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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

#81

Post by tannhaeuser »

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…

I haven't seen many desktop apps emerging in the last decade, so whom is that "legacy is holding back the Linux desktop" argument addressed at? X may not be the most modern architecture, but it's still the API almost all F/OSS desktop apps are ultimately written and tested against. For many apps, wayland doesn't bring a new perspective, but end of life with no new apps taking their place. For other apps, wayland means additional testing and porting effort. And wayland, like gnome and almost every other "innovation" by RedHat, brings fragmentation into the free desktop world also for BSD and Mac OS ports. Desktop app development, being starved off developers anyway, doesn't need a "Python 2" moment, that is, a decade+ long phase of transition in the name of dubious progress, or other impediments getting thrown in its way. The end result is simply that less usable software will exist.

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

#82

Post by michaelmrose »

PurpleFoxy wrote: post #31
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…

The author obviously hasn’t tried plugging a high dpi monitor in to a laptop if they don’t understand what’s wrong with X. Wayland solves so many of my problems and so far the only thing it breaks is screen capture in electron apps. And not even all electron apps. Discord has no problems.

This is not the only challenge

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

#83

Post by brmgb »

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…

> Xorg is 16 years old

Xorg is a fork of Xfree86 which started in 1991 but feature parity minus the cruft has been reached years ago. Some people disagree about what is cruft however.

For example, I view 90% of the list in the posted articles to be minor softwares relying on undesirable behaviour and unwilling to adapt (the remaining 10% being misrepresentation of actually solved issues listed in bad faith). The original author would obviously disagree.

Then again, I consider X.org to be and always have been completely unusable. How can people accept to use a display manager with constant screen tearing is beside me.

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

#84

Post by tjoff »

badjeans wrote: post #45
tjoff wrote: post #13

Not much constructive here... I'm of the opposite opinion. Think twice before doing anything with X as the experience and knowledge you gain will soon be useless. Instead invest in wayland, it works great and will only get better and X will only get worse at this point. The pain points are few but yes, if you must have screen sharing with a particular app that doesn't work with wayland that might be a dealbreaker. If…

> soon That's been the sentiment for the past 12 years and X11 still works great and wayland implementations are a buggy, slow, featureless mess.

They aren't though. And X is pretty deprecated by now.

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

#85

Post by canofbars »

enriquto wrote: post #58
PurpleFoxy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author obviously hasn’t tried plugging a high dpi monitor in to a laptop if they don’t understand what’s wrong with X. Wayland solves so many of my problems and so far the only thing it breaks is screen capture in electron apps. And not even all electron apps. Discord has no problems.

> The author obviously hasn’t tried plugging a high dpi monitor in to a laptop if they don’t understand what’s wrong with X This is the only actual, honest, problem that I've ever seen about X. Still, it does not seem a really fundamental problem, it must surely be solvable from within X? Do we really need a full-rewrite of X, unstable, with new bugs and less functionalities? (many of us don't use "desktop" applicati…

The problem has been crippling the Linux desktop for many years now and it still remains unsolved in X which must indicate that either it is not realistically possible or it is so much work that no one is willing to do it and likely never will.

The transition to Wayland is largely finished now. Electron added support last year and eventually the last of the electron apps will update and everything will be done other than nvidia proprietary driver support.

There are so many minor improvements from wayland that are less noticeable like the lack of screen tearing, the possibility of sandboxing apps.

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

#86

Post by michaelmrose »

LeonM wrote: post #46
izacus wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Holy sh... I've been battling this for YEARS now on X11. I'll try Wayland and see if it's better

If that doesn't why not get all high dpi hardware

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

#88

Post by normaler »

edent wrote: post #44
axlee wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you manage to get screensharing working with Slack on Wayland? Did you manage to setup more than 1 monitor to run on various (an sometimes very different) dpi settings?

I don't use Slack for that, but it works on Zoom, Teams, and Meet. So I suspect it works. I have set up fractional scaling of different fractions on all three of my screens. No issues on Wayland.

The biggest issue with slack and wayland is due to Slack running via Xwayland (so not wayland native).

When electron 12 is released and slack will be build using it, it will be possible to use slack as a native wayland application and then screensharing should work.

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

#89

Post by roenxi »

jchw wrote: post #69
yoz-y wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Xorg development largely halted circa 2008 though, since then most of the "Xorg" features have been deleting code in X and moving it to Mesa/libdrm/the kernel.

Wayland's latest release "mostly contains bug fixes and minor protocol updates." [0]. That is ~12 months worth of changes. Pretty similar to 1.18. It isn't like the protocol is a hotbed of massive changes, it looks largely complete according to the release notes.

[0] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2021-Ja...

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

#90

Post by casept »

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…

Well, if the protocol is fundamentally broken there's no way to go but an incompatible rewrite.
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