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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

#91
post #59
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…

X as a display server is over three decades old, the popular incarnation in the nineties being XFree86, which devs abandoned in 2004 to form Xorg due to licensing issues. Most of the code itself really is ancient.

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

#92
post #78
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…

>if this is really the future of desktop Linux, why doesn't it gain more momentum?

Nvidia is the major blocker here and there is very little wayland devs can do to fix this. Fedora has actively discouraged using the proprietary nvidia driver for a while now and they ship wayland by default since the open source driver works fine. I saw that ubuntu is also shipping wayland by default soon for amd and intel users.

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

#93
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…

> But more to the point, that the problem is that moving away from Xorg as a display server really needs to happen eventually Yeah, to a "better Xorg". The problem is people don't believe Wayland is a "better Xorg".

And for me, this is the main Issue:

belief

People are flaming and screaming about their beliefs, demonizing systemd, Wayland and what-not with FUD, baseless arguments and non-arguments, because they "believe" these things are bad and must die.

If I want to talk about what runs on my workstation as if it was religion, I install Temple OS.

If I want a modern (and basically following sane/safe architecture decisions) display protocol, I run Wayland.

The linked post is just one thing: superfluous. It helps no-one, a waste of energy and time for everyone involved.

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

#94

My 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.

Give it some time. With the way sway and wlroots are developed, someone will create a proper high level framework-to-write-a-WM one day and we'll get all those experiments on wayland too.

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

#95
I have a high tolerance of stuff breaking... even now my mid-2020 release laptop requires a custom built kernel because the latest kernel (5.10.12) doesn't support the WiFi 6 chip properly.

Ultimately the reason why I won't adopt Wayland is that I use XFCE, and XFCE doesn't support it.

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

#96
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Tridactyl is extremely quircky due to the limitations imposed to Web extensions though. I remember good old Vimperator to be more reliable.

I get why they did it though, allowing extensions to effectively take over the browser sounds like a recipe for disaster. Too bad there isn't a way to opt into it when it's actually what you want.

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

#97
post #9

There must be a name for this phenomenon where an upgrade breaks most things. Haha. Reinvention?

Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers. Instead of solving a bug, rewrite everything from scratch and close all the bug reports of the previous, now obsolete, system.

Wayland is a clear-cut example of that. Oh, mixed-resolution does not work well in X? Alright, let's rewrite everything from scratch. Of course, new bugs will appear, but then you can iterate the process to close them!

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

#99
post #83
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…

> 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 orig…

> How can people accept to use a display manager with constant screen tearing is beside me

That's solved by using a compositing window manager such as Compton.

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

#100
post #83
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…

> 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 orig…

> How can people accept to use a display manager with constant screen tearing is beside me.

I never even noticed it, and I never quite understood what people are on about with this. I had to go to YouTube to watch a demo video to see what it really looks like. And if I try it, then yes, I suppose I see some tearing if I move a window and pay close attention to it. But I never even noticed on my own, and am not bothered by it in the slightest.

Would it be better without it? Sure. But the amount of effort to eliminate what I experience as basically a non-issue is a poor trade-off IMO.

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