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

#331

Post by ralfn » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:33 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #119

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…

> It's the sort of thing that seems attractive to junior developers You make it sound like Wayland has been pushed by some script kiddies, when in fact the lead developers on Wayland are the actual Xorg maintainers. To me, the migration from X11 to Wayland looks similar to the switch from DOS-based Windows to Windows NT. At the time, lots of programs were broken by the move because they assumed you could meddle in ot…

Yes and no.

Application sandboxing is not a need I have or one that I want my display manager to solve.

But incompatibility vs the architecture disallows features like screen sharing, automation or accessibility means I will not ever have it installed anywhere.

I can't tell people want to do, but those features seem very "contemporary" to me.

Perhaps it's because I use linux as my work desktop. I suppose if this is the feature I should just migrate to OSX.

Because I need video conferencing. I don't need a sandbox. I already am selective about what I install and most of those things aren't even desktop applications.

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

#332

Post by rwmj » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:37 PM UTC

teekert wrote: post #260

rwmj wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"screen tearing" is this thing which is always rolled out to defend Wayland, and I use X all the time and have never worried about this as a problem (even assuming I understand what the problem is). Maybe my eyes are too slow to see this or something. To throw away everything to get this imaginary benefit seems pretty strange to me.

Watching any video under X is really horrible for me. May depend on settings/hardware?

I watch videos all the time under X without apparent issues. Maybe VLC works around it somehow?

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

#333

Post by posix_me_less » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

tjoff wrote: post #84

badjeans wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

X is not deprecated by the global community at all, only by the few who push Wayland.

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

#334

Post by account42 » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

scarygliders wrote: post #203

noname120 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You don't even need a compositor. Just activate Force Full Composition Pipeline if you have an nvidia card. see: https://imgur.com/a/lDfObqw It's in the advanced settings. Silky smooth Xorg web browsing and video at no extra compositor cost.

Or `Option "TearFree" "on"` in your xorg.conf for AMD users. Might even be the default by now.

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

#335

Post by posix_me_less » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #238

teekert wrote: post #131

So funny to read "Wayland breaks everything", yet I run it everyday (on Ubuntu), it solved my screen tearing and other than that I only switch to X for my sons Minecraft. For me it didn't "break everything" in fact, it fixed something for me. Moreover, it seems to be more secure (which is of course something you only notice by things not happening). So such a title does not really make me want to read what is probabl…

"screen tearing" is this thing which is always rolled out to defend Wayland, and I use X all the time and have never worried about this as a problem (even assuming I understand what the problem is). Maybe my eyes are too slow to see this or something. To throw away everything to get this imaginary benefit seems pretty strange to me.

I think it is a matter of proper GPU driver support + correct configuration and people mistakenly attribute all bad to Xorg. My polaris AMD cards have perfect tear-free video, but with intel I had problems/difficulties to configure tear-free behaviour.

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

#336

Post by DyslexicAtheist » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:51 PM UTC

ralfn wrote: post #331

majewsky wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the sort of thing that seems attractive to junior developers You make it sound like Wayland has been pushed by some script kiddies, when in fact the lead developers on Wayland are the actual Xorg maintainers. To me, the migration from X11 to Wayland looks similar to the switch from DOS-based Windows to Windows NT. At the time, lots of programs were broken by the move because they assumed you could meddle in ot…

Yes and no. Application sandboxing is not a need I have or one that I want my display manager to solve. But incompatibility vs the architecture disallows features like screen sharing, automation or accessibility means I will not ever have it installed anywhere. I can't tell people want to do, but those features seem very "contemporary" to me. Perhaps it's because I use linux as my work desktop. I suppose if this is t…

> I already am selective about what I install and most of those things aren't even desktop applications.

in X any application can turn into a keylogger, and you don't need a GUI for it, as long as the program can "speak X" it will be able to read the shared memory of all other programs the X server manages.

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

#337

Post by cies » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:52 PM UTC

_a1_ wrote: post #236

cies wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only Nvidia has a history of being uncollaborative to open source: https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=lin... At some point, even in kindergarten, some kid's just being an ass.

That's part of what I'm talking about. Giving a 'f you' sign on a public conference is not professional at all. I mean I know that it's Linus who did it, and we all like Linus, so we give him a free pass with his sh-ttalk, at the same time when we would condemn anyone else who uses such rhetoric who isn't Linus, but in closed-source software development world such clashes happen all the time, each month. Whether a so…

Yeah when two parties fights, two are to blame. /s

Sorry, I'm picking sides here. :)

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

#338

Post by alphager » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:52 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, and creating a program to do this change for these toolkits externally without changing them at all is a "hack"

Most issues could probably solved by a variety of hacks. Several issues that don't concern yourself couldn't. The problem is that X consists of 40 years of hacks piled up on each other. THe X.org devs actively chose to stop further development and continue their work on wayland.

You are on the same side as the people bemoaning IPv6 and asking why we couldn't just use one of the unused flags in IPv4 to solve the address depletion issue. It sometimes makes sense to make incompatible changes.

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

#339

Post by steerablesafe » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:53 PM UTC

Deukhoofd wrote: post #330

steerablesafe wrote: post #72

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 responsib…

People get defensive for Wayland due to the tone of the article. Sentences like "Let Wayland not destroy everything and then have other people fix the damage it caused" sound extremely hostile, making people who disagree immediately defensive.

People get defensive for Wayland whenever it comes up. While I don't agree with the tone of the article, the author brings up valid points (mostly in the comments though).

Also I believe the problem is not Wayland. It's the lack of other standard protocols on top of it that are required for application developers to not chase ad-hoc, desktop environment dependent protocols for basic needs like screen sharing. The issues are probably political rather than technical, and the solution is coordination between the desktop environment implementers to use the same standards and provide common interfaces for application developers.

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

#340

Post by dbrgn » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

adrusi wrote: post #287

nly wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking your example of screenshots... I don't think there's an 'official'/defacto Wayland protocol for that. Under GNOME Shell you can use the org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot dbus API, but under KDE you presumably have to use something else. It is pretty grim.

Pretty grim, heh Context: https://wayland.emersion.fr/grim/

I use grim with sway / wayland and it works great, much better than scrot on X (which always leaves strange visual artifacts on the image when using rectangular selection).

Here's my key binding config from sway: