I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by mondoshawan » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

uncledave wrote: post #92

Oh ffs I’m quite frankly fed up of gargling alpha grade crap from people forcing it down my throats. I don’t have to drink it and praise it if it doesn’t work. When exactly on Linux my NVidia 1660 GTX will do fractional scaling at 150% so a 27” 4K monitor is usable, doesn’t crap out every two minutes and actually ships with some distributions and importantly actually stays working every time I update it, I will stop…

You're getting downvoted, but its not clear why.

This is a perfectly valid argument about why wayland doesn't work, from a user's perspective, not a developer's. This is precisely what users expect from the system, and frankly, Xorg made it work, despite the mess it was of a tech stack.

Wayland is a very beautiful ivory tech stack, but it was created for a much different use casw than what an average user is going to care about, and as such, it suffers greatly in the end-user's eyes vs. the old and busted Xorg.

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

#352

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

throwaways885 wrote: post #278

boudin wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reverse is also true. Don't blame people maintaining software for changing your routine. You make a lot of assumptions there but the reality is often much more nuanced. Everything changes, all the time, that's a rule that is true for absolutely everything in life.

And people wonder why Linux isn't popular outside of industry and hobbyists... Like, sure, maintainers can tell all their users to sod off, but don't be surprised when very few people are left around using your software, and especially don't get confused when companies refuse to invest in Linux ports. All the successful projects Linux users like to talk about nowadays (gaming now a practical thing, new kernel feature…

Wine was actually pretty damned good even before Valve got involved. I remember playing Half-Life with Wine in the early aughties.

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

#353

Post by nlstitch » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

Is screen sharing on a modern laptop with a Nvidia 1070 too much to ask though?

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

#354

Post by kuschku » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #337

kuschku wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flatpak runs applications in what’s nowadays referred to as container: the application can’t see any processes outside the container, can’t access any filesystem except for files you explicitly open with the application, and especially can’t edit your .bashrc. That’s the point of flatpak. But as long as you use X11, there’s one single privilege escalation path left, and that’s the complicated one I described above.

What if I don't trust the person that sent me the flatpack container itself? A truly secure sandboxing should be a standard OS facility, not tied to a package distribution method. The flatpack/snap model is all wrong. I need to run arbitrary hostile applications in a safe manner, not only those that the developers have decided to distribute in a certain form.

Sure, but the flatpak model is a way to get these advantages for as large a userbase as fast as possible. If you use flatpaks without bind-home under wayland today, you’ve significantly improved your actual security already.

Sandboxing arbitrary badly behaving software is just going to use the same APIs as flatpak, so this helps for your use case as well.

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

#355

Post by foldr » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

betterunix2 wrote: post #319

pjc50 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made. The option always remains to change it yourself or stop using it. It's not as if it's bound to the hardware (Apple) or shipped with the machine (Windows). It's not a SaaS that may vapourise or change underneath you. There's no way to force consensus in situations like this. The best you can do is force…

"The option always remains to change it yourself or stop using it." If I changed every bit of software I dislike, I would have no time left for my actual job. Yeah, I get it, these volunteers found the time to work on this one project and therefore get more of a say about what changes will be made, but you know what? They also have to use other software, and they would not have time to work on something like Gnome if…

All I see here is that you're not going to get everything that you want. No-one is. We are all using software that's imperfectly adapted to our personal use cases. Unfortunately, unless we're paying, no-one is under any obligation to change it for us, and we'll have to make do as best we can.

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

#356

Post by gregmac » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

nescioquid wrote: post #198

patrickaljord wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can certainly understand the frustration at having to deal with a community that gets annoyed at anything that changes simply because they're already so used to the garbage pile they have that they now hold the delusion that it's actually not garbage. It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones).…

> It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI This seems to point to the general situation of change fatigue. If you pick up a random Android device, what does the "settings" app icon look like? Individually, these things are small, but the small impedances these changes introduce does take a toll on people, especially when…

> Individually, these things are small, but the small impedances these changes introduce does take a toll on people, especially when you're trying to just get stuff done.

One of the problems is a parity disconnect. A developer/PM often has very different perspective from their users: They see the new changes as they're happening and so they're all small, incremental changes, plus they're closely following development.

A lot of users only infrequently update and/or infrequently use certain features, and so for them, all these small incremental features add up to be massive change for the sake of change. This will often manifest as "Every time I go to do x, it's totally different and I have to re-learn everything!".

I find a lot of software -- especially FOSS -- also communicates change poorly. Release notes are the primary way to get across changes, yet there are several bad things people do that make it basically impossible to read:

* List every change or commit message, especially without categorizing or simplifying the wording

* Don't properly highlight feature changes (eg with screenshots and/or reasoning)

* Have dozens of betas/pre-releases, but don't consolidate the release notes into a final "here's what's changed since the last main release" document

Some examples of exceptionally good release notes: Visual Studio Code [1], Jira [2], Gitlab [3] (though if they only provided their changelog [4] it would be a good example of being overly verbose to the point of unusable).

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_52

[2] https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftware/jira-software-...

[3] https://about.gitlab.com/releases/categories/releases/

[4] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/blob/master/CHAN...

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

#357

Post by titzer » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

Oh yes, the solution to people being pissed off at you is to be even more pissed right back at them. That'll teach them how wrong they are!

Drew, all of the points that you have made here might have some backing in facts, and it is clear from the tone and overall message that you're frustrated, angry, at your wits' end....but such a rant will accomplish nothing but make you look like an asshole, which hurts everyone in the long run.

I would encourage you to delete this and start over. Even if you are a 100% right, this looks terrible, and nobody wants to see this.

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

#358

Post by Conan_Kudo » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

adkadskhj wrote: post #225

robert_foss wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVidia is broken, not Wayland. They refuse to implement the same APIs as everyone other driver does. Wayland is 10 years old, and extremely stable. If it isn't working properly it's either your driver vendor or your desktop environment that is to blame.

Sure, i'm willing to accept that - but is your solution for me to buy a new graphics card? How much of the market share is Nvidia? A stupid quick search's top result says 80%. So 80% of PCs can't run Wayland? To be clear, i know nothing of compositors/etc, I've had nothing but problems with Xorg, and i want to use Wayland. _and yet_ - it seems like there is not a single PC in my house, or any of my family, that can r…

> How much of the market share is Nvidia? A stupid quick search's top result says 80%. So 80% of PCs can't run Wayland?

No. 80% of PCs cannot run Sway. Both Mutter (GNOME) and KWin (KDE Plasma) implement support for EGLStreams for the Nvidia driver. However, EGLStreams itself is inherently quirky and kind of broken, per Nvidia themselves. They're working on moving to DMA-BUF to fix this, and at least on the KDE side, are committing to replacing the implementation in KWin to use that once the driver is updated to use it.

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

#359

Post by DCKing » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

Fellshard wrote: post #321

DCKing wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if what's bothering you is the implementation and not the protocol, you should be talking about fixing the implementation instead of diverting attention to the protocol? I might not understand your question here.

If every implementation of a protocol seems stuck with deal-breaking bugs or incompatibilities, it's time to start asking whether the protocol itself has some problems that make it impossible to implement consistently - unstated assumptions, for example, in the reference implementation that never made it to the protocol spec. For a modern example of this in action, see Bluetooth and the madhouse of device 'quirks' yo…

I would agree here, if you could make a reasonable case that the problems trace back the protocol. But my point here is that practically all issues at hand happen outside of what Wayland is used for.

Wayland is a display protocol. Practically all of the pain people are experiencing has nothing to do with how Gnome/KDE/Sway really display things differently. The pain everybody experiences is that the realization that suddenly we need a new input stack too, a new way to screenshare, a new way to do clipboard access, a new way to do a bunch of other things. All stuff that also needs to made, standardized, and achieve maturity outside of the new display protocol.

It's tempting to call that fallout of other stuff that needs to be changed "Wayland" as well, but I'd say that misses the point completely and calling it that won't help anyone get this stuff fixed.

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

#360

Post by mindcrime » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

So, I have to admit, I'm sadly under-informed on many aspects of this discussion. While I'm a "Linux diehard" and have been for decades, I care more about the command line and generally look at the desktop environment as just something to run a browser and an IDE. So I'm FAR from a "Linux Desktop UI / Graphics Geek".

With that in mind, can anybody recommend one or more good books / websites / whatever, that represent a moderately comprehensive introduction to all this "desktop stuff"? That is, graphics servers, window managers, compositors, yadda, yadda, yadda. I'd like to dig in and actually start to understand some of the underlying details of what's going on with all of this.