I mean moving away from something that has like a decade of polish to something freshly minted was always going to involve significant pain.
Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
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Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#62While I am not the biggest fan of Wayland and understand the author, this link in the comments gives some reasonable responses/rebuttals:
https://refi64.com/posts/dont-boycott-wayland.html
They seem to point to https://pipewire.org/ for screen recording. I don't know how well that works out in practice and if there are other solutions for automation
Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#63Kinda offtopic but do steam, gog games, and wine games work on wayland well? What about things like obs?
Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#64> Wayland solves no issues I have This is a common sentiment, but it is kind of funny. Because software engineers working for companies will know the struggle of trying to justify reducing technical debt, improving security practices, etc. but fail to see why these things are useful to them personally when the tables turn. Wayland indeed “breaks a lot of shit” but it’s not an accident or done due to incompetence. Als…
> [...] reducing technical debt, improving security practices, etc Reducing technical debt by rewriting everything from scratch (almost?) never works. It's the baby and the bathwater. It's the sort of thing that seems attractive to junior developers, but more seasoned folks know that the legacy system contains years of embedded knowledge and workarounds for "real world" issues. The new, conceptually beautiful system…
I agree that rewriting things needlessly is bad. However I actually think the folks working on this knew exactly what they were doing and actually made a reasonable choice; they’re not rewriting Xorg, they’re making something completely and utterly foreign to what Xorg is. And I think it is justified regardless of whether Wayland ultimately succeeds or fails.
Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#65This is completely the opposite of my experience. I've been running Wayland on Pop OS since last year and it has been great. X11 had horrible tearing on external rotated screens - Wayland fixed that. Colour temperature changing works. Screensharing works just fine on Chrome and Firefox. I use it every day. Screen recording works with Gnome's built in recorder. I'm sure there are a few esoteric bits which don't work -…
> Firefox Firefox is quite buggy on Wayland, you need to set up some environment flags before launching it, and there's a trove of bugs still open for it. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134 > I'm sure there are a few esoteric bits which don't work Like cut and paste between different kind of applications, which is an horrible user experience tbh.
Firefox has just been updated to fix copy and paste issues on wayland, apparently
Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#66This is completely the opposite of my experience. I've been running Wayland on Pop OS since last year and it has been great. X11 had horrible tearing on external rotated screens - Wayland fixed that. Colour temperature changing works. Screensharing works just fine on Chrome and Firefox. I use it every day. Screen recording works with Gnome's built in recorder. I'm sure there are a few esoteric bits which don't work -…
Not to mention that mixed DPI screens work! I'm using Ubuntu 20.04 on an XPS13 and can finally have different scaling factors between the internal HiDPI screen and external normal DPI screen without awful issues.
Ironically this is a toolkit issue, rather than a display server issue.
Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [...] reducing technical debt, improving security practices, etc Reducing technical debt by rewriting everything from scratch (almost?) never works. It's the baby and the bathwater. It's the sort of thing that seems attractive to junior developers, but more seasoned folks know that the legacy system contains years of embedded knowledge and workarounds for "real world" issues. The new, conceptually beautiful system…
> Perhaps we did need a new display server, perhaps Wayland is conceptually better than Xorg, but it'll be many years before it reaches feature parity, if it ever does. I haven't followed the development at all but, Xorg is 16 years old and Wayland is 12. It seems counterintuitive that feature parity could not be attained in this time unless it's for philosophical reasons. Edit: Thanks for pointing out that Xorg is a…
Xorg was kind-of forked from a working solution (XFree) whereas wayland started from scratch.
Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#68My biggest issue with Wayland is how it makes window managers a thing of the past. i3, xmonad, elightenment, ctwm, WindowMaker and dozens of others appeared only because X made it easy. Wayland makes developing window managers difficult again.
That's true, but wlroots (sway's compositor) has tried to fill some of that gap: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-wl...
It has its own libraries for things like screensharing (xdg-desktop-portal-wlr) that should work across these window-manager-esque desktops.
Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [...] reducing technical debt, improving security practices, etc Reducing technical debt by rewriting everything from scratch (almost?) never works. It's the baby and the bathwater. It's the sort of thing that seems attractive to junior developers, but more seasoned folks know that the legacy system contains years of embedded knowledge and workarounds for "real world" issues. The new, conceptually beautiful system…
> Perhaps we did need a new display server, perhaps Wayland is conceptually better than Xorg, but it'll be many years before it reaches feature parity, if it ever does. I haven't followed the development at all but, Xorg is 16 years old and Wayland is 12. It seems counterintuitive that feature parity could not be attained in this time unless it's for philosophical reasons. Edit: Thanks for pointing out that Xorg is a…
Ahh, 2004 is when Xorg forked off of XFree86, but XFree86 had already been going on since 1991, and already that was an implementation of X which already existed since 1984, and you can trace back even further than that if you want. It’s been a long ride home.
Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#70> Wayland solves no issues I have This is a common sentiment, but it is kind of funny. Because software engineers working for companies will know the struggle of trying to justify reducing technical debt, improving security practices, etc. but fail to see why these things are useful to them personally when the tables turn. Wayland indeed “breaks a lot of shit” but it’s not an accident or done due to incompetence. Als…
Save the obvious distance, I kind of see a bit of similarity with the Python 2 to 3 transition; it breaks downstream programs and processes that shouldn't break.
Another similarity I see is that Xorg is like the Linux Kernel of GUI applications. Ideally, you just shouldn't break "userspace".
I agree that some stuff is definitely broken in Xorg, like High DPI setups. But I also believe that's no reason to break a myriad other setups that are working well, right now.
This constant "1 step forward, 2 steps back" (from the point of view of the final consumers, who really only care about the result, and not the means) is so common in the ecosystem of GNU/Linux based O.S. It's also why I see the mantra of the Linux kernel so utterly fascinating and inspiring. It takes real work to build something and keep it working for decades with a minimum of breakage; starting from scratch looks then like child's play in comparison.
I guess the problem is the same as always: money. In a parallel universe where Xorg is at the base of Windows, Microsoft would just throw millions at it to improve the architecture and fix issues, while at the same time trying to limit breaking changes as much as possible... but that requires willingness to do it, and deep pockets.