[HN Gopher] It's Time To Admit It: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware
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It's Time To Admit It: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware
Author : caution
Score : 347 points
Date : 2020-10-25 09:32 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.phoronix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.phoronix.com)
| ansible wrote:
| Maybe when it hits 10 years without a release (like its
| predecessor), we can really call it abandonware:
|
| https://www.xfree86.org/cvs/changes.html
| 0x_rs wrote:
| Is there anything to admit, though? X.org has been in the so
| called "maintenance mode" for years and any development on the
| current main project is dead in its tracks, this is a well known
| fact. But no "drop in" replacement exists as of now, nor in the
| foreseeable future it seems there will be one - Wayland is an
| alternative, if you limit yourself to anything that is properly
| supported, with fundamental design differences (necessary for a
| more "modern", efficient approach to the current technologies),
| but I personally can't but think it's dead on arrival. There was
| some quote from the original developers of X.org about only few
| people in the world being able to grasp it in its entirety and I
| believe it's gotta be true.
| est31 wrote:
| Today I've updated to the newest Kubuntu release 20.10 and
| considered switching to Wayland, but then abandoned the idea when
| I found out that middle click copy paste is only implemented in
| Plasma 5.20, and I only have Plasma 5.19. I've seen they've fixed
| the screenshot program though (which I remember to have been an
| issue on older versions).
|
| I'm looking forward to 21.04 for my next attempt to switch, maybe
| by then Firefox's native wayland support will have progressed as
| well. After all what's the point of Wayland when most of your
| software uses xwayland :).
| gbil wrote:
| Funnily enough earlier today I checked the status of Wayland on
| my setup- Arch - with KDE and my main issue is still mouse
| gestures. Currently using easystroke, which is itself an
| abandonware, but until I find something that works under
| Wayland I can't change yet nomatter the quality of DEs etc.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| Yes and something akin to easystroke would have to be
| implemented in each compositor under Wayland. You are thus
| dependent on the window manager you want to use to implement
| it. I asked the maintainer of the window manager I would want
| to use whether they would accept a PR for something like that
| and they said no, they would not.
|
| So, I would have to maintain a fork of my window manager and
| compositor to keep using something like easystroke under
| Wayland, instead of using a finished tool that hasn't needed
| any significant maintenance in 7 years. All in the name of
| 'security'.
| boudin wrote:
| Firefox native support is pretty much here already (I've been
| using it for quite a time now and it works really well). The
| only missing piece that is not merged yet is screen sharing
| unfortunately. It's available on Fedora's Firefox build.
|
| All GTK3 apps runs well on Wayland too. Qt apps runs well but
| it doesn't feel as polished (I mainly have issues when I use 2
| screen with different scaling).
|
| The last big things are chromium and electron. Once those have
| ozone merged and enabled in stable, it's gonna be a massive
| step forward. Those are the last apps I can't run natively on
| wayland. Ozone is in the beta branches now so, hopefully, it
| will happen next year.
|
| After, it's not that much of a big deal to run those on
| xwayland as long there's no scaling. As soon as you're on a
| hidpi screen or just use scaling, it's when it becomes blurry
| and is quite annoying. I personally still prefer wayland over x
| because the experience is just better. No flickering, it's
| smooth and feels more snappy.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| Based on my somewhat limited testing, the qt stuff is much
| better with qt 5.15, which is a very new release (and what
| kde plasma 5.20 is based on).
| vetinari wrote:
| It is blurry only if you have fractional scaling enabled
| (enabled is enough, even if you use integer scale). With
| fractional scaling disabled, even xwayland apps are sharp.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Yup, I've been running the ozone AUR release of chromium for
| a while, and outside of a couple remaining rough spots
| (mainly menus used for extension development/debugging) it's
| been great.
|
| I run a 4k display and a 1920x1080 display side by side, and
| X is utter garbage at handling it.
| cesarb wrote:
| > The only missing piece that is not merged yet is screen
| sharing unfortunately. It's available on Fedora's Firefox
| build.
|
| In my experience, it doesn't work yet; Firefox can select the
| IDE window (though you have to select it twice for some
| reason), and I can see the shared screen on my side (so the
| Wayland part seems to be working fine, since Firefox can get
| the window contents), but to my coworkers it appears frozen
| (they don't see any changes I make to that IDE window). I
| don't know if it's a bug in Firefox or a bug in Google Meet.
| swiley wrote:
| Sure X.org is abandonware but there are serious problems Wayland
| still hasn't solved that X has.
|
| 1) Wayland is really slow. I don't know if it's the compositing
| or what but it's unusable on lighter hardware that X ran fine on.
|
| 2) Widget toolkits handling window decoration is _awful._ Before
| the large number of toolkits just meant some controls were a
| little different but now basic behavior changes based on how
| programmers decided to build an app. And if you don 't like the
| window decorations (say, they take up too much screen space) your
| choices are suck it up, or if you're lucky and willing to spend a
| bunch of time reconfigure _every different toolkit your apps
| use._
|
| 3) basic stuff that worked fine on X11 doesn't work on wayland in
| the name of "security" (screenshots are a big one, there are
| extensions but isn't that the complaint about X? And if there's a
| security problem with something isn't hacking around with it
| because people need it a really strong indication that the idea
| is broken and probably making the situation worse?)
| solarkraft wrote:
| > Wayland is really slow.
|
| I think you don't mean that the Wayland protocol forces
| slowness but that the compositor you used was slow. The one I
| use is fast.
|
| > And if you don't like the window decorations (say, they take
| up too much screen space) your choices are suck it up, or if
| you're lucky and willing to spend a bunch of time reconfigure
| every different toolkit your apps use.
|
| No, there are protocols to negotiate whether an app has server
| side decoration or not and the compositor has the last say.
|
| > basic stuff that worked fine on X11 doesn't work on wayland
| in the name of "security"
|
| On only the core Wayland protocols you're absolutely correct,
| you can't even implement desktop shells with those. This means
| there must be extensions and there are 3 different classes:
| KDE, GNOME, wlroots, with tools for and incompatibility between
| each. The wlroots extensions are designed to be accepted into
| the standard and for wider Wayland acceptance they probably
| should be.
|
| Screen sharing is still a particular issue that we are starting
| to see solved with the advent of Pipewire.
|
| Wayland desktops are definitely usable. I've been happy with a
| wlroots based one (Wayfire) for a few months and KDE before
| that (from what I see GNOME has been perfect for a while).
|
| One of the last standing real issues I'm facing is kerfuffle
| with Nvidia drivers, especially the ones paired with Intel
| GPUs, but I think (surprisingly) Nvidia are actually working on
| fixing that.
| mort96 wrote:
| > No, there are protocols to negotiate whether an app has
| server side decoration or not and the compositor has the last
| say.
|
| The compositor can implement that protocol and just respond
| with "this compositor doesn't support SSDs". GNOME does this,
| so all toolkits must use CSDs if they wanna work on the most
| popular Wayland compositor.
|
| Incidentally, that's hell for all the simple libraries out
| there which just exist to get a GL window on the screen.
| GLFW, GLEW, SDL, etc. all have to implement CSDs now if they
| wanna work with Wayland. It also means that it's no longer
| feasible to just make a Linux application which uses the
| windowing system directly; everything must use a huge toolkit
| now.
|
| EDIT: To clarify, I don't think this is an issue with
| Wayland, but with GNOME. There's no reason it couldn't have
| supported SSDs like every other Wayland compositor. But as it
| stands, it hurts the Wayland ecosystem.
| cycloptic wrote:
| GLFW and SDL are looking at using libdecoration to draw
| CSDs. Yes it's an additional dependency but most
| applications won't need to worry about it unless they need
| it.
|
| The way GNOME is built it's not really possible
| architecturally for them to support SSDs in Wayland. Maybe
| that will change if they ever get around to redesigning
| mutter and gnome-shell, but I wouldn't wait for it.
| mort96 wrote:
| I've seen libdecoration, and yeah, that seems like their
| intended solution to this. It doesn't seem like a
| terrible solution, but last time I looked at it at least,
| libdecoration was a long way off being production ready,
| and GNOME with Wayland is shipping _right now_ and must
| be supported.
| cycloptic wrote:
| You can use a library like that or you can draw your own
| decorations. There unfortunately is no other option. I
| don't see it as being likely that GNOME will support SSD
| any time soon, it just isn't designed for that.
| mort96 wrote:
| I know, and that's kind of what I'm complaining about.
| There's no reason it couldn't support SSDs.
| cycloptic wrote:
| I was trying to be clear here: There is a reason and it's
| that it's not really possible architecturally for them to
| support SSDs in Wayland; doing so would require a
| redesign of significant parts of the compositor's code.
| I'm sorry if that was misunderstood. If you're trying to
| say they should have anticipated this and made a
| different architectural decision years ago, maybe that's
| true, but that also offers no practical solution to the
| applications that need to support it right now.
| mort96 wrote:
| I am trying to say that maybe they should have made the
| architectural decisions which wouldn't prevent non-GTK
| applications from working in GNOME. That's all.
| cycloptic wrote:
| I don't know what you're trying to get at. We can sit
| here and argue and say they should have done this and
| they should have done that, but that doesn't help anybody
| who wants support for them at this current moment.
|
| And please don't exaggerate, non-GTK applications do work
| in GNOME. Qt5 has native CSDs that will show up in GNOME.
| If the application is a game or something that doesn't
| support CSD then the experience is somewhat degraded but
| they still work. You can resize and move any window by
| holding Super and Left/Middle clicking. I won't pretend
| the situation is ideal but I also don't believe it's
| totally unusable or on a bad trajectory at the moment--
| like I said the other libraries are working on getting
| CSD support too.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > There unfortunately is no other option.
|
| Gnome could stop being unreasonably obstructionist, but
| that indeed seems unlikely.
| cycloptic wrote:
| What would it take for something not to qualify as being
| "unreasonably obstructionist" to you? If there's an open
| source desktop project that has infinite resources to
| redesign and rewrite everything at will at a moment's
| notice, then please let me know. I'll gladly use it.
| Hell, I'll sign up as a developer.
| bigbubba wrote:
| Have GNOME devs yet acknowledged that XFCE exists? In one
| now infamous exchange with Transmission developers a
| GNOME dev claimed that he didn't even know what XFCE was
| and, furthermore, that cross platform applications like
| Transmission should choose whether they would be "GNOME
| apps or XFCE apps", suggesting that they can't be both.
| The context of this exchange was that GNOME developer
| asking that a feature be removed from Transmission
| because GNOME would no longer support it.
|
| That's just one example, but GNOME has a reputation for
| not respecting Linux desktop diversity for a reason.
| cycloptic wrote:
| I had to dig up the comment you're talking about but just
| to put this in perspective: You are forming your current
| opinion about entire communities based on one comment
| made by one developer 10 years ago. I'm fascinated by all
| this open source that's out there but if you told me that
| a developer had to know every single open source desktop
| out there in order to contribute to one of them then I
| can't really get behind that. It's very hard to keep
| track of what everyone's doing all the time.
|
| But in any case I don't understand what is contentious
| about that. Some pieces are shared between GNOME and
| XFCE, but a lot of pieces are different and applications
| have always needed to choose. If they weren't trying to
| be different they wouldn't have made a separate desktop
| environment with their own separate libxfce libraries and
| components. (To GNOME's credit, they have gotten rid of
| most of the "libgnome" things since then, but now an
| application that wants to speak to certain GNOME-specific
| pieces is usually expected to use their private dbus
| protocols, things that XFCE would never implement anyway)
| bigbubba wrote:
| > _You are forming your current opinion about entire
| communities based on one comment made by one developer 10
| years ago_
|
| Incorrect. I am using a single example to illustrate a
| trend. A single example to illustrate what "unreasonably
| obstructionist" looks like. That particular incident made
| everybody roll their eyes but it hardly surprised anybody
| _because GNOME has earned this reputation._ Even back
| then nobody was particularly surprised by the GNOME
| arrogance, and I 've not seen this change.
|
| (Also, maybe I'm getting old but 10 years ago really
| isn't that long ago.)
| cycloptic wrote:
| Please don't use this kind of hyperbole. It's really not
| an interesting conversation when it leads into platitudes
| like "everybody did this" and "nobody did that" and "an
| entire group of people is arrogant and obstructionist"
| which neither of us have any way of proving or
| disproving. I wish this open-source-holy-war type of
| comment was not so common on Reddit and HN, it's about as
| constructive as the endless Emacs and Vim flame wars.
|
| If you're trying to illustrate the trend that GNOME and
| XFCE (and KDE, and LXQT, and MATE, and Budgie, and
| Mint...) all have different goals and ideas for how
| applications should behave then yes, I would say that
| much is obvious by now, and it has only gotten more
| obvious over the last few years. If you have a technical
| solution to this then I'd love to hear it, but aside from
| that I don't care to bicker about whose fault it is that
| your applications broke, because honestly no answer is
| going to pleasing for you to hear. Unless I'm mistaken
| then we aren't paying customers, this is all just random
| no-warranty open source and there's no support hotline
| that's going to care about what's broken.
| bigbubba wrote:
| Transmission never broke. GNOME devs requested that
| Transmission break itself on non-GNOME platforms. Falling
| back on 'well you're not paying anything' really does
| nothing to dispel the perception that GNOME devs don't
| play nice with others. If anything, it cements it.
| cycloptic wrote:
| If nothing broke then I don't see what the problem is.
| And, your assertion doesn't even seem to be correct. I
| re-read the bug and it's one GNOME developer suggesting
| for changes to be made only in GNOME 3, because support
| for a particular feature was deprecated upstream. The
| developer is apologetic and later goes on to make
| suggestions about what can be done in Ubuntu and XFCE. I
| see nothing there about "GNOME devs requesting that
| Transmission break itself."
| https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685
|
| I'm not trying to dispel any perceptions either, if you
| have a deep seated belief that GNOME (or XFCE, or
| anything really) are "not playing nice" because they
| removed features from upstream, there's nothing I can
| really say to you to change that view. If you want to
| challenge your own perceptions, I'd suggest you start
| developing a new open source desktop and application
| platform yourself over a period of many years just to see
| how much work it is, and how it's practically impossible
| to support everything that every app developer asks for
| when none of them are paying you a cent.
| ywei3410 wrote:
| > GLFW, GLEW, SDL, etc. all have to implement CSDs now if
| they wanna work with Wayland.
|
| I honestly don't understand what you're talking about here?
| If you want to get a window on the screen with OpenGL or
| Vulkan you don't implement anything special for Wayland.
|
| In fact with Vulkan+Wayland, it's fairly easy to do it
| without any third-party dependencies, with OpenGL you'll
| probably need EGL which is a Khronos dependency. Here's
| some slightly outdated example code [1].
|
| [1] https://gist.github.com/Miouyouyou/ca15af1c7f2696f66b0e
| 01305...
| mort96 wrote:
| If you just create a Wayland window, GNOME will draw
| _only_ that window, with no decorations. The window can't
| be moved, minimized, resized, etc. because there's no
| decorations. The window's content shows up, but that's
| it.
| ywei3410 wrote:
| I don't believe that's correct. The move, minimize, full-
| screen and resize seems to be part of the _xdg_shell_
| protocol (which has no extra methods for decorations and
| is only for window roles etc...) under the _configure_
| event [1]. I suspect that 's how the tiling window
| managers like _sway_ do it without extra server-side
| decorations.
|
| Possibly this is a subtle distinction, but I do think it
| matters.
|
| [1] https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-
| protocols/blob/ma...
| mort96 wrote:
| Sway does server-side decorations. It draws window
| borders and a title bar for you, and handles the drag
| events in the title bar and borders for you.
|
| Go ahead and make a basic Wayland window in GNOME.
| Compare the user experience to KDE or Sway.
| ywei3410 wrote:
| I believe you misread my comment; I said that the full-
| screen, minimize, re-size isn't part of the server-side
| decoration extension, but was part of a more basic
| _xdg_shell_ protocol through the _configure_ event.
|
| I was objecting to the fact that you said that windows
| did not have this capability without the server-side
| extensions, whereas I think they can be through
| _configure_. I did not dispute whether sway had server-
| side decorations or not.
| bigbubba wrote:
| > _The [compositor] I use is fast. [...] I 've been happy
| with a wlroots based one (Wayfire) for a few months_
|
| wlroots performed very poorly on my i5-3427U with 4000 series
| iGPU. _Very_ poorly. I ended up using neither X nor Wayland
| and instead having mpv render straight to the frame buffer
| (--vo=gpu --gpu-context=drm)
| emersion wrote:
| I'm a wlroots developer, and I'm using an old Sandybridge
| mobile i5 CPU daily. So I'm pretty surprised about this.
| I'd be interested in a bug report if you were to try again.
| blibble wrote:
| > Wayland is really slow.
|
| as a counterpoint: my sway (Wayland) system is the first one
| I've ever had where I can watch youtube, or vlc/mpv at 60fps
| without flickering, dropping frames or tearing
|
| I've used nvidia and radeon cards, plus intel onboard in this
| machine with X and none of them allowed all of the above
|
| the display server also remains responsive even if one client
| starts going nuts
|
| generally sway is considerably more responsive on the same
| system than the Xorg it replaced
|
| I am very happy with it
| tutfbhuf wrote:
| > first one I've ever had where I can watch youtube, or
| vlc/mpv at 60fps without flickering, dropping frames or
| tearing
|
| Have you tried Picom?
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Picom
| circlingthesun wrote:
| It apparently also lacks good color management.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/ihi1wm/xwayland_ov...
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _Wayland is really slow. I don 't know if it's the compositing
| or what but it's unusable on lighter hardware that X ran fine
| on._
|
| This is crazy when you think about it. I remember running an X
| server, Hummingbird I think it was called, on 386 and 486
| machines connecting to Suns and it was _fine_ , this was a
| perfectly acceptable way to work. Couple of xterms, an Emacs,
| xbiff for email, maybe some xeyes just for fun. Developing with
| Tcl/Tk and running those applications. Now we have several
| orders of magnitude more CPU, memory, network and Wayland
| doesn't even perform as well as that! My mind is truly boggled.
| folkhack wrote:
| Yeah - I have no clue why you're being downvoted. I have the
| exact same professional experience where Wayland is slow out-
| of-box vs X. I also share the experience of getting X to work
| on ancient hardware without much difficulty.
|
| Let's be real here - if you're needing something to "just
| work" you're going to install X. Sorry Wayland, you're just
| not there yet.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| > Yeah - I have no clue why you're being downvoted.
|
| I didn't downvote but it's because parents comment are
| anecdotal and not providing further data one might be able
| to engage/confirm/refute ... and therefore I learned
| nothing from reading it.
|
| I'm also running a dual setup of i3/sway and the only
| reason why I still keep i3 around is screen-sharing in
| jitsi and similar. and my experience is that wayland has a
| lower use of CPU/memory than when running X (i3) but it's
| not why I prefer sway. (I'm using sway with "xwayland
| disable" so maybe this is where a lot of resources are
| saved). But the whole discussion is pointless without
| verifiable benchmarks.
| tutfbhuf wrote:
| Maybe someone could try to install Wayland on an old
| device, where latest Xorg works fast, and see if Wayland
| also does. Comparison video would be nice.
| asveikau wrote:
| Well, the anecdotes are kind of real, and vast in
| numbers. I suspect many readers here never used X on a
| 90s PC or workstation, so they could be forgiven for not
| realizing it was up to the task on hardware that is now
| pitiful.
|
| Another example I like is the Nokia N900, which ran X on
| a phone no less, phone hardware from 2009, and it was
| pretty good there.
|
| Part of the problem is surely software bloat over time on
| higher parts of the stack, rather than X itself. You
| couldn't get the 486 in the comment above to run recent
| gnome or a recent browser. But you could run software of
| the era well.
| gnufx wrote:
| For what it's worth, Exceed was never fine in my experience,
| and you were better off with the Cygwin server. At one time,
| the first thing to ask about certain sorts of Emacs problems
| that were reported was "Are you running Exceed?", with high
| probability the answer would be "Yes". I never understood why
| "we" paid for it. But, yes, X did always run on relatively
| low-resource machines. (I can't comment on how Wayland
| compares.)
| Flex247A wrote:
| What could be the reason behind this? Asking as a noob.
| beowulfey wrote:
| I personally don't know, but most likely when you are not
| _forced_ to think about memory, efficiency, etc... most
| people just don't. So if you aren't actively developing on
| those lightweight systems your code won't run efficiently
| on them.
| Flex247A wrote:
| I guess that explains why Electron based apps don't feel
| as snappy as native ones.
| Const-me wrote:
| Technically what Wayland is doing, using 3D GPU for
| everything, is the best way forward. Windows is using it
| since Vista. When done right, gradients mentioned in other
| comments are free, GPUs have hardware to interpolate values
| (such as colors) across vertices of triangle, for free.
| Many other effects are either free or very cheap.
|
| Engineering-wise it's really hard.
|
| Microsoft reworked GPU driver model introducing WDDM. They
| invented a new user-facing API for that, introducing
| Direct3D 10. They did that in close collaboration with all
| 3 GPU vendors. They made user-mode components like desktop
| compositor itself, dwm.exe, and higher-level libraries to
| benefit from all that stuff. Initially they were optional
| things like WPF, Direct2D, DirectWrite, then with Win8 they
| introduced WinRT later rebranded to UWP. That one is no
| longer optional and is the only practical way to render
| "hello world, GUI edition" in modern Windows (possible to
| do with DirectWrite or legacy GDI but neither of them is
| practical).
|
| The problem "render nice high-resolution graphics, fast"
| affects everything, the entire stack. Modern Linux has
| decent kernel infrastructure (DRM/KMS), but even so,
| remaining challenges are hard. Linux has less luck with
| user-facing GPU APIs (Vulkan is not yet universally
| available, neither is GLES3+ or OpenGL 4.3+). For some
| GPUs, quality of drivers is less than ideal. OS maintainers
| oppose stabilizing kernel ABI for drivers. There's no high
| level GPU-centric graphics libraries, I tried once with
| moderate success https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac but that
| only supports one specific Debian Linux on one specific
| computer which happens to support GLES 3.1, and some
| important features are missing e.g. no gradient brushes or
| stroked pens.
|
| I don't see any large party interested in making that
| happen. At least not for desktop Linux. Valve started to do
| relevant things when they thought Windows 10 is going to
| kill their Steam business model, then it became apparent
| Microsoft won't make Win10 into an iOS-style walled garden,
| and they no longer have much motivation.
| p_l wrote:
| Part of it is toolkits throwing sometimes multiple megabyte
| bitmaps to draw, which starts to have problems the moment
| you don't have a zerocopy, gpu accelerated method to draw
| them.
|
| The old core protocol approach extensively used optimized
| graphic operations on the server side, with clients sending
| things like "draw me a rectangle/fill a rectangle/draw a
| bunch of lines" etc. - today you're going to get pretty big
| bitmap (especially with high dpi).
|
| It's the same problem that mobile devices faced, and is
| related to a lot of issues on how android devices were
| "janky" (and related to the various hacks that Apple did to
| make sure your application wasn't capable of overstressing
| the early iPhones - cause just displaying basic UI was
| close to doing that.)
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _What could be the reason behind this? Asking as a noob_
|
| Abstractions piled on top of abstractions. Something that
| might have been 5 function calls deep on either side with a
| carefully crafted packet in the middle is now 100s on each
| side.
|
| We have a culture that prizes programmer happiness above
| all and this means everyone thinks "this is a mess, I'll
| put my own layer on top to make it nice, then work above
| that layer". Repeat 100 times and now you have processors
| literally 2000 times faster that struggle to even keep up
| with keypresses. But what noone wants to admit, is that
| it's messy because the problem domain is messy and
| sometimes you just have to live with the mess and get some
| real work done. The programmers of old understood this.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Exactly. There's no customer, so the product is a nerd
| carnival that delivers whatever the developers want.
| adwn wrote:
| Okay, nice rant, but are too many layers of abstraction
| the _actual_ cause for Wayland 's (alleged?) slowness
| compared to X? From what I understand, no.
| Fnoord wrote:
| The compositor is evil [1]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24466929
| pfortuny wrote:
| When a window bar needs a gradient, you are starting to
| stress the graphics engine... And that is just a simple
| bitmap (or not)...
| pmarin wrote:
| http://xopendisplay.hilltopia.ca/2009/Jul/Xlib-tutorial-
| part...
| pfortuny wrote:
| Wow thanks. I was saying that just in order to show the
| most basic example.
| adwn wrote:
| For what it's worth, whenever I tunneled X over a non-local
| SSH connection, it was slow as molasses. That's because
| almost all contemporary GUI applications render to a bitmap
| anyway. Those that actually use the outdated X vector
| graphics operations look like utter garbage compared to
| anything post-1995. Frankly, I'd rather my applications are
| at least somewhat aesthetically pleasing.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _Those that actually use the outdated X vector graphics
| operations look like utter garbage compared to anything
| post-1995. Frankly, I 'd rather my applications are at
| least somewhat aesthetically pleasing._
|
| That is entirely subjective no? Personally I think Motif is
| one of the pinnacles of GUI design.
| adwn wrote:
| Aesthetics is always subjective, but it's safe to say
| that most people today would find Motif to be rather
| ugly.
| nullc wrote:
| I also agree, and even if I did think that the modern
| stuff with the impossible to see borders and the buttons
| that you can't tell were up and down looked better (I
| don't), I'd still prefer smooth remote operation.
|
| Alas. That isn't the way the world has went, and it's
| extremely expensive to be weird.
| josefx wrote:
| > Those that actually use the outdated X vector graphics
| operations look like utter garbage compared to anything
| post-1995
|
| Modern UIs could do with being a bit more like 1995. Most
| of my work is performance sensitive so the first thing that
| goes are all the desktop effects that try to barf pointless
| rainbows and glitter in my direction.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > whenever I tunneled X over a non-local SSH connection, it
| was slow as molasses
|
| And? Last time I checked, tunneling Wayland over a non-
| local SSH connection was slow as _glass_. Which is to say
| it didn 't work at all.
| jleahy wrote:
| I routinely use modern X applications running on a remote
| (25 miles) machine, all day long as part of my job.
|
| It works flawlessly if you have a reasonable amount of
| bandwidth and reasonable latency.
|
| Sure, it doesn't work over dial-up.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Of course it does, just like video-based remote desktop
| systems work great these days.
|
| That's the point, X's claimed advantages here long since
| stopped existing, and nobody noticed because the
| "inferior" approach is perfectly fine with modern
| internet connectivity.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Honestly, X forwarding doesn't work that well in my
| experience, unless you have a very stable connection,
| with quite a bit of bandwidth (~1Mbps at the very least).
| I've had more success using xpra for forwarding, as I'm
| often connecting over Wi-Fi (hostel, campus rooms...).
|
| It's also rather complicated to set-up on the server side
| (xauth, magic cookie, etc).
|
| waypipe, on the other hand, was a breeze to use, even
| though it's very young. I tried with Firefox and 500Mbps
| of upload capacity, it worked fine as long as the window
| wasn't too large.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > It's also rather complicated to set-up on the server
| side (xauth, magic cookie, etc).
|
| you mean "ssh -Y user@host..."?
| MayeulC wrote:
| No, that is the client side. I went back and looked at
| the documentation, I was wrong and conflated two ways of
| doing it:
|
| - X forwarding over SSH: this only requires changing
| X11Forwarding in OpenSSH sshd's config
|
| - Plain X over network, which is secured with `xhost`,
| insecure, and needs transfering the magic cookie or other
| authentication information
|
| So, not nearly as complex to setup as I recalled, though
| it's much simpler to run a nested wayland compositor
| (which waypipe does) than a X11 server (which xpra does).
| The difference between X11 and Wayland remote access
| thins when xpra is involved.
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37157097/how-
| does-x11-au...
| bromonkey wrote:
| that would be the client side
| sokoloff wrote:
| To me, it's been a while since 1Mbps was "quite a bit of
| bandwidth", even for WAN connections.
| hansvm wrote:
| Outside of major metros, in the US a lot of towns only
| offer up to 5Mbps down, and only then if you pay out the
| nose. Not sure if it matters for X forwarding, but upload
| caps are also ridiculously low even on otherwise
| reasonable connections.
| bmn__ wrote:
| x11vnc is the answer. Performs okay at 10000km (quarter
| Earth circumference).
| flyinghamster wrote:
| I think much of the problem is that today's systems have vast
| amounts of eye candy that was all but nonexistent back in the
| 80s and 90s. X terminals and 486s don't have the resources to
| throwing fancy visual effects on the screen, and sometimes
| might not even be color displays.
| pmontra wrote:
| Anecdotally I run X11 on several Sun workstations (Motorola
| 680xx), a Dec Alpha (some RISC), HP X terminals, etc. All of
| them were reasonably fast or at least not any slower than the
| Windows and Mac boxes of the time (1990/95.)
|
| We played videogames on them. Does anybody remember Netrek,
| Xtanks, and a F16 vs MIG flight simulator which I can't
| remember the name of?
| [deleted]
| pengaru wrote:
| > 1) Wayland is really slow. I don't know if it's the
| compositing or what but it's unusable on lighter hardware that
| X ran fine on.
|
| Presumably your compositor is using llvmpipe software rendering
| if it's so slow.
|
| Unaccelerated Xorg using something like the vesa driver is slow
| too.
| linuxdaemon wrote:
| I am forced to use ms teams for work. Every time I attempted to
| share my desktop, teams would crash. I thought it was just
| because teams sucks. As it turns out, it seems to be that
| running under wayland was actually causing it. Everything works
| fine under x.org. After I was running with x.org for a couple
| days, I realized there are quite a few little oddities that I
| just lived with and didn't realize it was because wayland was
| actually messing things up.
| aorth wrote:
| Teams is an Electron app (like Skype, Signal, VS Code, Atom,
| etc), which is based on Chromium. Chromium doesn't have
| Wayland support yet so those run via XWayland. Things should
| get better once Chromium supports Wayland properly (soon, as
| it finally entered beta in 2020-09):
|
| https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chrome-8.
| ..
| Arnavion wrote:
| Electron running on Wayland natively isn't relevant to its
| ability to screen-share. Even if it were running on Wayland
| it wouldn't be able to screen-share just based on that
| alone, because having a Wayland window doesn't have
| anything to do with screen sharing.
|
| Native applications these days have the option to use
| pipewire and xdg-desktop-portal for screen-sharing, and it
| doesn't matter whether they use that from a Wayland window
| or an Xwayland window. Both Firefox (under Wayland) and
| Chromium (under Xwayland) use this method today.
|
| Unfortunately Teams does not use that method and instead
| calls an X function directly, which crashes, as I wrote in
| the sibling comment.
| Arnavion wrote:
| Yes, Teams uses a function that is unsupported by Xwayland
| (XGetImage, if I remember the backtrace correctly), so it
| crashes. I worked around it with a rather convoluted setup
| that involves running Xephyr under Xwayland, then running
| Teams under Xephyr (via setting `DISPLAY`), and running
| vncviewer under Xephyr connected to a VNC server (wayvnc)
| sharing my screen on the parent wayland instance. Then I tell
| Teams to share the "whole screen" (ie the entire Xephyr
| window) and quickly maximize the vncviewer window (within the
| Xephyr window).
|
| To be able to maximize vncviewer you do need a compositor
| running under Xephyr too. I picked i3 to be the most minimal.
| Again, i3 can be told to run in the Xephyr window by setting
| `DISPLAY`.
|
| One caveat is that I still use Teams under Wayland to join
| calls for the audio, so this setup means I need two Teams
| instances to join the same call. This works for meetings but
| not for individual calls. Of course if you want to use the
| Xephyr'd Teams to do audio too there shouldn't be any
| problem; I just prefer having easy access to the Teams window
| to mute myself, etc instead of having to reach into the
| Xephyr window and unmaximize the vncviewer window.
|
| People on the #sway IRC channel on Freenode suggested an
| alternative might be to use v4l2loopback to create a "camera"
| device that is sourced from the screen and then have Teams
| use it as a webcam, but I couldn't get v4l2 to work on my
| distro (it kept insisting my distro's ffmpeg couldn't encode
| video even though it could) so I didn't investigate further.
| tbr1 wrote:
| The v4l2 trick "works", but usually the application will
| use a lossy video codec optimized for faces, not screens.
| wf-recorder to v4l2 as a poor-man's screenshare to Discord
| ends in a blurry mess. YMMV with Teams.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I salute your creativity and tenacity but what the actual
| fuck the need for a rube goldberg setup in order to make an
| application work is ... unfortunate. If I did such a thing
| I would take one last look to take pride in my work before
| deleting the whole affair and installing an OS that isn't
| broken.
| Arnavion wrote:
| Well, I knew what I was signing up for when I decided to
| switch from X to Wayland, so I'm personally okay with it.
| It's the same with doing anything that isn't mainstream,
| such as my decision to use Linux in a workplace where a
| lot of stuff is Windows-first, and sometimes Windows-
| only. The best thing the iPhone did to the world was to
| make web applications more popular, and as long as Safari
| lags on web standards it pushes websites to not use
| Chromium-only features and give Firefox users like me a
| chance.
|
| Anyway, a less convoluted setup might be to use the
| browser version of Teams in a browser where it allows you
| to screen-share, ie Chromium and not Firefox. IIRC when I
| tried it a few months ago people on the call said they
| could only see me broadcasting a black screen, but I know
| the browser is fine so it had to have been a Teams issue.
| Maybe it's fixed now.
|
| Hopefully these applications will catch up soon. As
| another example, Zoom's native Electron application uses
| a GNOME-specific method of screen-sharing which doesn't
| work in non-GNOME DEs, but I've heard the browser version
| works fine.
| martinsb wrote:
| Re: black screen when using Teams from browser. Check you
| have environment variables set correctly:
| XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland and XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=sway. I
| set up them in my .zshrc before starting sway. This
| helped me to fix the black screen issue. Hope it helps
| you too!
| Arnavion wrote:
| If those env vars weren't set screen-sharing with xdpw
| would be broken as a whole because pipewire wouldn't
| invoke it, which wasn't the case. Other applications like
| that one python gstreamer script could access xdpw just
| fine, and Firefox and Chromium could screen-share in
| other websites (like Mozilla's gUM test page) just fine;
| the only one broken was Teams.
| SweetestRug wrote:
| I had the exact same problem - as others have already said,
| its a problem with electron not having Wayland support. I
| solved it in two _different_ ways:
|
| - An unofficial Teams app
| (https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux) which
| works great - screen sharing works without problems, no
| crashing, _and native notifications!_.
|
| - Use teams in qutebrowser: the dev (The-Compiler) added
| support for screensharing and it works great. Just like the
| unofficial app above, it also has _native_ notifications, not
| the weird popup notifications of the official app.
| SweetestRug wrote:
| > Wayland is really slow
|
| I have to wonder if this is distribution dependent? On Manjaro
| my experience with Wayland has been fantastic. I cannot
| perceive any speed differences vs X.org; Wayland just flies.
|
| It would be interesting to poll users and see just what factors
| are contributing to speed issues. GPU? CPU? Distribution?
| Wlroots vs Gnome? etc. Learning more about what _users_
| experience could be helpful in making Wayland better. Has
| anyone done this?
| sergeykish wrote:
| I've found GamingOnLinux statistics [1]. Mostly X11, wayland
| 7%. But look at the other data:
|
| * Both Ubuntu and Arch based distro 40%
|
| * Manjaro helped a lot 15%
|
| * Both AMD and Intel 50%
|
| * AMD GPU 40% and rising
|
| * Open source GPU driver 43% (almost all of it AMD)
|
| * 10% own VR Headset
|
| [1] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics
| &vi...
| microcolonel wrote:
| Yeah, I think there are a lot of distro bugs, and a lot of
| old or mismatched packages, outside of the Arch/Manjaro
| ecosystem. This hurts the impression of Mesa, the Kernel, and
| basically anything else like this where there's no good
| reason conventional distros shouldn't ship new feature
| releases at least a bit more frequently than they do.
| ironmagma wrote:
| This is a great idea. So many Linux issues go undiagnosed
| because the response is so often "it works fine for me, on my
| <insert insanely overpowered system specs here>."
| derefr wrote:
| > And if there's a security problem with something isn't
| hacking around with it because people need it a really strong
| indication that the idea is broken and probably making the
| situation worse?
|
| If there's a security problem and people are hacking around it,
| that's an indication that the either those people have bad
| needs, or that the security _model_ is flawed -- but it's not
| an indication that it's wrong to attempt to secure that
| resource in the first place.
|
| If a janitor needs the nuclear-missile launch codes to clean
| the missile silo, you've probably fucked something up -- but
| that "something" isn't the fact that the missile silo doors are
| code-locked. (Instead, it's probably 1. the fact that you're
| using the same credentials for physical missile access as you
| are for missile launch, and 2. the fact that your regular
| janitor is expected to clean the missile silo.)
|
| In this case, the security model of Wayland is the same kind
| that Windows and Android already have: preventing "low-
| integrity" apps from screen-scraping "high-integrity" apps. In
| other words, preventing a random webpage running in Chrome from
| stealing your credit card details sitting visibly in a sibling
| text-editor window.
|
| (Or, of course, preventing you from Twitch-streaming your
| playback of DRMed Netflix video. That's a use-case that "needs
| supporting" too, given that the alternative is that type of
| video not playing back on the platform at all.)
| varbhat wrote:
| I recently came to know about Arcan which is the alternative to
| both Wayland and Xorg .
|
| https://github.com/letoram/arcan
| dralley wrote:
| standards.xkcd
| snazz wrote:
| I don't think we'll ever get into that situation. Mir is gone
| now and Arcan is a pretty niche solution, so I think that
| Wayland will continue replacing X.org unabated now.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| And honestly, it's doing a decent job.
|
| Happy to see Ubuntu make the switch, it'll pull in a good
| number of daily users and we can iron out the last few
| remaining issues.
|
| Frankly, Wayland has been excellent to me. It's hard to
| describe how nice it is that I can't remember the last time
| I had to open an xorg conf file to try to get monitors
| working, or get even basic functionality from my touchpad.
| moonchild wrote:
| > Then again, that coming from an Intel Linux developer isn't too
| surprising considering it's been more than six years since the
| last xf86-video-intel DDX release
|
| I don't quite follow? modesetting was supposed to replace
| xf86-video-intel, so it shouldn't be surprising if the latter
| isn't getting updated.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| The beauty of the software world is that "abandonware" can live
| on for decades.
|
| Let the impatient get on with beta-testing today's developments,
| and I'll get around to using them 20 years from now, when only
| the good stuff remains.
|
| I still do most of my writing and publishing work from Windows 95
| and Me, and I love it, because everything is a solved problem,
| and no new patches to break things are coming out.
|
| Keeping it within NAT and VM is plenty secure enough for my
| purposes, and IE6 is plenty enough modern for me.
|
| At least I can still read my config files.
| ddevault wrote:
| Oh, look, more non-experts spreading misinformation about Wayland
| on HN. Must be Sunday.
|
| https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-de...
| rconti wrote:
| I love it when experts explain to users why their opinion is
| wrong.
| ddevault wrote:
| Ah yes, all of these facts are conveniently converted into
| opinions once shown to be wrong.
| jancsika wrote:
| On the small point wrt "stuff not working" for a user:
|
| There is a future blog that will point out all the "support
| myths" about Wayland. E.g., how, contrary to popular
| misconception, obs and other standard Gnu/Linux
| applications _do_ work out of the box with Wayland at the
| time of this future blog 's writing.
|
| I imagine the impossibility of writing that blog today is
| the reason Ubuntu 20.04 ships with x11 as a default.
| ddevault wrote:
| >obs and other standard Gnu/Linux applications
|
| 1. obs is not a standard GNU/Linux application
|
| 2. It supports Wayland via a plugin which is available in
| several Linux package repositories
|
| Please: stop levying false criticisms based on facts you
| don't actually know. _Please_ stop.
| verroq wrote:
| I only really care about performance and Wayland hasn't been
| very convincing [0] with no discernible improvement over X11.
|
| [0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-
| Xo...
| ddevault wrote:
| GNOME is not a good representative of Wayland. Wayland is
| just a protocol - it's up to the compositors to have good
| performance to distinguish it from Xorg, and GNOME does not
| do well in this regard. Other compositors, particularly
| wlroots, enjoy excellent performance.
|
| Wayland also opens the door to many performance improvements
| which are not possible on Xorg, and which take advantage of
| newer GPU features, especially on embedded systems but moreso
| every year on desktop and laptop GPUs as well.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > GNOME is not a good representative of Wayland.
|
| Can you recommend me a good representative of Wayland I
| could try?
|
| I've been running KDE Neon for the past few years, but as
| you noted elsewhere it seems KDE on Wayland needs more work
| still.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Drew, if someone posted a comment saying "there's this
| Linux feature that's incredibly slow on x86-64", it
| wouldn't be a refutation to say "it's fast on RISC-V". That
| would rightfully just produce a response of "that's nice
| for you, it's still slow on x86-64 and that's what I'm
| using, so from my perspective _the feature is slow in an
| environment many people use_ ".
|
| If you want this to stop, make GNOME's performance better
| in the ways you envision, because it _is_ the experience
| most Linux users get. (Quite a lot of work has been going
| into GNOME Wayland performance lately.) Arguments about
| Wayland protocol feature politics don 't necessarily make
| the out-of-the-box experience worse; for many people it's a
| good "Just Works" experience. Stop telling people they need
| to switch desktop environments to get a better experience;
| some fraction of people will go "if I have to switch, I'll
| switch back to Windows/macOS/etc". A vanishingly small
| fraction of people will go "oh, sure, I should switch to a
| different window manager and environment that isn't what
| I'm used to and doesn't necessarily have the integration
| I'm used to, and switch my apps to match too; this makes me
| happy", and those people know who they are already.
| ddevault wrote:
| "there's this Linux feature that's incredibly slow on
| x86-64"
|
| This isn't the appropriate comparison. What they said is
| "x86-64 is incredibly slow", and then when you teased
| them for details, what they meant was "this Linux feature
| is incredibly slow on x86-64". To which the answer isn't
| "it's fast on RISC-V", but rather, "that's a problem with
| Linux, not x86-64".
|
| If you have a beef with GNOME, then bring it to GNOME.
| Don't pin it on a tangentally related technology which
| bears none of the fault, and which has had hundreds of
| thousands of hours of work invested in it by volunteers
| all to make something nice for you to use.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Is your goal to fix people's terminology or to fix the
| actual problem?
|
| It's not an end user's job to tease apart what specific
| thing is the root cause. If something changes, and their
| system feels slower, they're going to reasonably assume
| the thing that changed is at fault. That's doubly true if
| there's an easy switch to turn that thing on and off
| (which there often is, by picking a Wayland or non-
| Wayland session at login), and they can easily evaluate
| the difference in isolation. It might be cathartic to
| spend time yelling at people about who is actually at
| fault, but fixing the root cause would make there not be
| a fault to seek blame for.
|
| People aren't going to stop running GNOME en-masse.
| Distributions are not going to abruptly abandon GNOME. If
| (and I do mean "if") there's some issue with GNOME's
| Wayland implementation, that's going to be many people's
| primary exposure to Wayland as a technology.
|
| People will continue working on optimizations, to many
| places in the stack. It doesn't matter where the fault
| lies or where the fixes need to happen, the _net result_
| is people saying things like "I switched to Wayland and
| things got slower / less smooth / etc", and they're going
| to continue saying things like that. It'd be nice if
| people phrased it more that way (slowness associated with
| switching to Wayland, rather than Wayland being slow),
| and provided more details about their environment, rather
| than implying that "Wayland" is a single piece of
| software which should incur their ire. It'd be even nicer
| if there were less ire to go around because more things
| Just Work.
|
| It's also entirely possible that some of the people in
| these various threads have issues with some _other_ piece
| of software in the stack.
|
| > If you have a beef with GNOME, then bring it to GNOME.
|
| I'm not the one with a beef with GNOME; you seem to be.
| If _you_ have a problem with GNOME, take it to GNOME.
| GNOME works great for me, and I don 't care which Wayland
| protocols it does or doesn't choose to implement. You
| haven't even specified what precise change you think
| ought to happen there, just some general complaints about
| protocol extensions.
| ddevault wrote:
| The lengths to which people will go to justify being
| wrong. Yeesh.
| [deleted]
| notankies wrote:
| Regardless as to whether Gnome "does well" in the regard of
| performance, you must admit that for some of us choosing a
| competitor like wlroots over one like Gnome introduces a
| whole new adventure in replacing all the features of Gnome
| with standalone applications to use with wlroots. Plus a
| tiling window manager is a totally different workflow.
|
| Not everyone has the time for curating a desktop
| environment with individual utilities, and not everyone
| likes tiling WMs. i3 gave me an RSI.
| ddevault wrote:
| It's not a particularly arduous "adventure". We maintain
| a list[0] of programs which use these protocols. And
| wlroots != tiling window manager: there are multiple
| wlroots-based compositors which do not use the tiling
| paradigm, the most developed of which is probably
| Wayfire[1].
|
| [0]: https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/wiki
|
| [1]: https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire
| notankies wrote:
| Apologies; I misunderstood one of your links and thought
| sway had been renamed to wlroots.
|
| To be clear the "adventure" I'm talking about is for
| replacing desktop environment niceties like the ones
| provided by gsettingsd and the tight integration provided
| between devices and the system management tools offered
| in full desktop blown environments like Gnome and KDE. I
| used i3 for six or seven years and it was never as nicely
| integrated as Gnome and I spent a LOT of time yak shaving
| to get it nice and keep it that way. Eventually I gave
| up. Gnome is really nice these days.
|
| But maybe I missed the point of your original comment.
| sergeykish wrote:
| wlroots excellent performance => bottleneck is not
| Wayland.
|
| Gnome will catch up some day.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Gnome hasn't provided a good desktop experience since
| 2011. By the time they figure out how to stop sucking
| insofar as Wayland performance they will surely have
| discerned new ways to err.
|
| There are other environments that have worked well for a
| decade and will work well for the next decade.
| sergeykish wrote:
| Test was about GNOME, I do not understand what they were
| expecting. It should be about same on most workloads.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Which embedded systems actually run GLES on Linux stably
| enough to do anything with Wayland? My experience is the
| choices are:
|
| Use a binary blob that only works with a 3 year old vendor
| kernel, and works most of the time (but you can't fix it
| when it doesn't work, and if you are compositing most of
| the time isn't good enough)
|
| Use a mainline Linux kernel that is so buggy that fixing
| the bugs in it is a full time job
|
| Use fbdev
| ddevault wrote:
| Wayland has nothing to do with GLES, and some compositors
| support pixman-based rendering similar to Xorg on
| embedded devices.
| verroq wrote:
| Is there a benchmark where it blows X11 out of the water?
| ddevault wrote:
| I am not aware of any up-to-date benchmarks which make a
| fair comparison (i.e. not just benchmarking GNOME), but I
| am intimately familiar with the technology and its
| performance characteristics.
| taeric wrote:
| Gnome is a fair comparison. Since it is the main
| comparison for many users, it is the most fair
| comparison.
|
| Otherwise, this is starting the benchmark wars with
| meaningless comparisons at the outset. :(
| ddevault wrote:
| It's not a fair comparison. You're benchmarking GNOME,
| not Wayland, and making generalizations about Wayland
| based on GNOME benchmarks is a false equivalency.
|
| Is GNOME on Wayland worse than GNOME on X11? Perhaps. Is
| Wayland worse than X11, based on that answer? No.
| taeric wrote:
| I get your point. But until those benchmarks at least
| correlate with behavior users see, they are not worth
| much.
| sergeykish wrote:
| Protocol limits what is possible. Legacy defines
| performance. Gnome is X11 first. Wlroots in Wayland
| first. It should be possible to optimize Gnome.
|
| Wayland was created because of horrible X11 performance
| [1]. It is not Waylands prime time yet but X.Org still
| works and maintained. Phoronix.com should have checked
| contributions [2].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ
|
| [2] https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-
| xserver/graphs/commit-ac...
| taeric wrote:
| These are appealing arguments. But our industry is
| flooded with appealing arguments losing to pragmatic
| compromises.
| sergeykish wrote:
| Our industry is flooded with critics who do not
| contribute.
| taeric wrote:
| Most of the pragmatic solutions were built by
| contributing to existing things, not starting over.
|
| Think risc v cisc. It isn't that there are not points to
| be gained from the alternatives. It is that leaving the
| past behind is not necessarily the best way to get
| progress. And even when enough time passes that the
| alternative gains ground, it often looks more like what
| it was replacing than less.
| sergeykish wrote:
| You clearly have not watched video by X.Org developer,
| have not you? I expect you are better informed, worked a
| lot with X.Org codebase and can show some links on your
| commits.
|
| Or if you truly believe there is nothing wrong with X.Org
| you would become maintainer.
|
| > My (often incorrect) views and opinions are my own and
| not those of anyone I currently or have ever worked for.
| Please help me make them more informed (and hopefully
| more correct) whenever you can!
| taeric wrote:
| Goal shift much? My point here has been to point out that
| gnome is the benchmark that matters most. That one side
| seems bent on ignoring that is baffling to me.
|
| Sadly, for the most part I have been discouraged from
| Linux desktop usage in recent years. Shame, as I have
| been on Linux for a couple of decades now. That said, I
| confess this is opening my interest. Would love to get
| myself and my children contributing, and I will start
| looking for ways to make that possible.
| sergeykish wrote:
| > I only really care about performance and Wayland hasn't
| been very convincing [0] with no discernible improvement
| over X11.
|
| there would be no controversy with
|
| "I only really care about GNOME performance and GNOME
| Wayland hasn't been very convincing [0] with no
| discernible improvement over GNOME X11"
|
| GNOME matters for you, it does not matter for me (xmonad,
| xterm, browsers). If all user see is GNOME he can decide
| it is Linux that is broken as well.
|
| "The real story behind Wayland and X" by Daniel Stone
| (link above) specifically shows X11 performance problems,
| it is view from developer what is wrong with X. The story
| which we, as users, do not know. We can't blame
| developers for trying to implement something sane.
|
| I have no contributions to core projects but I don't
| blame them either.
| taeric wrote:
| Ah, fair. Taking back to the root, I see the connection.
| Since you directed specifically at me, I took it just
| back to my entrance.
|
| Continuing in that vein. I stand by pointing that the
| choice of benchmark matters. I've been burned by my own
| choices and choices from peers too often to agree that
| hypothetical benchmarks will see improvements for
| everyone.
|
| I also find it dubious that there are many use cases that
| are better served today than in the past. I want to
| believe you, but the evidence is coming in weak with a
| ton of argument from authority. You don't get a pass just
| for being a developer to tell users they are wrong.
| ddevault wrote:
| I don't know what you're trying to say, outside of some
| vauge attempt to avoid admitting a mistake.
| taeric wrote:
| I'm saying that we get your point. But you seem to be
| missing ours.
|
| Nobody cares about benchmarks that a) don't exist or b)
| are not indicative of what folks will experience.
| ddevault wrote:
| Obviously? The disconnect is that you seem to think that
| we can draw conclusions from nonexistent benchmarks.
| taeric wrote:
| You are asking us to literally draw conclusions from
| hypothetical benchmarks where the opposite results will
| exist.
|
| I am sympathetic to the idea that things needed to start
| over. I'm annoyed with the lack of honesty and self
| critical approach. As framed by you, Wayland is above
| criticism. Which immediately raises my suspicions.
| ddevault wrote:
| I have not said that Wayland is above criticism. I have
| said that the criticism which has been raised thus far is
| largely invalid, and that the benchmark you pointed to is
| flawed. If you insist on using flawed benchmarks as
| evidence for the inferiority of a technology simply
| because no less-flawed benchmark exists to provide a
| counterpoint, you are _wrong_.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| What percentage of Wayland users are on Gnome? It seems
| likely to me that Gnome is likely to be 90-99% of peoples
| experience with Wayland.
| ddevault wrote:
| So what? What percentage of Wayland desktops are on
| Linux? Do comments on Wayland generalize to comments on
| Linux? What percentage of Linux installations are on
| x86_64? Do comments about Linux generalize to x86_64?
|
| No, obviously they don't. So, knock it off.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| If the majority of new users are exposed to linux via
| wayland and exposed to wayland via gnome and the gnome
| experience sucks people will perceive that linux wayland
| and gnome suck regardless of who is at fault.
|
| Have anyone ever bought a car or piece of electronics
| that was bad because of a particular component and though
| wow <component oem nobody has heard of> really sucks
| instead of <name on the box> sucks?
|
| Desktop linux may be a niche but window managers are a
| niche among niches. Interesting window managers
| implemented via Wayland are a niche in a niche in a
| niche.
| ddevault wrote:
| GNOME sucks. This sucks for users. GNOME is popular, so
| it sucks for a lot of users.
|
| That is not a statement about Wayland, so fucking knock
| it off. If you really want to fix this problem for this
| large number of users, you ought to make it about GNOME,
| to pressure them into fixing it and make more people
| aware of the problem. Making it about Wayland is (1)
| _wrong_ and (2) makes it worse for the people actually
| doing something about it.
| taeric wrote:
| How is it wrong? You felt it was just unfair, earlier. :)
|
| To an extent, I actually agree. I just don't care,
| though. Pointing at comparisons that are not real world
| user cases is... Annoying. And feels ridiculously bad
| faith in argument.
|
| Worse so, when it has been a prominent argument in this
| space for a long time.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. However wrong
| others may be, it's not ok to break the site guidelines by
| attacking them personally or impugning bad faith. If you have
| evidence of abuse, that's different--but the bar for 'evidence'
| obviously has to be higher than other commenters simply holding
| a different view.
|
| Believe me I understand how frustrating it is when the
| community or a large subset of commenters seem to be repeatedly
| and perversely wrong about something. But that is the internet
| doing its internet thing. We all run into it on some topic that
| we know a lot about and/or feel strongly about. It can't be
| stopped or fixed. All you can do is share some of what you
| know, and yes, it's Sisyphean because the whole thing is
| stateless and has to be repeated every time. It won't stop
| because you ask it to or want it to; "it" is impersonal and
| doesn't have consciousness to begin with. One needs to accept
| that for one's own sanity (I hope it's clear that I'm talking
| from personal experience about this) and then patiently supply
| corrective information wherever you can and have the energy.
| Telling people to "fucking knock it off"
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889242) is only going
| to hurt both yourself and your cause. We also can't allow it in
| comments here for obvious reasons
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and we've
| been pleading with you for years already not to do it.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24885769.
| ddevault wrote:
| > we've been pleading with you for years already not to do
| it.
|
| The same years during which you've done nothing to prevent
| the spread of seditious misinformation on Hacker News. If you
| were better moderators I might take your guidelines more
| seriously.
|
| My thread with counter-arguments is detached and languishing
| at the bottom of the page, meanwhile all of the
| misinformation dominates the conversation comfortably from
| the top. This is a gross failure of the moderation on HN. Are
| you a human script, enforcing the guidelines with blinders
| on? Or are you a moderator, helping to craft thoughtful and
| good faith discussions, and to combat misinformation and
| propaganda?
| dang wrote:
| Detaching flamewars so that they languish at the bottom of
| the page is standard HN moderation and the reason we do it
| should be obvious. If you don't want that to happen,
| nothing is easier to avoid (from a moderation point of
| view): simply provide corrective information respectfully.
| Of course that is not so easy from a personal frustration
| point of view--that is something every HN user (certainly
| including me) has to work at.
|
| I definitely don't want to penalize your counterarguments,
| but if you can't or won't decouple them from guidelines-
| breakage, what choice do we have? We do just the same with
| users and threads that are arguing the opposite.
|
| There are two very different issues here: (1) Wayland; (2)
| protecting the commons. Important as the first one is, the
| second has to take precedence because it affects every
| topic, every thread, and the survival of the community.
| ddevault wrote:
| The commons are full of propeganda and misinformation at
| the hands of your policies to "protect" them. Your
| guidelines are not holy writ, and are unfit for this
| task.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| So, there are plugins somewhere that support all kinds of basic
| functionality. I can already see how nice will be to keep a
| system like this up to date.
|
| Do the developers expect to incorporate those plugins at the
| main code at some time?
| ddevault wrote:
| I don't know what you mean by plugins. They're protocols,
| they have first-class support. X11 also uses protocols to
| implement these features.
| jhasse wrote:
| Wayland isn't a code base but a protocol.
| gpm wrote:
| Wayland is _both_ a code base and a protocol unless you are
| being unreasonably technical about terminology
| (distinguishing between wayland and libwayland) to the
| point where you are deceiving casual readers.
|
| It is for all practical intents not possible to implement a
| useful wayland compositor without relying on libwayland,
| because mesa links to libwayland and expects to be passed
| pointers to data structures defined in libwayland.
| ddevault wrote:
| Another obsolete "fact" about Wayland which hasn't been
| true since 2015. Which is all the anti-Wayland
| propegandists seem to be able to come up with.
|
| This was addressed by the linux-dmabuf protocol extension
| (which also works on *BSD, despite the name). The mesa
| route has been deprecated for years.
| ywei3410 wrote:
| I do believe that the parent comment was unfair; it is
| possible to implement a compositor without _libwayland_
| -- but I do think that there is some truth in that the C
| structures are the de-facto protocol from the client-
| side. For example graphics drivers seem to expect
| _wl_display_ and _wl_surface_ [1] rather than, say
| expecting the object id.
|
| It's not as though this is different under X though and
| isn't a criticism of Wayland.
|
| [1] https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/specs/1.2-ext
| ensions...
| gpm wrote:
| > isn't a criticism of Wayland.
|
| Indeed, my comment is merely observing that wayland is
| both a protocol and a code base for all practical
| purposes, I'm trying to leave the criticism to other
| people ;)
| [deleted]
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Ok, so does the standard body plan on incorporating those
| extensions into the main standard at some point?
| ddevault wrote:
| That's not really how Wayland extensions work. If I can
| reword your question as "are these protocols legitimate
| and standardized" the answer is "yes".
| [deleted]
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Are they optional1 and are there alternatives to them?
|
| If the answer is yes, then there is a problem.
|
| 1 - I imagine "optional" can be the wrong word, maybe the
| correct is "universally adopted".
| ddevault wrote:
| Yes, they're optional, and no, they're not universally
| adopted, but _this doesn 't damn Wayland_. An example of
| where the screenshot protocol isn't supported (and this
| is fine) is where Wayland is used as the driver for the
| dashboard display in a vehicle (which is one of the major
| places where Wayland adoption is strong in industry).
| Wayland is designed to accomodate a broader variety of
| use-cases than X11: it's not _just_ for desktop systems.
| That 's _why_ these protocols are optional and separate
| from the core Wayland protocol: it gives us greater
| flexibility, by design.
|
| Among desktop systems, GNOME is really the only one who
| maintains a concrete _objection_ to these protocols. KDE
| supports most of the wlroots-sponsored protocols in
| theory, and a handful in practice - patches welcome for
| the rest. The remainder of the major Wayland
| implementations for desktops, and many for mobile,
| support most or all of the necessary protocols.
|
| I am really getting tired of explaining this stuff, over
| and over and over again. Can we please just _stop_
| spreading FUD for technologies that we don 't understand?
| I'm just so sick of it.
|
| Why do people do this? What can be done to stop it?
| Obviously nothing I've done so far has been working. This
| feels like talking to conservatives about climate change.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| From the linux-on-the-desktop perspective, I have the
| impression there are 2 major groups today: Red hat, going
| all in on both gnome and wayland, or most others on X11.
| So gnome having an objection to these basically means
| wayland does not have them. All the other wayland clients
| together are mostly background noise.
|
| Stated from a programmer perspective, what I can count on
| being available. What is the baseline?
|
| Desktop linux is a mess compared to windows or OSX, with
| gnome/KDE as major frameworks, and a ton of minor but
| still relevant frameworks. The one thing they have in
| common, the one thing that makes GUI applications work
| more or less together is X11. Wayland causes a split
| here: yet another painfull technology reset that will
| probably cost us a decade before everyone has migrated.
| Now if wayland itself is fractured between its major
| player and everybody else, there is a 3-way split.
|
| It seems X11 will die, Gnome as 800 pound gorilla will
| dictate the technological baseline, hence end users will
| lose basic functionality after suffering trough wayland's
| maturisation.
|
| I can understand your frustration. You've probably built
| something great, X11 seems a dead end, and I presume you
| can't do much about Gnome. But I'll either have to live
| with this mess or run back to windows. I've dealt with
| pulseaudio and systemd, and both were arrogant low-
| quality projects that took years to stabilize back to
| their original levels. I can live without beeps on my
| desktop for a week, or the occasional service weirding
| out. I can't live with a usable UI.
|
| Maybe you deal with climate change conservatives by
| demonstrating they still can get their groceries without
| their CO2 spewing SUV.
| ywei3410 wrote:
| Maybe a more concrete example will answer your question.
| The Wayland protocols are found here [1]. Your compositor
| will implement some of these protocols and not others. If
| I'm writing an application I will; possibly through some
| toolkit, ask the compositor what features it supports and
| configure how my application works accordingly.
|
| This isn't particularly different to say, an toolkit not
| supporting a particular form of input, such as _GLEW_ not
| supporting tablet devices or certain GPU's having more
| extension methods -- which you can see if you look at
| Khronos specification. Or an even more drastic example,
| is an application having both a terminal display and a
| X11 display like Emacs.
|
| [1] https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols/
| [deleted]
| HeadsUpHigh wrote:
| The main code of what? Wayland doesn't have a codebase. There
| are protocols( just like x11) and different compositors
| support different extensions. The point is that it's much
| more modular this way.
| naveen99 wrote:
| I wonder why we don't see anything out of China for x.org ? They
| want to be self reliant in hardware, why not start with software
| ? Then I wonder if the us government will come around and ban
| open-source like they want to ban encryption in the name of
| protecting the economy... not that I want the last thing to
| happen of course.
| podiki wrote:
| What's the tiling WM landscape like on Wayland these days? I know
| of Sway (i3-like), but is that the best game in town? I started
| with i3 but now love StumpWM (Common Lisp) and XMonad (Haskell),
| and can't imagine being without something very similar.
| [deleted]
| udioron wrote:
| I am still waiting for bug 865 (now 258) to be resolved.
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/258
| xaduha wrote:
| Linux is nice, but as soon as new LTSC is out I will probably
| switch to it to use WSL2.
| remexre wrote:
| I'm kinda annoyed this is the case before the GBM/EGLStreams
| argument got resolved...
|
| I've done some programming against GBM directly (wanted an OpenGL
| ES application to be in a "kiosk mode," didn't want to have to
| install X / a Wayland compositor + configure it), and the whole
| DRM+GBM stack is kinda _terrible_. Generously, one could call it
| barely documented; the majority of the useful and correct
| documentation I found was on Mesa contributors' blogs, and there
| were still edge cases in the API that were getting ironed out in
| the 5.9 kernel release.
|
| I haven't needed to write against EGLStreams, but I might give it
| a try to see if it's as much of a pain or not; from the 1-page
| overview on the nvidia docs, I suspect not -- it sounds quite
| similar to the VK_KHR_swapchain extension.
| emersion wrote:
| Yeah, the KMS docs need some love. I'm trying to help with
| that. But note that even with EGLStreams you'd still be using
| KMS. And GBM's API is pretty small, basically just
| gbm_bo_import/gbm_bo_create/gbm_bo_get_*.
| Const-me wrote:
| Interesting, probably depends on hardware then. On Pi4, that
| same workflow (drm/kms without desktop managers, with GLES on
| top) delivers superior image with no tearing (tearing does
| happen in windowed mode under load), while consuming less
| resources than windowed mode. This library:
| https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac
| yissp wrote:
| NVIDIA's EGLDevice / EGLOutput / EGLStream API isn't too bad in
| and of itself. The annoying thing is trying to have backends
| for both it and DRM / GBM in the same application. The
| programming models are just so different.
| nsajko wrote:
| If Wayland is the future, the future is grim. People often
| complain that Wayland is taking a long time to catch up to X11,
| but that actually stems from a deeper issue: Wayland has a
| horrible design, for an X11 replacement, a design that leads to
| massive fragmentation issues across the graphical part of the
| Linux ecosystem. Implementing a Wayland compositor requires much
| more effort than implementing an X11 window manager and each new
| compositor implementation reinvents the wheel many times, leaving
| users with less options for a desktop environment than on X11.
| Even worse, Wayland does not standardize on or is hostile to some
| essential features, meaning that users need to rely on compositor
| specific behavior for those features, if they are even available.
| E.g., an application that needs to grab the entire screen will
| need separate code for each compositor it supports screenshots
| on, or it must use a protocol outside Wayland to get the
| screenshot. Quoting Red Hat:
|
| > Furthermore, there isn't a standard API for getting screen
| shots from Wayland. It's dependent on what compositor (window
| manager/shell) the user is running, and if they implemented a
| proprietary API to do so.
|
| An xdotool (an input event automation tool, imagine wanting to
| inject or intercept input events) replacement is not possible on
| Wayland (without having separate support for each compositor, of
| course). These seem to be intentional design decisions (marketed
| as being necessary for security, but really being power-user
| hostile), this[0] Reddit comment puts it nicely:
|
| > It has been almost a decade, why does Wayland not have a
| protocol definition for screenshots?" - answer - "Because
| security, dude! Wayland is designed with the thought that users
| download random applications from the interwebz which are not
| trustworthy and run them. Wayland actually makes a lot of sense
| if you don't think of Linux desktop distributions and desktop
| systems, but of smartphones. But for some reason we absolutely
| need this technology on the desktop, like we had not enough pain
| and lose ends over here without it.
|
| But the lack of these features AFAIK also causes big trouble for
| users with special accessibility needs. Wayland is also, with its
| forced composition, hostile to interactive applications requiring
| low latency, e.g. video games.
|
| [0]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7lb5l7/new_screensho...
| Androider wrote:
| The problems Wayland solve are those of yesteryear, sprinkled
| with the broken dreams that we'd all be running it on Linux
| phones by now. In that context a strict security model makes
| sense.
|
| Trouble is, that security model makes no sense on today's
| desktop. In 2020, people aren't downloading and running native
| applications on desktops, not even (especially?) on Linux. The
| desktop is now solely a manager of browser windows. Everything
| that normal folks do is done through the browser, from email to
| office collaboration. Maybe a few Electron apps sprinkled in
| (mostly targeted for developers, ironically). Maybe the
| calculator? That's pretty much it.
|
| The most important desktop apps today? Chrome and Zoom. Both
| which barely work in Wayland. But at least all that non-
| existent native desktop software can't now spy on my web mail?
| Too bad screen sharing is now a complete shitshow.
|
| Actually worthwhile problems to solve on the desktop are for
| example high DPI and fractional scaling, rock-solid multi-
| monitor support, dynamically plugging in and removing displays,
| mixing displays of varying DPIs, high refresh rates and
| variable sync etc. The desktop will increasingly become a niche
| for high-end developer setups.
| transpostmeta wrote:
| You must realise that many people use desktop applications
| for their work. The Office suite, the Adobe suite, AutoCAD,
| ArcGIS: whatever program is in use in the industry you are
| in.
| nsajko wrote:
| One more thing: the Wayland security model doesn't make much
| sense anyway, considering that running untrusted code without
| at least virtualization is probably a bad idea anyway
| nowadays, and even virtual machines can be ecaped from.
| severino wrote:
| > Implementing a Wayland compositor requires much more effort
| than implementing an X11 window manager and each new compositor
| implementation reinvents the wheel many times, leaving users
| with less options for a desktop environment than on X11
|
| At least if this helps to reduce fragmentation, so that we can
| have a decent desktop environment, instead of 4.000 half backed
| ones, could be something positive for Linux.
| dralley wrote:
| > Wayland is also, with its forced composition, hostile to
| interactive applications requiring low latency, e.g. video
| games.
|
| https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/gnomes-mutter-gets-fu...
| andreyv wrote:
| In fast-paced games it is essential to disable vertical
| synchronization as well, trading possible tearing for less
| input lag.
|
| Does Wayland support this?
| pas wrote:
| You can draw to the OpenGL/EGL surfaces directly (Weston
| 5.0+ has composition bypass).
| ximm wrote:
| Was the pun intended? https://github.com/emersion/grim
| nsajko wrote:
| No, it's just awkward and unfortunate wording :)
| cycloptic wrote:
| Check ydotool for an xdotool replacement:
| https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool
|
| The lack of a common screenshot protocol isn't related to
| security. The desktops just haven't been able to agree on a
| common protocol (yet?)
| pmoriarty wrote:
| ydotool only supports a tiny fraction of xdotool's features.
|
| ...and that's unlikely to improve much any time soon, since,
| according to ydotool's README:
|
| _" Since Jun, 2019, I have little time to maintain this
| project"_
| cycloptic wrote:
| Check the paragraphs below that where the developer asks
| for help either by donations or by pull requests.
|
| I understand you probably don't want to do that because
| you're fine with xdotool for now, but the options are there
| should you need them.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Ok, so I can write the features ydotool is missing or pay
| someone to do it. I guess those options are the same for
| any software.
|
| Either way, ydotool is clearly not a viable replacement
| for xdotool right now, if it will ever be.
| nsajko wrote:
| You're missing the point, which is that all of this should
| have been a part of Wayland.
|
| Also, you're wrong that this isn't related to security, I
| can't be bothered to dig up some quotes right now, but it
| is/was actually very common to explain the lack of a
| screenshot feature on Wayland with security, and even to
| dismiss the feature altogether as a security issue.
| grandinj wrote:
| And the Remote Desktop stuff needs to talk to each compositor
| to emplement copy and paste.
| noobermin wrote:
| I've added this comment to my favorites; a very succinct
| description of the problems with Wayland. At this point I
| wonder if starting from scratch was the right call vs. spending
| the 12 intervening years trying to (yes) dig into X11 and fix
| existing issues.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| And it doesn't even mention the valuable features of X11 that
| were considered out of scope for wayland, such as network
| transparency.
|
| It's really super useful being able to just fire up a program
| on a remote SSH session and get the window on my local
| computer. Without having to set up VNC and a window manager
| etc etc on the remote computer.
|
| Of course this feature also needs a big review. It needs
| proper security (though tunneling over SSH fixes a lot of
| that) and there's too many back-and-forths in the protocol
| leading to it being really sluggish over high-latency
| connections. Makes sense as it was mainly invented for
| X-terminals on a local network. Also, more and more features
| like fonts are now rendered remotely instead of locally on
| the user's computer (the server in X terminology). NX and
| X2go fix that mostly but it would be great to have this in
| the actual protocol. As well as provisions for smooth video
| streaming.
|
| As well as that, the whole computing industry is moving back
| from powerful endpoints (PCs) to powerful central computing
| (now cloud, the mainframes/powerful unix servers in the early
| days of X). So really, this feature will become more
| important again.
|
| But yeah I would really prefer to see X11 being brought up to
| date rather than Wayland. Wayland is focused way too much on
| the local desktop.
| nlayers wrote:
| X.org works fine, Wayland seems to be another RedHat thing.
|
| I must admit I haven't tried it, but given NetworkManager,
| systemd and other pearls from RedHat I'm not optimistic.
| flavor8 wrote:
| What's your problem with NetworkManager? It's generally good,
| and certainly much better than what came before.
| folmar wrote:
| If you are cable-connected and on the edge of your wifi range
| it will periodically drop your cable connection to check if
| wifi is good. Not great. Connecting to wifi takes way longer
| than without it. Simple dhcpcd for ethernet + wpa_supplicant
| with handcoded config work way better.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > it will periodically drop your cable connection to check
| if wifi is good
|
| I don't know when you encountered that behavior, but
| NetworkManager has for a _long_ time handled wired and
| wireless as two independent connections; it just sets
| routing priority to prefer wired if available. I believe
| you that you observed that behavior, but to the best of my
| knowledge this does not match any _current_ behavior of NM.
| willtim wrote:
| This isn't true. It was never as good as Intel's Connman,
| which was designed to be modular from the start.
| NetworkManager started out as a UI app and then was evolved
| into what it is now. It's still not as fast as connecting to
| WiFi as Connman. I guess it was adopted instead of Connman
| because RedHat.
| vetinari wrote:
| NM doesn't connect to wifi by itself, it uses wpa
| supplicant for that. If something is slow, it is wpa
| supplicant. Fortunately, nm backends are modular and you
| can use Intel's iwd instead.
| bigbubba wrote:
| A while ago, maybe about a year ago, after upgrading
| Debian I discovered that I was no longer able to connect
| to my 5GHz wifi network, but could connect to 2.4GHz
| networks. Switching from NM to wicd fixed the problem.
| Same kernel, same wifi card and driver, same wifi AP with
| the same configuration. As baffling as it seems, getting
| rid of NM was the only thing I had to do, or could do, to
| make it work again. NM is now dead to me.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Maybe Intel was not cooperative about Connman. Trying to
| contribute a patch to Connman was the worst patch
| contribution experience I've ever had. On the official IRC
| channel, over several days and times of day, there were
| only people who could tell me about the developers, but the
| developers were not there. The bug tracker required writing
| an e-mail to someone at Intel to open an account. I don't
| remember details about the mailing list, but if I did write
| to it I was ignored as well. In the end the patch never
| went in, I had enough. And yes, the patch made sense. Years
| later I later saw one that seemed to fix my problem in a
| similar way.
|
| Connman is better at least insofar that it is less code
| than NetworkManager and that it connects to a Wifi network
| in under a second instead of several seconds. But I believe
| it can also do less, for example regarding VPNs and such.
| akvadrako wrote:
| NetworkManager can work with iwd, which will give you the
| quickest available way of connecting to WiFi.
| nullc wrote:
| So for example, I applied updates to a set of fedora systems
| recently.
|
| The updates to network manager decided to change network
| interface names from looking like enP51p1s0f0 to
| enP51p1s0f0np0. The rename broke the (also networkmanager)
| channel bonding configuration, resulting in them being
| unreachable and requiring a physical visit to get them back
| online.
|
| Networkmanager adds a lot of automagic, but outside of simple
| widely used configurations ("laptop with wifi") it causes
| unpredictable and unreliable behaviour.
|
| I especially like the standard fedora server install where
| the nics present during the install all get DHCP enabled on
| them, but only those nics. So if you move a network card to
| another PCI slot after the install it will mysteriously not
| work. ... I see nothing wrong with not automatically bringing
| up interfaces on a server, but mysteriously bringing up some
| and not others makes for mystifying and difficult to diagnose
| issues that no one seems to know how to fix.
| apatheticonion wrote:
| I just spent an hour trying to get it to connect to a VPN via
| a shell script with no success sudo nmcli
| conn up id "VPN" --ask
|
| Works great but there is no sign of
| --password --user-name
|
| Instead I have to write my configuration to a file and read
| from the that file. Even then I couldn't get it working.
|
| Also `--ask` doesn't ask for your user name.
|
| I mean, sure, it's probably fine when you know how to use it
| but it has to be one of the least intuitive CLI front ends I
| have used
|
| I am also frustrated that I couldn't figure it out, which
| makes me biased
| znpy wrote:
| just yesterday i set up a vpn client very easily by running
| nmcli connection import type openvpn file myconfig.vpn
|
| the only issue that i had was SELinux doing its job, and
| was quickly fixed.
|
| Even easier than with the usual gui tools.
| vfclists wrote:
| How did you find SELinux was doing its job and how long
| did it take?
|
| I gave up on SELinux about 20 years ago when it was a
| source of endless frustration, or was that 15?
| dx87 wrote:
| You can have SELinux in a learning mode where it gives
| you a notification when it blocks something, and a
| command you can run to make it not block that action any
| more.
| freedomben wrote:
| selinux is at the heart just about labels. If something
| tries to do something but doesn't have the right label,
| selinux will block it.
|
| I agree working with selinux is a bit of a PITA but if
| you learn sealert, ausearch, and/or audit2allow it can
| severely reduce the pain and allow you to keep selinux
| enabled. I really like this page personally:
| https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/SELinux
| znpy wrote:
| it took me about 10-15 minutes to turn my eyes towards
| SELinux, after some initial debugging.
|
| i turned off selinux temporarily and activated the
| connection successfully, and determined that it was
| indeed SELinux that was preventing NetworkManager from
| doing its job.
|
| then i re-enabled SELinux went to look at
| /var/log/audit/audit.log to see what it had to complain
| about and indeed some files created by NetworkManager in
| /root/.cert had bad contexts.
|
| I set the proper contexts (semanage fcontext -a -t
| <context> <pathregex>), applied them (restorecon -Rv
| /root) and all was well.
|
| SELinux was initially scary but:
|
| - The "SELinux for mere mortals" talks are very
| informative introductory video
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WOKRaM-HI4)
|
| - The SELinux User's and Administrator's Guide from Red
| Hat was a deeper explaination
| (https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-
| us/red_hat_enterp... -- linking to rhel 7 because that's
| what i read at the time)
|
| I had to study this stuff in order to get Red Hat
| certified (RHCSA, passed with 300/300).
|
| Getting certified is absolutely worth it. Getting
| certified is the difference between "10-15 minutes to get
| a diagnosis" and "I gave up on SELinux about 20 years
| ago".
| spurgu wrote:
| Or systemd? I've read about complaints regarding it but never
| had any issues myself on the many dozens of servers that I've
| managed. On the contrary I find systemd very easy to work
| with.
|
| Edit: This makes sense from an architecture point of view
| (although unsure whether things have changed since):
| http://www.landley.net/notes-2014.html#23-04-2014
| bjarnek wrote:
| systemd is hanging in 90% of all shutdowns on my machine.
| This never happened with sysvinit scripts.
| akvadrako wrote:
| There is a one-line fix for that. Change this line in _/
| etc/systemd/system.conf_:
| DefaultTimeoutStopSec=2s
| Dunedan wrote:
| That's a workaround, not a a fix and might break
| applications which legitimately need more time to stop!
|
| A proper fix is to integrate startup and shutdown of all
| applications with systemd. That's something not properly
| supported everywhere yet. For example for KDE that's
| currently in the works:
| https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/plasma-and-the-
| system...
| vetinari wrote:
| It's not much of a fix, it is a workaround. The stuff
| that systemd says is broken will continue be broken.
| p_l wrote:
| It took about a decade for NetworkManager to gain CLI, all
| the time it tried to eat more and more control over network
| stack. It was also opinionated in the worst possible way,
| like responding to requests to support ad-hoc wifi mode (back
| when NM was _only_ about WiFi) with "your request is dumb,
| you're dumb, and we will never do that".
|
| It got usable within last few years as somewhat general thing
| (after having already wrestled control over network from you
| first), of course by the time it got useful work started on
| replacing it with new thing.
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| NetworkManager was literally just a GUI initially, wasn't
| it? IIRC in 2006, connecting to wifi from the CLI on a
| system with NetworkManager involved running the
| wpa_supplicant commands that NetworkManager wrapped.
| circularfoyers wrote:
| Not saying I don't believe you, but do you have a citation
| for when they responded to requests in that way?
| p_l wrote:
| Wish that 2005-me was interested in keeping the citation,
| but I strongly remember it because I was dealing with
| first WiFi-enabled device at home at the time - and ad-
| hoc was the only form of network connectivity for me for
| a long time.
|
| At the time, NetworkManager was gaining steam as "the"
| solution to wifi woes, and well, I tasted dirt ;)
| bitwize wrote:
| As long as Red Hat continues to contribute to the community,
| and the majority of users consider their output superior to the
| alternatives, the Linux ecosystem will be dominated by Red Hat.
|
| The entire Linux userland is pretty much a Red Hat thing at
| this point. Deal with it or find another OS.
| ravenstine wrote:
| If Wayland is the future, then the future was 12 years ago.
|
| Since it hasn't really caught on or solved the same problems that
| X.Org accomplished a long time ago, it seems kind of pointless to
| continue pursuing it at this point. In my opinion, the best thing
| about X.Org is that it's no longer changing. I remember
| installing updates for X.Org all the time and booting to a black
| screen on multiple occasions.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Ubuntu is shipping Wayland by default now.
|
| I vastly prefer Wayland on every machine I've used both X and
| Wayland on (and on laptops, it's frankly hard to describe how
| much better it is).
|
| Basically - Wayland isn't the future, Wayland is the _NOW_.
|
| If you want a great touchpad experience on linux? - Wayland
|
| If you want multi-touch and gesture support out of the box? -
| Wayland
|
| If you want multi-monitor support and mixed scaling? - Wayland
|
| If you don't want to have to edit multiple conf files on every
| new install? - Wayland
|
| If you want your windows to resize and actually respect the
| scaling of the current display, instead of the one they opened
| on? - Wayland
|
| Honestly, it does _exactly_ what I want my display server to
| do, and then mostly gets out of the way.
|
| My last real sticking point was screen sharing, and I can get
| that fine with Pipewire and chrome at this point.
|
| I don't open sessions in x anymore.
| 1_player wrote:
| The issue is not Wayland or "something else".
|
| The issue is trying to implement a radical change in the
| userspace Linux ecosystem. It's not possible without a ton of
| effort, so it takes an incredible amount of time, sweat and
| tears. That's the reason it takes 12 years and counting.
|
| The utopian philosophy of "Linux is about choice" has doomed
| any idea of a Linux desktop.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| So why not just fork it?
|
| If the maintainers do not want to maintain it anymore... why not
| just fork it? I've heard people saying that it is big and complex
| but some time ago i downloaded the code of the X server itself
| and it didn't seem _that_ big (i 've worked in much bigger
| codebases myself).
| sergeykish wrote:
| No one wants? XOrg developers started Wayland, they don't want
| to work on XOrg anymore. Red Hat does not need anymore.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| One X.org developer started Wayland and some (but not all)
| others joined.
|
| In any case, i wasn't referring to X.org developers - i
| explicitly mentioned that they do not want to maintain it
| anymore.
|
| I was referring to those who want to see it continue existing
| in one way or another.
| sergeykish wrote:
| Ah, I red "fork" as in ffmpeg-libav case, it is not what
| you meant, I would say "contribute".
|
| I am too surprised by critique. Anyone can contribute to
| X.Org [1], maybe there are no stable releases but it works,
| have active contributors [2] and recent commits [3] [4].
|
| Wayland lives, ten years ago it was demo, now it has a lot
| of compositors [5], wlroots shared among many projects.
|
| [1] https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver
|
| [2] https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-
| xserver/graphs/contribut...
|
| [3] https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-
| xserver/commits/master
|
| [4] https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-
| xserver/graphs/commit-ac...
|
| [5] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| What looks like "typical Linux geeks being geeks" with this
| situation:
|
| 1) the old, mostly working thing is being abandoned in favor of
|
| 2) that new thing which doesn't work in so many cases it's
| laughable, even after 11 years. How many years was it between the
| concept of X and a working release at Palo Alto?
|
| Note that the new situation is so perfect for passing the buck
| from the windowing system to the compositors, and compositor
| folks are busy fighting feuds over which one another's private
| protocols or even public ones they are not going to support.
|
| Oh, and the browsers. Chromium is making its first shy bumbling
| steps towards actually working on Wayland! A mere decade after!
|
| I've heard it was so much easier to write Wayland clients, what
| could have happened?
|
| Upd: This toxic development culture in a nutshell is exactly what
| this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24165445 is about.
| Well, we know it's not limited to Google.
| bitwize wrote:
| > What looks like "typical Linux geeks being geeks" with this
| situation:
|
| I call systems like this CADT-compliant after Jamie Zawinski's
| Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers idea.
|
| Wayland is a system for which CADT-compliance (and maybe
| security) trumps nearly all other concerns. No surprise, the
| primary use case for Wayland is and was always GNOME -- the
| very system for which Zawinski coined CADT.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I mean, could it help if we mercilessly threw away all the
| code from Xorg that is there to support all the Unixes from
| the 80s and 90s, all the code paths for kernel-bypassing
| direct hardware access, and reimplemented the protocol on the
| same stack Wayland compositors live? Wouldn't it have solved
| the problems that were not about the protocol design?
|
| Sure if someone wrote it in Rust it would be also safe and
| secure /s
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I mean... having used both X and Wayland as daily drivers,
| you're fucking insane if you think you can EVER get me back
| on X.
|
| On Wayland I get excellent multi-monitor support (mixed
| scaling ratios, much better automatic detection and
| configuration, much better plug-and-play). I also have a
| touchpad on my XPS that feels just as good as a Mac.
|
| To boot, I haven't had to touch a config file related to
| input devices or output devices a _single_ time using Arch
| /GDE/Wayland.
|
| Honestly, I'd probably still be running linux in a VM on my
| laptop if it weren't for Wayland.
|
| If X is your opinion of "stable and working" then I don't
| want any part of your systems.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Cannot say Wayland works smoothly on my triple-monitor
| setup. One of the monitors sometimes stops working
| randomly, and wakes up to display Plymouth screen when I
| reboot the thing.
|
| Dell Precision 7520 with an AMD GPU. The degree of
| flakiness is different depending on whether you're on
| Plasma or GNOME, but it's there nonetheless.
| copperx wrote:
| You need to purchase an AMD graphics card for Wayland,
| though.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Just curious, what was your browser again?
| sergeykish wrote:
| This criticism looks like "free as beer and I know better".
|
| 1. The old, mostly working thing waits your commit
|
| 2. That new thing can have some help too
|
| I recommend developers story about this "mostly working thing"
| (2014) [1]. It is quite fun and eye opening, he clearly knows
| his subject better than most of the comments.
|
| Wayland demo worked almost from day one. I've run it in 2010
| [2]. But we need applications, that is migrating toolkits and
| this took 10 years.
|
| It is very toxic development culture, cancel culture, mob.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ
|
| [2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=858020#p858020
| wegs wrote:
| Newer isn't better-designed. Unix was really well-designed,
| compared to so much of the modern stuff, and it does everything
| I need. Nineties Linux was a nice Unix. I wish we hadn't spent
| the past quarter-century turning it into nineties Windows, with
| layers upon layers upon layers of cruft.
|
| I don't get why Wayland is slow, when Enlightenment was fast on
| machines with 32MB of RAM, a 3dfx Voodoo, a spinning HDD, and a
| 66MHz CPU...
| moomin wrote:
| One of these days you should read the X section of the Unix
| Haters Handbook. Wayland is being built for the world as it
| is, X was built for a world that never was. In this case,
| it's quite hard to not be better designed.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| And yet it suffices to have two GPU in your system (both
| driven by OSS drivers) that the option of running Wayland
| disappears from GDM on Fedoras up to 32 at least.
|
| The laptop in question is from the late 2016.
|
| So much for "the world that is". My machine must be very,
| very otherworldly.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I've heard enlightenment can be a Wayland compositor now,
| could you try it?
|
| Also I think 3dfx Voodoo was the magic pixie dust, once you
| ever go OpenGL, you're not going back.
| kyberias wrote:
| Microsoft should contribute their Windows compositing engine
| (Desktop Window Manager or Desktop Compositing Engine) to Linux
| and we can move one.
| IshKebab wrote:
| The fact that the Windows desktop works reliably with basically
| zero issues and the Linux desktop is a complete mess is quite a
| compelling reason to use Windows surely? I can't see Microsoft
| giving away that advantage, even if it were technically
| possible, which it probably isn't.
| openfuture wrote:
| Okay so Wayland is a no go and X.org is too crufty to attract
| contributors.... Where is the "rewrite it in rust" crowd when you
| need it? :)
|
| The X11 protocol is the surface you need to maintain but swapping
| the internals should be do-able. Maybe we should have some call
| to action or reverse-auction or something. I'd love to support a
| viable path forward (I feel this effort would be a bit like
| neovim).
|
| Personally I think it could start as a Xephyr or Xnest type
| project (to allow you to run rootless X) and then extend it with
| a from-scratch protocol that slowly replaces X (starting with
| support for simple but useful applications and going from there).
|
| But clearly I only barely know what I'm talking about. Probably
| the reason things are the way they are is because of how the
| whole OpenGL / Vulcan etc. thing is not resolved, so any
| potential replacement has no foundation to build on (but this is
| something I don't know anything about).
| Spivak wrote:
| The problem is that if you were going to rewrite a display
| server from scratch you would probably want to implement
| Wayland over X11. X11 is barely a protocol anymore because Xorg
| is so dominant, you either do what Xorg does bug-for-bug and
| with all the extensions or apps will break.
| dekhn wrote:
| X.org is one of my longest-used pieces of software. I've used it
| for 25 years (at the time it was called XFree86 and you had to
| calculate your own modelines to get hi res), and it has worked
| incredibly well for me. I've written software some 20 years ago
| that still runs just fine (some xscreensavers) and I still use it
| today.
|
| Kind of a shame.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Oh, man. "It this a Sony Trinitron 19in CRT running at 65Hz, or
| is this a Gateway 17in monitor running at 60Hz? Why can I only
| see the left half of my desktop on the right side of the
| screen?", etc.
| coliveira wrote:
| Most work on X.org happens on its extensions and drivers. Just
| because the main server is stable (i.e., no new features are
| introduced) doesn't mean that the project is dead.
| jojobas wrote:
| X.org is not abandonware, it is actively supported.
|
| The fact that it's not updated with Awesome New Features every
| month, well, neither is Bash or Postfix.
|
| Some things should just work.
| boudin wrote:
| Not it is not, that's the whole point of the article. There's
| been no release for the past 2 years, even if there's bug fixes
| and updates waiting to be released. There's no release planned.
| If another company steps in an decide to take over support from
| Redhat, it can come back to life though.
| jojobas wrote:
| Debian's last release is from March this year, presumably
| from the current tree.
|
| Do officially declared releases really matter all that much?
| boudin wrote:
| Yes, it's quite important, the fact that there's no
| official release means that the project is stalled. It
| doesn't prevent to create custom builds by applying patches
| on top of the last release but that will only work for
| small bug fixes, customization and security fix. Bigger
| pieces of work will never be tackled this way, such as a
| good handling of hidpi screens, fixing security flaws such
| as being able to grab the output of any graphical
| application and read all inputs.
| corty wrote:
| The major X11 implementations always had phases of stalling
| development and disagreement. The last big phase lead to
| X.org taking over. Maybe this new big stall is the end, maybe
| it is just a signal for another change of direction. But
| there have been doom-and-gloom announcements about X11
| before, yet we are still stuck with it.
| tpoacher wrote:
| Abandonware means "not actively supported" / "no people
| involved in the project anymore". It does not mean "the
| maintainers do not adhere to a regular version-bumpy release
| format that I approve of".
| fugufugu wrote:
| Curiously, noone mentioned Xenocara[1] yet?
|
| [1]: https://www.xenocara.org/
| oriesdan wrote:
| This sounds like a bad case of Cult of Release.
|
| X works perfectly for me, and there is nothing I would want it to
| do that it doesn't do now. Why should it change?
|
| I have many programs I wrote years ago that I don't change and I
| use every day. Constant changes are not a measure of utility.
|
| But again and again, you'll find users looking at repositories
| and deciding that something is "dead" because there isn't any
| recent commit, often blaming developers for not doing more free
| work for them. This is a toxic attitude. When we have a software
| that works well and solves our problems, we should celebrate it,
| not complain it doesn't find new problems to solve.
| perlgeek wrote:
| If somebody discovers a security bug, what are the chances that
| somebody can cut a high-quality release with the fix in it, if
| it hasn't been done for two years?
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| The fix can be submitted on the previous release branch. If
| that branch doesn't exist, it can be cut off of the old
| commit the release was made from.
|
| If your objective is to improve security, this is better than
| getting a version with myriad changes that may introduce new
| bugs.
| Aeolun wrote:
| We do need some form of signal that indicates a project has a
| maintainer though. It doesn't matter that he has been inactive
| for 4 years (on that project), but if I submit a PR, it's nice
| if there's someone at the end of the line.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Repos could really have exactly that. A dead man's switch
| that asks you every, I don't know, three.to six months - via
| email even - "you good for this repo still?". You answer with
| a click "yup" and that's it - a signal on a repo on github or
| whatever that says "still alive". Otherwise "uh oh - we need
| help" and then a mechanism there to immediately offer
| alternative forks with a good enough signal "strength". It's
| like a pinky promise instead of actual repo activity.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| You wouldn't even necessarily need git/github to implement
| a new system! Agree on a standard file name like
| .githeartbeat containing a timestamp. Every few months (or
| w/e), active maintainers could push a commit to update the
| timestamp.
| oriesdan wrote:
| It sounds like a good idea, but I'm afraid it may be a
| nightmare for packagers (like the ones providing packages
| on GNU/linux distros), as they see updates to upstream
| only to realize they are just pings and don't need to be
| repackaged.
|
| It wouldn't be that often, though. And maybe they would
| actually love to have such heartbeat. I would love to
| hear a packager on that.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Packagers should generally only be looking at tagged
| releases in the upstream repository, though -- not every
| commit.
| mcny wrote:
| Personally I'm a fan of zero touch where I as a developer
| submit my code repo to app store like play store, apple
| app store, flathub or something and they just build it
| using a standard definition that the store defines and
| make it available on the store. Kind of feels like a lot
| of effort for every distro to look at every change in
| every application...
| ptx wrote:
| That's what distros do. That's what they are - a
| collection of vetted software packages tweaked to work
| together.
| vincnetas wrote:
| But someone has to volunteer to implement this process. Do
| you have time for that?
| Keyframe wrote:
| On github? I can't do that. Process has to be as
| frictionless as possible - hence not in a repo in files
| itself. A simple email with a button, not to bother
| maintainers too much / at all.
| biryani_chicken wrote:
| Repos could also have a notice like "It's been X days since
| last interaction" which would track the last commit, merge
| or even just comment in the issue tracker made by the
| maintainers.
| beervirus wrote:
| Having an active maintainer fixing security bugs as they arise
| isn't "finding new problems to solve."
| taeric wrote:
| While not wrong, ignores that this isn't the norm.
|
| I think we could use the terms releasing and maintaining.
| Constant releases is not the same as constant maintenance.
| And it is hard to agree that our industry sees that.
|
| By way of analogy, we seem to think we can improve the roads
| by building new bridges every year.
| vially wrote:
| > X works perfectly for me, and there is nothing I would want
| it to do that it doesn't do now. Why should it change?
|
| I'm not sure whether a program that works _for you_ is a good
| indication that it no longer needs to change.
|
| > When we have a software that works well and solves our
| problems, we should celebrate it, not complain it doesn't find
| new problems to solve.
|
| I think anyone can agree that, at the very least, screen
| tearing and proper support for mixed DPI setups are problems
| that fall squarely in the responsibilities of X and yet it
| _still_ didn 't manage to solve them after so many years.
|
| So it's hardly the case that X is just so good that users
| nowadays have to try really hard to find new problems for it to
| solve.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Implement the window system in the web browser and be done with
| it. Sheez.
| ac130kz wrote:
| Nvidia doesn't care about proper support of Wayland, many devs
| don't care about proper support of Wayland, Wayland's
| configuration itself is very limited, for example, forced
| software compositing. As much as I want to switch from X.org, I
| simply can't due to these limitations
| ceronman wrote:
| I have been using Fedora with Wayland daily for over 7 months now
| and I it works pretty well.
|
| I see that there are a lot of complains about Wayland here on HN.
| About input, screenshots and other stuff. But I have not
| experienced any of that. Input works perfectly and I have no
| problem with screenshots or screencasts.
|
| Maybe it's that I have well supported hardware (Thinkpad X1C7) or
| is it something that I'm missing?
| roenxi wrote:
| "Works for me" is a risky defence; if you are a slightly
| demanding Wayland user then it is fine, if you have unusually
| simple needs it isn't a useful contribution.
|
| It isn't anything to do with the hardware, it is the design
| assumption that isolating application's input and output should
| be mandatory.
|
| In hindsight; that was a design mistake. The correct design is
| probably something like isolation by default but optional (ie,
| allowing sharing). The current design means further protocols
| and de-facto standards are required to support, eg, streaming
| and screenshots. That is bad for an ecosystem that relies on
| low barriers to entry to get good software written.
|
| Basically, there needed to be a security model but the
| developers skipped it because it seemed like it shouldn't be
| the compositor's job. And after a very painful couple of years,
| seems quite likely that it _was_ the compositor 's job.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| >In hindsight; that was a design mistake. The correct design
| is probably something like isolation by default but optional
| (ie, allowing sharing).
|
| I'm not really convinced it was. Frankly, Wayland does a
| great job handling the tasks I want my display server to
| handle. I don't have to wade into config files every time I
| plug in a new HID, or a new monitor, and my touch pad is a
| joy to use.
|
| I think how screen sharing works is actually very dependent
| on the system in question ( I want a different set of prompts
| on my desktop from my laptop from my server), and that
| leaving that complexity out of the display server was a
| rough, but correct, decision.
|
| That said, I'm with you - I held off on Wayland for a long
| time because screen sharing and screen recording just weren't
| there. At least for me, Pipewire is now a working solution. I
| won't go back to X.
| freetime2 wrote:
| I last tried Wayland on Ubuntu 19.10, but quickly went back to
| Xorg after discovering some issues trying to share my screen on
| Zoom. I don't remember what the issues were specifically, but
| given that Xorg was working perfectly fine, it wasn't something
| I was willing to spend much effort troubleshooting.
|
| It sounds like screen sharing is a known problem area? Does
| anyone know if they have fixed these issues in later versions
| of Zoom or Ubuntu?
| p_l wrote:
| It depends on your desktop environment and the applications,
| because the only compatible parts of Wayland are the dumbest
| "draw a rectangular window" and simplest input support
| (assuming your "WM" implemented the input right).
|
| Essentially, what could depend on shared standards and
| implementations in X11, can't do so in Wayland, and there are
| two major forks when it comes to protocol extensions, as well
| as major fork between GNOME and everyone else on topic of
| Server-Side decorations.
| kochthesecond wrote:
| I have to say the story on server side decorations is nasty
| and disappointing from the GNOME devs.
| p_l wrote:
| It's evolution of the stance that started in early GNOME
| 2.x time, and crystallised with GNOME 3. Similar to how
| GNOME 3.8 was used to push systemd one everyone, similar to
| how they tried to push their own idea about input methods
| on everyone (since I don't use IBus, I don't know if they
| finally succeeded - fortunately UIM and XIM still work).
|
| "We know better" could be their motto.
| symlinkk wrote:
| And yet, they have built the most popular desktop
| environment for Linux. To me, GNOME (on Fedora) feels
| more polished and visually consistent than Windows 10,
| which is impressive considering the massive imbalance of
| resources between those two projects. Would that have
| been possible if they listened to the zealots online who
| complain if they don't support every possible
| configuration under the sun? I don't think so.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| And yet, Microsoft has built the most popular desktop
| 'operating system'.
|
| We've seen, again and again, that popularity has
| absolutely nothing to do with technical merit or even
| lack of overt user-hostility.
| bitwize wrote:
| Being better than Windows 10 is a low bar to clear, and
| doing so doesn't make your software not shit.
|
| Honestly, the current state of mainstream desktop
| environments -- open source or proprietary -- is pretty
| awful with the exception of perhaps KDE and little ones
| like XFCE and LXDE. It kind of makes me glad I didn't hop
| on the GNOME train in the late 90s -- I could see the
| awful coming even back then -- and just stuck with a bare
| WM.
| csande17 wrote:
| My personal conspiracy theory: the GNOME/Freedesktop/Red
| Hat crew is pushing Wayland so hard to prevent people
| from using 30 years' worth of lightweight X window
| managers that exist and are better than GNOME.
| p_l wrote:
| It's not about supporting every possible configuration
| under the sun. It's often about not supporting the bare
| minimum that would make it a good environment, based on
| "know better" from people who have no relevant
| experience.
|
| The IBus case is classic example - There was high-handed
| declaration that having one single global IME state is
| "easier" for users. The problem is when you regularly
| have to use languages that are incompatible in writing
| systems and input methods. Whether its one of the CJK or
| switching between one of the cyrillic variants and latin,
| life is much easier when you can have separate input
| state between let's say an Instant Messenger and your
| IDE.
|
| For me, I recall the "canary in the coal mine" was when
| they refused (despite earlier promises and roadmaps) to
| re-implement certain things related to printing, again in
| a way that probably didn't bother the developers.
|
| A similar case involves all the very deep integration
| with systemd, where they essentially declared that
| there's one Operating System under the Sun and its name
| is Fedora.
|
| And it might feel more polished than Windows 10 on
| surface, yes. But then it's much less capable and the
| resources in Windows go towards things like not breaking
| people's software and behaviours.
| corty wrote:
| You are probably only using Gnome and GTK3 applications.
| Everything else lags behind (because in Wayland you need to
| reinvent everything for each WM and toolkit). Everything is
| also incompatible because of all those reimplementations, so if
| you don't just stick to the one true Gnome way, it will be
| broken. If you just do what Fedora is designed for, I agree
| that it can be fine.
| kriive wrote:
| Well, I am using sway, and I have found that not true in my
| experience. Qt has also good support for Wayland and so do
| SDL-based apps. I don't use any GNOME native applications and
| I manage just fine.
| art4ur wrote:
| The last time I checked Wayland I still couldn't share only one
| monitor when I screen shared in Jitsi.
|
| The CPU jumped to 100 when I recorded my desktop with OBS and had
| a terrible delay.
|
| It's just not ready yet.
| emersion wrote:
| This talk "The Real Story Behind Wayland and X" by Daniel Stone
| (a longtime X developer) may debunk some misconceptions in this
| thread:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
| sergeykish wrote:
| It is not controversial so it is down here.
| verroq wrote:
| Someone explain why the push to wayland when there is no
| discernable performance increase [0] and lots of broken
| applications.
|
| [0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-
| Xo...
| roenxi wrote:
| Most of X.Org is horrible and the entire system is
| unmaintainable. It is hard to even get maintenance releases for
| it released, as the article alludes to.
|
| Development hasn't stalled because people think X is good.
| Development has stalled because the fundamental design is so
| misaligned from the modern graphics stack that improvements are
| not worth attempting.
| verroq wrote:
| So where are these Wayland "improvements"? A Wayland stack is
| "better" but has same perf as X11.
| p_l wrote:
| The thing is, X.Org server is not X11 the protocol.
|
| X11 could be easily implemented on new driver framework
| supporting new graphic stack. Instead we got a piece of sh*t
| that is fitting for a custom embedded device or some closed
| environment, but not an X11 replacement.
| roenxi wrote:
| Nobody in particular wants to use the X11 protocol. It is
| complicated and supports a bunch of weird functionality
| that is rather niche. The trend seems to be to use OpenGL
| and call that done.
|
| I haven't seen many serious complaints that Wayland doesn't
| support the X11 protocol since people can run an X server
| directly using XWayland.
| p_l wrote:
| As I mentioned elsewhere, XWayland isn't actually
| compatible if you want to support modern applications,
| for example ones that might expect a systray. ICCM is,
| iirc, broken (I haven't spent time checking after finding
| out some apps critical to me didn't work at all).
|
| X11 could be updated a lot. But some of the "weird
| functionality" is stuff that is slowly becoming available
| for normal people that was thrown out with the bathwater
| by GTK3, like ability to use more than 8bit per colour
| channel.
| roenxi wrote:
| > As I mentioned elsewhere, XWayland isn't actually
| compatible if you want to support modern applications
|
| Yeah, Wayland is a bad protocol. It isn't flexible enough
| to do what X11 does. But if it was a good protocol, and
| capable of implementing X11, then it would get X11 for
| free through XWayland.
|
| They don't need to reimplement X11. They can use X.org or
| whatever for that.
| p_l wrote:
| My point is that XWayland, for various reasons, does not
| replicate X11 fully. So yeah, I can open something like
| Xnest/Xephyr. At that point, the utility value of Wayland
| drops _ridiculously heavy_ from my point of view.
| sergeykish wrote:
| It is theoretical until you've done it. People who worked
| on XOrg decided to abandon it and create Wayland. X11 is
| not good enough for them but is good for you...
| madmulita wrote:
| RedHat
| boudin wrote:
| Wayland is not just focused on performances but on addressing
| security flaws of X11. Those benchmarks were benchmarks of
| gnome 3.36, it doesn't represent "wayland" but gnome 3.36
| implementation of it. If your concern is performance, it's
| still pretty much on of the point of focus. Gnome 3.38 already
| brought some good improvement there and there's still a few
| things to come in the area.
|
| In term of broken application, what do you mean?
| arendtio wrote:
| If Wayland would work out the box, I would love to switch. Last
| time I checked (a few months ago), it didn't work too well for me
| and after a week or so I returned to my working X.org setup.
| mamon wrote:
| The best Linux desktop environment is Windows 10 (with WSL2)
| That's why some journalists have already called 2020 "Year of
| Linux On Desktop".
|
| Let's be honest, Linux has a good (but not great) kernel, good-
| to-great apps on server side, and the crappy UI side (Wayland,
| windows managers, desktop environments)
|
| The best way to interact with Linux is throught API or
| commandline. Leave UI stuff for more competent folks (Microsoft
| or Apple)
| tristor wrote:
| The fact that both X.org and Wayland are unusable and have
| horrible architectures for various different reasons, plus both
| seem to be abandonware, does not give me hope that desktop Linux
| will ever become a meaningful thing within the next two decades.
| trashburger wrote:
| I think the solution is not Wayland but an X12, that is, a
| protocol that solves the problems of the aging X11 protocol while
| also not completely breaking compatibility and requiring the use
| of a separate Xorg server within Wayland. I wish people had gone
| that way instead of fully dismissing Xorg.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I disagree and think a clean break was the way to go. X had
| acquired a whole lot of legacy baggage and compatibility with
| that should be provided by a separate piece of code.
|
| Wayland should have been a completely new thing built with the
| lessons learned from X but vastly simplified for how modern
| display systems are actually used. Unfortunately it was built
| with no intent to handle many of the common use cases X already
| handled just fine, leaving that up to third parties to develop
| their own ways handling it, leading to some fragmentation
| (Linux really needed more fragmentation!) and very slow
| adoption.
| Avamander wrote:
| I love how people say that an unified method of taking
| screenshots, screen streaming, screen recording and
| performance in general is legacy baggage.
| dralley wrote:
| Those standards need to exist, but those standards do not
| need to exist as part of the display protocol.
|
| People make this mistake over and over and over. Nothing
| prevents the compositor writers from deciding on a common
| API for screenshots and similar things (and there has been
| movement in this direction)
| Avamander wrote:
| > Those standards need to exist, but those standards do
| not need to exist as part of the display protocol.
|
| They do. It's pointless fragmentation otherwise.
| 2ion wrote:
| The big mistake with W was leaving so much of function
| specification to the implementor. W was a spec, but totally
| incomplete for what was needed to build a usable power user
| desktop. The Linux DE landscape was already fractured to
| the degree of inefficiency for such a small user base, and
| with W this fracture actually deepened due to the Great
| Unsharing of implementation details. Nothing global.
| Everything local, from decorations to whatnot. Now, besides
| competing implementations of an entire display server
| stack, you have the huge communications & politics overhead
| between the camps that is required to agree on such simple
| "protocols" like "inhibit screensaver start" (the "idle-
| inhibit wars") --- not a good use of resources.
|
| I think the future of X11 will be that if a vendor ---
| likely Nvidia --- sees any point in it down the road,
| they'll fork Xorg and provide, complete with their own
| driver bundle, the display server.
|
| For now, no vendor of drivers like Nvidia is likely to be
| concerned about X11 stabilizing because that's less toil
| for them to keep their drivers stable on Linux. They are
| busy enough with keeping up with the Linux kernel breaking
| their stuff every release <--- not a great advertisement
| for vendors to even support Linux; looked the same with X11
| to me during the 2008-2015 period. Changing X11 was not
| economical to support without a great justification.
|
| Some software is finished --- maybe it's time to call X11
| finished.
| 1_player wrote:
| With W I assume you mean Wayland? You comment is
| confusing because the W Window System [1] is in fact the
| predecessor of X11 and that's what I thought you were
| referring to.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_Window_System
| nullc wrote:
| A lot of this is due to a design culture that seems common
| around the Gnome project.
|
| Victims of this mimetic disease have caught on to the idea
| that 80% of _usage_ needs 20% of the features.
|
| This might well be true in a literal sense, but it ignores
| that 99% of the _users_ need one or two items from the
| remaining 80% of the features and its just a different one
| or two items for each user.
|
| The result is something that isn't completely functional
| for all but a tiny portion of the user base. :( Workarounds
| exist to expand that somewhat, though they're often
| extremely poorly maintained.
|
| For example, I had a gnome3 using system that suddenly
| started insta-crashing anytime a GTK dialog was opened on
| it. I eventually had to blow away all its gconf to recover
| it.
|
| It turned out that at some point someone decided that 300%
| and 400% scaling had no purpose and caused issues because
| in some cases they messed up UI layout. They removed them
| and the removal was just shipped along with security &
| bugfix updates in fedora. The way it was removed caused
| instant crashing for people that previously had them
| enabled!
|
| I'm fixed now, though with the display at 200% I have
| difficulty reading it (It's a 4k TV that I need to read
| from a long distance away) ... but since I can't use gtk
| interface stuff on it at all now I guess I won't be opening
| any bugs on minor layout issues that might be caused by
| increased scaling. PROBLEM SOLVED :(
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Yeah, as soon as I saw Unity, I jumped ship from Gnome,
| and soon after, Debian.
| boudin wrote:
| Since wayland has been pretty much started by Xorg developers,
| you can consider it as X12 I guess.
| bitwize wrote:
| Wayland is in many ways the exact _opposite_ of X design
| principles. It 's a giant rebellious-teenager "fuck you,
| daddy!" to X11, not really a successor. A successor
| technology would be _great_.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| I'm all for Wayland - I agree with its direction and focus.
| However, Wayland will take a long time to reach the maturity that
| X.org has had for decades, including remote support. As a result,
| having both X.org and Wayland available on your disto is probably
| going to be the norm (and should be the norm) for a while. X.org
| is less "abandonware" and more "transitionware" in my opinion.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Wayland will take a long time to reach the maturity that
| X.org has had for decades
|
| Xorg (the server) is from 2004 (16 years ago), the X Consortium
| was founded in 1988, and Wikipedia puts X11 itself at 1984 (36
| years ago). Wayland's initial release was 2008 (12 years ago).
| Wayland is either 3/4ths the age of Xorg, or 1/3rd the age of
| X11 - bluntly, if they don't have their act together now, why
| should I expect them to ever get it together?
| tbr1 wrote:
| Developers willing/able to work on X11/Wayland plumbing are a
| (very) finite number. A single developer can have a large
| impact. With more of them switching their primary efforts to
| Wayland, the past few years have seen large improvements in
| the landscape, and this trend is bound to continue.
|
| Granted, there are rough edges, and I wouldn't claim any
| Wayland compositor is as polished as an X11 one -- but we're
| not that far off, and for many people the benefits of running
| a Wayland session today outweigh the cons.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| The thing is, that's _also_ been true since at least 2015 -
| the claim is that Xorg is dead and all the devs who were
| working on it are on Wayland now and it 'll be working any
| day now. And that's _been_ the claim for at least the 5
| years that I 've been following it. And in fairness, they
| have made progress in that time - by the time Wayland is as
| old as Xorg, it might even reach feature parity!
| tbr1 wrote:
| To make the comparison closer to apples-to-apples, the
| Wayland analog to the Xorg server would be something like
| GNOME's mutter compositor, which had its first Wayland
| support out in 2013[1] -- 7 years ago. And the rate of
| progress has only sped up since then -- take a Wayland
| compositor from a year ago and compare it to the same one
| today, and things tend to be much more polished.
|
| [1]: judging by
| https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland
| nailer wrote:
| Old Linux person here - what does Keith Packard (man who
| restarted work on X when it was stagnant and made x.org) work on
| these days?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Another proof that open source is only half of it, it doesn't
| matter if the code is available when there isn't anyone around to
| actually do something with it.
| sergeykish wrote:
| Open source gives you freedom to fix it, to share fix, to hire
| to fix.
|
| I see it as another proof that people who depend on the
| infrastructure do not want to contribute. They would better
| whine and critique.
| pjmlp wrote:
| A freedom that a large majority ignores, because they only
| see it as free beer.
| sergeykish wrote:
| I've submitted Daniel Stone "The real story behind Wayland
| and X (2013)", checked past submissions, there is yours 6
| years ago.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24888454
| emilsedgh wrote:
| How is this news?
|
| The long term plan was to abandon X.org and move to Wayland.
|
| Of course Wayland is still not there, but X.org is mature and
| stable enough to keep users happy for the time being, until the
| whole ecosystem catches up with Wayland.
|
| As a matter of fact, abandoning X.org (except for security
| patches) would be a good strategy to incentivize the ecosystem
| not to build on top of it anymore.
|
| Maybe X.org should do what request.js and momen.js did and call
| it done at some point.
| gjvc wrote:
| This is a rather worrying stance to be pushing on something which
| is relied upon day in and day out. The phoronix author has lost
| credibility with me by the opinion expressed in this article.
|
| With this kind of FUD, it is no wonder Linux has a hard time
| being accepted on the desktop. What enterprises -- and everyday
| developers like me -- need, is a stable desktop to run IDEs and
| the like. As an example, Debian with Xorg has been fantastic for
| me for several years for JetBrains tools and GSuite for mail and
| docs, which is a pretty complete setup, and in the WFH era, Zoom
| and Teams just work. This is what we should be striving for --
| boring, predictable, reliability, not juggling with chainsaws on
| the bleeding edge.
|
| X11 comes from a different time, but any successor must be
| worthy, not just have a different approach. It's also worth
| remembering that much of Windows' practical longevity is due to
| its backwards compatibility. It's not shiny, but it works, and
| that begets loyalty.
| tupputuppu wrote:
| Apologies, but I don't understand your comment. The original
| article said X.org is unmaintained. Your comment basically
| replied "it works for me and I like it, Wayland doesn't cut
| it".
|
| Sure - great opinion - but doesn't change the state of the
| world, which is that X.org is unmaintained and all the real
| development firepower has moved on to Wayland.
|
| We can all have opinions and I kind of agree with yours, but
| the article is about the realities of life and facts which we
| need to accept.
| ddingus wrote:
| "Need to accept" vs "get stuff done" = "use Windows or OSX"
|
| Fact is the people who developed X thought through multi user
| graphical computing.
|
| That process has not really happened since.
|
| It needs to, or we just won't see desktop Linux compete.
| znpy wrote:
| I am not necessarily against Wayland or new things in general.
|
| But it bothers me when no clear upgrade path is defined ("drop
| your stuff" is not acceptable) and a half-hassed incomplete
| solution is proposed instead, and backwards compatibility is
| pretty much disregarded.
|
| For what concerns my personal computing, I'll stay on Xorg until
| XFCE supports Wayland. Then I'll update.
| mrob wrote:
| I'm against Wayland because it forces compositing on all
| windowed applications. I'll stay on Xorg as long as possible
| because I'm not willing to sacrifice latency for no tearing.
| jcelerier wrote:
| yep, compositor latency is infuriating when you're used to
| non-composited UI
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Can you really tell the difference? What's the latency? Are
| your eyes that sensitive?
| cannedslime wrote:
| I think our sight is all a little different. I can
| clearly see 50/60hz strobing in light when others can't.
| Back in the old CRT days I would get strained eye sight
| and nausea if I worked at monitors running below 85hz,
| unless it had long lasting phosphors like the old
| monochrome CRTs.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Good LCDs are static unless you're running a dvi-vga-
| displayport-vga-hdmi dongle monster where the pixels are
| inevitably shifting a bit every instant. What you're more
| likely to be seeing is PWM backlight flickering at you.
|
| If it's indeed the LCD and not the backlight, pray tell
| us the model so we don't end up buying it.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| They didn't say anything about LCDs.
| [deleted]
| dralley wrote:
| Wrong: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/gnomes-mutter-
| gets-fu...
|
| I get it, all these features that used to just be supported
| by the one Xorg server now need to be supported by individual
| compositors - but still, it is simply misinformation that
| "Wayland" is broken because Mutter / Kwin / Sway are
| incomplete.
| mrob wrote:
| I specifically said "windowed applications". This is
| talking about fullscreen applications.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| How is a 1yo merge request about "surface fullscreen
| unredirect" relevant to a complaint about forcing
| compositing on _WINDOWED_ applications?
| hedora wrote:
| If it isn't broken, then give an example of a compositor
| that isn't broken.
|
| A protocol with zero practical implementations is, in
| practice, broken.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| All your stuff is already composited, and if done well it
| doesn't add much latency at all. You're still paying it in X,
| just badly, and with none of the upsides (eg, no tearing).
| Even if you're trying to avoid a compositor, none of the UI
| toolkits are participating in that nonsense.
| josefx wrote:
| KDE seems to have a flag to turn of the compositor, which
| seems to result in no tearing.
| mrob wrote:
| That's no reason to add another layer of avoidable
| compositing.
| diegocg wrote:
| >backwards compatibility is pretty much disregarded.
|
| Wayland compositors provide backwards compatibility with most
| X11 apps via XWayland, I don't think it's fair to say that they
| completely disregard compatibility
| znpy wrote:
| last time i checked remote desktop (ala vnc) was not really a
| thing and opening remote apps on the local display (ala ssh
| -X) wasn't a thing either.
|
| That's disregard for backwards compatibility to me.
|
| edit: which is not to shit on wayland itself, it's to
| complain about the general attitude which is like "just don't
| do that" or "oh that's old, we don't support that"
| chousuke wrote:
| wayvnc and waypipe work just fine nowadays.
|
| I've actually used waypipe more often in the last year than
| I ever used ssh -X, thanks to a shift towards WFH :P It's
| sometimes useful to be able to run Firefox remotely from my
| workstation at the office.
| p_l wrote:
| Due to how XWayland works, a lot of applications (sometimes
| critical ones) won't work under XWayland ever (pretty much
| everything that works on interaction between X clients fails
| hard).
| rjzzleep wrote:
| I keep trying to use Wayland, but it never fully works.
| Everyone keeps saying how well the highdpi stuff works, but
| then it really only works for a subset of things. For the rest
| it's actually worse than Xorg.
|
| Multiscreen is Xorg is kinda mushy so I thought maybe Wayland
| fixes it, but no it doesn't.
|
| Wayland is now 12 years old and everything is still half-baked.
|
| It quotes an intel developer saying they don't want to do any
| more stuff on Xorg. But the reality is that as much as I admire
| intels open source contributions. I don't remember a time where
| all the features in the Intel driver actually fully worked. But
| sure, maybe it's an Xorg issue, or they don't know how to do
| release management.
|
| Either way, Wayland doesn't seem to solve the problems it
| promised to fix.
| p_l wrote:
| Having used Intel open source drivers for 12 years, I've
| never lost the opinion I gained back with X3100 gpu that
| Intel is the darling because technically open sourcing the
| driver papered over the many, many faults of their code.
|
| Whenever I had a chance to run on nvidia binary drivers, the
| only things I occasionally missed were some new features, or
| having to wait a bit longer to update the kernel. Stability
| was better, drivers more performant, and I don't remember
| daily fighting with memory leaks.
|
| And X.Org's driver architecture could be replaced completely
| (in fact, it could be made to run on the same stack as
| Wayland) - it wouldn't be the first compositing Xserver
| around, and could use methods that would deal with noticeable
| to many lag involved in compositor-based UI.
| ATsch wrote:
| > And X.Org's driver architecture could be replaced
| completely (in fact, it could be made to run on the same
| stack as Wayland)
|
| Many distros do this already. Both for graphics drivers
| (xf86-video-modesetting) and input drivers (xorg-input-
| libinput)
| p_l wrote:
| There's more to it - X.Org is based on lowest-common-
| denominator code from early days of X11, and the internal
| driver system despite upgrades is a bit lacking.
|
| There's glamor, but AFAIK it's not as tested as it
| should, and is still shoehorned into old model.
|
| An example of not following the old model is Xsgi, which
| was (hw) compositing and quite ingenious in many ways.
| Fnoord wrote:
| > Whenever I had a chance to run on nvidia binary drivers,
| the only things I occasionally missed were some new
| features, or having to wait a bit longer to update the
| kernel. Stability was better, drivers more performant, and
| I don't remember daily fighting with memory leaks.
|
| I had a Nvidia Riva TNT2 and later on an Nvidia GeForce. I
| ran Linux on it.
|
| I had stability issues with the driver, but I solved it the
| following way: ran one X server with a DE, and another X
| server with Nvidia's proprietary driver (mostly for games).
| This way, if I had to kill the X server using Nvidia's
| driver I didn't lose any work.
|
| If that wasn't enough, all the bloody time there were
| massive security problems found in Nvidia's proprietary
| driver. I don't know if that is still the case, cause I
| switched away to ATi in the 00s, and Intel graphics cards +
| ThinkPad as laptop. ATi/AMD has come a long way ever since.
| Their FOSS drivers are stable, and they deliver (see
| various Phoronix benchmarks).
| solarkraft wrote:
| Wayland is a protocol. It has nothing to do with multi screen
| support. You're talking about the compositor you used. The
| one I use handles multi-screen setups quite well.
| severino wrote:
| I never got to fully understand Wayland's model, but if
| this means that something that previously was handled by
| the display server for everybody, and now every single
| desktop environment (or at least something like wlroots)
| has to solve it over and over again... how isn't this a
| step back?
| zepearl wrote:
| I agree. On one hand I can understand the need to shrink
| code, focus on the core functionality etc..., but on the
| other hand X has e.g. "xset" and "xbindkeys" which can be
| used for all X-desktops (or "Window Managers" or however
| they're called). With wayland each single desktop
| environment has to re-implement all that functionality =>
| looks like wasted effort to me - the modularity (from the
| point of view of functionality) of X is lost in Wayland.
| josefx wrote:
| Cutting out bloat, just like you loose weight by cutting
| of your head.
| Spivak wrote:
| There's nothing from someone implementing a single
| extensible compositor that everyone standardizes to build
| their DE. It's the same as Xorg and X11.
|
| Right now there's a bunch of competing compositors with
| different use-cases but nothing says it has to be true
| forever.
| josefx wrote:
| > Wayland is a protocol.
|
| A protocol definition could cover multi screen support,
| requiring implementors to do something sane. Of course one
| of the reasons that Wayland exists was to cut down the
| bloat X had accumulated over the years. Given that it is
| rather surprising that the Wayland spec isn't just an empty
| page.
| vageli wrote:
| > Wayland is a protocol. It has nothing to do with multi
| screen support. You're talking about the compositor you
| used. The one I use handles multi-screen setups quite well.
|
| Which compositor do you use?
| solarkraft wrote:
| I use Wayfire [0], a customizable compositor based on
| wlroots, the same base as sway. It's quite involved and
| not absolutely perfect yet, but it has some features I
| haven't yet seen on other DEs like being able to swipe
| horizontally on your touchpad to _smoothly_ switch
| workspaces (following your fingers) and the satisfaction
| of having it properly configured is pretty high.
|
| There have been 3 issues I've had regarding it, 2 I'd
| call minor:
|
| - I haven't found a way to rearrange external displays,
| though it is theoretically supported
|
| - After a bug in my TV switching to the lowest possible
| resolution through switching the input in home assistant
| it would not work with 4K again until after a complete
| reboot (so it may not even be a wlroots issue)
|
| - XWayland apps are unresponsive in the upper half of the
| second screen (4K at 1x scaling)
|
| Using mostly native Wayland apps neither of these have
| been deal breakers for me. Something under-discussed is
| that virtual desktops are per-screen, which I find quite
| cool.
|
| So that's my adventure with Wayfire, but I would assume
| that Gnome and KDE have perfected multi-screen usage on
| and off of Wayland by now.
|
| [0]: https://wayfire.org/
| selectodude wrote:
| >XWayland apps are unresponsive in the upper half of the
| second screen (4K at 1x scaling)
|
| Seems to be a bit of a dealbreaker for people who want to
| use 100 percent of their screen instead of only 75
| percent.
| josteink wrote:
| > I keep trying to use Wayland, but it never fully works.
| Everyone keeps saying how well the highdpi stuff works
|
| I use Wayland daily and have for a few years. It's clearly
| gotten better, and I rarely encounter problems. I do have my
| load of applications still running in XWayland though.
|
| But yes. Support for varying DPI in my multi-monitor setup is
| handled much better on Wayland than on X11. I would say much
| better than on Windows too.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| How's the forced v-sync? I assume all games run XWayland,
| which makes it a non-issue. (Otherwise, it'd presumably be
| an FPS hit in a world where adaptive sync [like G-SYNC but
| not really FreeSync since the latter doesn't really work in
| Linux lol] makes tearing a thing of the past and obviates
| v-sync entirely.)
|
| Also, can you use xdotool for key input redirection or
| screen capture programs and stuff yet?
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| I use sway with no issues and a much snappier Desktop with no
| screen tearing.
| weare138 wrote:
| This. I'm not necessarily against moving to Wayland but the
| display server and compositor is a _really_ important component
| and Wayland has been a long time coming, 12 years now to be
| exact. Either we need a clear path to Wayland or just keep
| maintaining Xorg.
| noobermin wrote:
| May be it's time for people to be against new things.
|
| Open source I know is often a work of love, but it's a bit
| painful that everyone is chasing after new things instead of
| keeping things that already work working. It's like how there
| are dozens of js frameworks that have thousands of contributors
| whereas openssl had one which lead to the infamous heartbleed
| bug. We need to talk about how the culture of open source is
| broken in this regard and figure out how to fix it.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Trying out something new and fun is what you do in your free
| time. Working with decade-old legacy code is what you get
| paid huge amounts for and the reason you want to start from
| scratch in your free time.
|
| I agree that this is not good overall, but it's going to be
| very hard to convince people to work on not-fun things for
| free. Some might see it more akin to volunteer work, but the
| amount of people willing to do this are far outnumbered by
| the people simply doing things for fun. Too be fair, it is at
| least pretty great in so far as that they're doing open-
| source work :)
| ernst_klim wrote:
| >May be it's time for people to be against new things.
|
| Maybe it's time for people to stop whining in the internet
| and start writing code?
|
| X.org code is there, support it, contribute to it, improve it
| if you want to.
|
| > infamous heartbleed bug
|
| Yeah. Because real open source is like that: millions are
| arguing in forums, few write code.
|
| And that's the problem Wayland is trying to solve BTW, by
| removing quite a lot of obscure legacy which only a few
| properly understand.
|
| Writing things from scratch is usually good, it allows:
|
| 1) To follow modern practices so modern devs can understand
| the code and contribute
|
| 2) To use modern languages and technologies which are
| inherently more safe and secure (due to better type systems,
| linters, language design)
|
| 3) To get rid of technical debt
| hobby-coder-guy wrote:
| Who are you expecting to provide this for you?
| cpach wrote:
| Let me fill in with my perspective as a Mac user: I expect
| the vendor (i.e Apple) to supply a decent desktop
| environment. The did a quite good job at it. I didn't need to
| pay extra, it was included in the sale of the computer.
| freehunter wrote:
| But X.org isn't a hardware vendor. It's not owned by any
| hardware vendor. It's not even owned by an OS vendor, or by
| an OS at all.
|
| Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company. Microsoft and
| Google are close behind. Of course they can give away their
| desktop environment away for free. System76 (et al) can't
| compete with that. X.org can't compete with that.
|
| I mean, this is exactly the reason I use Mac, because it
| ships with a good DE out of the box supported by a trillion
| dollar vendor. But that doesn't help people who prefer
| Linux.
| NeutronStar wrote:
| Who is he to expect non half assed solution? That's your
| answer?
| kllrnohj wrote:
| I think the problem with Wayland is it _isn 't_ half-assed. The
| insistence on being a generic protocol instead of a product
| fragments an already small dev community. And being a protocol
| so incredibly slows down velocity.
| darthrupert wrote:
| Wayland was the last straw for me. It made me switch to Macs
| after 20 years of almost exclusive Linux on the desktop and a
| few dev stints. It was cool when my time was less expensive.
|
| I check the state of the linux world about once a year still.
| And obviously keep using it on the servers.
|
| Best of luck to everyone using it for desktop. I totally get
| why you do it, but it's just not for me right now.
| grep_name wrote:
| Have you considered using a tiling window manager? I've been
| using bspwm for years and it just uses X. I don't really miss
| anything about floating window managers, and since switching
| everything feels more stable and portable
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I'm using a tiling window manager on Mac
| na85 wrote:
| Which one?
| eatonphil wrote:
| Not who you're responding to; there's Amethyst but I use
| Rectangle (the fork of now defunct Spectacles).
| sergeykish wrote:
| But why? X11 works. I've tried wayland in 2010, second time
| today. If anything today's story shows that developers do not
| want to work on X11 and how much we depend on Red Hat.
|
| X11 problems explained by Daniel Stone [1]. As I understand
| there are two parallel architectures, one uses X11 server
| primitives (xfontsel), another renders on client (fontconfig
| fc-list etc). It is very confusing.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ
| bashtoni wrote:
| I was provided with a Macbook Pro 15" by my work and I
| struggle to understand comments like this.
|
| Upgrades often break things, I'm forced to use brew to
| install software which leaves files strewn around the file
| system and regularly seems to have cross package conflicts.
|
| And don't get me started on the hardware - the laptop is
| excessively heavy and the keyboard is awful (and I don't just
| mean the touch bar gimmick).
|
| My personal laptop is a Lenovo Carbon X1 and Fedora runs very
| nicely on it, requiring very little thought put into
| management if you're running the default desktop (Gnome). I
| can update the firmware and BIOS from inside Linux, and
| Lenovo have even started shipping newer versions of the
| laptop with Fedora pre-installed.
|
| There's massive scope of tinkering with Linux if you want to,
| but as long as you're careful with the hardware you buy
| there's absolutely no need to tinker at all if you don't want
| to.
| javagram wrote:
| Macports seems much better than brew generally, but also
| under maintained and vastly under-used compared to brew for
| some reason.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Nobody is forcing you to use Wayland. Or are they? On Fedora
| it's a single line change em /etc to disable it (which I do
| because of Nvidia).
| darthrupert wrote:
| Indeed. And thankfully nobody is forcing me to use Linux.
| grandinj wrote:
| Except that, in the name of progress, various things are
| broken in the x11 world too on fedora, as a direct
| consequence of the wayland updates. Which is unfortunate
| wayneftw wrote:
| Sounds like a Fedora problem then. Pick a different
| distro - problem solved.
|
| There is nothing so special going on in Fedora that can't
| be done in other distros. Try an Arch based Linux
| desktop. You'll get newer packages and better package
| management. Manjaro has worked well for me.
| sergeykish wrote:
| Fedora switched to Wayland, that is unfortunate for X.Org
| users but basically it means someone stopped fixing
| issues.
|
| You either fix them yourself and contribute back if
| possible. Or switch to distribution where someone still
| fixes these issues.
|
| I've investigated X.Org caused bug just for two days and
| since then totally support Wayland development. What we
| have today is not healthy.
| grandinj wrote:
| We used to have a well-functioning display server that
| was robust and battle-tested.
|
| The wayland people replaced that with a half-baked
| solution because they insisted on boiling the ocean -
| replacing the entire thing in one go, instead of working
| piecemeal (which the X protocol was explicitly designed
| to allow).
|
| Which is a great pity, because now the day of the Linux
| Desktop is even further off.
| meddlepal wrote:
| The day of the Linux desktop is Windows with WSL2.
|
| The irony.
| sergeykish wrote:
| X.Org people replaced it with Wayland. Are you going to
| maintain X.Org? Who is going to maintain it? Maybe you
| are going to hire developers to preserve purity?
|
| > instead of working piecemeal
|
| That's exactly what happened. Do you remember fonts
| without anti-aliasing? Run xfontsel, that's X11 fonts
| rendering. Freetype, Fontconfig, Cairo, Pango, HarfBuzz
| work on client side and push pixels to X Server. Entire
| rendering model changed, X.Org become compositor. They've
| faced limits, they've implemented DRI, DRI2 [1].
|
| Now developers decided to make good compositor. And
| they've done it without disturbing X11 ecosystem, with
| clean way to port toolkits. Window Managers can't be
| ported but they can be reimplemented, just look how many
| compositors people built [2]. It is a miracle.
|
| Linux future is bright. Video drivers moved from X Server
| to kernel, display configuration parts replaced by KMS,
| we've got modern font rendering, text shaping, we've got
| open source AMD GPU driver!
|
| I still use Intel GPU, X.Org and xmonad, but the times
| they are a changing.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Infras
| tructur...
|
| [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland
| nullc wrote:
| > Do you remember fonts without anti-aliasing?
|
| On a 200 dpi display the xfontsel display looks better.
| :)
| sergeykish wrote:
| I believe you can disable anti aliasing and font hinting
| in Fontconfig.
| blitblitblit wrote:
| So can we revive any of these also abandoned alternatives?
|
| * Tiny X (Still Xorg just barebones and faster) -
| https://github.com/tinycorelinux/tinyx
|
| * Xynth - https://github.com/alperakcan/xynth
|
| * Nano-X / MicroWindows - http://microwindows.org/ (Seems still
| active? Just needs some modern GUI ports.)
|
| * DirectFB (Needs modern driver support) -
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120118003245/http://www.direct...
|
| * SVGALib (Needs modern driver support) -
| https://github.com/akosela/svgalib
|
| * FBUI (Needs porting to modern kernels) -
| https://github.com/8l/fbui
| moonchild wrote:
| > Tiny X
|
| Probably not, because:
|
| > Design choices [...] no gl
| pengaru wrote:
| You left out GGI/KGI.
|
| But most of this stuff is basically irrelevant in a post-
| KMS/DRM linux world.
|
| So few apps were ever written targeting directfb and libggi
| it's as if they never existed.
|
| SVGAlib apps frequently performed direct hardware access
| requiring root and disrupting graphics hardware state WRT other
| graphical apps like X or fb. Unfortunately we have a
| significant collection of old demos and games targeting
| SVGAlib, but at this point it's probably best to just run them
| in a virtualized linux environment lacking any graphics drivers
| so SVGAlib can run the show on a faked VGA. For such apps where
| source is available, it's better to just port to something like
| SDL.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Better to say both X11, and Wayland are now two pieces of
| abandonware.
| Rochus wrote:
| What's the alternative then?
| corty wrote:
| Lack of an alternative does not make Wayland any better
| unfortunately.
| corty wrote:
| I fear you are right. While there might be commits in the
| Wayland repos, featurewise progress has ceased. Waylands broken
| architecture has made progress hard to impossible. Porting of
| popular window managers is extremely slow since there is just
| no thought given to X compatibility. Input handling by each
| application on its own is insane and broken. Feature-
| consistency across compositors on things like screenshots is a
| pipe-dream. A promised easy ssh -X replacement doesn't work
| right after a decade.
|
| Waylands broken architecture makes progress slow through
| unnecessary duplication, incompatibility and the lack of a
| smooth migration for many software packages (usually it's
| rewrite-time). Wayland should be abandoned and the design
| redone.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| In what way is Wayland's architecture broken? Is there a
| critique floating around I could look at?
| corty wrote:
| The design overview slides are their own critique: Wayland
| does almost nothing besides render buffer handling. Input?
| Applications job. Window decorations? Compositors job.
| Application talking to the Compositor? Somebody elses job.
| Clipboard? Maybe compositor or toolkit. Screenshots and
| remoting? Somebody elses job, but only after Wayland has
| bored the appropriate holes in its security model. This all
| leads to a ton of incompatibilities between compositors,
| toolkits and applications. And beyond Gnome, the full
| "featureset" is still not implemented, where "featureset"
| is barely adequate as an X11 replacement.
|
| But the buffer handling is great, no more flickering...
| nullc wrote:
| > But the buffer handling is great,
|
| ... so long as you don't care about latency and don't
| mind a $3000 top of the line 64 core desktop feeling
| slightly slower than a machine from 20 years ago.
|
| :(
| heeen2 wrote:
| Wayland has shipped on plenty of embedded devices with
| anemic arm socs as early as 2014
| nullc wrote:
| As I understand it the extra latency is relatively
| hardware independent, and caused by extra whole frames of
| delay from additional compositing layers. I expect an
| anaemic SOC to be slow, it's less fun when extremely high
| end machines are also slow.
|
| Every time I pull a old system out of mothball and start
| it up I'm disappointed at how much less responsive the
| feel is of modern systems sitting right next to them.
| zlynx wrote:
| This depends on the user. Personally I never minded the
| extra frame of latency.
|
| And some of the newer Gnome desktops have even removed
| that, thanks to some tricky work by one guy, as I
| understand it.
|
| I may have misunderstood the explanation but it seems to
| involve some nice timing getting all of the application
| buffers swapped _just before_ the main GPU screen buffer
| swap. This gives applications long enough to draw
| updates, for the most part, and gets all updates into the
| next screen buffer update instead of the update after
| that.
| tbr1 wrote:
| This comment is mostly correct (as a daily Wayland user),
| with a few exceptions.
|
| > Wayland does almost nothing besides render buffer
| handling. Input? Applications job.
|
| Applications don't do more work to handle input on
| Wayland as opposed to e.g. X11. It's still event-based,
| and the compositor feeds input events to applications
| that can process them as normal. Keyboard, mouse and
| touch input are part of the core Wayland protocol, and
| tablet input is part of an extension that all major
| compositors fully support.
|
| > Window decorations? Compositors job.
|
| Kind of, it's the job of the application (client-side
| decorations) _or_ compositor (server-side decorations).
| The compositor can choose which to use. CSDs give more
| custom look-and-feels to applications that have them
| (think Firefox or Chrome); SSDs provide consistent looks
| across all apps. GNOME only supports CSDs, but is an
| exception in that regard.
|
| > Clipboard? Maybe compositor or toolkit.
|
| Both: https://emersion.fr/blog/2020/wayland-clipboard-
| drag-and-dro...
|
| Clipboards are (implementation-complexity-wise) scary in
| X11 as well.
| kochthesecond wrote:
| I also fear this. I dont care about most WMs being left
| behind, kde and gnome is already spread too thin. And I say
| that as a xfce user of ten years.
|
| Got a new laptop with amdgpu and am enjoying the new life
| with wayland and gnome. It just took waay too long.
| pjmlp wrote:
| ChromeOS runs on Wayland, and it is used by WSL as well.
| tbr1 wrote:
| > ChromeOS runs on Wayland
|
| Kind of. The Chrome browser itself doesn't run on Wayland, it
| runs on a custom compositor (I believe Aura?). Sommelier[1]
| is a Wayland compositor used for Linux apps on CrOS
| (Crostini), but Chrome doesn't use it. There is an ongoing
| effort (Lacros) to make the Chrome browser itself run under
| Wayland on CrOS, but it's not public outside of development
| builds (and not yet on par with the "native" version).
|
| [1]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform2/+
| /HEA...
| Avamander wrote:
| I really hate to say it, but Canonical was and still is correct
| with starting Mir.
| acgkmopvvgvmgv wrote:
| Canonical announced Mir out of nowhere in an attempt to gain
| control just like they are trying now with Snap. After the
| announcement of Mir their developers went to IRC and made
| abundantly clear they had no idea how Wayland works and that
| Mir was useless. Where is Mir now? Using Wayland.
|
| People who were in the fence about supporting Wayland were
| now even more convinced they should ignore it. That's one of
| the reasons a decade later you still have this much FUD.
| Avamander wrote:
| > Where is Mir now? Using Wayland.
|
| It could have not gone that way. Now we've got two equally
| bad alternatives out there.
|
| > That's one of the reasons a decade later you still have
| this much FUD.
|
| I don't think you know what FUD means.
| acgkmopvvgvmgv wrote:
| Nice ignore the part where they realized Mir was useless.
| They even went on an edit spree in their wiki page.
|
| If Mir was so good and superior they would just keep
| developing it. Isn't that obvious? If the company who
| already spent all this dev time aka money on Mir doesn't
| believe in it, why would anybody else? They were even
| eating their own dog food and had some major industry
| pull at their disposal. The answer is they fucked it up.
| wander_homer wrote:
| > If Mir was so good and superior they would just keep
| developing it. Isn't that obvious? If the company who
| already spent all this dev time aka money on Mir doesn't
| believe in it, why would anybody else?
|
| Not that I care or know a lot about Mir, but do you
| seriously believe that it was always the best technology
| that became successful and triumphed over its
| competitors?
| lmedinas wrote:
| the problem was that the "whole" open source community
| sponsored by RedHat, Intel etc... bashed the project to
| oblivion and left Canonical as the only contributor and put
| all the efforts on Wayland. This is just one of the reasons
| why Linux never reaches highs as a Desktop OS.
| LockAndLol wrote:
| > This should hardly be surprising but a prominent Intel open-
| source developer has conceded that the X.Org Server is pretty
| much "abandonware" with Wayland being the future.
|
| Why do you say Wayland is abandonware? The last activity in the
| repo is from a week ago https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland
| kbumsik wrote:
| > The last activity in the repo is from a week ago
|
| Actually most of repos you linked have the last activity of
| months ago. It's pretty worrying though.
| boudin wrote:
| Wayland is just a protocol. Look at the work on actual
| compositors, like mutter and wlroots to see some activity
| https://github.com/GNOME/mutter
| https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots
| einpoklum wrote:
| So what do my Linux machines run desktop sessions on?
| agumonkey wrote:
| webvnc
|
| -- whatwg
| speedgoose wrote:
| Windows?
| tpoacher wrote:
| '[...] but a prominent Intel open-source developer has conceded
| that the X.Org Server is pretty much "abandonware" with Wayland
| being the future.'
|
| So? A "prominent US politician" recently conceded that global
| warming is a hoax by the Chinese, with coal being the future.
| Should I be doubling over myself to dismantle my solar panels?
|
| Very weasel-wordy article if you ask me. X11 is fine.
| monoclechris wrote:
| Are you ok?
| aktuel wrote:
| It's fine if you're stuck in time. No more releases, no
| changes, no fixes. It's great if you seek stability and don't
| want to upgrade anything for the rest of your life.
| sildur wrote:
| That sounds like paradise. Where do I have to sign? I'm tired
| of crapware breaking on every "upgrade".
| nix23 wrote:
| OS: OpenBSD
|
| Phone: Nokia8110
|
| Watch: Vostok or Raketa
| peatmoss wrote:
| I was just thinking that, if X.org truly were abandonware
| (I have no basis to accept or reject the opinion reported
| in this article), OpenBSD becomes a bit of a haven.
|
| My understanding is that Wayland does address some
| security issues in X11, but that Xenocara (OpenBSD's
| branch of Xorg) also attempts to address the security of
| X11 in a way that integrates with the rest of OpenBSD's
| security mitigations.
|
| OpenBSD is a great example of actively developed software
| that has exceptionally good taste when it comes to
| change. It's not that OpenBSD never changes; it's that
| OpenBSD only makes changes that feel organic 20 seconds
| after you experience them.
| nix23 wrote:
| >It's not that OpenBSD never changes; it's that OpenBSD
| only makes changes that feel organic 20 seconds after you
| experience them.
|
| Exactly! And Xenocara. And Upgrades are painless.
| tupputuppu wrote:
| That's not correct - OpenBSD is being actively
| maintained. Although they're using a lot of old, stable
| and proven software, they're also doing security and bug
| fixes and even creating new functionality.
| nix23 wrote:
| He asked for stuff that does not break...not for
| abandonware.
|
| I would not recommend a OS that is not maintained for day
| to day work.
| [deleted]
| m0zg wrote:
| I tried Wayland last year. It was nowhere near ready for prime
| time. Perceptibly slower, and I had video tearing when watching
| video in the browser. This is with bog standard Intel iGPU in a
| laptop a couple years old.
|
| In its present state it can't beat "abandonware" I'm afraid.
| X.org works. Wayland does not. And that's all there is to it at
| the moment.
| jbirer wrote:
| I have defaulted to using X.Org on my Debian GNOME installation
| because of awful font rendering on Wayland along with other
| issues such as recording.
|
| This desperate push by Wayland people is putting me off of
| Wayland. You can't FUD a software into being dropped in favor of
| yours.
| flurdy wrote:
| Wayland's poor screen sharing support in these days of WFH is a
| big issue.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yep. It works ok with some apps, but Bluejeans and Webex refuse
| to play nice. Google Meet seems to work ok. I'm sure these are
| complicated issues and that Linux desktop users are a tiny
| minority, but dang it's painful.
|
| I try to steer everyone toward Google Meet if possible, and
| unfortunately for the others, I have a decent amount of sway
| :-D
| stevefan1999 wrote:
| Yes, I agree. X11 is a historic artifact that is supposed to be
| honored in the museum now.
|
| The C/S architecture of X11 hits the spot when terminals and thin
| client are the norm, that means 20-30 years ago, but today, we
| all have dedicated graphics display devices (GPU, monitors) even
| in our pocket smartphone, and the way X11 works is holding Linux
| desktop scene back.
|
| But without X11 there you can't show how much improvement Wayland
| has. We shall not forget X11.
| simias wrote:
| Counterpoint: while I would've jumped ship from X to Wayland or
| anything else 15 years ago because I kept having to mess with
| my Xorg.conf every other week to resolve some breakage or tweak
| anything, I haven't really had any significant issue with Xorg
| in the past 5 years at the very least. It just works for me.
|
| I think X11 not seeing a lot of development doesn't necessarily
| mean that it's abandonware, it's probably more that people like
| me who still use it feel like it's effectively feature-
| complete.
|
| And I won't take the word from some graphics hardware vendor
| that it is abandonned. Over the years they've always done the
| bare minimum to support the Linux desktop so of course they'll
| take the first opportunity to claim that X is "abandonware" so
| that they have a plausible excuse for dropping support.
| corty wrote:
| Where is that supposed Wayland progress after a decade? Input
| is broken and inconsistent, screenshots don't work, remoting is
| broken, every WM has to be rewritten or abandoned, trivialities
| like c&p handling are not yet there. Wayland is still in the
| early phase of catching up to X11, for any progress it will
| take another decade or maybe even a Wayland replacement. We
| should face it, Wayland is a dead end.
| nsajko wrote:
| Yeah, but Wayland won't ever be able to "catch up to X11",
| because it's broken by design. (See my next comment.)
| corty wrote:
| Waylands design is even more broken and leads to common
| functionality being duplicated and broken all over the
| place. Each app has to do input handling on its own?
| Comeon, a 5yearold could tell you that that is a huge
| design flaw. There are equally problematic design flaws in
| X11, just less of them and in different areas. Where
| Wayland tries to get rendering right and botches all the
| rest, X11 is weird for rendering, but at least has kind-of-
| ok answers for remoting, input, clipboard, screenshots,
| etc.
| diegocg wrote:
| There is no reason why window managers can't share
| functionality via libraries. In fact, some do (wlroots).
|
| X11 and its separation of graphic server and window
| manager encouraged code reuse by placing it in the
| server, but with Wayland that separation (and the extra
| context switches) are gone so there is less incentive to
| share code.
| p_l wrote:
| Which would be fine if we had something like COM to
| enable portable interfacing between libraries and certain
| level of separation, especially when a library plonks
| something breaking your runtime by messing with global
| resources (for example, threads and signals).
|
| But we don't, and the libraries push other issues into
| your design as you often are forced to follow their
| specific idiosyncracies.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| It's this kind of endless stream of broken and incompatible
| technologies that makes me use Linux in server and embedded
| scenarios only. Every time I've had to use desktop Linux it's
| just been one problem after another.
| s1k3s wrote:
| Not sure what you're trying to use it for but I've been on
| Mint for the past 4 years and I've had no problem with it,
| other than the fact that every time I turn on the computer
| I have to run a shell script that fixes my resolution. I'm
| using it for development, I also have a personal Mac and my
| work PC is Windows and I can say the Linux is miles ahead
| of both of them. And the Mac and Windows computers have
| been $1500 and $700 respectively, while the one that runs
| Mint cost me $300. Linux is #1 for me for development just
| because of how fast and non intrusive it is, no resources
| spent on user tracking, no unwanted updates shoved down
| your throat and so on.
| brabel wrote:
| > I've been on Mint for the past 4 years and I've had no
| problem with it, other than the fact that every time I
| turn on the computer I have to run a shell script that
| fixes my resolution.
|
| That's funny. I was on Linux Mint (windows PC with dual
| boot) for a few years, then I bought a Dell XPS13 with
| Ubuntu installed from the factory. I really wanted to
| like the XPS13, but both the hardware and the OS were
| just so poor compared to my Mac (that I used at work)
| that after a few broken things (power source plug broke,
| the fan was very noisy when I was coding on an IDE, the
| trackpad was not nearly as advanced as the Macs',
| shortcuts broke when I upgraded to Ubuntu 19, then to 20,
| language switching suddenly started taking 2 seconds for
| no reason, etc etc etc I hope you get the point) that I
| decided to finally hit the bank and get a little MacBook
| Air... what a life changing experience: even though the
| specs of the MacBook Air are a lot lower than the XPS13,
| it's just a incredibly superior UX. No fan noise even
| when using the most out of my IDE... trackpad is
| awesome... even the keyboard is excellent (after the
| fiasco of the previous Macs, they did get it right),
| quite superior to the XPS13. The OS itself is just much
| prettier in all aspects. I feel a small amount of delay
| sometimes when putting some pressure on the processor,
| but that's still not something I would call remotely
| annoying (as opposed to the incredibly annoying Linux
| UX).
|
| As much as I don't like using Apple stuff due to price
| and their closed-garden policies, I just can't pass on
| the superior UX.
|
| Even though my Windows and Linux machines are still
| available in my closet, I just never had the desire to
| touch them again since I got the Mac. Unfortunately!
| pferde wrote:
| Following is just an anecdote, I am aware that I may not
| be a representative sample, so read accordingly.
|
| My current desktop PC has been on Debian (mostly Stable,
| sometimes Testing) for about fifteen years now, and apart
| from some minor bug here and there, everything works.
| Including gaming (Steam, as well as some standalone
| games), work, software development, multimedia.
|
| From where I'm standing, I find Linux desktop much less
| bothersome than Windows or Mac these days. Every other
| week, there is an outcry about some new Bad Thing that
| Apple or Microsoft has done to their OS and half the tech
| community is up in arms about how all of their workflows
| are broken.
|
| Or random Twitch streamers often having to fight against
| Windows more often than I thought reasonable, in order to
| get their streaming setup back under control.
|
| Or work colleagues annoyed every other month about some
| VPN app not playing nice with Windows TCP/IP stack and
| locking them out of company network until they reboot.
|
| Meanwhile, I'm in my little Linux corner, quietly doing
| my thing and not really having to fix anything other than
| mistakes I make, and bugs I cause.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| And Debian is ironically hard mode! Packages are so
| outdated and Debian is so unfriendly and clunky. Like a
| worse Ubuntu.
|
| IME, Manjaro/Arch unironically provide a better, less
| buggy experience. Maybe the bugfixes come in faster than
| the bugs and the devs pay most of their attention to
| current versions.
|
| And more anecdata: I wouldn't say scripts to fix your
| resolution are "common" pains on Linux. (Though crashes
| on Cinnamon are ;p -- stick to KDE or GNOME if you want
| polish.) The closest I've come to that lately was having
| to reset the sound daemon due to a Manjaro bug, but
| that's the only thing in _two years_ I 've had to do.
| Meanwhile, on Windows, the internet dies when I turn my
| VPN off (the same VPN I use on Linux, at that). And, for
| that, the scriptable solution's more elusive. "Reinstall
| and pray" is the only way to go.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| > I've had no problem with it, other than the fact that
| every time I turn on the computer I have to run a shell
| script that fixes my resolution
|
| I can't tell if this post is a parody or not. The fact
| that it's 2020 and minor annoyances like this are still
| fairly common in desktop Linux is telling.
|
| macOS SSHing into a Linux VM (either locally hosted or on
| the cloud) is the sweet spot for me.
| iso1210 wrote:
| I have far more issues with my OSX laptop than having to
| run a script once every few months (presumably that
| script is called automatically)
|
| I've just had another popup from OSX wanting a password
| for google, sophos pops up saying it's upset a fair bit,
| on occasion the entire machine just hangs, and wireguard
| doesn't set my search domain. There are other niggles but
| those are the ones that have affected me in the last 30
| minutes.
|
| On the other hand the biggest hassle from my desktop is
| ssh connections time out if I suspend the machine
| overnight.
|
| (I've used ubuntu LTS on the desktop since 2006, before
| then it was debian testing since 1999)
| akvadrako wrote:
| If those are your best arguments against Wayland you are
| making a good case for it because:
|
| _input is broken and inconsistent_ - what?
|
| _screenshots don 't work_ - they do. I use them all the
| time.
|
| _remoting is broken_ - I know it 's supported but I've never
| wanted to do it.
|
| _every WM has to be rewritten or abandoned_ - of course,
| that 's by design. Wayland doesn't even have WMs.
|
| _c &p handling are not yet there_ - do you mean copy and
| paste? That works fine; it also has a clipboard manager
| protocol.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > screenshots don't work - they do. I use them all the
| time.
|
| they don't work on wayland, they work on specific
| compositors that implement an extension.
| akvadrako wrote:
| Wayland is a protocol, like X. X.org is an
| implementation, like a compositor.
|
| Screenshots require a privileged application to have
| access to the whole screen. The X protocol doesn't
| provide that, though some implementation might.
| ywei3410 wrote:
| While technically correct, this misses the point. Very
| few features are part of the core Wayland protocol; off
| the top of my bind, there's the input methods, and a few
| ways to describe shared memory with the compositor and
| some callbacks to handle device registration. That's it.
|
| For example, top level _windows_ and popups themselves
| are an extension in Wayland ( _xdg_shell_ protocol rather
| than the defunct _wl_shell_ ), and so is the rather basic
| feature of compositing on the GPU ( _dma_buf_ ) rather
| than going through some shared CPU memory.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > Very few features are part of the core Wayland
| protocol;
|
| but that _is_ the main critique. Most of the things not
| being part of core means that there is a lot more
| fragmentation of the linux desktop than there was with X,
| which is unilaterally a bad thing.
| akvadrako wrote:
| The Wayland base can be implemented in a library, like
| wlroots, which complete compositors could use.
|
| Currently compositor developers prefer separate
| implementations and it's really their choice.
| jcelerier wrote:
| the fact that the system provides a choice is the issue
| that leads to fragmentation (which is the main problem).
|
| Saying "people could just do / not do X" absolutely never
| ever ever works, not in politics, not in programming, not
| in "not being an asshole to each other", not in "not
| using firearms", etc - things have to be enforced &
| unescapable at some point if we want sanity.
| ywei3410 wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure that I understand your point. Here
| are the facts which I think we can agree on.
|
| * X11 is a protocol * Wayland is a protocol
|
| * X11 and Wayland are not compatible protocols
|
| * Wayland protocols are all public
|
| * XOrg is an implentation of the compositor of the X11
| protocol
|
| - _wl_roots_ is a toolkit used for creating compositors
|
| From this, it follows that:
|
| - Anyone can theoretically write another X11 compositor
| which implements a subset of the functionality
|
| - Anyone can write a Wayland compositor which implements
| a subset of the functionality
|
| I really don't understand where this supposed extra
| fragmentation is coming from -- unless your objection is
| that we have more than one Wayland compositor? I don't
| see that as a particularly bad; in the same way I don't
| see having GNOME, i3 and XFCE existing is necessarily
| problematic.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Are there even any Wayland compositors in actual use that
| don't support that extension?
| jcelerier wrote:
| if you go to r/unixporn there are a ton of custom X11 WMs
| with very very small userbase - sometimes a dozen
| individuals. Screenshotting works with all of them.
| akvadrako wrote:
| WMs are not compositors. Compositors are more like a WM
| combined with X.org.
| jcelerier wrote:
| yes, that's the issue - writing a different desktop
| metaphor like the various tiling WMs was something that
| took as few as a couple hundred lines of C. Now with
| Wayland the person who wants to write his own desktop
| environment has to rewrite _much more_ to get to
| something that doesn 't even provide half of what Xorg
| gives.
|
| Also, compositors are not mandatory anyways on X (I don't
| use one personnally and prefer it like that) so it's a
| weird remark to make.
| isaac21259 wrote:
| Not sure what you referring to with regards to screenshots as
| they're working fine for me. I've been using Wayland for a
| few months now (wayfire which I switched to from bspwm) and
| overall it's seemed like a huge improvement in terms of
| smoothness and I have yet to run into any issues. Input seems
| to work fine even with things like multitouch gestures. I've
| never tried remoting into my machine graphically but there
| seem to be working vnc servers for Wayland.
| imtringued wrote:
| I've been using Wayland for 4 years now. I haven't
| encountered any of those issues.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > The C/S architecture of X11 hits the spot when terminals and
| thin client are the norm, that means 20-30 years ago, but
| today, we all have dedicated graphics display devices (GPU,
| monitors) even in our pocket smartphone, and the way X11 works
| is holding Linux desktop scene back.
|
| I used X11 forwarding just yesterday to open & control my linux
| desktop's music player from my mac - which other 2020
| technology allows me to just run $ ssh -Y
| my_desktop > my_music_player&
|
| and being able to do that without lag (scrolling through the
| list views was much more fluid that my experiences with e.g.
| RDP or VNC even though it's a Qt 5 app, strawberry, which
| likely does most of the drawing server-side) or blurry jpeg-
| compressed pixmaps, and with the ability to resize, minimize,
| etc this individual window without any issue ?
| znpy wrote:
| good luck doing that with wayland
| emersion wrote:
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/
| aldanor wrote:
| What about e.g., being able to run guis like pycharm/clion that
| run on Linux in corporate environments where you only have
| direct access to a windows box?
| raesene9 wrote:
| Microsoft's Wayland based Linux GUI support with WSL2 is in
| development
| (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/whats-new-in-
| the-...) . That'll hopefully be a good solution for that
| usecase in the not too distant future.
| peatmoss wrote:
| Does anyone know the status of Freesync / VRR on Gnome-Wayland?
|
| Last time I investigated this, I went down a rabbit hole that
| made me vow to buy a Playstation.
| epx wrote:
| So x.org is abandoned, Wayland does not work/is not mature, Linux
| for desktop is dead? Adopting the upper-half of Android AOSP UI
| would be the escape hatch?
| kriive wrote:
| I have been using sway on Fedora for a year. It's been really
| good so. It's a smaller niche than X.org's, but I get to do
| everything I need. HiDPI support is just right, just throw output
| eDP1-1 scale 2 in the config and you're set.
|
| Clipboard works perfectly splendid, screen-sharing works (not as
| perfectly splendid as clipboard does), input works,
| chromium/electron is getting support for native wayland. Qt and
| GTK Wayland support's quite good.
|
| I have had no problems whatsoever and I invite you to try it. I
| have no hard-proof evidence or numbers to support my opinion,
| just try it.
| arpa wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, how does screenshare work for you? I've
| been trying setting it up for work (slack/teams), but to this
| day it just doesn't work. Using debian sid, so pretty up-to
| date packages tbh.
|
| I just start new xorg session for screenshare, which, frankly,
| sucks.
| kriive wrote:
| Well, it works on FF and certain builds of chromium (those
| built with ENABLE_PIPEWIRE flag on). I am using xdg-desktop-
| portal-wlr and it works quite good. I was able to present my
| desktop to others without significant hiccups. Once Electron
| enables Ozone (and builds with PIPEWIRE on) we will be able
| to use screen sharing also on teams and other electron-
| packaged apps. This obviously works for my workflow and I
| understand it won't work for everyone. I don't know about
| Zoom, but I heard (and thus not entirely sure) it works only
| on specific distros with some specific GNOME versions.
|
| EDIT. I misread Slack for Zoom.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Yup, this is sort of here with pipewire at this point, but it
| hasn't propagated through to the electron apps.
|
| Slack is still a pain point for me as well, but mainly
| because Slack continues to demand that I install the desktop
| app for calls/screen sharing.
|
| Zoom's desktop app also doesn't work, but I can use zoom-
| redirector and have the calls immediately open in my browser
| (you can get the same thing without the extension, but it
| requires you pretend that you can't install their desktop app
| and several button presses for every meeting).
|
| My guess is that we're about 12 months away from having it
| work by default in most places.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > just throw output eDP1-1 scale 2 in the config and you're set
|
| Why? What? Why? The system exactly knows the DPI of all
| attached displays, why does it still need explicit
| configuration in 2020 to support HiDPI?!
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Why do you think it needs any of that? For that matter why do
| you think windows, mac, android, chromeOS etc. all need
| "explicit configuration"? They all simply set a reasonable
| default scale and then give you an easy way to pick a
| different one if you want.
| hibbelig wrote:
| Maybe my monitor it's close by and I have good eyes. Or it's
| further away. The system can't know.
| Athas wrote:
| How would it know what scaling factor you want?
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The standard has been ~100 DPI, so a 200 DPI display should
| by default get 200 % scaling with no extra configuration
| needed.
| Athas wrote:
| I'd rather just have the configuration file be simple and
| well documented and let me make the decision. My monitor
| running at maximum resolution is about 163 DPI, so an
| automated system could guess both ways. 200% scaling
| works well for me, and it's a single line of
| configuration, done once, and I don't have to worry about
| heuristics changing behind my back.
| snazz wrote:
| It should start with a reasonable default and then give the
| user the choice of different scaling factors like macOS
| does: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/380570311227
| 342859/...
| HeadsUpHigh wrote:
| This is sway, i3 on wayland, a tilling window manager.
| Not some commercial piece of software that has to target
| the lowest common denominator to survive in the market.
| It's meant so that you configure it and it's very
| configurable. So it doesn't any defaults bar what's
| needed to launch the manager. The rest is up to you.
| snazz wrote:
| Configurability is great, but that isn't an excuse for
| having poor defaults. A child comment to yours mentions
| that Sway now uses a heuristic to find a "reasonable"
| default scaling factor, so it appears that Sway currently
| does the right thing.
| getfactsright wrote:
| Never mind this,
|
| _Sway already detects hidpi displays based on a
| heuristic from EDID info and chooses an appropriate scale
| factor_.
|
| https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1800
|
| 8, now 9, comments in a subthread because no one could
| bother to validate assumptions or do a Google search.
| agurk wrote:
| One important point to note in these discussions is that X.Org is
| a specific implementation of the X11 protocol (the canonical
| implementation as it happens).
|
| Wayland is the protocol and compared to X11 in this context.
| There are multiple implementations including:
|
| 1) Weston (the reference implementation)
|
| 2) Mutter (Gnome)
|
| 3) Kwin (KDE, also implements X11)
|
| It's important to draw the distinction as many/most of the
| limitations people come across are in the implementation not with
| the protocol. People using different implementations will come
| across different issues too.
| kbumsik wrote:
| > People using different implementations will come across
| different issues too.
|
| ...which is the biggest problem of Wayland in my opinion.
|
| By defining protocols only, we now have the development
| fragmentation problem. The desktop experiences will be more
| inconsistent between DEs than the era of X11, and minor DE
| users eventually are forced to switch to major DEs like Gnome
| because other DEs won't have enough devs to maintain its low-
| level implementation.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Wlroots as a library for implementing a Wayland compositor
| has done wonders to help develop small-scale Wayland "desktop
| environments". Sure, you pull the whole wlroots things, but
| under X, you pull xlib, plus some X11 server.
|
| https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-
| wl...
| roel_v wrote:
| Is there a summary somewhere of what's wrong with x.org/x11? I
| haven't been keeping up.
| sergeykish wrote:
| The real story behind Wayland and X
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ
| bekantan wrote:
| As a XMonad user, I am not considering X11 alternatives for the
| foreseeable future. I have zero issues with it.
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