibility of WM/DE devs!'

naikrovek 1mo ago
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dralley 1mo ago
Wayland is not a "display server", it's a display protocol. A lot of the "existing functionality" that it broke has nothing to do with displays, it's stuff that got crammed into Xorg at some point whether it made sense or not. I find it quite funny that many of the same people that rag on systemd and say it does too many things, are big fans of Xorg doing a bunch of things that "display server" probably should not be handling. Even if Wayland was a "display server", it would still "remove existing functionality" if it meant that in any principled sense, because "display server" is only half of what Xorg does. But sure, the transition was difficult and took a long time.
- wing-_-nuts 1mo ago
  >Wayland is not a "display server", it's a display protocol. I, as an end user, do NOT care. >A lot of the "existing functionality" that it broke has nothing to do with displays, it's stuff that got crammed into Xorg at some point whether it made sense or not. I also don't care about ivory tower ideals of what is within the dominion of 'display' and what is not. The fact of the matter is their changes broke a ton of functionality, and instead of even trying to provide feature parity, they basically dumped all that responsibility onto the WM/DE devs. I have no idea why the community didn't take one look at their proposal and flatly ignore them.
  - skydhash 1mo ago
    This pretty much. Xorg got almost everything that I care about to have a functionning GUI. You only startx and the only thing you may need are utils programs like a wm, a compositor, a bar… now you have conflicting implementation from gnome, kde, wlroots,… each with its own set of features.
    - wing-_-nuts 1mo ago
      Yeah, instead of the wayland folks leading the effort to fix issues, it's often some individual DE / WM going off, fixing it the way they prefer, and wayland grudgingly adopting it as official because they know the ecosystem is fragmenting bad enough as it is.
  - cschep 1mo ago
    If nothing else this is a very strong commentary on just how challenging landing positive changes in Xorg felt to the community.
  - setopt 1mo ago
    > instead of even trying to provide feature parity, they basically dumped all that responsibility onto the WM/DE devs. In other words, the Wayland people should perhaps have defined official protocol extensions early on to cover most of what X did, thus preventing all the initial interop issues when Gnome and KDE and Sway tried to reinvent them independently.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 1mo ago
      In hindsight, it's my opinion that wayland, if it had to exist at all, should have been implemented like this: 1. Add GBM to graphics drivers and start working it up the stack from the bottom, stopping at Xorg. That is, make rootful XWayland the standard Xorg before standalone even is a thing. This reduces maintenance work up front rather than belatedly. 2.a. Implement weston as a standalone compositor. 2.b. Actually make weston fully functional. Figure out everything needed to provide an actual working desktop environment with the features that users expect out of the box. Standardize all the protocols needed for at least a basic XFCE-ish environment rather than hoping someone else will do it. 3. Then, only after these things are done and working, announce to the world that wayland, a quiet project that has until now explicitly suggested nobody use it, is now the future of linux graphical systems and everyone should plan to migrate.
- drmr 1mo ago
  And this transition is nowhere near done. Just look at Kicad and pretty much any DAW that loads audio plugins (to name two major usecases where Wayland simply doesn't cut it). Sure Xwayland exists and mostly (not entirely) works, but that's a band-aid for what is essentially a "we broke it and don't care" approach.
  - wing-_-nuts 1mo ago
    Also, as benchmarks show, xwayland introduces pretty bad latency..
    - dralley 1mo ago
      The latency isn't that bad, it's reasonable for a compatibility shim.
      - wing-_-nuts 1mo ago
        I can't find the benchmarks now, but the ones I recently saw on hacker news, xwayland was notably worse than either wayland native or xorg native. Bad enough to be noticeable by the average user.
      - account42 1mo ago
        It may be reasonable when you emulate a completely different platform but not when your are providing a compatibility feature in a supposed successor platform that can be designed to support that use case.
  - Blackthorn 1mo ago
    The daw problem is really really bad too. We've got a de facto standard forming right now where you link libwayland.so and hope the structs never ever ever change in the next 30 years.
- mzajc 1mo ago
  > Wayland is not a "display server", it's a display protocol. This is a huge part of what "user/dev hostile" means in my book; with Wayland, getting a working desktop always someone else's responsibility, all features have to be reimplemented across DEs endlessly (with often-incompatible variations, of course), and they all blame each other and program authors for bugs while the Wayland project refuses to even acknowledge basic features like desktop automation or screen recording. > But sure, the transition was difficult and took a long time. And this irks me too, people are convinced they're done but I still don't have xmacro. And flameshot is broken, while the alternatives suck. And support for everything depends on the DE now. And java.awt.Robot is broken with no replacement. And the clipboard randomly misses copies. And OBS screen recording is broken for me. And there's no support for display resolution scaling. And ssh -X is gone, while waypipe doesn't work all programs. But hey, at least there's HDR now or something! It was definitely worth replacing a functioning stack for this. I'm so glad that Plasma 6.8 removes X support!
- somat 1mo ago
  It does not matter, X11 is also not a display server it is a protocol. That distinction changes nothing. For what it's worth Xorg is the display server, before that it was XFree86, there was also Xsgi and Xsun and for mac Xquartz, I even saw a neat project once where the Xserver was in javascript, I am trying to find it again but our modern search engines are a bit shit. The point being all of these can interoperate with one another. Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long? -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 We have our cathedrals, only we are such barbarians as to call them worthless garbage and unfit for purpose and do our best to tear our legacy down.
  - kps 1mo ago
    > X11 is also not a display server it is a protocol With a reference implementation. Xsgi, Xsun, Xquartz, and all the rest used the reference implementation with platform driver glue.
- kps 1mo ago
  > Wayland is not a "display server", it's a display protocol. Bailey: Wayland replaces Xorg Motte: Wayland is just a protocol > because "display server" is only half of what Xorg does. Yes, that's a big part of the problem. X was build for I/O, Wayland was built for O and had to be dragged kicking and screaming into rudimentary I.
- account42 1mo ago
  People aren't lamenting over Wayland not doing font rendering or audio but they care about display system features like screen recording and input automation that Wayland intentionally hobbles.
M95D 1mo ago
I think it was the "security" argument. Some magic words like "security" and "protect the children" make most people go insane, abandon all reason.
- dralley 1mo ago
  Xorg's security (and X11 in general) is objectively terrible - this is not even a debatable question.
  - wing-_-nuts 1mo ago
    Great, so let wayland be a hardened option for those who care.
    - mort96 1mo ago
      It is and you're free to use X if you want
      - wing-_-nuts 1mo ago
        If wayland had been sold as a hardened display for those who needed that level of security, I would not have a problem with it. As it is, the community got constantly browbeat with 'this is the future' and 'it's so much faster!' when recent benchmarks have proven that to be false.
        mort96 1mo ago
        Then go use X. Nobody's stopping you, you can just ignore any brow beating. /ignore is a useful IRC command. You'll probably find it to be a not great experience, since almost all the people who spend their time actually working on graphics and GUIs in the Linux world prefer to work on Wayland. So X doesn't get much love these days (and you're not entitled to their efforts after all). But it's not like they erased all the old X code from existence.
doublerabbit 1mo ago
> For the life of me, I'll never understand how wayland got traction with the community. Corporate drive. Originally sponsored by Intel followed by IBM (RedHat) and the rest followed suit.
- dredmorbius 1mo ago
  Sauce?
  - doublerabbit 1mo ago
    It's how any of these projects get shifted in distribution if not sponsored. > Kristian Høgsberg, I work at Intel in the graphics team in the Open Source Technology Center. I'm the founder and maintainer of the Wayland project. You either pitch or bring it with you. Demonstrate a tech demo and you're granted an engineer or two. It's how Amiga came to be, Steve Jobs with NeXT. And it appears you can no longer link anything from reddit without being asked to login and they've now nuked old.reddit If you have an account this thread has some very insightful comments. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1m0ztn/how_is_wayland_considered_a_community_effort_when/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1m0ztn/how_is_waylan...
- dormento 1mo ago
  Money, the "cure" to the hacker ethos.
- throwaway84932 1mo ago
  Wayland didn't start as a corporate project, and even if it had, you might be shocked to learn that the majority of contributions to projects like the Linux kernel and Mesa actually come from corporations, not individuals, right?
0xbadcafebee 1mo ago
> I'll never understand how wayland got traction with the community There were only a few people willing to work on an alternative, and they didn't have to take a vote, so they just did what they wanted. Corporations and projects adopted it because they wanted something different, and it was the only other option. Now that we have AI, it will be much easier for genuine community alternatives to emerge, even if we have to battle over the legal ramifications. I for one am willing to go without "official support" to have software that doesn't suck.
rascul 1mo ago
They've been working on Wayland support for awhile now. https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

naikrovek 1mo ago

[dead]

dralley 1mo ago

Wayland is not a "display server", it's a display protocol. A lot of the "existing functionality" that it broke has nothing to do with displays, it's stuff that got crammed into Xorg at some point whether it made sense or not. I find it quite funny that many of the same people that rag on systemd and say it does too many things, are big fans of Xorg doing a bunch of things that "display server" probably should not be handling. Even if Wayland was a "display server", it would still "remove existing functionality" if it meant that in any principled sense, because "display server" is only half of what Xorg does. But sure, the transition was difficult and took a long time.

wing-_-nuts 1mo ago
>Wayland is not a "display server", it's a display protocol. I, as an end user, do NOT care. >A lot of the "existing functionality" that it broke has nothing to do with displays, it's stuff that got crammed into Xorg at some point whether it made sense or not. I also don't care about ivory tower ideals of what is within the dominion of 'display' and what is not. The fact of the matter is their changes broke a ton of functionality, and instead of even trying to provide feature parity, they basically dumped all that responsibility onto the WM/DE devs. I have no idea why the community didn't take one look at their proposal and flatly ignore them.
- skydhash 1mo ago
  This pretty much. Xorg got almost everything that I care about to have a functionning GUI. You only startx and the only thing you may need are utils programs like a wm, a compositor, a bar… now you have conflicting implementation from gnome, kde, wlroots,… each with its own set of features.
  - wing-_-nuts 1mo ago
    Yeah, instead of the wayland folks leading the effort to fix issues, it's often some individual DE / WM going off, fixing it the way they prefer, and wayland grudgingly adopting it as official because they know the ecosystem is fragmenting bad enough as it is.
- cschep 1mo ago
  If nothing else this is a very strong commentary on just how challenging landing positive changes in Xorg felt to the community.
- setopt 1mo ago
  > instead of even trying to provide feature parity, they basically dumped all that responsibility onto the WM/DE devs. In other words, the Wayland people should perhaps have defined official protocol extensions early on to cover most of what X did, thus preventing all the initial interop issues when Gnome and KDE and Sway tried to reinvent them independently.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1mo ago
    In hindsight, it's my opinion that wayland, if it had to exist at all, should have been implemented like this: 1. Add GBM to graphics drivers and start working it up the stack from the bottom, stopping at Xorg. That is, make rootful XWayland the standard Xorg before standalone even is a thing. This reduces maintenance work up front rather than belatedly. 2.a. Implement weston as a standalone compositor. 2.b. Actually make weston fully functional. Figure out everything needed to provide an actual working desktop environment with the features that users expect out of the box. Standardize all the protocols needed for at least a basic XFCE-ish environment rather than hoping someone else will do it. 3. Then, only after these things are done and working, announce to the world that wayland, a quiet project that has until now explicitly suggested nobody use it, is now the future of linux graphical systems and everyone should plan to migrate.
drmr 1mo ago
And this transition is nowhere near done. Just look at Kicad and pretty much any DAW that loads audio plugins (to name two major usecases where Wayland simply doesn't cut it). Sure Xwayland exists and mostly (not entirely) works, but that's a band-aid for what is essentially a "we broke it and don't care" approach.
- wing-_-nuts 1mo ago
  Also, as benchmarks show, xwayland introduces pretty bad latency..
  - dralley 1mo ago
    The latency isn't that bad, it's reasonable for a compatibility shim.
    - wing-_-nuts 1mo ago
      I can't find the benchmarks now, but the ones I recently saw on hacker news, xwayland was notably worse than either wayland native or xorg native. Bad enough to be noticeable by the average user.
    - account42 1mo ago
      It may be reasonable when you emulate a completely different platform but not when your are providing a compatibility feature in a supposed successor platform that can be designed to support that use case.
- Blackthorn 1mo ago
  The daw problem is really really bad too. We've got a de facto standard forming right now where you link libwayland.so and hope the structs never ever ever change in the next 30 years.
mzajc 1mo ago
> Wayland is not a "display server", it's a display protocol. This is a huge part of what "user/dev hostile" means in my book; with Wayland, getting a working desktop always someone else's responsibility, all features have to be reimplemented across DEs endlessly (with often-incompatible variations, of course), and they all blame each other and program authors for bugs while the Wayland project refuses to even acknowledge basic features like desktop automation or screen recording. > But sure, the transition was difficult and took a long time. And this irks me too, people are convinced they're done but I still don't have xmacro. And flameshot is broken, while the alternatives suck. And support for everything depends on the DE now. And java.awt.Robot is broken with no replacement. And the clipboard randomly misses copies. And OBS screen recording is broken for me. And there's no support for display resolution scaling. And ssh -X is gone, while waypipe doesn't work all programs. But hey, at least there's HDR now or something! It was definitely worth replacing a functioning stack for this. I'm so glad that Plasma 6.8 removes X support!
somat 1mo ago
It does not matter, X11 is also not a display server it is a protocol. That distinction changes nothing. For what it's worth Xorg is the display server, before that it was XFree86, there was also Xsgi and Xsun and for mac Xquartz, I even saw a neat project once where the Xserver was in javascript, I am trying to find it again but our modern search engines are a bit shit. The point being all of these can interoperate with one another. Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long? -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 We have our cathedrals, only we are such barbarians as to call them worthless garbage and unfit for purpose and do our best to tear our legacy down.
- kps 1mo ago
  > X11 is also not a display server it is a protocol With a reference implementation. Xsgi, Xsun, Xquartz, and all the rest used the reference implementation with platform driver glue.
kps 1mo ago
> Wayland is not a "display server", it's a display protocol. Bailey: Wayland replaces Xorg Motte: Wayland is just a protocol > because "display server" is only half of what Xorg does. Yes, that's a big part of the problem. X was build for I/O, Wayland was built for O and had to be dragged kicking and screaming into rudimentary I.
account42 1mo ago
People aren't lamenting over Wayland not doing font rendering or audio but they care about display system features like screen recording and input automation that Wayland intentionally hobbles.

M95D 1mo ago

I think it was the "security" argument. Some magic words like "security" and "protect the children" make most people go insane, abandon all reason.

dralley 1mo ago
Xorg's security (and X11 in general) is objectively terrible - this is not even a debatable question.
- wing-_-nuts 1mo ago
  Great, so let wayland be a hardened option for those who care.
  - mort96 1mo ago
    It is and you're free to use X if you want
    - wing-_-nuts 1mo ago
      If wayland had been sold as a hardened display for those who needed that level of security, I would not have a problem with it. As it is, the community got constantly browbeat with 'this is the future' and 'it's so much faster!' when recent benchmarks have proven that to be false.
      - mort96 1mo ago
        Then go use X. Nobody's stopping you, you can just ignore any brow beating. /ignore is a useful IRC command. You'll probably find it to be a not great experience, since almost all the people who spend their time actually working on graphics and GUIs in the Linux world prefer to work on Wayland. So X doesn't get much love these days (and you're not entitled to their efforts after all). But it's not like they erased all the old X code from existence.

doublerabbit 1mo ago

> For the life of me, I'll never understand how wayland got traction with the community. Corporate drive. Originally sponsored by Intel followed by IBM (RedHat) and the rest followed suit.

dredmorbius 1mo ago
Sauce?
- doublerabbit 1mo ago
  It's how any of these projects get shifted in distribution if not sponsored. > Kristian Høgsberg, I work at Intel in the graphics team in the Open Source Technology Center. I'm the founder and maintainer of the Wayland project. You either pitch or bring it with you. Demonstrate a tech demo and you're granted an engineer or two. It's how Amiga came to be, Steve Jobs with NeXT. And it appears you can no longer link anything from reddit without being asked to login and they've now nuked old.reddit If you have an account this thread has some very insightful comments. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1m0ztn/how_is_wayland_considered_a_community_effort_when/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1m0ztn/how_is_waylan...
dormento 1mo ago
Money, the "cure" to the hacker ethos.
throwaway84932 1mo ago
Wayland didn't start as a corporate project, and even if it had, you might be shocked to learn that the majority of contributions to projects like the Linux kernel and Mesa actually come from corporations, not individuals, right?

0xbadcafebee 1mo ago

> I'll never understand how wayland got traction with the community There were only a few people willing to work on an alternative, and they didn't have to take a vote, so they just did what they wanted. Corporations and projects adopted it because they wanted something different, and it was the only other option. Now that we have AI, it will be much easier for genuine community alternatives to emerge, even if we have to battle over the legal ramifications. I for one am willing to go without "official support" to have software that doesn't suck.

rascul 1mo ago

They've been working on Wayland support for awhile now. https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap