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I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

drewdevault.com

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Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#281
post #216
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but there's no such thing as "switching to Wayland". What most people mean when they "switch to Wayland" is that they're switching from Gnome on X11 to a "pure Gnome" stack that uses Wayland and a bunch of other Freedesktop standards for interopability. There is absolutely no code from the "Wayland project" running there, because the Wayland implementation is Gnome's own (it's…

This is be a fine distinction to make if there is an implementation of Wayland that is there. Then we can say this is just about a particular implementation, and not Wayland itself. If no implementation of Wayland is ‘there’, it seems pretty reasonable to say Wayland is not there yet.

People use the name "Wayland" as an umbrella term for "the entire effort on the Linux desktop get rid of X11". I'd generally agree that there aren't any desktops that flawlessly replace X11 [1], but I don't like that Wayland is the name for "the entire effort on the Linux desktop get rid of X11".

I think it can be seen in OP's list that most of the issues that OP raised are actually not due to deficiencies in the display protocol. Specifically replacing of the X11 display protocol with the Wayland display protocol. But Wayland solves fewer problems than X11. So to replace things like standardized screen recording and input processing, you need other things on top of Wayland.

And that's where by far the most issues with "Wayland" come from - stuff that has nothing to do with the display protocol, but the tremendous pains it takes to replace X11.

[1]: It's worth pointing out for fairness that X11 based desktops are also pretty flawed even if you're used to some of the flaws.

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#282
post #14

I’m using a Dell UP2718Q (3840x2160, 144dpi, 60Hz) and a Fujitsu Siemens P17-2 (1024x1280, 96dpi, 75Hz) side by side, and without Wayland this setup isn’t even possible to get working properly. Sadly, KDE still doesn’t support it nicely under Wayland (so I moved to Ubuntu Budgie), but under X11 it’s entirely impossible to run it properly, as except for Qt nothing supports mixed DPI, or mixed refresh rates properly. O…

Professional pentester here - Wayland alone doesn't really do much for you, security wise. It is still very possible for an application simply running under a wayland compositor to do lots of nasty things. The Wayland protocol provides the building blocks for someone to create an Android-like sandboxed environment, but doing so would break every application. Snaps and Flatpak come closer, but still generally miss the…

> You're saying this because Xorg runs as root, which means that any security flaw in Xorg yields root access.

They're saying that because every app under Xorg can do keylogging they're effectively running as root, as any of them can keylog your root password next time you type it in.

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "well you don't need that anyway!" Something similar used to frustrate me no end when asking the Python community for help trying to solve a problem. Regularly someone would comment, "Why would you want to do that?". I wouldn't be asking if I didn't have a need to do it! It's bizarre that some people can't see beyond the end of their own nose and imagine different use cases to their own.

To be fair, there's a lot of people asking for help on X-Y problems in the programming world, especially on python, and often the fastest way to sort out someone's issue is to walk it back to the original problem X they were trying to solve.

Yeah, but if you don't have an XY problem, you have to spend a lot of your question pre-defending the "it's not an XY problem" stance and lordy ... is that frustrating.

There's a lot of people out there who are happy to tell you that you have an XY problem, but when you explain why it is not, ... crickets.

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how screen shots/sharing is really that hard of a problem. Wayland's model doesn't give the ability to arbitrarily capture these things the way X did, but surely it couldn't have been that difficult to add an escape hatch for common use cases like this to the base protocol. Remote desktop is a harder problem to be sure, but it is also a pretty common use case (window remoting less so). If you're setting o…

I'm not a developer on Wayland and I haven't looked at the code, so I can't comment directly on their situation. A hypothetical I can come up with is that if they've tried to implement a very secure architecture, they may have painted themselves into a corner if there's no easy way to capture pixels post-composite... Then no one piece of the system has enough authority to see all the pixels to capture an arbitrary sc…

Security is one of the major reasons, and this is indeed a privileged operation that should not be accessible by all clients.

The other reason is that this isn't base functionality, for example an embedded implementation has no need for screenshots.

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Multiple tabs are good, multiple windows are not. "It's a perfect compositor, as long as it is not expected to composite." ;) Personally I need the ability to open a remote window on my desktop, fingers crossed that someone will add that.

I'm pretty sure that it's a bug in Chrome / Chromium since other applications are just fine even when Chrome is being dog slow.

If every other compositor/desktop system/whatever it is, is running fine, but not with Wayland, then how is it a Chrome 'bug'?

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#286

> In the case of Wayland, the “vague authority” are a bunch of volunteers who have devoted tens of thousands of hours of their free time towards making free shit for you. That does not mean anyone is under an obligation to like it. > Maybe Wayland doesn’t work for your precious use-case. More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago. If y…

>"I don't use it because it doesn't do what I need"

Why do you feel the need to announce this to anyone, particularly the people who work on it for free and owe you nothing? Is that not his point?

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#287
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll work with Nouveau. Nvidia refuses to implement an interface in their driver every other graphics driver implements Drew wrote a blog entirely devoted to the Nvidia issue: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

Appreciate the info! I'll have to look into that. As someone who runs Computer Graphics software GPU perf is important to me. I'll be curious to look into how Nouveau behaves there

Nouveau is extremely slow compared to official drivers in my experience (using 1080Ti).

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#288

> In the case of Wayland, the “vague authority” are a bunch of volunteers who have devoted tens of thousands of hours of their free time towards making free shit for you. That does not mean anyone is under an obligation to like it. > Maybe Wayland doesn’t work for your precious use-case. More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago. If y…

>In my admittedly somewhat distanced opinion, Wayland's biggest mistakes were not launching with a coherent strategy for replicating functionality like screen sharing, screenshots, and to a lesser extent remote desktop/applications. They just punted and said "that's a compositor problem!" as though that was supposed to make it ok. I am not sure what you mean here. Weston, the original implementation, includes support…

> screensharing and RDP. Other implementations decided to implement those in a different way

I'm not fully up to date on the state of these things, but if the different implementations doesn't have a common interface it's goodbye to ever having screensharing work for everyone. I think that's what the parent means.

If we're lucky Discord/Zoom/etc. will implement it for the most popular compositor(s).

Similarly with screenshots - even though it's a much simpler problem it's annoying if the program taking the screenshot is fundamentally bound to a specific compositor.

If I'm not mistaken there are standardization efforts underway today though?

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#290
post #191

The author is kind of a jerk. He complains that users don't like wayland when he entirely and wholesale rejects anyone who wants to use an nvidia graphics card. Maintainers with attitudes like this are why we can't have nice things: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html Sadly, the OSS driver doesn't support the 4k monitors I use for work well enough to actually use day to day. So my option is to use…

Or you start buying a GPU that actually supports linux? If you buy a proprietary product with no actual linux support, then why are you complaining to the unpaid volunteer to fix it, and not the multi-billion dollar company you just made several hundred dollars richer?
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