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

#341

Post by pas » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 3:00 PM UTC

nly wrote: post #229

gggtt wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All major distros seem to have agreed on Flatpak/Freedesktop Portal dbus APIs. For eg, for screenshot : https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/portal-api-reference.html... There are still apps using legacy gnome/kde specific APIs, but, from what I understand, in the future Flatpak APIs are becoming the defacto standard

These are dbus APIs though, not wayland protocol specifications that you can call with libwayland's RPC mechanism. On the one hand this means you can support both X11 and Wayland with a single API from a client perspective, on the other you have to use DBus, which is horrendous to use (especially from statically typed languages). It also doesn't seem to work on my XFCE/X11 desktop, which shows what fragmentation we h…

> DBus, which is horrendous [from] statically typed languages

Could you explain this? In my experience DBus provides you with a schema, the exposed DBus interface describes the callable methods, their arguments and types, readable properties, and signals.

Just like with SQL it's useful to create a layer that takes advantage of the statically typed powers of the language.

Usually there are tools that use introspection (or the XML introspection data) to generate "types" (ie. this layer).

https://crates.io/crates/dbus-codegen

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

#342

Post by turminal » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 3:00 PM UTC

ehvatum wrote: post #297

turminal wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are overestimating the difficulties of porting old stuff to wayland. XWayland doesn't have a prespecified EOL, it's just going to sit there indefinitely to support all the legacy apps. This means that there is no need to hurry with migration. And the issues in X that wayland aims to fix are much bigger than the issues that python2 had when it got replaced.

“You are overestimating the difficulties of porting old stuff to wayland” The same is true for moving away from win32 GUI API. How many times has Microsoft tried? I have experimented with wayland and considered submitting patches for various 30-bit color issues, but the community is so catty. Everything is met with snark. It reminds me so much of trying to help a damaged person who doesn’t trust me, which is so weird…

> The same is true for moving away from win32 GUI API. How many times has Microsoft tried?

I'm not very familiar with this example, but experience from proprietary systems rarely applies to FOSS because the way free software is developed is so different. Furthermore, Qt and GTK apps work out of the box with both wayland and X. The same applies to many other toolkits and libraries.

> I have experimented with wayland and considered submitting patches for various 30-bit color issues, but the community is so catty. Everything is met with snark.

What part of the ecosystem did you attempt to contribute to? I got a couple of patches merged into Sway and some of its utilities and the community always felt rather welcoming.

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

#343

Post by account42 » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

adrusi wrote: post #262

rob74 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Do they have a common screen capture and automation API yet?

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

#344

Post by brmgb » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 3:14 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #275

adrusi wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome OS straight up lets you install Linux desktop apps. It runs a wayland compositor.

Point is that, like Android, it eschews the typical Linux Desktop stack, because it is a garbage pile that reasonable people don't want to deal with.

> because it is a garbage pile that reasonable people don't want to deal with.

I mean to be fair now that Wayland and PipeWire are there it's finally starting to look like a modern OS.

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

#345

Post by k33n » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 3:15 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #148

k33n wrote: post #14

Wayland fixes tons of security and inefficiency issues. You can also run xwayland, which is a compatibility layer that would fix 99% of the author’s complaints. I’m not sure there’s a legitimate case to be made against Wayland at all. The author seems to have installed it without understanding what it is.

You have a better chance of being hit by a meteor than falling victim to a compromise that would have been stopped had you only used wayland. Also xwayland is not a fix for any of the issues identified.

That's not remotely accurate, but thanks for writing!

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

#346

Post by posix_me_less » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 3:24 PM UTC

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #311

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…

> when in fact the lead developers on Wayland are the actual Xorg maintainers. Daniel Stone[0] incredibly funny and educational talk[1] from 2013 could help many critics who missed the 3 decade long ongoing discussion of why X is bad . We've talked about this already in the mid 90ies (when there were no alternatives) and now 8 years after this popular linux.conf.au talk, people still having troubles understanding why…

The talk was interesting but it also shows how the speaker is a little deluded that everything turns around technical quality of code and developers. X is used and preferred by many users and application authors because it is the standard and it works.

> so what is the 1 thing X does, and what is it doing well?

It provides functional and well-established(accepted standard) graphics server technology/libraries for any application that uses graphics.

I don't care if it takes 10 liters of blood to compile one version of X or whatever. I'm a user. All I care is that my desktop works as robustly as did it yesterday or 5 years ago. If that's not happening, I'm not interested in macros, classes, variables, declarations, structs, or any other geeky CS technobabble. That's irrelevant. And a product that advertises itself as being created to be convenient for the people developing it is a paradox. Don't develop it, then. Makes things even easier.

-- from https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/fedora-25-wayland-vs-xor...

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

#347

Post by ragnese » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

_abox wrote: post #318

ragnese wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you said is correct. But, there are surely cases where even though rewriting everything from scratch almost never works, the status quo doesn't work either . I'm afraid that's where the Linux desktop is today. Linux as a platform actually sucks for running "untrusted" software. And "untrusted" doesn't just mean proprietary games. It also just means "can I please run the alpha version of this cool open sour…

Android does a thing where it has its own display stack and very strict sandboxing so X11 isn't really a thing :) And for the sandboxing it uses SELinux which is available on desktop as well. It's just a royal PITA to configure. This is why many people don't bother with it. But in a highly restricted environment like a smartphone it's a lot easier. I wouldn't call that a 'hacky' thing, it's just using it in a very di…

The Android thing was a bit of a tangent. I did know that it doesn't use X.

The point was intended to be that Linux is becoming more and more lacking as a personal computing platform, relative to the gains elsewhere in the space. The display server is one part of that- the entire user/group permission model is another part.

The part of Android that is "hacky" is using a separate user for every app. That's obviously not what the Linux/Unix guys had in mind for the user mechanism, thus it's a "hack". It's not necessarily a bad thing and it's totally hidden from the UX of your typical Android user, so it's fine. Just interesting.

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

#348

Post by ralfn » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #336

ralfn wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah. But that's a company risk.

Not being able to participate in video conferencing and desktop sharing is an employment risk.

Im a picky person though. I already use i3, but also have NVidia gpu's. I don't mind spending some money on another real GPU (will it work with AMD).

I understand the frustration of the developers too. But screen sharing or my custom screenshot tool.. are things that will make me recompile if needed for days before I give up and abandon linux for the desktop.

I realize I'm spoiled, but I do wonder if this is the direction things are going who is going to be that hypothetical user that cares?

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

#349

Post by josefx » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

adrusi wrote: post #313

josefx wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tearing can be a gigantic issue when you have full screen videos or render games. However as far as I could find these are caused by the KDE/Gnome/etc. compositor not running in sync with the screen refresh rate. Find a way to bypass the compositor(KDE options to disable it, GNOME with full screen windows, or tell the X window to override the compositor) and it goes away. Its easy to lob all problems on X but whats n…

I'm not familiar with the internals enough to know if you're right about tearing being the compositor's fault, though I'd be quite surprised if disabling the compositor resulted in less tearing. But I do know that I experienced tearing using compton with i3 (though much less than i3 with no compositor). If Gnome, KDE and compton all manage to get compositing wrong on X, and yet every wayland compositor manages to get…

> though I'd be quite surprised if disabling the compositor resulted in less tearing

I have been running OpenGL based applications on KDE for some time and the answer to tearing was always disabling the compositor in the desktop settings or just overriding the compositor related redirect state of the window. OpenGL tends to sync against vblank anyway so I don't find it surprising that rendering directly to the final output buffer instead of an off screen buffer that is at the mercy of the compositor helps.

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

#350

Post by rkangel » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:09 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…

You don't need application sandboxing from your display manager. I at least, do want my display manager not to break all other application sandboxing.