[HN Gopher] On Abandoning the X Server
___________________________________________________________________
On Abandoning the X Server
Author : cheshire_cat
Score : 342 points
Date : 2020-10-28 15:49 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com)
| jrm4 wrote:
| As a part outsider/part insider (long time Linux user, not much
| of a programmer) let me see if I can try to summarize my
| frustration with this transition process -- it simply seems to be
| a _much different_ methodology than the one that got Linux to
| where it is.
|
| As I understand it, Linus' number one deal is "don't break
| backward compatibility." The Unix Way is "Write programs that
| talk to one another..." etc. This is the foundation that I
| believe put Linux where it is today, this is why I love it and
| use it so much.
|
| Which is why I'm dismayed to see so much comfort with what feels
| in line with a proprietary top-down control attitude, the thing
| that Microsoft and Apple et al do, i.e. "This thing is going to
| change, so get over it."
|
| I appreciate that there is work being done. I'm willing to trust
| that there is a point to Wayland (I literally don't get it at
| this stage; trying to use it presently creates FAR more problems
| than it solves) -- but it seems like it should be axiomatic that
| the project works harder to preserve the space than it appears to
| now.
| wmf wrote:
| For whatever reason, people who follow the classic Unix/Linux
| philosophy no longer write much code. The people who are coding
| the desktop are all using a more Mac-like philosophy.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Right, though I don't think that's quite it -- I think that
| the "Mac-like" projects/philosophies are more visible because
| of spaces like Hacker News and Reddit et al, plus perhaps the
| greater level of PR that bigger projects like Gnome and KDE
| (and Ubuntu, Mint, PopOs, etc) get.
|
| I have to remind myself to try to dig a bit deeper around to
| find out about the things I'm more into; what matters more to
| me than "the desktop" is "applications/programs" -- and that
| seems to be harder to seek out these days.
| sergeykish wrote:
| You see, we have a lot of interchangeable parts. We have
| bash/zsh/sh, glibc/musl, apt/pacman/yum, systemd/runit/OpenRC,
| GNOME/KDE/XFCE, i3/wmii/xmonad, chromium/firefox etc etc. Even
| kernel is interchangeable - HURD [1], kFreeBSD [2].
|
| Distribution is a collection of such parts, you may think of it
| as "proprietary top-down control attitude" but it is just a
| collection that suits someone needs. It may not suit you, you
| may replace parts, you may create another distribution. For
| example as Arch Linux user my install does not include
| graphical system, no one forces me.
|
| The point I see is that Wayland got something useful. So useful
| that distributions started to switch their default. If anything
| it conforms that X11 has some problems, that it was harder to
| achieve same result there. Maybe it does not cover your needs
| but it covers someone needs better.
|
| [1] https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/
|
| [1] https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/
| kllrnohj wrote:
| On the contrary, Wayland is very much in the spirit of Unix &
| Linux philosophy, while X11 isn't. Wayland is an attempt to do
| one thing and do it well, hence why it doesn't have solutions
| for things like clipboard management. Because that's not part
| of display management & composition. Wayland only does that one
| thing.
|
| By contrast the common complaint about Wayland is that it
| doesn't have the vast variety of unrelated features rammed into
| it like X does.
|
| Part of the problem here then is that there's A) no big pushes
| for 'does one thing & does it well' for all the _other_ X
| features (like clipboard or global keyboard shortcuts), and B)
| fragmented implementations of the wayland protocol. There
| really should have been a much better, and more singular,
| reference implementation that Gnome, KDE, etc... all just
| embedded instead. Which means the "does it well" part is
| taking a really long time, as developer communities are split
| up.
| albertgomariz wrote:
| ugjg
| pmoriarty wrote:
| It's a couple of years old, but this post on _" Why I'm not going
| to switch to Wayland yet."_[1] summarizes some of the concerns I
| have about switching to Wayland:
|
| _" at the moment there are several types of applications that
| not only don't work in wayland, but would be very difficult, or
| impossible to work natively in all major wayland compositors._
|
| _Examples (in order of importance to me):_ *
| Programmatic output configuration (xrandr, arandr, etc.) *
| CLI clipboard access (xsel, xclip) * Third party app
| launcher/window switcher (rofi, dmenu, albert, docky). *
| Clipboard managers (parcellite, klipper, Gpaste, clipman, etc.)
| * Third party screen shot/capture/share (shutter, OBS, ffmpeg,
| import, peek, scrot, VNC, etc.) * Color picker (gpick,
| gcolor3, kcolorchooser) * xdotool
|
| Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable and
| feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not willingly
| switch to Wayland.
|
| [1] -
| https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_...
| heinrichhartman wrote:
| I would not consider this examples "Applications", but more
| configuration tools. I would also not expect to be able to port
| the OSX Clipboard manager to Windows or the "Displays" utility.
| From a new window server I would expect to have some ways to
| configure output, switch applications, manage clip-board but I
| would not expect to have my existing tools continuing to work.
|
| If you are re-architecting a system from the ground-up there is
| always some fallout expected.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| Hell, I'd be happy if there was just fewer bugs.
|
| Case in point: Gnome + Wayland + guake. If you configure guake
| to use anything less than 100% of the width of the screen, then
| it suddenly appears in the wrong position.
|
| But wait, maybe that's a guake bug, right?
|
| Wrong. I tried a couple of other options for similar
| functionality and they demonstrated the same issue. So odds are
| it's actually a bug in the compositor.
|
| And that's ignoring that basic things like global keybinding
| don't work (edit: ya ya, the Wayland proponents will tell you
| that's by design, but it's a) user hateful b) totally different
| than literally any other desktop OS out there today, and c)
| breaks apps, right now, in ways that will require major code
| changes to fix) so I have to put a hack in place to allow F12
| to open guake up in the first place.
|
| Meanwhile, we only _just_ got the "official" solution for
| screensharing (what Zoom does is an incredible hack: they just
| take lots of screenshots! No, I'm not kidding, that's actually
| how it works, which is why the framerate is so bad) and it
| involves yet more new stuff (pipewire, et al) that I'm sure
| will be a source of its own raft of bugs.
|
| I'd say "maybe in a year or two", but we've been saying that
| for a long time, now...
| d4rti wrote:
| I think pipewire broke my audio when I upgraded to Kubuntu
| 20.10. Removing it fixed it and seems to have had no ill
| effects.
| djsumdog wrote:
| The trouble with your guake bug is it might be Gnome +
| Wayland specific. With the separation between the server and
| composer, bugs might need to be fixed in multiple places.
| Some window managers use wlroots, so maybe some bugs can be
| fixed there, but others have their own forks and
| implementations.
|
| The hotkey thing is big and it's annoying because it's
| another thing that might need to be implemented/fixed in each
| and every composer and environment (and it could be different
| in every environment).
|
| I've seen the X11/Wayland talks and I agree Xorg has tons of
| old crufty garbage in it, and screen locking in Xorg is not
| very secure. But the Wayland team seems to have made little
| effort in addressing even the most basic things like hotkeys,
| screenshots, etc.
|
| I'm not sure if "user hateful" is the right term, but they
| don't seem to be prioritizing the most basic things people
| are asking for.
| Spivak wrote:
| It's not that they're user-hateful it's just that they're
| (I think rightfully) being aggressive about scoping Wayland
| to things related to drawing surfaces and handling input
| events. If people started treating as _one_ domain specific
| protocol that display servers use for drawing stuff on the
| screen and not "everything a desktop app might want to do"
| protocol there would be less conflict.
|
| I'm glad they're leaving all the "desktop" stuff out and
| letting desktops agree on dbus interfaces. I doubt people
| writing little CLI utilities want to have to create dummy
| Wayland surfaces to do interact with the display server
| which is how wl-clipboard works.
| CountSessine wrote:
| Exactly. What we're really seeing here is technical debt
| from the fact that we have so many different desktop
| environments. Much of the cost of having Gnome and KDE
| was hidden by the fact that a lot of the job of putting
| pixels on the screen and handling keyboard and mouse
| events was done (very badly) by X in one way or another.
|
| Now the compositor/screen manager isn't doing that
| anymore because it never should have and it was a
| terrible division or responsibility in the first place.
| But we have devs pushing forward on multiple different
| fronts with different DEs and development is painfully
| slow.
| nerdponx wrote:
| So what does a Wayland-only future look like? Your
| clipboard, keyboard hotkey daemon, app runner, etc. all
| communicating happily over D-bus?
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I mean, from my perspective, they're literally prioritizing
| the things that I want my display manager to do well
|
| - Handle rendering things to screen
|
| - Handle user input
|
| My issue is that while X has a LOT of other things it also
| happens to do, it just doesn't do those two primary things
| very well on modern hardware.
|
| As an aside -
|
| This reminds me of the systemd arguments all over again,
| but the same crowd that was ready to crucify systemd for
| all the things it does are now bemoaning all the things
| Wayland doesn't do.
|
| But really, I think there are just a lot of folks who
| aren't willing to try something new, or to re-evaluate some
| of the toolchains they've made for themselves.
|
| Now - I'm not going to blame them for that, having a
| working system change under you isn't fun, and it eats up
| time and resources some people don't have. But it also
| doesn't stop the new thing from replacing the old thing.
|
| Particularly if the new things happens to be genuinely
| better in many respects.
|
| And while I can certainly understand the pain point of
| missing features in Wayland, The way it gets user input and
| display output _right_ are just delightful.
|
| So delightful that I actually prefer it to my work macbook,
| which is not something I could _ever_ say about X.
| oconnor663 wrote:
| > the same crowd
|
| It might not be the same crowd. There are many crowds on
| Hacker News, and the voting mechanism tends to select for
| whichever crowd is angry at any given time.
|
| Which is, like, super frustrating. I want to feel like I
| have a relationship with the people I'm talking to, but I
| don't really. It's always different people, and they're
| not consistent with each other.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| You bring up a good point, it's something to think about.
|
| I try to address this with completely transparent and
| public voting, and also non-numerical voting, meaning
| every vote has to also be a "tag", like on Slashdot:
| insightful, interesting, troll, flamebait, offtopic, etc.
|
| But not only that, you also get to see who tagged you,
| and this tells you whether it's someone you know or just
| some random.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Entirely fair.
|
| I almost wrote out an aside in the above comment, because
| the person I was replying to certainly didn't mention
| systemd.
|
| I do think there are some interesting echoes between the
| two conversations, though. Namely that the "angry" that
| happens to be getting selected for has nothing to do with
| the merits of either piece of software, and a lot more to
| do with the fear of having to learn something new to
| replace something familiar.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Namely that the "angry" that happens to be getting
| selected for has nothing to do with the merits of either
| piece of software,_
|
| What, you don't think people have legitimate criticisms
| of Systemd, or Wayland?
| pmontra wrote:
| I can work with a system running on systemd, upstart or
| old good init but I cannot work without screen sharing
| especially now that everybody is working remotely. I can
| probably survive with all the other missing features but
| not this one. I'll consider Wayland only when all the
| different softwares my customers and friends use will
| work on it as they do on X.
| roenxi wrote:
| > Hell, I'd be happy if there was just fewer bugs.
|
| There are strategic and tactical issues here.
|
| Tactical issues are obvious. Wayland's problem with
| screenshots and all the bugs from not having a decades long
| lineage.
|
| Strategic issues are less obvious. As this blog pos alludes
| to the standard X server is reaching a maintainability crisis
| where long term devs don't think the project is a good idea.
|
| I think Wayland is a tactical mis-step myself for reasons you
| and GP mention, but I think now that the bad has been covered
| someone needs to mention the good:
|
| The reference X server cannot practically be replaced. The
| reference Wayland compositor quite possibly isn't ever going
| to get established before being replaced. This is an
| excellent thing - it beings evolutionary pressure to the
| display system.
|
| Wayland has problems, but unlike the current X ecosystem the
| problems can be fixed by replacing bits of software. The
| Wayland protocol seems light enough that Wayland+1 can
| implement it as a compatibility layer. When the dust settles,
| leaving X will have been a good idea.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as
| stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not
| willingly switch to Wayland.
|
| Every time this topic comes up, a bunch of people bring up the
| things X has that Wayland doesnt yet have, or have in the form
| they think it should.
|
| I'm not sure if it's just me but these comments come across as
| some combination of defiant, demanding, or I dont know what.
| It's like they don't understand that the world is moving on and
| doesnt really give a $h!t about them and their love of X. I
| mean here is a post from "the guy" whose been keeping X going
| for a long time saying "this shit is done" and people keep
| complaining about that as if they have some say in it without
| actually contributing to the code. It reads like entitlement -
| some kind of expectation that other people exist just to make
| things the way they want them to be.
| chaorace wrote:
| Features drive adoption. I might be more inclined to believe
| in Wayland if other secured platforms adopted similar
| constraints. Unfortunately for Wayland, other comparable
| platforms _have_ consistently found security-conscious
| solutions that don 't compromise on added value.
| clusterfish wrote:
| The comment you're responding to lists very concrete issues.
| Try accepting constructive criticism instead of accusing
| people of entitlement just because they dare to disagree with
| you.
|
| Entitled developers who think their work is above criticism
| just because it's open source are just as annoying as
| entitled users who think they are owed something.
| izacus wrote:
| They also seem to "dare" to disagree with major Linux
| distribution direction so perhaps it's not the responders
| opinion that's in the minority?
|
| I mean, this really sounds very similar to systemd and
| pulse audio type gnashing of teeth where the new solutions
| added plenty of widely required features while compromising
| on niche use cases which had other workarounds.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| So non laggy screensharing is niche use case? Such
| statement does not make any sense to someone that live in
| the reality, especially since covid.
|
| Wayland bring the risk of having critical bugs on
| compositor Y and critical missfeatures/missoptimizations.
| Staying on X does not have any major user facing issue.
| Therefore choosing to use Wayland right now is an
| irrational action which pros does not offset the cons.
|
| Maybe that it'll make sense in the next 5 years, then I'd
| reconsider
| izacus wrote:
| I've never seen non-laggy screensharing with X either
| (especially since most modern apps draw directly and
| don't use X commands) so that's a really facetious
| argument to make. Even with NX and Xpra.
|
| State of the art has moved to image compression based
| screen sharing even on Linux and demanding that we stay
| on an obsolete stack which falls apart as soon as you
| connect a modern monitor to modern laptop due to some
| 1990s usecase is the crux of all these neckbeard
| complaints. Just like with Pulse, SystemD and bunch of
| others.
|
| Linux distros want to stay competitive in the now, not in
| 1990s. Which is why they're gaining market share.
| dfox wrote:
| I see major difference in there: both systemd and
| pulseaudio do things differently but in fact do not break
| any existing usecases. For both these "modern" solutions
| all the super niche things that get broken are still
| possible. While Wayland outright does not provide
| solutions for things that are decidedly non-niche.
| izacus wrote:
| PulseAudio certanly broke a lot of existing use-cases.
| But it also brought some very clear advantages.
|
| Same with Wayland - it's a way to drag Linux desktop into
| a world where mixed DPI displays exist and where HW
| acceleration of desktop is a norm. That seems to be
| signifiantly more useful in 2020 where most displays need
| some kind of scaling.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Try accepting constructive criticism instead of accusing
| people of entitlement just because they dare to disagree
| with you.
|
| That's valid, and I did say I'm not sure if it's just me -
| meaning my (possibly wrong) interpretation. A list of
| specific things missing is fine, but the I'm-not-switching-
| until sounds different than a simple valid criticism or an
| inquiry as to weather those are being addressed.
|
| I probably should not have responded to a particular
| comment with my comment though. It wasn't too bad as those
| things go. Some of them _really_ do come across the way I
| described.
| yyyk wrote:
| >Every time this topic comes up, a bunch of people bring up
| the things X has that Wayland doesnt yet have, or have in the
| form they think it should.
|
| Every time this topic comes up, a bunch of people remind that
| Wayland doesn't yet have an accepted standard for basic
| features. Wayland is very good at some niche features like
| HiDPI or fractional scaling* , but more people (at least two
| orders of magnitude more) need screensharing these days when
| companies move to WFH.
|
| * Yes, these are relatively niche features right now. e.g.
| Look at the Steam hardware survey: more people run
| resolutions below 1080p than above it - and that's in a
| biased sample, since gamers are more likely to have high
| resolution monitors! Now, it's nice to be future proof, but
| these features should not be prioritized over basic features.
| app4soft wrote:
| > _Examples (in order of importance to me):_ *
| Image editor, with own modern looking GUI-toolkit built on top
| of X11 (AzPainter)[0]
|
| > _Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as
| stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not
| willingly switch to Wayland._
|
| Same thing actually decided by AzPainter developer: they
| already tried to add Wayland support to its GUI-toolkit
| (additionally to already supported X11), but postponed it due
| to Wayland still is not fully usable.[1,2]
|
| [0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter
|
| [1] https://aznote.jakou.com/prog/wayland/index.html
|
| [2] http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/memo/index.html
| mFixman wrote:
| This is a good time to ask a question I wondered for a long
| time: why is does the clipboard depend on the window manager at
| all?
|
| Wouldn't it be easier to make it a separate service instead of
| having X or Wayland deal with it?
| pkulak wrote:
| You kinda just need to use new stuff when it's all so heavily
| dependent on an X server. * swaymsg (no idea
| what Gnome or KDE do here) * wl-clipboad *
| wofi, or a Wayland fork of rofi (https://github.com/lbonn/rofi)
| * I don't use a clipboard manager, so I'm gonna skip this one.
| :D * slurp, grim, wf-recorder, mpv (OBS and ffmpeg work
| fine, not sure about the others)
|
| I think I was lucky to get back into Linux this year because I
| didn't have to unlearn anything to use Wayland. You mention a
| dozen tools I've never heard of! If I had some X flow I'd been
| using for years with 10s of tools that no longer work on the
| other side, that would be overwhelming.
| mikenew wrote:
| clipman, for a clipboard manager.
|
| Also here's a oneliner for color picking:
|
| grim -g "$(slurp -p)" - -t png -o | convert png:- -format
| '%[pixel:s]\n' info:- | awk -F '[(,)]'
| '{printf("#%02x%02x%02x\n",$2,$3,$4)}'
| falsaberN1 wrote:
| May I recommend CopyQ as well? I moved to it when Plasma
| changed Klipper some time ago and I am quite glad I did.
| Can even install it on Windows in a portable fashion. I
| can't shake the feeling that I can do so much with it yet
| I'm barely scratching the surface as user, it's quite
| powerful.
| mkhnews wrote:
| +1 for CopyQ from me, it is awesome.
| emersion wrote:
| I can find Wayland equivalents for my compositor for all of
| these tools:
|
| https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide#commo...
| jancsika wrote:
| And I can develop on an ancient Thinkpad if I want. But I'm
| not going to claim that's the best UX.
|
| From the article, about X:
|
| > But using it to drive your display hardware and multiplex
| your input devices is choosing to make your life worse.
|
| This is a weird conflation of this developer's experience
| after being burned out on development, and the user's
| experience running a modern distro.
|
| If as I user I confuse those two things, then I'm going to
| click the button to choose Wayland when I log in. And I
| guarantee you my experience as a user will be _worse_ on
| Ubuntu, Debian, and probably any other modern distro by
| making that choice.
|
| I can work around that worse user experience by choosing
| alternative to what doesn't work, but that's a separate issue
| from the default UX under Wayland making my life easier.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Ok so I've mainly used Windows, but I got a secondary machine
| with Linux, which for the last few years has been running KDE
| Neon which I rather enjoy.
|
| This whole "desktop stack" on Linux always makes my head
| hurt, so these might be really dumb questions:
|
| If I install some distro, Arch say, and I wanted to use Sway,
| and I then want to run Kile, will Kile then run through
| XWayland? Will it work just as well as Kile on KDE Neon?
|
| I understand KWin has some Wayland support but it also seems
| not quite ready for prime time the times I've tried it. So
| was curious about alternatives, just for curiosities sake.
| josefx wrote:
| > Kile
|
| Since Kile is a KDE application it should run using Qts
| wayland backend.
|
| > Will it work just as well as Kile on KDE Neon?
|
| Depends, do you need anything more fancy than mouse and
| keyboard? No? Then great.
|
| Power user functionality like copy paste on the other hand?
| https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/4007 might want to
| pray before using that.
| chungy wrote:
| Kile most likely runs as a native Wayland application.
| Though for any legacy apps/games that use X, yeah they'll
| run in XWayland and should be seamless.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| Right... seamless...
|
| https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1065
| emersion wrote:
| >If I install some distro, Arch say, and I wanted to use
| Sway, and I then want to run Kile, will Kile then run
| through XWayland?
|
| Kile seems to use Qt5, so should work without Xwayland.
|
| > Will it work just as well as Kile on KDE Neon?
|
| It should, yes. I don't use Kile though, so I haven't
| checked.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Just to take a couple of examples from that list:
|
| ydotool is listed there as an equivalent of xdotool, but
| ydotool has only a tiny fraction of the features of xdotool.
|
| And it's unlikely that it'll get much better any time soon,
| as its README says:
|
| _" Since Jun, 2019, I have little time to maintain this
| project"_
|
| wtype is listed as another equivalent to xdotool, but it has
| even less features than ydotool.
|
| If the rest of the X equivalents on that list are as feature
| poor as these, I don't hold out much hope for Wayland in the
| near future.
| cycloptic wrote:
| I said this last time, but ydotool probably won't ever have
| the same features as xdotool because the scope isn't the
| same. A lot of the X commands in xdotool don't even make
| sense in the context of wayland, so it would be
| unreasonable for them to have the same scope.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| As an end-user, the fact that Wayland can't do what I
| need while X can is a black mark against Wayland.
| cycloptic wrote:
| I don't understand where you're getting this idea that
| Wayland is or was supposed to do all the same things as X
| in exactly the same way. It's not, that's the entire
| point. As an end-user you can continue to use what works
| for you. Yes X is much more flexible at some things (and
| Wayland is more flexible at others) but it comes at a
| cost which is expounded on by the article.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" it comes at a cost which is expounded on by the
| article."_
|
| I would appreciate it if you could quote the article
| where it expounds on the cost.
|
| I've read through it a few times, and could only find two
| very brief, vague, handwavy complaints against X:
|
| 1 - _" the code happens to implement an unfortunate
| specification"_
|
| 2 - _" You can only apply so much thrust to the pig
| before you question why you're trying to make it fly at
| all."_
|
| As an end-user, I don't find these to be particularly
| convincing.
|
| Moreover, X works for me now and does everything I need.
| cycloptic wrote:
| Those are all quotes that are referring to it, as well as
| this one:
|
| >But using it to drive your display hardware and
| multiplex your input devices is choosing to make your
| life worse.
|
| If X continues to work for you and you don't find it
| makes your life worse, then... keep using it?
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| > I don't understand where you're getting this idea that
| Wayland is or was supposed to do all the same things as X
| in exactly the same way. It's not, that's the entire
| point.
|
| Ahh, classic: blame the user.
|
| You are wrong for expecting things to work in a way
| that's familiar!
|
| Global hotkey bindings? Sure, that works on Windows,
| macOS, and X, but it doesn't on Wayland and its your
| fault for expecting it.
|
| The beatings will continue until morale improves!
|
| > As an end-user you can continue to use what works for
| you.
|
| LOL, Wayland is literally being marketed as the
| replacement for X. It's even the default display server
| in Debian, Ubuntu, and (I think?) Fedora.
|
| Why are you surprised that people therefore expect stuff
| that works in X to work in Wayland?
| bitwize wrote:
| > Global hotkey bindings? Sure, that works on Windows,
| macOS, and X, but it doesn't on Wayland and its your
| fault for expecting it.
|
| It's not that. It's that global hotkey bindings are out
| of scope for a Wayland compositor. But don't worry. An
| API for such things for the crufty d-bus broker should be
| dropping aaaaaaany minute now... then all you have to do
| is wait for your compositor to support it!
| cycloptic wrote:
| Please tone down the rhetoric, I'm not blaming anybody. X
| is still included on those distros as a fallback option
| in case you have something that doesn't work.
|
| Re global hotkey bindings: Can you please describe your
| setup to me? I honestly have no idea what you're talking
| about, global hotkeys were supported in all the Wayland
| implementations I tried recently. (KDE, GNOME, Sway,
| Wayfire)
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| > Please tone down the rhetoric, I'm not blaming anybody.
|
| I understand that's not your intention, but that's
| effectively what you're doing.
|
| I'm a former developer who moved into product management
| a long time ago, and I've seen the syndrome.
|
| "I understand what you want, but we didn't build it that
| way, so you need to change your expectations" places the
| onus on the user to change their behaviour, instead of on
| the developer to build the thing the user actually wants.
|
| > X is still included on those distros as a fallback
| option in case you have something that doesn't work.
|
| The trouble is, a neophyte will a) have no idea what the
| difference is between Wayland and Xorg, and b) not
| realize that switching might fix whatever issue they're
| encountering.
|
| And BTW, this all presumes that a distro installs Xorg at
| all. If not, you've gotta dive into the package manager,
| which adds an additional barrier since you need to know
| what to look for and install.
|
| > Re global hotkey bindings: Can you please describe your
| setup to me? I honestly have no idea what you're talking
| about, global hotkeys were supported in all the Wayland
| implementations I tried recently. (KDE, GNOME, Sway,
| Wayfire)
|
| It certainly doesn't.
|
| Two examples that immediately spring to mind:
|
| Guake, a handy pop-up terminal. In X I can press F12
| anywhere and it opens. Super handy for quick terminal
| interactions, always-on commandline tools, etc.
|
| Gnome Do or equivalent. Basically Quicksilver for Linux.
| Fast search, command execution, etc, from the keyboard.
| Hit a hotkey and it pops up.
|
| Right now the way this works is that the compositor binds
| the key and then... does stuff. But that requires these
| applications to be redesigned to support that. For
| example, guake added a whole separate binary, 'guake-
| toggle', and it's only job is to toggle visibility.
|
| Unfortunately, that requires the user to know that they
| need to go into their compositor settings, bind the key,
| and set it to run that application.
|
| Meanwhile, on literally any other OS, this would be
| handled with a config setting right in the application.
|
| Maybe eventually be addressed with yet-another-dbus-
| protocol, but right now it's just a gaping functional
| regression.
| amaccuish wrote:
| > The trouble is, a neophyte will a) have no idea what
| the difference is between Wayland and Xorg, and b) not
| realize that switching might fix whatever issue they're
| encountering.
|
| But they're definitely clever enough to be using xdotool.
| Lol.
|
| Wayland may not fit with everyone, which is fine, no one
| is taking X away from you. But allow the vast majority of
| users to have their scaling displays and multiple monitor
| setups, which is far more common than your requirements.
| I'm sorry Wayland hasn't come far enough yet to cover you
| as well, but it's far enough for the vast majority of
| users. You bring up xdotool in everything thread as if
| it's something that Grandma uses Linux for. It's not.
|
| > And BTW, this all presumes that a distro installs Xorg
| at all. If not, you've gotta dive into the package
| manager, which adds an additional barrier since you need
| to know what to look for and install.
|
| So be honest what you're arguing for. You, as an
| accomplished unix user, want distro defaults to be
| tailored to your use case. That's not what distro
| defaults are there for.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| And regarding global hotkeys? Something which before
| would involve going into an application's settings and
| seeing "Choose hotkey for X", a la Windows, now involves
| going into the compositor's settings, adding a hotkey,
| knowing what the command line is and how to achieve X via
| the command line, understanding how launching commands
| can affect already-running instances of applications,
| adding a hotkey there...
|
| That seems distinctly anti-grandma.
| dylan-m wrote:
| I think we should acknowledge many people have grandmas
| who build desktop operating systems, so this is perhaps a
| source of misunderstanding :b
|
| What kind of global hotkeys are we talking about that
| casual everyday users need, as opposed to people who
| build their own desktop OS from parts?
|
| We all tried the universal frictionless global hotkeys
| thing. It was a really bad idea for a general audience
| [1]. That's why we have MPRIS for global media player
| controls (Firefox supports it now, which is awesome!),
| and stuff like the keyboard shortcut inhibit protocol for
| VMs and the like. It's unfortunate for the building an OS
| from parts thing, but unlike cars and smartphones, at
| least it is still all open source.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_logging
| cycloptic wrote:
| >I'm a former developer who moved into product management
| a long time ago, and I've seen the syndrome.
|
| I'll repeat: please tone it down, this is not the way to
| contribute to open source. I'm not a developer on any of
| these projects and you aren't my project manager. If you
| intend to try to step up to manage this as a work project
| then that's fine but this is not the place to do it. Save
| it for your own employees that you're hiring.
|
| Re user confusion: If you know enough to write scripts
| using xdotool you can probably figure out how to use a
| package manager and switch a machine over to X.
|
| Re global hotkeys: I still don't understand your
| complaint. You just described two applications that
| didn't work and then went on to explain how one of them
| was made to work on Wayland. Yes, applications need to be
| ported, no solution on the Wayland side will ever change
| that. If the complaint is that the chosen method adds
| latency, or that the config setting has moved, those are
| vastly different than your original complaint which is
| that it doesn't work.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Please don't tell other users repeatedly to shut up even
| if you phrase it in a slightly more passive formulation.
|
| I have a tendency to want to write little phrases into my
| response like "as I already said" "if you would just pay
| attention" "If you bothered to look". Note that none of
| the above actually add information to the discussion they
| are basically little ways of poking someone in the chest
| verbally for the benefit ones own ego. I try to delete
| such things from my posts which as are complete and
| better written without them. You would do well to strike
| "I'll repeat" from your vocabulary it is very much in the
| same vein as the above.
| [deleted]
| sokoloff wrote:
| > I'll repeat: please tone it down, this is not the way
| to contribute to open source.
|
| I don't have a dog in the Wayland-X fight, but I don't
| see any excess or unproductive rhetoric in GP's
| contributions here. They seem factual and specific with
| some background thrown in. When you twice asked for it to
| be toned down, I went looking to find offense and
| couldn't.
|
| Contributing to open-source by stating concerns as a user
| of the system is a minor positive way to contribute.
| Writing docs for workarounds is a greater positive.
| Contributing code patches is a yet greater way, but those
| don't take away from the fact the filing bugs (literally
| or conversationally) is still a positive action.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| In their defense, my first comment in this subthread
| wasn't great. I'll own that.
|
| In the second one, the one phrase I probably could've
| phrased differently was "I've seen the syndrome". I could
| see reading that as a personal attack.
|
| I have good days and bad. This hasn't been one of my
| best. But I appreciate your being generous to my
| motivations.
| jlokier wrote:
| About global keybindings.
|
| Interesting, I just noticed MacOS allows normally global
| keybindings to be overridden by applications that really
| want to override them.
|
| So for example, doing Command-Tab in the VNC viewer will
| tab through applications on the VNC server you're
| connected to, which makes sense because you feel like
| you're using that other desktop. But everywhere else,
| Command-Tab is intercepted by the window manager and tabs
| through the local applications.
|
| Same for other hotkeys that are usually universal, like
| the one that takes screenshots and screen recordings
| (which are both done really nicely in MacOS by the way),
| or the one that lets you search for anything.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Wayland is not currently the default on Ubuntu.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| Doh, my bad, you're right. I... think? they were planning
| to make it the default in 20.04 and then they backed off.
| jolmg wrote:
| > I don't understand where you're getting this idea that
| Wayland is or was supposed to do all the same things as X
|
| This entire post is about Xorg becoming abandonware.
| People are expressing why they're not willing to switch
| to Wayland, citing lack of features they use.
|
| > As an end-user you can continue to use what works for
| you.
|
| Until Xorg becomes unmaintained and eventually breaks.
| Wayland is _not_ being put forth as an option. The idea
| is that X _will_ eventually be unsupported.
| cycloptic wrote:
| The article also includes a call for developers that want
| to help support X.
| jolmg wrote:
| Yes it does, but that's not going to stop people from
| expressing themselves online or discuss the disadvantages
| of what's coming.
|
| Besides, realistically speaking, not everyone is capable
| enough to do that. Their only way to contribute is to let
| the web know that not everyone prefers Wayland and why.
| Discussions like these are like feature requests and bug
| reports, only broader, encompassing multiple projects.
| Some people might interpret that as entitled b____ing,
| but then apparently so are feature requests and bug
| reports sometimes.
| hapless wrote:
| Yes, the missing scope is the problem!
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I find this comment _deeply_ ironic.
|
| You're here complaining that a maintainer isn't around to
| add features in a thread that's literally a major
| maintainer of X server telling you he's not going to work
| to maintain the project anymore.
|
| ---
|
| Here's my take on your position - I absolutely agree that
| if you have processes and tooling in place that you
| currently depend on, and can't replace, you should stick
| with X.
|
| That said - As a way to manage input and output on my
| system (MY system, with my preferences and my requirements)
| I've found Wayland to be a delightfully better experience
| than X.
|
| So to come back at your list of requirements, mine looks
| like
|
| - Multimonitor support, including mixed scaling ratios
|
| - Touchpad input with gestures, approximately in line with
| the experience on OSX
|
| - A sane "default" that does not constantly require that I
| manually edit settings or xconf files on _EVERY_ system I
| touch
|
| - No screen tearing or flickering. Seriously - NO!
|
| ---
|
| The difference between the two lists, is that I believe
| Wayland can eventually replace the tools you need. I no
| longer have _any_ faith that X will be able to solve my
| requirements. Wayland does.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" You're here complaining that a maintainer isn't around
| to add features in a thread that's literally a major
| maintainer of X server telling you he's not going to work
| to maintain the project anymore."_
|
| The difference is that a huge number of essential
| features both _exist_ and actually _work_ in X, but not
| in Wayland.
|
| That particular X developer might have abandoned X, but X
| itself is still here, still works, and still does what I
| need. Can't say the same about Wayland, yet...
| bitwize wrote:
| s/That particular X developer/All X developers, except
| maybe for Keith Packard/g
|
| The X development community has decided, almost
| unanimously, that Wayland is the way forward. More
| powerful and knowledgeable forces than you have cast this
| die for you. It is now upon you to either adjust, or step
| up and contribute where Wayland is lacking.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| This is an interesting dichotomy. Alternatively just keep
| using X until 2030-2040. If X does everything you
| presently care for well and major apps like gimp and
| firefox are apt to support X for the next decade+ an
| alternative contribution might be bug fixes for X or
| packaging for distros that opt to continue to support it.
|
| When about do you think firefox will no longer build for
| X?
|
| Python 3 was ready in 2008 but 2 will be supported by
| RHEL until at least 2024 16 years later. I will be
| surprised if in 2030 I can't simply pick distro with X
| and fire up firefox. Its kind of silly to expect users
| who are disinterested in using foo to pitch in to make
| foo acceptable when said users really want bar because
| you tell them that bar is now the standard "get over it".
| mixedCase wrote:
| Or, we could just use X if it still works for us. I don't
| need any "more powerful and knowledgeable forces" to tell
| me what works for me and what doesn't.
|
| I'd like to use Wayland. But there's no replacement to my
| bspwm+picom setup that works with a little configuration.
| Tough luck, guess I won't be using Wayland for now.
| bitwize wrote:
| Yeah, except what happens when the apps and toolkits you
| use drop X support because they consider X a dead end?
| What will you do then?
|
| This is NOT a hypothetical. Projects have dropped ALSA
| support and adopted a policy of PulseAudio or GTFO -- and
| ALSA has more commitment to its long-term maintenance
| than Xorg now does. And I suspect the next phase will be
| Wayland maintainers putting pressure on toolkits to drop
| X support, much like Lennart pressured the GNOME
| community to hard-depend on systemd.
| bluGill wrote:
| The other option is to maintain X. I'm not interested in
| that, and since thise who have done that in the past
| agree Wayland is the future I'm cautiously going to trust
| them and so I'll transition my systems to Wayland (if
| they are still x).
| michaelmrose wrote:
| This is an interesting dichotomy. Alternatively just keep
| using X until 2030. If X does everything you presently
| care for well and major apps like gimp and firefox are
| apt to support X for the next decade an alternative
| contribution might be bug fixes for X or packaging for
| distros that opt to continue to support it.
|
| When about do you think firefox will no longer build for
| X?
|
| Python 3 was ready in 2008 but 2 will be supported by
| RHEL until at least 2024 16 years later. I will be
| surprised if in 2030 I can't simply pick distro with X
| and fire up firefox.
| emersion wrote:
| Nobody is forcing you to use Wayland. Nobody is arguing
| that X.org's server will disappear from the face of the
| earth.
| bitwize wrote:
| That's precisely what people are arguing. That's
| precisely what Kristian Hogsberg wanted from the get-go:
| for X to simply go away, except as a compatibility layer
| for "legacy applications". (And I bet Xwayland will
| eventually be deprecated and unsupported, except for Red
| Hat's government clients or something.) X has been quasi-
| officially deprecated for years now, with Wayland offered
| as its replacement.
| jolmg wrote:
| > Nobody is arguing that X.org's server will disappear
| from the face of the earth.
|
| Actually, that's exactly one of the major reasons put
| forth for switching to Wayland. The very comment you
| replied to quotes it:
|
| >>> a major maintainer of X server telling you he's not
| going to work to maintain the project anymore
|
| If the project ends up truly unmaintained, it really
| would end up disappearing from the face of the earth as
| the platform under it (the hardware, the kernel, etc.)
| changes to the point that it becomes non-functional.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I'm sorry, this sounds like some strange mix of
| entitlement and unwillingness to explore new solutions.
|
| You don't want people to use a new thing because it might
| siphon off resource you're benefitting from now?
|
| If you love X, go work on it, or pay people to.
| Otherwise... what possible point are you trying to make?
| jolmg wrote:
| > ... entitlement and unwillingness ... You don't want
| ...
|
| Did I express any want in my comment? I didn't even say
| anything about my preferences. I wonder if perhaps you
| replied to the wrong comment?
|
| > what possible point are you trying to make?
|
| To correct emersion about Wayland being an option. Do you
| think what I said was incorrect?
| Joeri wrote:
| X disappearing from the face of the earth would be a
| great thing for wayland, because people would be forced
| to fix the remaining issues.
|
| I've seen this happen multiple times with replacement
| systems: as long as people can escape back to the old
| system the new one remains rough around the edges, but
| once the old one is turned off the new system rapidly
| improves to production level quality.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Why would they be forced to fix the remaining issues
| instead of telling users they don't really need the
| features that they have deprecated?
| jolmg wrote:
| > people would be forced to fix the remaining issues.
|
| The problem is that they _can 't_ be fixed, as I
| understand. People are asking for things that some see as
| features and others see as bugs.
|
| The only way to keep everyone happy is for both to
| continue co-existing, but unless something changes, it
| doesn't seem like that's going to happen.
| sjy wrote:
| The issues can't be 'fixed' in the Wayland protocol, but
| have been addressed by individual compositors and
| libraries like wlroots. The difficulty is not in building
| a decent Wayland desktop from scratch (GNOME, Sway and
| ChromeOS have all done this), but in rewriting X11 window
| managers, screen sharing apps and automation tools that
| perform functions that are the compositor's
| responsibility under Wayland.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| > You're here complaining that a maintainer isn't around
| to add features in a thread that's literally a major
| maintainer of X server telling you he's not going to work
| to maintain the project anymore.
|
| I... think you already understand why this is a
| disingenuous argument, but I'll explain anyway:
|
| The difference is, for most folks, X works, right now,
| today, while its maintainership is in question. For
| example, of the four items you listed, none of them
| particularly matter to me.
|
| ydotool, as an example, doesn't work _and_ it 's not
| maintained.
|
| Does that make sense?
|
| > I believe Wayland can eventually replace the tools you
| need
|
| Alright, well, ten years from now we should revisit this
| conversation!
|
| Unfortunately, at this point, the Wayland ecosystem is
| looking a bit like Zeno's Paradox...
| horsawlarway wrote:
| My opinion - today - is that X doesn't work on laptops
| where the user expects to use a touchpad. Nor does it
| work on a laptop with a resolution that requires scaling
| (at least not the second you plug in another display).
|
| It also takes a _hell_ of a lot more configuration to
| reach that state.
|
| It's also not maintained.
|
| So no disrespect, but it really sounds like your argument
| has boiled down to "I won't acknowledge issues unless
| they personally impact me and my daily workflow".
|
| Now - I'm fine with that when you're making an argument
| for the machine you should use personally (hell, I agree
| with you, if X works and you like, rock on). But that's a
| pretty disingenuous take to make while discussing the
| merits of the platform with other folks.
| pmontra wrote:
| > My opinion - today - is that X doesn't work on laptops
| where the user expects to use a touchpad.
|
| My touchpads work very well with X, out of the box (any
| Ubuntu I used.) HP ZBook 15 from 2014 and a HP nc8430
| from 2006.
|
| > Nor does it work on a laptop with a resolution that
| requires scaling (at least not the second you plug in
| another display).
|
| I can't comment on this. The few times I added another
| display it wasn't larger than the usual 1920x1080 px.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| > My opinion - today - is that X doesn't work on laptops
| where the user expects to use a touchpad. Nor does it
| work on a laptop with a resolution that requires scaling
| (at least not the second you plug in another display).
|
| None of those issues actually make X unusable. And I say
| that while writing this on an X1 Carbon running Debian
| testing using X in a multi-monitor setup (and yes, this
| is a totally plug-and-play setup with zero monkeying
| around in config files... a fact that, frankly, amazes
| me, having grown up hacking X modelines).
|
| Wayland, by contrast, is _literally_ unusable (as in, it
| lacks fundamental features that make it something people
| can 't use) in many circumstances due to either
| compositor bugs, features that don't work by design, or
| features that don't work due to a lack of solutions or a
| lack of adoption of those solutions.
|
| And I know this because I've _tried_ to use it. I really
| _like_ the possibilities it opens up.
|
| But it's so far from mature, at this point, that it
| simply cannot act as an X replacement for most people.
|
| Frankly, I'm a little shocked distros are making Wayland
| their default display server ecosystem, as it's an
| objective step backward for desktop Linux and I expect
| will scare a lot of neophytes away who wonder why the
| hell basic features like screensharing still don't yet
| work in their favourite application.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Funny, I'm writing this on a Arch/Gnome/Wayland XPS
| machine, that I use as my daily driver. So clearly it's
| not "literally unusable".
|
| > Frankly, I'm a little shocked distros are making
| Wayland their default display server ecosystem
|
| They're making it the default because it work better for
| most people.
|
| You may not be most people, but I can at least concede
| that X is probably still the right choice for you.
|
| You seem to be unable to have a good faith conversation
| about the merits of Wayland.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| > You seem to be unable to have a good faith conversation
| about the merits of Wayland.
|
| Actually, we haven't talked about the merits, yet!
|
| Unfortunately, when I was playing around with Wayland, I
| struggled a bit to find the benefits that would make it
| so irresistible that I'd put up with the downsides.
|
| Tear-free? Eh, I have that with X thanks to Intel's
| drivers. Though I absolutely understand that's not a
| universal experience.
|
| Different display DPIs? Anything that falls back to
| Xwayland (which unfortunately is still a lot of
| applications) look like blurry garbage for obvious
| reasons, which means it's actually unusable in a lot of
| circumstances. And that's assuming solid application-
| level support (I seem to recall Firefox had mixed DPI
| regressions that were recently resolved, but that's only
| a vague recollection).
|
| TBH, I was really _really_ rooting for this feature as it
| could be really nice, and I was deeply disappointed when
| it didn 't work out.
|
| Touchpad gestures? Okay, legit these are really nice!
| Three-finger workspace switching in Gnome is pretty
| slick. OTOH, the lack of that feature isn't a
| dealbreaker, either.
|
| General touchpad improvements? Funny thing is, libinput
| is being backported into Xorg, which means that you can
| get a lot of those benefits without switching. For
| example, I'm using Firefox with libinput2 and it's a
| fantastic improvement!
|
| Honestly, I'd love a killer feature that'd push me to
| Wayland and cause me to put up with all the functional
| regressions. But I simply haven't found one... :(
|
| So, at this point, I'm waiting for the regressions to be
| resolved. Hopefully we'll get global hotkeys, broadly
| supported screencasting, better application-level support
| for things like mixed DPI, and lots of bug fixes so I can
| finally make the switch!
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Honestly - It sounds like it's been a minute since you've
| tried it.
|
| I can say that 4 years ago I was firmly in the "it isn't
| ready" camp.
|
| 2 years ago, touchpad support was my "killer feature"
| (I'm left handed and have issues with RSI in my right
| wrist).
|
| Global hotkeys work pretty much everywhere I've tried in
| the last year or so (including being able to configure
| global hotkeys in an electron app I have to maintain for
| work, which was a nice plus). I also actually tend to
| like that they're centralized and apps aren't able to
| just stomp all over the configured hotkeys.
|
| Screencasting is still a pain point, but I actually
| appreciate the security model that makes it painful, and
| pipewire is functional enough that I can pretty easily
| share a screen on anything that can run in a browser
| (Zoom, Discord, Hangouts - Slack is still a pain).
|
| I don't have issues with XWayland being blurry - although
| I do have issues with Xwayland windows having the same
| scaling restrictions as X (If you move a window from a
| scaled screen to a non-scaled screen, it won't re-
| adjust). Fortunately, most of my daily apps are now
| Wayland native, including my editor, my terminal, and my
| browser (Chromium build with ozone enabled).
|
| ---
|
| Now, all that said, if you've tried recently and it's
| still not there, I absolutely get it. But I think it'll
| move faster than you expect. 4 years ago I certainly
| wouldn't have believed you if you'd told me I'd like
| Wayland enough to bother writing out this whole comment
| chain :D
| michaelmrose wrote:
| > Global hotkeys work pretty much everywhere
|
| To be clear you mean that can in your config file or
| settings menu bind a hotkey to run a particular action if
| and only if that action can be specified by a particular
| command line operation.
|
| This is indeed my preferred way to specify such things I
| like that it is centrally managed and if the application
| developer lets you interact with the program that way it
| is quite powerful.
|
| Is this possible on gnome wayland or just under sway?
|
| There is another form of global hotkey configuration
| wherein the app lets you specify a global command for an
| operation that may be internally specified and may not be
| provided via a cli interface and this functionality will
| never work by design.
| sjy wrote:
| The GNOME Settings app allows you to assign global
| hotkeys under Wayland using the normal GUI [1]. Not sure
| about configuring those hotkeys in a config file like
| i3/sway, I assume it's some dconf thing.
|
| [1] https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-
| help/stable/keyboard-shor...
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| > Now, all that said, if you've tried recently and it's
| still not there, I absolutely get it.
|
| Unfortunately I tried it... I'd estimate two months ago
| (I switched back to Debian testing from Ubuntu a couple
| of months back and decided to give Wayland a shot now
| that it's the default).
| anonunivgrad wrote:
| > _on my compositor_
|
| Yikes! So just more fragmentation and half-baked
| alternatives.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| This is actually an extremely important point.
|
| Because Wayland pushes so much logic into the compositor,
| there's now the very real likelihood that things will work
| on Gnome but not KDE, or work in i3 but not Gnome.
| kzrdude wrote:
| We already see this with global hotkeys/shortcuts - some
| compositors support it and others not, and how to
| configure it is not unified. :)
| Spivak wrote:
| This is why the org.freedesktop.* namespace exists. Very
| few people complain about org.freedesktop.Notifications
| not being portable. The next ones on track are
| org.freedesktop.Screenshot and
| org.freedesktop.Screencast.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Why don't these compositor developers just get together
| and standardize?
| emersion wrote:
| That's what wayland-protocols [1] is for.
|
| [1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-
| protocols
| Spivak wrote:
| And dbus for things that aren't in-scope for Wayland
| itself.
| marcthe12 wrote:
| That's kinda the full issue in standardizing. Gnome wants
| dbus for everything while sway wants wayland extension
| most things as they avoid using dbus code. So stuff like
| xsettings/xrdb or screensharing replacement has basically
| has wayland extension and a dbus API.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| It looks like thanks to Wayland being more modular, there
| is even more room for fragmentation. X had its fair share
| of extensions, but somehow most WMs and DMs managed to
| agree on things.
|
| And in my opinion the whole isolation and security
| concept is hot garbage. It hinders so many useful things.
| My Linux desktop is not a smartphone where I download
| random, badly screened closed source apps from a play
| store. I'm downloading open source tools via my distro's
| package manager. If one of these got backdoored, Wayland
| preventing it from taking a screenshot of another Wayland
| app won't exactly save the day anyways.
|
| Instead we're now getting clumsy, overly complicated
| solutions for all these simple use cases. Ultimately I
| don't care. If people enjoy creating these needlessly
| complicated monstrosities, fine. It's just that we need
| to wait ten times as long until we get something usable
| that way. I guess X needs to keep chugging along a couple
| more years....
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" My Linux desktop is not a smartphone where I download
| random, badly screened closed source apps from a play
| store. I'm downloading open source tools via my distro's
| package manager."_
|
| You're forgetting all of the untrusted Javascript (and
| soon Webassembly) most people are running through their
| web browser.
|
| That seems to be one of the biggest security holes
| Wayland is designed to plug (to some extent).
| jolmg wrote:
| Indeed. I wonder if these alternative tools are
| guaranteed to work no matter what compositor the user
| chooses for their computer. In X, the user has complete
| freedom over their WM and the tools will always work. You
| can build confidently on top of them. I'm concerned the
| same can't be said of Wayland.
| emersion wrote:
| Correction: on my compositor and all compositors
| implementing the protocols wlroots pushes forward. This
| includes Sway, but also all wlroots-based compositors, and
| for some protocols also KDE and Mir.
| boogies wrote:
| > Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable
| and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not
| willingly switch to Wayland.
|
| For me it's some of those, dwm, sxhkd, keynav, xcape, the
| Compose key, and simple highlight + middle click/Shift+Insert
| copypasta. I'm a bit confused about the extent to which the
| Wayland devs have changed their minds about the last one.
| tincholio wrote:
| xcape and the compose key are really killer tools. Not having
| them would really screw with productivity
| simias wrote:
| Man reading this thread confirmed that I probably shouldn't
| even attempt to use Wayland in the near future, I basically
| use every single of the features you've listed.
|
| So far I basically kept using X11 because it mostly just
| works for me, but I didn't expect that Wayland was still so
| far behind.
| mkhalil wrote:
| Wow.
|
| I was suprised to read that OBS doesn't work with Wayland. I
| found some articles [0] on how it runs well using XWayland [1]
| - which I guess let's you run X-Clients under Wayland - but it
| seems that the amount of work to get this to work is not
| trivial, considering the official PR for the work, is on part 3
| and that has been open since March![2]. Oh, how did it get so
| bad?
|
| ---------------
|
| [0]:https://feaneron.com/2019/11/21/screencasting-with-obs-
| studi... [1]:https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html#headi
| ng_toc_j_3 [2]:https://github.com/obsproject/obs-
| studio/pull/2484#issuecomm...
| [deleted]
| nsajko wrote:
| I agree those features are essential for an Xorg replacement,
| but you're missing the fact that the Wayland designers excluded
| them intentionally, so Wayland is intrinsically hostile to the
| features and the power-users that use them. See my comment at
| the top level of this thread.
| shmerl wrote:
| There are few replacements:
|
| * https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard
|
| * https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool
|
| OBS / ffmpeg and etc. should get integrated with Pipewire I
| think for screen capture and the like? But I'm not sure how far
| that progressed.
| creese wrote:
| I switched to Sway recently. I couldn't believe how snappy it
| is.
|
| Some of your issues are solved:
|
| CLI clipboard access: wl-clipboard:
| https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard
|
| App launcher: bemenu: https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu
| horsawlarway wrote:
| > I switched to Sway recently. I couldn't believe how snappy
| it is.
|
| This is the common refrain I tend to see. I know I was
| certainly in the "Can't believe it" category, since I'd tried
| wayland about 4 years ago and ended up moving back to X.
|
| That said, I had exactly the same reaction 2 years ago when I
| gave it a shot on my new machine.
|
| It was fast, didn't show any tearing or flickering, handled
| automatic configuration of most monitors correctly, and made
| my touchpad genuinely nice to use.
|
| Just the touchpad support alone won me over pretty much
| immediately.
|
| I went from "Eh, Wayland isn't ready" to "Holy shit, I'm
| never going back!"
| The_rationalist wrote:
| On what benchmarck can we measure this? Phoronix regularly
| show that Wayland is slightly slower than X.
| dralley wrote:
| It could be mostly subjective - lack of "jank" can go a
| long way in terms of making UIs feel faster and nicer to
| use.
| renox wrote:
| I'm not surprised: one of Wayland's goal is to produce
| 'perfect frame' at the very least this has a latency
| cost..
| The_rationalist wrote:
| I have yet to see evidence that Wayland has less
| artifacts/tearing than X. Wayland does not has such a
| thing: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&p
| x=Radeon-T... Also Wayland probably has less support for
| adaptative sync (which is the biggest feature regarding
| what you call a perfect frame)
| djsumdog wrote:
| > Wayland is only supported by compositors that implement the
| wlr-layer-shell protocol. Typically wlroots-based
| compositors.
|
| I'm really concerned about Wayland fragmentation. Will some
| tools work on only wlroot implementations and not others? X11
| apps generally work across window managers, although the
| weird ones (tiling window managers like i3) may have some
| interesting things you have to work around.
|
| If wlroots became the standard for all window managers on
| Wayland and everyone used it, I guess it would be fine. But
| if not, we're going to see a lot of apps that have to be
| adapted for each and every composer.
| Spivak wrote:
| I don't know why people are so afraid of fragmentation in
| this respect. There are lots of "de specific" protocols
| that are well supported everywhere like
| org.freedesktop.Notifications.
|
| If the world can agree on Wayland then desktops can agree
| on some dbus interfaces for doing stuff like screenshots,
| screencasts, and automation.
|
| Wayland is a shiny new thing and lots of people are writing
| compositors since it's suddenly possible for people to
| write them in a way that you simply couldn't with X11. The
| ecosystem will eventually mature but I think it would be a
| mistake to recreate the Xorg monoculture with wlroots.
| People seem to see the value of multiple browser
| implementations agreeing on standard but not display
| servers.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > There are lots of "de specific" protocols that are well
| supported everywhere like org.freedesktop.Notifications.
|
| except when they aren't - I had a firefox bug for a
| couple years where the browser showing a notification
| would completely hang it for at least 15-20 seconds
| simias wrote:
| I'm personally concerned because I like to use "niche"
| tiling WMs (I used Ratpoison then StumpWM for over a
| decade, then I switched to a rather heavily customized
| DWM a couple of years ago).
|
| Even with a relatively monolithic and "opinionated"
| protocol such as X11 it's not uncommon to encounter
| applications that don't play very nicely with alternative
| paradigms (because they expect a tray to be available, or
| to be able to place floating windows anywhere they want
| for instance). Still, overall with a few hacks here and
| there it works mostly very well. Basically I know that
| we're 2nd class citizens within the unix desktop world
| but at least the X11 model gives us enough of preemption
| to get things working mostly correctly.
|
| From what I see of Wayland I'm very concerned in the long
| run. Not being able to just beat a window into submission
| X-style seems like it would create a world of troubles.
|
| And _because_ tiling environment are fairly niche I don
| 't expect the ecosystem to organically evolve solutions
| to all of these problems.
|
| And if you think "well just stop using tiling WMs and use
| whatever else is using you weirdo" please do note that
| these issues are also often the same that are encountered
| by people with disabilities who need to rig their UIs in
| certain ways to make them usable. Also you'll have to pry
| my tiling WM from my cold dead hands, you heathen.
| nsajko wrote:
| What you fear is sadly true. See my top-level comment in
| this thread for some elaboration.
| sjy wrote:
| I tried a bunch of tiling window managers over the last
| two years, and found that the choice of X11 or Wayland
| does not make much of a difference with regard to the
| "second class citizen" effect you described. What finally
| solved it for me was switching to GNOME (ie. mutter on
| Wayland) with the PaperWM extension. Fundamentally, I'm
| running a conventional desktop with no tearing and
| standard, widely used solutions for keyboard shortcuts,
| the clipboard, screenshots, and floating windows, so
| graphical applications look and feel correct even if they
| are a bad fit for the tiling model. Tiling is implemented
| by PaperWM at a higher level, in JavaScript, leaving the
| complexities of hardware accelerated, animated
| compositing to GNOME. It's a good combination - I'd like
| to see more tiling window managers designed to take
| advantage of hardware-accelerated compositing.
| djsumdog wrote:
| There are tiling window managers for Wayland. Sway is one
| that is meant to maintain configuration file
| comparability with i3. But yes, obscure tiling managers
| will need to be rewritten for Wayland.
| simias wrote:
| I'm looking at sway and it looks promising (although I
| wonder how it deals with the many weird corner cases that
| X11 tiling WMs have had decades to fix and work around)
| but Sway's home page linked to the wlroots project which
| is:
|
| >[...] a modular basis for Sway and other Wayland
| compositors to build upon
|
| I was curious to see what that looked like so I went on
| the github and the first sentence on the README is:
|
| >Pluggable, composable, unopinionated modules for
| building a Wayland compositor; or about 50,000 lines of
| code you were going to write anyway.
|
| My jaw literally dropped when I read this. It seemed so
| wild that I actually cloned the repository and ran
| sloccount myself to check if there was a catch (there
| isn't, master is at 53k lines). My DWM is 3k lines and
| it's fully featured as far as I'm concerned.
|
| I realize that it just pushes a lot of that functionality
| (and code) into X but at least it separates the concerns,
| my WM doesn't ship with half of the X11 source code as a
| hard dependency. Also X11 has been battle tested for
| literally decades by now, it's not a fast moving project
| (well, arguably it's quite the opposite, hence the very
| existence of this discussion).
|
| I haven't looked very deeply at Wayland so I won't say
| that they're doing it wrong, maybe I'm just missing an
| important aspect, but the more I learn about it the more
| it feels like they've thrown the baby out with the bath
| water.
|
| X11 can be hugely hacky at times and some of it is
| seriously outdated at the conceptual level, but it also
| does many things amazingly well, arguably better than any
| other mainstream desktop environment out there. It's an
| incredibly flexible, if a bit idiosyncratic system.
| Wayland seems to fix some of its flaws by introducing a
| brand new system that comes with its own set of
| drawbacks.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| The more I learn about this, the more I start to think
| that there needs to be some kind of middleware library
| implementing all these missing features from Wayland that
| all Wayland compositors are going to to need anyway.
|
| Then the compositors could just use this library instead
| of every one of them duplicating effort and coming up
| with their own mutually incompatible ways of doing
| things.
|
| In fact, this library could even be protocol-agnostic,
| and be able to talk to both Wayland and X.
| Arnavion wrote:
| >The more I learn about this, the more I start to think
| that there needs to be some kind of middleware library
| implementing all these missing features from Wayland that
| all Wayland compositors are going to to need anyway.
|
| >Then the compositors could just use this library instead
| of every one of them duplicating effort and coming up
| with their own mutually incompatible ways of doing
| things.
|
| That's what wlroots is, except for...
|
| >In fact, this library could even be protocol-agnostic,
| and be able to talk to both Wayland and X.
|
| ... because that's outside its scope. The point of the
| middleware is to interface with the wayland protocol.
| It's not "protocol-agnostic".
| mcguire wrote:
| Rewritten and add compositor functionality.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| >Wayland is a shiny new thing
|
| It's 12 years old
| jhoechtl wrote:
| It usable since 2 years for my definition of usable.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| It breaks multiple things for me and does nothing of note
| I care about. The things I want to work will either never
| be fixed or will be fixed in the distant future.
|
| Since I have no desire to lose functionality or work
| around issues I will revisit the situation either when
| every major issue is resolved or within 1 year of major
| apps like Firefox not working on X even with a a user
| contributed build.
|
| I would be shocked if this was before 2030.
| emersion wrote:
| KDE and Mir already implement some wlroots protocols. We
| (wlroots) try to get as many compositors as possible on
| board.
| jordan_curve wrote:
| Is wlroots still incompatible with Nvidia hardware?
| nialv7 wrote:
| Do you try to get them into the official wayland
| protocols? (if there is such a thing.)
| mnd999 wrote:
| I always get downvoted for saying this but anyway. Wayland
| needs the Nvidia problem to be solved. I don't see how it's
| sustainable to have to build everything for GBM and EGLStreams.
| jordan_curve wrote:
| Yep. People can complain about Nvidia's refusal to comply to
| standards as much as they want, but at the end of the day,
| there is never going to be widespread adoption of Wayland
| until Nvidia hardware is fully supported.
| markstos wrote:
| I recently switched to Sway on Wayland. Sway has good dynamic
| output configuration. `wl-clipboard` and `wl-paste` are there
| for CLI clipboard access. There's a rofi fork that works on
| Wayland, and can also emulate `dmenu`. `clipman` is Wayland
| compatible. I use `grimshot` with `rofi` integration for
| screenshots. I have a HTML Color Picker script for sway that's
| launched from `rofi` that I should share. `ydotool` and `wtype`
| emulate the parts of `xdotool` that I care about.
|
| Also, there's no longer tearing when I resize windows!
| [deleted]
| DCKing wrote:
| The problem with Wayland is really that people understand it to
| be a drop-in replacement of X11, or something close to it. But
| it's not a replacement of X11. You don't "switch to Wayland",
| despite what that GDM button seems to indicate. Wayland is just
| a protocol, whereas X11 is a protocol and entire system around
| it.
|
| So Wayland is not a replacement of X11. Gnome on Wayland
| _should_ be a replacement for Gnome on X11. KDE on Wayland
| should be replacement for KDE on X11. Sway on Wayland should be
| a replacement for i3 and X11. But as you can imagine in this
| equation, KDE, Gnome and Sway are permitted and required to
| take on more responsibilities.
|
| You might take issue with the fact that a lot more of the
| display stack gets tied up in specific desktop environments.
| It's KDE and Gnome and Sway that are not providing you these
| command line tools/screen recording/clipboard access. I don't
| mean to say this as nitpicking or that """Wayland""" (whatever
| that means) is dropping the ball, but this is _really_ the
| responsibility of the desktop environment (or WM) in Wayland 's
| design. Wayland is just a protocol.
|
| What you're observing as shortcomings in Wayland is really a
| lock of pace and direction of development for (e.g.
| Freedesktop) standards that standardize clipboard access/screen
| recording use cases, and the adoption of those standards. The
| Linux community seems to have been hit by 1) not realizing
| Wayland does not replace X11 and 2) realizing that, not being
| to coordinate standardization well of the pieces of the X11
| stack that should be replaced as well. If you need to replace
| X11, you need a lot more than just Wayland. But that seems to
| keep on catching people by surprise.
|
| I think it'd be helpful for the future of the Linux desktop if
| more people recognized that.
| nine_k wrote:
| It looks like a ton of _common_ functionality is not ready
| yet. It is dispersed among DEs, and this is not convenient.
|
| I hope we'll eventually have some "wayland-goodies" package
| which will implement the common stuff like easy
| screenshooting, easy hotkey assignment, easy window
| inspection and control, etc. I _suppose_ this can be
| implemented based just on the protocol, and not specifics of
| a compositor.
| this_user wrote:
| Maybe the problem is precisely that Wayland is not an X
| replacement, because that has led to a situation where there
| is a certain mismatch between the different pieces of the
| stack. Few people really understand what Wayland actually is,
| and how it works, and how it all fits together, which means
| only few people are actively working on the ecosystem.
|
| Love it or hate it, but systemd has been around since 2010,
| and is almost ubiquitous by now. Wayland has been around
| since 2008, and it still seems more like a tech demo for most
| use cases rather than something that is production ready.
| There is clearly an issue with this project.
| DCKing wrote:
| > Maybe the problem is precisely that Wayland is not an X
| replacement
|
| For the understanding of all of this by the community,
| certainly. But Wayland could have never been a direct
| replacement for X. The problem with X is not that it's old
| or poor quality. Even if that were so, that is fixable. The
| problem with X is that its fundamental design principles
| are not suited to a desktop made after the early 1990s.
|
| The reason X is much more entrenched than being a display
| protocol very much has to do with every X running system
| having a standardized X server any system process can talk
| to. That client server principle was fundamentally flawed
| and Wayland fixes that, but that _very same_ client server
| principle allowed this X ecosystem to thrive. Any "X
| replacement" that did away with X11's core design problems
| would therefore run into not being able to replace the
| ecosystem in the same way.
|
| If there would have been a coordinated effort to replace X,
| we would have needed a much broader initiative pop in 2010.
| An initiative where Wayland is one component, something
| like PipeWire another, and some Freedesktop IPC standards
| for e.g. accessing the clipboard and other features
| provided out of the box by X11, and reference utilities
| implementing those standards.
|
| But coordinated efforts like that are not really how the
| free software community works! So Wayland just evolved out
| on its own. It started as a small effort by developers
| frustrated with X11 the display server protocol. The
| community then proceeded to take the line "Wayland is a
| replacement for X.org" and then ran with it, creating
| confusion everywhere, and stifling progress to replace X11
| in the process.
|
| Systemd is quite unique in the free software world because
| it's a tremendously coordinated effort and has taken on a
| broad scope. And just look at the sheer amount of vitriol
| that ended up getting just for those aspects of the
| project. It's just not how the community likes to operate,
| or at least a vocal minority does not like this.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| Deprecating Xorg and providing no replacement
| standard/protocol for almost everything it does and enables
| is kind of the whole problem, isn't it?
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Wayland is just a protocol, whereas X11 is a protocol and
| entire system around it._ "
|
| This statement doesn't make sense to me.
| DCKing wrote:
| Wayland is a display protocol.
|
| X.org is a display protocol, its own server implementation
| of that protocol, and many utilities to interface with that
| server. And even more stuff.
|
| To illustrate this: if you run Gnome on X.org, you will see
| you have an 'xorg' binary running in addition to all the
| Gnome stuff. That's the X11 server from X.org. If you run
| Gnome on Wayland, there's no 'wayland' stuff running.
| There's just Gnome implementing the Wayland display
| protocol.
|
| That's why this "switching to Wayland" talk is just missing
| the point. You're not really switching to Wayland, you're
| just switching to a "pure Gnome" stack, or a "pure KDE"
| stack, or a "pure Sway" stack. These stacks all just happen
| to implement the Wayland protocol in their own compositors
| (i.e. Mutter, KWin, Sway) because they're committed to
| standardization and all want to run
| GTK3+Qt5+Ozone+XWayland+etc apps built for Wayland.
| wnoise wrote:
| Yes, and I don't want to switch to a pure stack from
| _any_ desktop environment. I want all these things to
| easily mix and match. And for all these things outside
| the pure wayland protocol (and some supposedly inside
| it), they don't.
| andyjpb wrote:
| No matter how horrible X may be, it has a lot of value for
| end users. Almost all of this value is in the ecosystem
| around X.
|
| You can't capture an ecosystem unless you provide that value,
| _plus_ the activation energy needed to persuade people to
| change.
|
| systemd (as an example of a large, recent, change to the
| "whole system") touched end-users far less than X so the pain
| was felt mainly by distributors and sysadmins.
|
| Time and again, software that's "better" fails in the market
| because it doesn't provide the things that users need, want
| or use.
|
| Backwards compatibility is usually key when trying to capture
| a large, long established user base. ...and that means
| backwards compatibility even (or especially!) with all the
| "bad" or "wrong" stuff. This is one of the things that makes
| software "products" much harder than software "engineering"
| (which in turn is "harder" than computer science).
|
| Science is how it works. Engineering is getting it to work
| and productisation is getting people to adopt it.
|
| Wayland has to solve problems that end-users actually care
| about rather than just being better in technical ways.
| DCKing wrote:
| To be fair to """Wayland""" (again, whatever that means),
| Gnome on Wayland seems to be a lot better when it comes to
| the core smoothness of the desktop experience. I have never
| seen tearing on Gnome on Wayland, and with X11 I saw it
| every day. I haven't used KDE on Wayland extensively, but
| in my short time with it it was a lot less glitchy
| _graphically speaking_ than X11. For all the shortcomings
| of the """Wayland ecosystem""", there seems to be true
| technical merit Wayland has over X11. If only because it
| fundamentally solves X11's buffer sharing problem.
|
| But the writing's on the wall. This change is not coming
| about through market forces as you're suggesting, but where
| the developer's interests are. And that's pretty clear
| X.org's development has slowed down significantly compared
| to whatever is happening around a Wayland ecosystem.
| Although sadly not as much effort is put into the stuff
| that is needed _outside of_ Wayland.
| 4bpp wrote:
| I think tearing may be one of those personal preferences
| where the population is divided down somewhere near the
| middle, but people on either side can not fathom the
| existence of the other as anything other than some sort
| of bad-faith exercise in contrarianism. At least, I for
| my part could never imagine ever willingly giving up a
| "real feature" (my perception!) like xdotool for the
| cosmetic benefits of no tearing (which to me feels like a
| problem on the importance level of "getting the blinky
| blue LEDs on your GPU fan to work"), but at the same time
| there is clearly a large number of people on tech support
| forums, stackexchange etc. to whom it is of show-stopping
| significance, as evidenced by the effort and time put
| into achieving non-tearing and how often it is presented
| as a self-evident killer feature of systems like Wayland.
| vidarh wrote:
| For me the only reason is that my window manager would need to
| change (bspwm) and I have _no_ compelling reason to switch
| unless it 's 100% painless.
|
| This is the biggest problem. I accept Wayland brings benefits
| for some people, but I couldn't care less. Since I don't care
| about the benefits it brings, it needs to be entirely painless.
|
| Until the switch is more painless than holding on to Xorg,
| there will be a good chunk of users with no incentive to make
| the move.
|
| EDIT: I'd also say that the fact that so many of the tools need
| to change, rather than e.g. get support added to them to
| support Wayland compositors is a huge indictment of the whole
| thing. It seems like _no_ thought was put into planning for
| transition.
| hacknat wrote:
| When the last discussion of X being abandon-ware came up one of
| the things I wanted to say, being the creator of a highly used
| open source project myself, is that people are ultimately
| responsible for software. I was going to speculate that the
| maintainer of X might be burnt out and that none of us have any
| right to his free labour, and that the people whining should
| probably step up or shut up.
|
| Open source software is also free (as in beer) software.
|
| There's a word for people who complain about free things.
| znpy wrote:
| You miss the point.
|
| The problem is not wayland. I root for wayland and I hope it'll
| progress steadily to maturity.
|
| The problem is getting pushed to drop my well-working Xorg-
| based setup for some wayland-based setup that can't run the
| application I use daily and that I've been running for years.
|
| I'm okay with wayland, but I have a problem with people telling
| me "oh just drop that".
| osobo wrote:
| I'm fairly sure you missed his point. Entirely.
| Reelin wrote:
| No, GGP is saying that we (users) have no right to complain
| about a FOSS developer abandoning their project since we
| don't compensate them for it.
|
| GP is saying yeah, that's great and all, but _other_ people
| try to push everyone to switch to Wayland because
| <reasons>. The Wayland ecosystem simply isn't there yet
| though; they're hawking a broken solution.
|
| It's perfectly fine for a FOSS developer to walk away from
| any given project. When third parties come along and frame
| things as though the only option is to switch to a broken
| "solution" it derails the discussion. We (ie the community
| at large) should be having much broader discussions about
| both how to keep maintenance going as well as what's needed
| to actually make the replacement viable (so we can maybe
| switch to it later).
| sergeykish wrote:
| It is not Waylands fault that it serves same niche as
| X.Org.
|
| People who had objections against systemd maintained init
| systems [1], created new distributions [2]. I do not
| pretend there are no problems with systemd but it serves
| my (quite common) needs. And the way distributions shows
| some people were burnt out.
|
| If you need X.Org (and I do), speak how to help X.Org.
|
| Some people needs covered by Wayland. It is not their
| fault.
|
| Distributions default may be questionable, it is
| distributions problem not Waylands. I use Arch Linux, no
| default, no problems.
|
| [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Init
|
| [2] https://devuan.org/
| [deleted]
| nullc wrote:
| I don't see anyone complaining that X isn't being maintained.
|
| Only that they'd rather use (unmaintained) X over Wayland due
| to numerous shortcomings in wayland that are practically
| unfixable (because they're intentional design choices, or
| because they're a result of the fragmentation resulting from
| wayland's design choices).
| bee_rider wrote:
| What new features have even been added to X lately?
|
| It is fine. It is done. Maybe something better will come
| along at some point, but we could just keep using it like
| this indefinitely.
| bigbubba wrote:
| Trying to shaming critics into silence _might_ suppress their
| criticism, but it _won 't_ make them like you.
| hacknat wrote:
| I'm not trying to shame anyone into silence. I'm not trying
| to shame anyone. However, I would like to see people complain
| less and act more. Being on the other side of open source
| software is eye-opening. It can be very disheartening to get
| mostly negative feedback for something done out of passion
| (even if you might make a bit of money for it).
| bigbubba wrote:
| It's good to hear you aren't trying to shame anybody.
| Incidentally, what is the word for people who complain
| about free things?
| hacknat wrote:
| Well there, I was being a bit prickly... It's not a nice
| word, I'll leave it to everyone's imagination.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > There's a word for people who complain about free things.
|
| The post and comments are free, yet here you are complaining.
| Consider why you think that's okay, and you'll understand.
| johncolanduoni wrote:
| A post and comment today is by necessity an active effort;
| judging the quality of an ongoing effort on a project and
| judging why there isn't an ongoing effort on the project are
| two very different things.
| pessimizer wrote:
| What if you write a comment about it?
| stonogo wrote:
| Most (almost all) of the X.org and Wayland developers are paid
| for their work.
| emersion wrote:
| Not really. There are hundreds of contributors not paid by
| anyone. Until 1 year ago I wasn't paid for my Wayland-related
| work. I'm now very lucky to have a company sponsor my
| contributions, but that's far from being the case of
| everybody.
|
| Even if all developers were paid, they wouldn't be paid _by
| users_. It means the developers don't owe the users anything.
| stonogo wrote:
| There are hundreds of low-volume contributors not paid by
| anyone. The project would continue without them. Most
| regular developers, including you, are paid.
| anonunivgrad wrote:
| "You're not owed anything," from the developers of a
| flailing project to its users, is a red flag.
|
| Those users are the target market that those companies are
| interested in pleasing. It's not about "owing" or not. It's
| about delivering something that people want to use or not.
| If you fail, the users will go elsewhere. You don't have to
| care; you might develop the software for your own personal
| gratification. But people are going to share their
| dissatisfaction and might very well vote with their feet.
| And it's possible that, even if they don't, your work makes
| the world a worse place. No, no one can sue you or call you
| a cheat for doing a bad job, but they don't have to like it
| either.
| emersion wrote:
| > Those users are the target market that those companies
| are interested in pleasing.
|
| Not really, no. My company (SourceHut) has nothing to do
| with Wayland and is just sponsoring me for working on
| open-source software (_any_ open-source software). A few
| other developers are working for Collabora, which mainly
| focuses on Wayland for embedded use-cases. So, none of
| these companies have a real interest in pleasing desktop
| users.
|
| Regardless, it doesn't mean that I personally don't care
| about my users, or that I want to fight against them.
| It's just that if you don't like something, you need to
| step up and do something about it to improve the
| situation, instead of just complaining.
|
| Maintainers are scarce.
|
| > it's possible that [...] your work makes the world a
| worse place
|
| Always great to hear that...
| scaladev wrote:
| Thank you for sway and wlroots. You, Drew, and others
| have been doing an amazing job. For every complainer
| there are many more in the silent majority who simply use
| and enjoy the products of your hard work.
| cannam wrote:
| > > it's possible that [...] your work makes the world a
| worse place > > Always great to hear that...
|
| Painful, but it is true.
|
| Free Software development is awkward in this respect.
| Both developers and users feel as if they are doing
| something virtuous, but it's unclear to what extent the
| contributions of either party help the other (or anyone
| else).
|
| Meanwhile the presence of this self-conscious feeling of
| virtue makes transactions difficult, as every party feels
| they begin by deserving something out of it. So Free
| Software users are more demanding and aggressive than
| users of proprietary software, and Free Software
| developers are more prickly.
|
| Loss of ego is absolutely essential here.
|
| (More on-topic, this series of HN posts about X and
| Wayland has prompted me, a long-time holdout X user, to
| experiment again with switching one laptop to Wayland.
| It's massively better than the last time I tried it, and
| I'll probably leave this laptop like this unless
| something goes awfully wrong. Thank you, unappreciated
| Wayland developers.)
| sergeykish wrote:
| I am surprised. The system I use is someone else work.
| I've brought nothing, got it for free.
|
| Demanding users I see looks like spoiled web users. They
| expect free services, they pay with privacy or are clever
| enough not to pay (adblock). But Free Software does not
| sell their data.
|
| Or they compare to Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS,
| quite profitable companies. But Free Software does not
| acquire telemetry, does not sell hardware or bundled
| services. There are some private companies (Red Hat,
| Canonical, Mozilla), their difference from my industry
| (web development) is they ship source.
| dreamer_ wrote:
| From a fellow maintainer of open source software
| (currently not being paid for the work at all) - I agree
| 100%.
|
| Users are always demanding things: new features (which
| sometimes are very bad ideas), merging patches (which
| sometimes were never tested), expecting answers for
| questions that were asked and answered thousands of times
| before...
|
| > It's just that if you don't like something, you need to
| step up and do something about it to improve the
| situation, instead of just complaining.
|
| Exactly. Users who want to say on X (for whatever reason)
| should start contributing instead of spending time
| blaming the devs. If they want to switch to Wayland, but
| are missing something - they should work towards fixing
| it instead of dragging everyone else back.
| Veen wrote:
| But then the only users who get the features they want
| are programmers, who are a fairly atypical type of user.
| I understand that you don't owe users anything, but if
| you don't want to create software that's useful and
| pleasing to them, why bother creating open source
| software at all. You could get the same enjoyment from
| coding for profit or doing logic puzzles.
| sergeykish wrote:
| Hire, we have money for that specific reason.
|
| > why bother creating open source software at all.
|
| I create features for myself, I share it for free, that's
| gift, not pleasing.
| dplavery92 wrote:
| > expecting answers for questions that were asked and
| answered thousands of times before
|
| I don't mean to seem ungrateful for the work that open
| source maintainers do every day, but I think this sort of
| complaint is usually a symptom of a problem with either
| the documentation or the interface being unclear. These
| pain points are usually an opportunity for improvement in
| the product. On the other hand, there are probably more
| such opportunities than there are available
| maintainers...
| romanoderoma wrote:
| > There's a word for people who complain about free things.
|
| You don't complain about the weather?
| hacknat wrote:
| I don't think I do (I'm generally not easily put out by
| weather), but I would argue that the weather isn't free. I
| _have to_ survive and deal with weather (clothes, shelter,
| etc) no matter where I live or what I do.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Well, it's free as in free beer. I'm not paying for the
| weather, but I still complain about it.
| lallysingh wrote:
| > I don't have any real desire to get there while still
| pretending that the xfree86 hardware-backed server code is a real
| thing
|
| What does he mean by that? That there isn't really a hardware-
| accelerated Xorg server?
|
| If that's true, is the post indicating that Adam sees the Xorg
| code as an interface layer to some other rendering system that
| had hardware acceleration?
|
| Is that XWayland? I'm guessing at all this.
| wmf wrote:
| He means that running Xorg "normally" without Wayland is
| abandoned and will begin to bitrot. He's planning to support
| XWayland indefinitely.
| bitwize wrote:
| If the only X driver left were the modesetting driver, I
| could probably live with that.
|
| Xwayland can lick my sack.
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| The xserver code base is huge and supports a lot of stuff. It
| supports drawing through hardware-backed drivers (e.g.,
| xf86-video-radeon on Xorg), through generic drivers (e.g.,
| xf86-video-modesetting on Xorg) and even through weirder
| drivers (e.g., xf86-video-nested). It also supports servers
| other than Xorg (e.g., Xephyr, Xvfb) and many other things.
|
| In an ideal world where everything uses KMS or everybody uses
| something like Xwayland we would be able to kill million of
| lines of code from the Xserver. While this doesn't happen,
| those millions of lines not exercised by these paths remain
| unmaintand.
|
| Remember, Ajax works for Red Hat, which is trying to push
| really hard for Wayland on Gnome. They don't seem to care about
| anything graphics-related that's not Wayland+Gnome. Red Hat has
| much more decision power on the Linux community than people
| imagine it has.
|
| A huge problem here is that a lot of efforts that were
| previously redirected at X11 are now being done on the Gnome
| compositor, due to Red Hat. We just won't get to see a solution
| to the fragmentation power unless someone with a lot of money
| decides to play Linux Graphics.
| nerdponx wrote:
| What do game devs have to say about all this? Or do games
| bypass X11/Wayland and do some kind of lower-level rendering?
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| Quite the opposite: games often just run on GL or Vulkan
| (actually usually Unity or Unreal which will then use GL or
| Vulkan), and will abstract input with something like
| libsdl, so they don't have to care about Wayland or X11.
| But still, some problems that affect games to have to be
| solved in the X11/Wayland level. Some are solved by the
| graphics companies (Intel, AMD, etc), some others are
| either left or picked by companies with a different kind of
| interest in the graphics world, like Valve.
|
| If only we had more real world money-making products
| actually relying on the desktop graphics stack to make
| money, then we'd have a better graphics situation.
| smabie wrote:
| So, I need nvidia proprietary drivers, use a window manager that
| doesn't support wayland (cwm), do I have any options besides
| using Xorg? I think the answer is no, but I'm not super well
| versed in these things. Xorg seems to work just great for me, not
| sure what all the fuss is about. But then again, I'm not an
| expert, so I'm happy to adopt any other solution, assuming I can
| get fast graphics/cuda at 144hz and use my favorite window
| manager, cwm.
| johncolanduoni wrote:
| Compositors are starting to implement Wayland EGLStreams
| support, but it's very shaky at the moment. As always, X works
| fine in some setups but is hopelessly broken in others (e.g.
| multiple NVidia GPUs connected to multiple monitors).
| dreamer_ wrote:
| AFAIK Gnome and KDE already have EGLStreams support in place,
| but it does not work for XWayland because incompatibilities
| in NVIDIA-maintained libraries.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Kwin supposedly got it over a year ago, but trying to boot
| into a Plasma Wayland session on Nvidia still kicks me back
| to a TTY.
|
| I'm not convinced it will ever actually happen.
| busterarm wrote:
| How well do fcitx & ibus work in Wayland yet? I need good l10n
| support.
|
| Who is using Wayland without X in Asia right now and isn't using
| English?
| Arnavion wrote:
| fcitx works fine for me under sway. I couldn't get ibus to
| work, but I used to use fcitx under X as well so I didn't try
| too hard to get ibus to work.
|
| That said, the way fcitx works is to use toolkit integration
| directly, rather than work with the compositor via the input-
| methods protocol. So it only works for programs using those
| toolkits. Thus gtk2, gtk3, qt programs will work, but not
| something like alacritty. (This is good enough for my use
| case.)
| arexxbifs wrote:
| Funny how Wayland is trying to replace one of the few crucial
| parts of the *nix ecosystem that _isn't_ fragmented. Everyone's
| got their own take on everything from basic stuff like kernels,
| shells, userland, and directory structures to bigger stuff like
| desktop environments.
|
| Except X. X is X and everybody agrees that X is X. It's not
| perfect, but it's there, and it mostly just works, and all the
| programs are written for it. Instead of trying to fix the one
| thing we've all managed to agree upon, we're going to replace it
| with something completely different.
|
| I'm not sure this is a good idea.
| amelius wrote:
| I have to disable wayland in gdm3 (on ubuntu), otherwise I end up
| in a login loop ...
| djsumdog wrote:
| Have any of the BSD (FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD) started the
| transition to Wayland yet? X is more than just Linux? There are a
| lot of other operating systems out there and many have their own
| X11 forks they maintain.
| joshklein wrote:
| OpenBSD uses and actively supports a customized (not forked) X
| called Xenocara, which takes the opposite philosophical route
| from Wayland by putting a wider part of the ecosystem of X
| features into one coherent project so it can be maintained,
| improved, and culled (simultaneously, and without committees).
| You can learn about it on the Xenocara project pages and in its
| robust manual pages.
|
| If you read other comments in separate parts of the threads
| here, you'll see people describing re-scoping certain elements
| "out" of Wayland and "into" other layers to fix "broken" parts
| of X. Those "widely agreed upon" solutions for other layers
| exclude considerations for the way OpenBSD works in fairly
| fundamental ways that make it seem (to me, at least) there is
| no practical purpose in exploring Wayland on OpenBSD beyond the
| point it has already been explored.
|
| I'm speaking about the coherent and supported OpenBSD operating
| system, not what can be found in packages.
|
| If there ever become features fundamental to the current user-
| developers of OpenBSD that are enabled by Wayland, I would
| expect them to further modify Xenocara to support those use
| cases, but it is hard to even imagine what those could be. Most
| of Wayland's promised future features are anti-features to the
| OpenBSD approach.
|
| I expect that in 5-10 years, many user applications will be
| Linux-only, and there will be many conversations about how
| stubborn BSD (and Windows/Mac) designers are for not aligning
| to earlier decisions made on their behalf.
|
| These are just my personal opinions with no inside knowledge
| from any part of this intellectual territory, and I do not
| accuse or blame ANY developer on ANY project for working on
| what they are interested in, but I expect this unified Linux
| (and Linux-only) outcome is the unstated but express purpose
| behind promoting Wayland for some of the commercial interests
| that support it.
|
| I want to doubly emphasize that I am talking about the
| motivations of executives determining the allocation of capital
| and human resources, not about the motivations of the
| developers, which are clearly to facilitate cool or useful new
| things.
| grandinj wrote:
| I so glad to see there are still people practicing sound
| engineering in this world.
|
| The driving force behind Wayland appears to be commercial
| interests that have no interest in the desktop use-case per-
| se.
|
| The linux-only outcome is purely an unintended side-effect.
| [deleted]
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > and there will be many conversations about how stubborn BSD
| (and Windows/Mac) designers are for not aligning to earlier
| decisions made on their behalf.
|
| Windows & Mac are already on exclusively Wayland-style
| compositors, they made that transition years & years ago
| (Vista was Microsoft's transition, for example, which was 13
| years ago now). Why would they have any issues here?
| joshklein wrote:
| > Windows & Mac are already on exclusively Wayland-style
| compositors
|
| Only in a narrow sense; nearly all of the features one
| might reasonably consider fundamental parts of Windows/Mac
| are "out of scope" for Wayland. Wayland relies on layers
| upon layers of other solutions for things like central
| registries, interprocess communication, and negotiating
| hardware access.
|
| From the Wayland perspective, this is all perfectly
| reasonable. It's just how software gets made.
|
| From the perspective of someone who isn't already running a
| Linux kernel with evdev + KMS + DRM, we aren't able to even
| find common language to discuss what being "a compositor"
| means to Wayland.
| wahern wrote:
| https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/wayland_on_netbsd_trials_a...
| emersion wrote:
| The compositor I maintain (Sway) has continuous integration for
| FreeBSD.
| merqurio wrote:
| Thanks for sway!! It's my favorite compositor by far
| trasz wrote:
| FreeBSD certainly has:
| https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2020-07-2020-09.h...
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| My problem with switching from X to Wayland is not that Wayland
| doesn't do enough of the things that X does. It's that at it's
| not different enough. I've been waiting for a really good Linux
| desktop experience and windowing system since I first started
| using Linux in 1991. I've always found X hacky and awkward in the
| entire almost-30 years I've been using it -- it's definitely
| improved from the era of manual modeline and input device
| configuration, but it's still ... yuck. Especially things like
| clipboard. But I don't feel like Wayland is the thing that's
| going to move us towards any world of consistency and usability.
| It's just another way for very heterogeneous and mismatched
| applications to draw arbitrary stuff on the screen.
| nullc wrote:
| I like the X11 clipboard behaviour a lot better than
| windows/mac. Having the additional clipboard is well worth the
| occasional weirdness where a non-natively-x11-thing uses the
| wrong one.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| What specifically do you want to see?
| acomjean wrote:
| As a user of desktop linux (PopOS), I wonder what is going on
| here and how this effects me.
|
| I know enough about X, but. What the heck is wayland?
|
| wikipedia says (display server using the Wayland protocol is
| called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the
| task of a compositing window manager.) Whats the compositor
| doing? Does this effect local linux or only trying to run windows
| remotely? Xwayland?
|
| I've used X (Xwindows) to run windowing apps remotely (ssh -X)
| occasionally. It works, excepting that now that I WFH it doesn't.
|
| Linux moves very slowly, but shouldn't replacing X be a great
| thing?
| edent wrote:
| I use Wayland on Pop_OS. It works flawlessly. Much better than
| X for rotated displays and fractional scaling.
|
| I guess it would be nice to have Wobbly Windows - but there's
| nothing about it that is missing _for me_.
| vially wrote:
| > I guess it would be nice to have Wobbly Windows
|
| Wayfire got you covered: https://wayfire.org/
| ghostpepper wrote:
| As a user of sway who recently found out about wayfire, it
| feels a bit strange that I need to switch out sway for
| something similar but not the same (totally separate
| codebase?) to get a few additional features (animations).
|
| As much as I like sway, this smells like bad architectural
| decisions when so much code needs to be rewritten many
| times.
| ccmcarey wrote:
| Indeed, and how the answer to this problem always seems
| to be "use wlroots".
|
| The wlroots github page[0] even says so: "about 50,000
| lines of code you were going to write anyway".
|
| Seems to me that if there's a necessary 50k LoC that
| every compositor needs, it should actually be a part of
| Wayland.
|
| [0] https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots
| young_unixer wrote:
| X11 (X version 11) is the protocol that controls most the
| graphics stuff in traditional Linux systems. It employs a
| client-server architecture.
|
| The windows (clients) send their local framebuffers to the X
| server, X sends them to a compositor, the compositor joins them
| together into a big framebuffer that has the different windows
| in their respective positions and sends them to the X server.
| The X server then displays them on your screen.
|
| There's a relatively new (~10 years old) protocol, called
| Wayland, which will replace X. The architecture is better and
| it has some other constraints (vsync is always on, so there's
| no screen tearing). Some distributions are using it by default
| (Fedora), but most are still sticking to X, since Wayland is
| not completely ready yet (in practice) and other projects are
| still transitioning into Wayland.
|
| Maybe I got some technical details wrong, but that's the basic
| idea.
| acomjean wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| So basically Wayland replaces the X protocol. (I had to run
| some things with ssh -X, and windowing on remote machines
| came back to me..)
|
| And Xserver is replaced by another Compositor which is not
| specified, but poking around Weston seems like the reference
| one (towns in metro west Boston?)
|
| No tearing would be nice (I watch someone weekly on a Manjaro
| install, tearing linux screen share, it can be unpleasant).
|
| I'm assuming a lot this gets abstracted away by QT/KDE ,
| Gnome/GTK so developers can just Develop. (probably at the
| expense of alternative desktops..)
| fhars wrote:
| Yes, that is basically correct, except that ssh -X working
| is one of the bugs in X11 that Wayland fixes.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Apparently the creator of Wayland was driving through
| Wayland, MA when he had the idea for the project:
| http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Wayland-
| Beyond-X-14320...
| young_unixer wrote:
| All of that's correct, as far as I know.
|
| Just note that a Wayland compositor must implement some
| core Wayland protocols and it can also implement its own
| protocol extensions (for example, it can implement a
| screen-sharing extension, and efforts are being made to
| 'standardize' these extensions).
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I like the sentiment....but I don't know a single person who
| actually uses Wayland. This concerns me.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Why the downvotes? I generally try to run the latest stuff I
| can get away with on my laptop in solidarity of the devs who
| rather not be backporting fixes or putting up with technical
| debt.
|
| But I'm not even sure what to do about Wayland, other than
| switch to Fedora and meet that people that use it. I'm in a
| complete we-all-wish-we-were-using-wayland-but-aren't bubble.
| It's unfortunate.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| This ship has sailed for better or worse. The people who take
| these decisions don't hang out in forums to listen to every
| complaint and gripe. They work for the main corporations and
| foundations steering Linux development and they have decided that
| Wayland is the future, even if the transition is going to be
| ugly. Linux is no longer the "community" OS that it once was. In
| a way it has gone more mainstream than even MacOS or Windows, and
| that means it will cater to the larger market forces than the
| "community's" wants.
| ATsch wrote:
| This makes no sense. The community of people working on Xorg
| aren't gone, they're just working on wayland now. Wayland was
| designed by long time Xorg maintainers. This "hostile takeover"
| narrative is complete FUD.
| diegocg wrote:
| Wayland is not corporate policy. It was developed as a side
| project by some guy from Red Hat, people liked it. Corporations
| would have likely pressured to keep using X11 to avoid breaking
| compatibility with applications.
| emersion wrote:
| The people who take decisions can take decisions because they
| contributed a lot to the project. If you want to take decisions
| too, there's no need to be part of a big company, all you need
| is getting involved.
|
| The ecosystem is still powered by the community. I see a lot of
| patches coming from hobbyists in many related projects.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I wonder what this "only what is current may exist" culture is,
| whether it's manifestation of survival of the fittest, a baby
| step towards the machine uprising of 2037; whether it
| acknowledges a notion, that an environment, where what without a
| change may sustain, cannot host a life.
| politician wrote:
| It's a solution to the trust problem. Without consensus on what
| good, stable software looks like -- there are zero trustworthy
| review sites anymore (cf Amazon reviews) -- the only metrics we
| really have left are (a) backed by large corporation, and (b)
| is newer than the alternatives.
|
| The other problems like environment drift and maintainer
| interest are secondary to the trust problem.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| On two occasions I've heavily modified WM source (originally
| ratpoison, now write). Without caring about graphical extensions
| will I be able to hack similarly under Wayland?
| nightfly wrote:
| If Canonical hadn't wasted a few years developing and trying to
| push Mir I feel like Wayland could be a lot further along now
| than it is.
| rhabarba wrote:
| I love how these blog entries keep ignoring the non-Linux world.
| wmf wrote:
| The non-Linux world isn't paying its way. They're just doing
| the bare minimum (or less) to port Linux desktop code and
| hoping that doesn't get too difficult.
| https443 wrote:
| For someone not familiar with this world, what is X Server and
| xfree86? What problem does it solve?
| throwaways885 wrote:
| It started a long time ago, back in the days of mainframes and
| thin clients. Mainframe boxes would run the sever side part of
| "X Server" while clients (ambiguous term in this context, I'll
| admit) would send commands (e.g. keyboard strokes) and receive
| graphics back.
|
| XFree86 is a free software implementation of the X Window
| System.
|
| The whole server/client thing is a bit outdated now, since
| almost nobody uses actual thin clients anymore. X forwarding is
| useful, but it's not a mainstream way to do your computing.
| bitwize wrote:
| Not quite. The X server ran on the client only. The
| "mainframe" (usually a Unix server) had client programs that
| would connect to your X server, send it display commands, and
| receive pointer and keyboard events. The client-server
| relationship was reversed from the usual way, because the
| server was sitting in front of the user. The end-user
| computer was providing a service -- access to the user -- to
| the big machine in the server room.
| pjmlp wrote:
| We do use them, it is called browser nowadays.
| Koshkin wrote:
| I don't know, web browsers today are almost too powerful to
| be called "virtual programmable HTTP terminals"...
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I like this analogy... It's very true, and has a lot of
| local rendering which at the time of X terminals was a bit
| of a pipe dream. They could just locally render some things
| like fonts.
|
| Sun also tried to get into this game early with the
| JavaStations. But they were ridiculously slow, so painful
| to use. In fact they kind of ruined Java for me. I was
| learning it at the time, and we got a JavaStation on loan
| from somewhere. Working on it just established this "Java =
| slow" feeling in my head and really put me off so much I
| went to do other things.
|
| Of course this wasn't really deserved, and Java has gone on
| to become powerful (though I still consider its poor intra-
| version compatibility an issue). But I've never been able
| to quite shake that feeling.
| StillBored wrote:
| In the linux world I work on, a very large percentage of the
| developers are frequently unknowingly running X via ssh
| tunnels. Its just to convenient to be able to run the
| graphical version of tools on the remote dev/test machine
| than to live all day long restricted only to the GUI tools on
| your local machine and a terminal session.
|
| The one place that X could use some updating is all the sync
| method calls, that unlike RDP become quite slow if the
| network connection has any real latency.
| wnoise wrote:
| > The one place that X could use some updating is all the
| sync method calls, that unlike RDP become quite slow if the
| network connection has any real latency.
|
| I wouldn't say the one place, but it is a pain point.
|
| (And actually, many of the supposedly synchronous things
| are not synchronous at the protocol level, but at the C
| library binding level -- xlib. Nowadays there's a much
| closer to the protocol binding: libxcb.)
| https443 wrote:
| Thanks!
| linguae wrote:
| X11 is a window system. An X client is an application that uses
| the X protocol (e.g., Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice) while an X
| server is an implementation of the X protocol that handles the
| rendering. Note that an X server and an X client don't have to
| run on the same machine; if I log into a remote server and
| execute LibreOffice, LibreOffice is still the X client and my
| machine's X implementation is still the X server, despite the
| fact that LibreOffice is running remotely.
|
| XFree86 is a specific X server implementation, though it has
| been superseded by X.org sometime around 2004 due to a license
| change from the MIT license to the 4-clause BSD license, which
| is incompatible with the GPL. X.org is by far the most dominant
| X server implementation in the free open source software
| community, but it is not the only implementation; off the top
| of my head there were proprietary X server implementations for
| SunOS and NeXT.
| [deleted]
| ATsch wrote:
| While it's true that originally X was network transparent,
| this hasn't truly been the case for a long time now. All
| modern applications (including the ones you've listed) render
| the whole window locally for performance reasons. This does
| not work over the network. Instead, xorg will transmit a
| picture of the window, giving you an in many ways worse
| version of VNC. The only difference is the level of
| integration with other programs like SSH.
| https443 wrote:
| Thanks!
| asveikau wrote:
| > though it has been superseded by X.org sometime around 2004
| due to a license change from the MIT license to the 4-clause
| BSD license,
|
| My understanding is that the scene for the fork had already
| been set by the time of the relatively late license change. I
| seem to recall reading at the time that the XFree86 core team
| was unhappy that a sole contributor was attempting to
| modernize the system by introducing extensions, without
| building consensus around them to their satisfaction.
|
| So the license change was meant to prevent forks from merging
| in further work on XFree86.
|
| Of course the fork was adding functionality everybody wanted.
| So the fork survived and upstream languished.
| dialamac wrote:
| > I seem to recall reading at the time that the XFree86
| core team was unhappy that a sole contributor was
| attempting to modernize the system by introducing
| extensions, without building consensus around them to their
| satisfaction.
|
| This is a kind of odd retelling/interpretation of events,
| considering the "rogue" contributor version is the only one
| that lived and XFree86 is history.
| asveikau wrote:
| You may find it odd, but that is what the other, now long
| forgotten side said at the time, and I'm describing that
| without taking their side. I noted neutrally as I could
| that they were "unhappy" and consensus was not built "to
| their satisfaction", but then that their project soon
| died because interesting work was going on in the fork.
|
| They envisioned a world in which they needed license
| changes to block the fork from stealing all their work...
| And worthwhile contributions from their side did not
| materialize.
| linguae wrote:
| Based on my understanding, the license change was "the
| straw that broke the camel's back." There were already
| murmurs of a fork due to disagreements among XFree86
| developers, but the license change was the final push that
| led to distributions choosing not to adopt XFree86 4.4, the
| first version with the new license.
| billsmithaustin wrote:
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System.
| waynecochran wrote:
| It provides an implementation for the X Window System (aka X11)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
|
| It has a long a storied history. The concept of running an app
| remotely and use a local display server is probably the thing
| that sets X11 apart from the rest of the pack. This is still
| really useful in my humble opinion -- I can run X11 apps (e.g.
| xv) on a headless EC2 server running Linux in the cloud and
| have the UI/display on my Mac (using Xquartz).
|
| This story runs in parallel with the history of Unix itself.
| https443 wrote:
| Thanks!
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| The fact that there _is_ an implementation of X on Mac speaks
| to the power of this system, IMO.
|
| However, regarding remote setups, is X forwarding
| significantly superior to using something like VNC? I've
| never done a side-by-side myself, but most of what I've read
| indicates that VNC is usually faster.
|
| As a semi-experiment, a few months ago I decided to try
| running Firefox in a Linux VM, and render it in XQuartz on my
| Mac host. The experience was not pleasant, to say the least.
| And that's what I'd think to be the best-case-scenario for
| latency. Hard for me to imagine using it over WAN.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Depends on the era of apps. If you're doing mostly bitmaps
| (that is, Qt4+, GTK2+, anything that draws its own UI,
| anything with HTML incl all electron, anything using GL,
| anything using composition) then VNC will work better, as
| it transfers better bitmaps. Working with Xlib, GTK1, or
| Qt3-era or earlier apps, X will perform astoundingly
| better. Test with xemacs next time, and you should see your
| results inverted.
| mprovost wrote:
| There was a lot of work done to make X11 work better over
| low bandwidth/high latency links. [0] But in the end you
| could get most of the benefits just by forwarding your X
| session over SSH with compression enabled. Although X11 is
| old enough that compression would have used too much CPU
| back when it was developed.
|
| The more interesting comparison between X forwarding and
| VNC is that X is really only displaying a remote
| application locally, not an entire screen or desktop.
| (Unless you use xnest to run X inside X which is pretty
| cool.) I used to have a FreeBSD workstation with a browser
| window running on a Linux server and a bunch of terminal
| windows spun up on different Sun servers, and you couldn't
| tell the difference between your local and remote windows.
| Remote windows are first class citizens in X11.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Bandwidth_X
| StillBored wrote:
| A better comparison with X is the RDP protocol, which too
| is an API level protocol (its basically forwarding large
| parts of the windows GDI interface).
|
| OTOH, the big strength of RDP is the async stream
| requests. This gives it a much lower apparent latency
| than X, but it can also do the VNC thing and
| render/compress parts of the UI on the remote machine.
| djhaskin987 wrote:
| I'd love to hear more about Xwayland, a project the OP talks
| about. It sounds like a way to run X on wayland, or maybe the
| other way around. It sounds like a really nice way to bridge the
| gap while wayland is still working out some of its kinks and
| providing backwards compatibility for X apps.
| emersion wrote:
| Yes, Xwayland lets users run X11 applications inside Wayland
| compositors.
| sprash wrote:
| Xwayland is more of a hack if anything. Half of the programs
| don't work because the security model of Wayland is
| fundamentally different than that of X11. E.g. Xeyes won't
| follow the mouse cursor because Wayland developers decided it
| is a security risk to read out mouse coordinates when the mouse
| is not positioned above the window. More severe in the age of
| home office work is the lack of support for XGetImage() that
| makes using X11 videoconferencing software almost impossible to
| run on XWayland.
| ATsch wrote:
| This has been working by default in all compositors for a while
| now, it is not a new feature or project.
| hapless wrote:
| It's worth noting this is not the first time that X has become
| abandonware.
|
| It's not even the second time.
|
| This is the _third_ time X development has been abandoned. And
| yet, millions of us use X11 every day.
|
| Don't hold your breath for Wayland to replace X11.
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| I am curious, what are the others?
|
| When XFree86 was forked to X.org, is that what you call the
| first?
| rjsw wrote:
| XFree86 was itself a fork.
| na85 wrote:
| What's the difference between X11 and xfree86 (and I guess
| Xorg)?
| kstrauser wrote:
| XFree86 was an implementation of the X11 protocol. X.org
| is a fork of the XFree86 project (short version: XF86
| license changed, and a huge chunk of the core
| contributors saw that as the final reason to take their
| work elsewhere).
| rjsw wrote:
| XFree86 was a fork of X11R5.
| mcguire wrote:
| I thought it was R6.
| adobecs3 wrote:
| This is what happens when the losing player is humble enough to
| say GG because this was just a game. Nice RE at the end there.
|
| That said- Wayland might be the only future but I'm not convinced
| it is the present. It still misses a specified way to handle
| shortcut keys and screenshots.
| emersion wrote:
| Shortcut keys are configured in the compositor, and
| screenshots/screencasts work in a cross-compositor fashion via
| xdg-desktop-portal.
| jandrese wrote:
| Reading this post, it strikes me that there could have been
| standalone monitors with an Ethernet port that had just enough
| compute power to run an X server.
| jlokier wrote:
| There were, and they worked very well. I used them for a while.
|
| You could sit down at any of the terminals on campus, select
| the server you wanted to log into, and log into your own
| account.
|
| It would bring up a fresh instance of your desktop, much like
| when you boot up your own computer. Except all the files and
| configuration were on a shared server.
|
| The experience was almost as good as running applications
| locally, with the added benefit that the applications ran on a
| big, shared, beefy computer somewhere else, much more powerful
| than could be placed at each desk.
|
| And you could sit down wherever was convenient to do your work,
| and have all your files and familiar configuration available.
|
| Back then, most people didn't have their own laptop to work
| with so that wasn't an option. Those that did, their laptop
| would be much slower and have a poorer quality screen.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| You're right, this is how I studied computer science. A
| laptop was simply unaffordable for a student in those days
| (mid-90s). I remember one of my friends bought an IBM
| "Butterfly" laptop really cheaply at an auction. We were all
| amazed at it. Imagine, your own computer in your backpack! :D
| PAPPPmAc wrote:
| There were. They were called X terminals (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal ) and there were quite
| a few of them on the market around the early 90s, supplanting
| the traditional terminal protocols. Then there were quite a
| number of Thin Client (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client ) devices that were a
| hair more independent than dumb X terminals, from players like
| Sun (Sun Ray) and Wyse (Now part of Dell).
|
| There was an inversion from "Users per to Computer" to
| "Computers per User" and that model mostly fell out of favor.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yes and those X-Terminals were exactly what X was invented
| for. This is why the net transparency is not great over high-
| latency connections, it was never designed for that. In those
| days companies only had a handful of "computers" and people
| worked on terminals. Usually shared over a 10 megabit shared
| ethernet bus, which was surprisingly responsive!
|
| However they were more than a simple terminal. Most of them
| were basically small Unix computers (like the SPARC
| X-terminal which was just a diskless low-powered
| SPARCstation, it could actually run full Solaris). HP's
| EnvizeX stuff was similarly complex though I don't think they
| could run HP-UX. But they weren't nearly as 'dumb' as the
| text terminals of the days.
|
| I still have a few Sun Rays here but they used a very
| different protocol that only worked with their proprietary
| software.
|
| However I do expect a return of this model. Now with the
| cloud, a lot of computing is once again shifting to a central
| model rather than on the endpoint.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| There are third-party X servers for Windows, but almost
| nobody has heard of them, while everyone has a browser. So
| we're abusing Javascript and HTML to replace X as a remote UI
| protocol for desktops/laptops that barely have any installed
| software.
| shirro wrote:
| Typical X terminals ran xclock and xterm back in the day and
| not much else. Pretty cool for the time though. I remember lan
| gaming with friends in the 90s sometimes turned into hacking
| sessions. I would sometimes have a few Mosaic browsers run
| remotely off my system over 10Base2. Given how slow the dialup
| modem was downloading html X wasn't the bottle neck.
|
| Todays modern desktops with compositing and rendering libraries
| that can target hardware acceleration and run games and
| visualisation software on opengl or vulkan aren't well served
| by network transparency and the X extension model.
|
| The sad truth about X network transparency is that it generally
| worked better to write to a local screen and then send the
| screen updates over some other protocol like vnc or nx.
| Koshkin wrote:
| A Raspberry Pi 1 makes for a good X terminal.
| sprash wrote:
| Good! Xorg needs to become a community project again. The current
| maintainers are almost without exception full time paid employees
| and act solely in the interest of their employers and NOT in the
| interest of the FOSS community. Their employers have decided to
| sabotage the ecosystem by breaking established community
| standards. Maintaining backwards compatibility is the most
| important thing to keep any ecosystem alive. This means the
| community should abandon their software (e.g. Wayland) and put
| people in charge of X11 that start acting in their interest.
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| Just because Red Hat is moving resources away it doesn't really
| mean it is sabotaging the project, just that it's realigning
| the priorities. Instead of blaming them for not caring anymore,
| we should blame ourselves for empowering them so much?
|
| Ajax seems pretty open in his invitation for people to come and
| help maintain the things RH doesn't care about anymore...
| sprash wrote:
| I'm blaming nobody. I'm just saying that there is a chance
| for X11 to become a real community project again. Never waste
| a good crisis.
| nsajko wrote:
| > Just because Red Hat is moving resources away it doesn't
| really mean it is sabotaging the project
|
| I think you may have misunderstood the commenter you replied
| to: they were probably referring to the careless breaking of
| backwards compatibility that was being done while Xorg was
| still nominally being maintained. I think a good example is
| refactoring the Server while _silently_ breaking extensions
| they don 't care about.
|
| https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-
| server/+bug/3...
| nsajko wrote:
| > we can finally abandon xfree86
|
| The trouble here for those who use Unix-likes as graphical
| programming environments is that Wayland is the intended
| replacement for Xorg, and the quoted statement comes from the
| perspective of making products for non-technical end-users
| instead of something power-users (like many of us here) can use
| efficiently. I will not claim here that it is theoretically
| impossible for efficient graphical programming environments to be
| based on a Wayland compositor, but the facts are firstly that
| currently Wayland based systems are a downgrade compared to Xorg
| (I think the Wlroots/Sway is currently the only compositor that
| tries to cater to power users, and the issue with Wayland is also
| that support from the compositor is necessary and difficult for
| almost any feature), and secondly that the Wayland design is
| hostile to features that power users are already accustomed to
| from X Windows. More broadly, Wayland is actually hostile to
| features like screenshots that _all_ users of other operating
| systems are accustomed to, meaning that Wayland is actually
| causing an unnecessarily ugly image of Linux systems among users
| of other systems. Causally related to the above is the fact that
| the Wayland design necessitates great duplication of effort for
| both compositor implementations and applications that want to be
| able to use more than one incompatible compositor.
|
| Three days ago there was a discussion here on basically the same
| topic, and because my comment there[1] is completely relevant,
| I'm going to mostly just copy it here:
|
| A too common complaint about Wayland (or Wayland compositors,
| more specifically) is that it is taking a long time to catch up
| to X11. The elephant in the room is that this situation 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...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886074
| speeder wrote:
| Seemly people want badly to abandon X Server (not the protocol, I
| mean the server).
|
| Assuming they do.
|
| Is there any software that can replace the server part of it?
|
| For example in my current work I SSH -X to another machine, and
| use X apps installed on that machine, any other software can do
| that?
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Replace, no. But there are many implementations of it. It won't
| go away.
|
| Windows has Xming and Cygwin. Mac has XQuartz. Linux, well, has
| Xorh and Xwayland. Even on iOS and Android there's X servers.
| jlokier wrote:
| The trend for now is to use remote desktops instead. VNC, RDP,
| that sort of thing. Use Xvnc or Xrdp on the remote machine, so
| the apps on that machine have something to connect to.
|
| Although X was remote-capable from early on, it was never
| especially well designed for remote uses. For example you can't
| easily detach from a display and move an app to a different
| display. And it's not very good at latency on a high-latency
| network. Partly that's because of how it assigned XIDs in the
| protocol; they should have been client-assigned. It would still
| be possible to make that change (as an extension) but it hasn't
| been done.
|
| It would be great if there was a modern remote desktop
| application protocol, that works well over all kinds of
| networks and allows application windows be moved between
| different display clients easily (e.g. from your laptop to your
| desktop at work). Or even better, let the application move as
| well, for ideal responsiveness everywhere.
|
| I think we will get that eventually, because it's such a
| natural evolution of all the distributed things we're building.
| But I think it will be a long time coming.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| That's not a great trend though. Having actual programs
| rather than entire desktops run remotely is amazingly handy.
| A desktop inside a window has never been a great experience.
|
| Indeed it's not great at high-latency, it was invented for
| rooms full of local X-terminals (that were on constantly so
| connection loss wasn't an issue either, unless someone messed
| with the cable terminators :P )
|
| I would love for this to continue being developed though, as
| there is still a great usecase for it IMO. But the protocol
| could really be cleaned up removing a lot of round-trips with
| locally cached variants (basically what NoMachine NX and X2GO
| are doing).
|
| I do agree it makes sense in this increasingly cloud-centric
| world.. I hope it will eventually come too!
| jll29 wrote:
| The X Window System (X11 for short) looks and feels the same on
| my Intel Ubuntu Linux laptop and on my HP 9000 UNIX workstation
| running HP-UX 11 on PA-RISC.
|
| X11 is ancient (1987), but it's brilliant. Its designers even
| anticipated having 16 mouse buttons, and (more importantly)
| opening a window on a remote system.
|
| The system is flexible, programmable, customizable; I've got all
| development manual volumes here on my shelf.
|
| While I'm open and sympathetic to any new ideas and improved
| software systems, including novel windowing concepts, personally,
| I don't have any unmet window manager needs at present. Any new
| system shouldn't just replicate a subset of X11, they should go
| beyond the state of the art to justify the time investment.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Indeed, this network transparency, I use it every day... It is
| the #1 feature I couldn't do without on Wayland.
|
| But X11 has been stale so long it would really benefit from a
| back-to-the-drawing-board approach. From many points of view.
| Network latency, security etc.
|
| But Wayland isn't it for me... It's too desktop centric IMO.
| victor9000 wrote:
| X Server made my Dell XPS 13 suffer from horizontal tearing. Each
| Ubuntu release came with its own set of tricks to circumvent the
| issue until the release of Ubuntu 20.04, when nothing seemed to
| work. Switched to Wayland and the issue went away without doing
| anything at all. Never looked back.
| entropy1111 wrote:
| Where can I find a list of protocols and standards, and what
| compositors have implemented them? I don't want to dig between
| issues and thousands of repos or docs. I imagine commercial
| software have even less patience, maybe that's why Zoom used the
| proprietary GNOME thing instead of the open standard.
|
| Wayland works really well, I think people who can't use it yet
| because of features they miss should just use x.org and stop
| complaining and harassing open source developers. I'm using sway
| and wayfire but I have no clue how they work behind the scenes or
| wayland itself.
| ywei3410 wrote:
| Here's a link with a (partial) [1] answer.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889703
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| The X11 protocol is highly documented. There are many decent
| books about it. The Xlib and XCB are small wrappers around the
| protocol. Once you learn one, jumping to the protocol bits is
| easy.
|
| Wayland is also a protocol and also documented, somewhere. I
| heard it has support for extensions and they are also in some
| repo. Search: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/
|
| A big difference between the Wayland and X11 protocols is that
| X11 covers a lot more things, like drawing. Also, X11 has the
| concept of a client that is also a compositor and tons of
| interfaces for clients and compositors and the Xserver to
| interact. Wayland has none of those things, because the entity
| that implements the protocol is the compositor, unlike X.
|
| Everything that's not covered by the Wayland protocol or
| extensions has to be defined/implemented by the Compositor, and
| that's where Fragmentation is killing us. Each compositor is
| allowed to implement whatever it wants to deal with those
| things. I am not aware of any standards here, although I would
| recommend trying to look if any XDG standards exist for those.
| [deleted]
| ineedasername wrote:
| I've never used Wayland. Are there inherent advantages that make
| it preferable, even if the community could successfully revive X?
| (And assuming Wayland's deficiencies were addressed-- speed as an
| example, from other comments I've seen)
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