Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet • Hacker News Board

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#71

Post by mschuster91 » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:41 AM UTC

yoz-y wrote: post #59

elric wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

> 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.

Xorg is a fork of Xfree86, which was released in 1991 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86).

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#72

Post by steerablesafe » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:42 AM UTC

I don't get why everyone gets so defensive for Wayland. It's a fact that a lot of things still do break for users if they switch, without existing alternatives or workarounds.

Yes, Xorg is now legacy, outdated, insecure, and does too much. But what wayland did was to replaced one functionality of Xorg, without offering alternatives to other functionalities. Which is good, I guess, it has a clear and focused responsibility.

But now compositors are responsible for other functionalities and they seem to be doing things in their own way. Which is also good, I guess, they explore the design space and then they can gravitate to a standardized way of doing things later.

But it's more than a decade now, many things seem to be stuck in the "exploring design space" phase, so it's understandable if some users are impatient. Yes, it's free software without warranties, it doesn't mean immunity from criticism though.

I also get performance regressions in wine games on xwayland, didn't try wine-wayland yet though. But many games I play will never move from X.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#73

Post by xorcist » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:42 AM UTC

elric wrote: post #43

jchw wrote: post #19

> 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…

It feels important to note that in the case of Wayland, it is indeed designed by the very seasoned folks that have worked with Xorg. If someone like keithp who have worked with X since before X11 has opinions on the design, it is likely well informed.

I think very few people involved underestimate the work involved to replace X, and that it is going to be many years before it is somehow done.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#74

Post by javchz » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:42 AM UTC

I love wayland in old laptops, specially the ones with an week iGPU, as it's a lot faster than Xorg, only being a problem with a few specific programs like OBS Studio.

But.. in desktop I use a Nvidia card, and for business shenanigans the drivers are not compatible with wayland, and Xorg it's ok but there are some features I miss, like fractional scaling in Gnome 3.

Right now I can see wayland as great alternative for casual users, that mostly use a web browser and require a fast solution that it's good enough, but I don't see it as a full replacement yet, and god knows if will ever be.

The problem it's that despite being old Xorg it's great too, and the benefits for wayland are there, but maybe not enough for a full migration from all developers.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#75

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:43 AM UTC

yoz-y wrote: post #59

elric wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#76

Post by AshamedCaptain » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:43 AM UTC

It is trivial to write a desktop-agnostic screengrabber program in X11, but impossible to do that in any Wayland-like display server since by definition you need to integrate it with your display server (e.g. Gnome's, KDE's, etc.). Also for example Gnome's Wayland display server integrates a shitton of garbage into the display server process itself (e.g. a Javascript interpreter), and a crash in any of that code brings down the entire display server with all your windows.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#77

Post by michaelmrose » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:44 AM UTC

eitland wrote: post #49

jchw wrote: post #19

> 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…

> 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. Problem is, ever so often what should reduce technical debt ends up also reducing "technical assets" even more. Firefox is a perfect example of this, they reduced technical debt by…

Firefox has treesyle tabs which has zero good alternatives on chrome. Tridacyl, vim like bindings for your browser + ability to bind javascript or native shell is more powerful than chrome alternatives. Chromium is losing google sync and chrome and chromium are Effectively destroying adblocking sooner or later courtesy of manifest v3.

Ublock origin and treestyle tabs alone make a compelling case and are visually and functionally distinctive.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#78

Post by rob74 » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:44 AM UTC

jchw wrote: post #19

> 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…

As a complete outsider - ok, I'm a developer, but I haven't had the pleasure (?) of writing something that interfaces directly with Xorg yet - I have been reading for years about Wayland being the way forward and how Xorg is dragged down by a long history of dubious design decisions and features nobody needs anymore, and I was secretly wondering: if this is really the future of desktop Linux, why doesn't it gain more momentum?

This post is a bit too ranty for its own good, but it has a valid point, and one that is unfortunately common in the open source community: because you have no monetary obligation to your "customers" (=users), there's not really a lot that forces you to maintain backwards compatibility. And because a Linux distro is made up of thousands of applications, many of them not in active development anymore, changing such a fundamental component (without providing a "compatibility layer", which I have no idea if it would be even possible) will break a lot of applications that may never be "fixed".

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#79

Post by trepatudo » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:44 AM UTC

I've been using sway for more than an year but recently got an issue where all QT applications randomly close and can no longer start until I restart sway.

The screen sharing works fine with xdg-desktop-portal-wlr and with Fedora moving fully into pipewire I'd expect things to get even more stable under wayland.

One thing I'm missing is a decent screen recorder (gif/mp4). For screenshots one can use swappy, it works perfectly.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#80

Post by arghwhat » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:44 AM UTC

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #51

dbrgn wrote: post #23

This is absurd. Author claims that "Wayland breaks automation software". They then use the "py37-autokey" tool as an example. Autokey uses Xorg APIs for key handling. Of course this is not going to work on Wayland since it's written for Xorg and not for Wayland. The author is probably the type of person that buys an AMD graphics card, and then complains that AMD "breaks" software that's based on CUDA...

Is py37-autokey-for-Wayland possible?

Yes, officially and well contained mechanisms exist (used for virtual keyboards).

Heck, you can even go a layer lower and simulate a keyboard event device, which would work with any window system, past, present and future. Even kmscon.