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

#261

Post by CoffeeDregs » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 1:05 PM UTC

Just in case someone RTFA and gets worried: this is breathless FUD and could be handled much more usefully in some other fashion that invites discussion of pros/cons (such as is happening on HN but I doubt the gist will be updated...). Wayland is an 0.99:1.00 replacement for x11. I would appreciate a succinct "Wayland changed X, Y and Z and that will affect applications A, B, C" but TFA isn't that.

Much like systemd, Wayland sounded as though it might have some serious wrinkles but those, as with systemd, never really materialized for me (a power user on a powerful machine). Most issues I experienced were transient as applications caught up with the switch (mostly screen sharing). Even though it's not too important to me, games (wine and native) are working better than ever on Linux (and Wayland).

I think the two persistent "issues" I've seen are: graphical ssh (X-over-ssh); and, maybe, others screen drawing on my screen in Slack calls.

I trust the arguments from the x11/Wayland developers and, AFAICT, Wayland has been a Good Thing but some eggs were broken to make the omelette...

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

#262

Post by adrusi » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 1:06 PM UTC

rob74 wrote: post #78

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…

why doesn't it gain more momentum?

It has plenty of momentum. The two main desktop environments have wayland ports. Several distros ship wayland by default.

without providing a compatibility layer

Wayland does provide a compatibility layer, XWayland, which runs an X server that does all the internal processing that Xorg does, and then send the final frame to wayland to put on the screen. It works very well, just with some quirks around mixed-DPI setups, which X can't handle well to begin with.

When people complain about wayland breaking their set-ups, they're talking about tools like xdotool, which Wayland deliberately does not allow because they're security risks. Old applications, the kind that put a window on the screen, rather than manipulating other applications' windows, work just fine.

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

#263

Post by beowulfey » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 1:07 PM UTC

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #162

vetinari wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still, it does not seem a really fundamental problem, it must surely be solvable from within X? X gives you two options: set DPI per displays. The thing is, you cannot drag windows between displays, the app has destroy it, connect to another one and recreate it here. There's even no mechanism to detect multiple displays other that user setting up the DISPLAY env variable. Or you can do, as the Xorg does: use multip…

> [Xorg] limitation is, that all screens have to have same DPI. The limitation is not true. Yes, the core protocol gives you a single, global DPI value. However, who cares about the core protocol? You have XRandR, which gives you a per-screen DPI. Alternative, you could have a freedesktop standard/convention where the DPI is stored as a global property of the root window, in a array of values, one for each display, s…

I think that the reasons go beyond this one issue, tbh.

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

#264

Post by AshamedCaptain » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 1:08 PM UTC

vetinari wrote: post #251

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point of blurry scaled windows is, that X11 compositors cannot tell which clients are DPI aware and which are not. I Just make a new property, and make those DPI-aware clients set it! You could even make a small utility program that sets it on _other clients_, e.g. "windows created by these binaries get the DPI-aware property set automatically because I know it". This would be trivial to write in X11, but becom…

> Just make a new property, That's the easy part. > and make those DPI-aware clients set it! That's the difficult part. You are welcome to try, though! > You could even make a small utility program that sets it on _other clients_, e.g. "windows created by these binaries get the DPI-aware property set automatically because I know it". Yes, another hack to keep on piles on other hack. Why would anyone want nice, clean…

> That's the difficult part. You are welcome to try, though!

I am quite confused by the fact that apparently changing toolkits to set a new property (a one liner) is hard, and creating a program to do this change for these toolkits externally without changing them at all is a "hack" (despite the fact users likely want to do this, as evidenced by Windows offering this setting); but on the other hand throwing everything away and changing everything to support an entirely new display server protocol with its on set of problems is ... a nice, clean solution?

What I see is another manifestation of the "backward compatibility is a hack" mentality. Well, this annoys me to no end, but what can I do.

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

#265

Post by arp242 » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 1:08 PM UTC

ric2b wrote: post #156

arp242 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bother…

It's especially noticeable with fast-moving videos or games.

I never noticed it in that either. I played plenty of action games on my Linux machine twenty years, going back all the way to many hours I spent with the Loki port of Unreal Tournament, and I've watched plenty of videos in the last twenty years as well: but it just never registered for me. Maybe I'll notice it now that I know what to look for, but I'm the kind of person who is pretty happy with 1080p (or even 720p) too, so I suppose my brain is just not very good at picking up these kind of visual things, or something.

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

#266

Post by vetinari » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 1:11 PM UTC

alpaca128 wrote: post #256

vetinari wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 yet, distros like Ubuntu are too conservative, because they are too careful not to break something. Their signalling is then c…

> Apple breaks compatibility at much faster rate than Linux world, and everyone is fine with it. That's news to me. I have yet to read or hear the sentence "removal of magsafe was a great idea", or "I love carrying around this bag of $50 USB-C adapters". Or "this touchbar sure is a gamechanger, who needs the F-row on a Pro device anyway". > Apple decides and does. And Linux decides not to break everything just becaus…

> That's news to me. I have yet to read or hear the sentence "removal of magsafe was a great idea", or "I love carrying around this bag of $50 USB-C adapters". Or "this touchbar sure is a gamechanger, who needs the F-row on a Pro device anyway".

I'm not talking about hardware. I'm talking about software. How they changed the network filtering several times in last 5 years. How they deprecated and removed i386 support during the same timeframe that Ubuntu only considers switching to Wayland. Heck, my ~2015 Samsung MFP in office doesn't scan with MacOS anymore, apparently the latest driver from September 2020 is too old now. And bazillion other examples, see them in sibling thread.

> I am not sure why you complain so much about Ubuntu when you can just use another distro that does things differently.

I do use another distro that does things differently. To problem with Ubuntu is, that application developers do target Ubuntu, not those another distros. So when Ubuntu doesn't need Wayland (or Pipewire, or whatever), they won't allocate manpower for Wayland (or Pipewire, or whatever) support.

Then we get stuff like "Wayland is still broken after 10 years".

> I'am certain one distro or another will still support Xorg for a long time,

That's certainly fine

> and who knows, maybe one day Wayland is actually mature enough for me to use out of the box.

In order to mature, it has to be used by critically-sized amount of users. If you just push it aside, it will stay aside. It is not just Wayland's problem, for another example see ARM support under Windows.

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

#267

Post by swiley » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 1:11 PM 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…

I for one prefer the multiple "weird" clipboards in X.

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

#268

Post by vetinari » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 1:13 PM UTC

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #264

vetinari wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just make a new property, That's the easy part. > and make those DPI-aware clients set it! That's the difficult part. You are welcome to try, though! > You could even make a small utility program that sets it on _other clients_, e.g. "windows created by these binaries get the DPI-aware property set automatically because I know it". Yes, another hack to keep on piles on other hack. Why would anyone want nice, clean…

> That's the difficult part. You are welcome to try, though! I am quite confused by the fact that apparently changing toolkits to set a new property (a one liner) is hard, and creating a program to do this change for these toolkits externally without changing them at all is a "hack" (despite the fact users likely want to do this, as evidenced by Windows offering this setting); but on the other hand throwing everythin…

> I am quite confused by the fact that apparently changing toolkits to set a new property (a one liner) is hard, but changing them to support an entirely new display server protocol with its on set of problems is ... nice, clean solution?

Because if it was just setting a new property in a toolkit, we would not have this discussion now.

Ultimately, it is not just that; if it were, all clients would be Wayland native already as the toolkits have had Wayland backends for years.

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

#269

Post by AshamedCaptain » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 1:14 PM UTC

vetinari wrote: post #251

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point of blurry scaled windows is, that X11 compositors cannot tell which clients are DPI aware and which are not. I Just make a new property, and make those DPI-aware clients set it! You could even make a small utility program that sets it on _other clients_, e.g. "windows created by these binaries get the DPI-aware property set automatically because I know it". This would be trivial to write in X11, but becom…

> Just make a new property, That's the easy part. > and make those DPI-aware clients set it! That's the difficult part. You are welcome to try, though! > You could even make a small utility program that sets it on _other clients_, e.g. "windows created by these binaries get the DPI-aware property set automatically because I know it". Yes, another hack to keep on piles on other hack. Why would anyone want nice, clean…

> Hardware encoding for WebRTC is in the works; that's something they would not be able to efficiently do under X11 at all.

And this is a not true, as evidenced by the fact even software ported from Windows (OBS) does it.

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

#270

Post by mnd999 » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

turminal wrote: post #257

severino wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nvidia is the major blocker here and there is very little wayland devs can do to fix this I know, but it can be difficult to understand. I mean, how come we currently have Nvidia drivers for Linux, which work pretty well, and they can't be used for Wayland?

Because the entire linux graphics community uses the same API (GBM) and wayland is mostly built around that, but Nvidia insists on not using it for some reason.

As I understand it, they’re not allowed to use it - the APIs are GPL only. They would have to open-source their entire driver.