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

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

#461

Post by throwaways885 » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:50 PM UTC

pwdisswordfish6 wrote: post #341

throwaways885 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a big issue is there's no discipline in the Linux community. The Kernel team has done an amazing job of preserving ABI compatibility through every last byte, but then you look at projects like glib or GNOME which seem to pride themselves on huge, sweeping, changes and don't care if downstream consumers are hurt by the changes. Edit: glib not glibc

> there's no discipline in the Linux community [...] look at projects like glibc or GNOME So not the Linux community then. Outside it. Do all the new GitHub-driven programmers who exclusively use MacBooks and constantly rev things with the same frequency not exist? Why is this still being presented as a freedesktop-related problem and not a general problem with creators' fickle and fleeting attention, when we have ev…

No I do agree it's a general problem with software, but we're not talking about some rando throwing leftpad code up on GH. We're talking about a set of operating systems that clearly want more mainstream adoption being bewildered when they suck at respecting the user.

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

#462

Post by pkulak » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #375

corty wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually one of the big, unfixable, conceptual problems of Wayland that all the effort is duplicated in each compositor. The Wayland concept pushes out most of the work to the DEs. That of course will result in tons of predictable inconsistency, incompatibility, bugs, delays, consolidations and general pain. Wayland devs are then generally in the lazy "worksforme, use sway (or whatever)" position while the user…

> It is actually one of the big, unfixable, conceptual problems of Wayland Why not have a shared implementation?

We do, wlroots. But it came _after_ mutter, and maybe even kwin, so right now there are basically three.

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

#463

Post by happytoexplain » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

MartijnBraam wrote: post #2

I'm not even a wayland developer and I get annoyed by all the posts about wayland not working, I've been running it for years and it Just Works(tm) for me aside from the occasional gotcha.

This is confusing - "works for me" is a common joke. The point of that phrase is usually that it is not a good reason to minimize those for whom it does not work.

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

#464

Post by zamadatix » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

arepublicadoceu wrote: post #401

seabird wrote: post #301

It's really rich when these types get riled up about software having very obvious flaws. I respect the author and really want to like Wayland, but there's big things missing. I recently installed Fedora after my Windows install bombed out after an update. I went to play World of Warcraft with my buddies and found that the mouse handling in Wayland was pretty severely broken, at least for WoW. You move by clicking bot…

You can't play World of Warcraft well under wine and you call this one of your two big things? The second being, screen sharing broken for you. Well, for me it works really well, maybe you didn't google hard enough? Now I suggest you to google extremely hard on how to make x11 handle displays with mixed DPI. A way more common usecase than running World of Warcraft though a compatibility layer AKA Wine. If you find a…

Pure Wayland (no xwayland) sway user here.

Screen sharing is a pain, I did get it working on Arch finally though, but it's still a pain at this point. And I only got "screen" sharing i.e. not "app sharing" or "monitor/virtual-monitor sharing" working. Latter part could well be some more config or tweaking I need to do, regardless it's not the users fault if they can't figure this out in Wayland when it works fine everywhere else out of the box. I've gotten it to work well enough for my personal use case but it's definitely not far enough along for the typical use case.

X11 isn't that great with monitor setups with multiple DPI. It's certainly one of the biggest user facing "wins" for Wayland but much like you dismiss playing WoW as something you don't do most users don't deal with mixed DPI setups so the biggest "win" really doesn't mean much to most. That doesn't mean it can't be a great reason for you to prefer Wayland though.

Sway won't even launch on my Nvidia computers so I've just got them running Windows with WSL. I don't think it's X11/Wayland's fault on this one, Nvidia is just a bit too locked down when it comes to Linux preventing good support from anybody. At the same time the professional hardware is just better so you don't always have a choice to just use an AMD card even if you were willing to change hardware for better support.

I really like my Wayland setup but it's important to understand the tradeoffs I was willing to make and the efforts I was willing to put in don't mean Wayland was perfect it means it was better for my situation. For another user it's probably a HORRIBLE fit right now. That's not their fault, nor anyone else's fault, it's just a difference in use case.

I think Wayland is getting pretty close (particularly for the less stubborn willing to let xwayland run as well) to being ready for most users but that's what many have been trumpeting for 5 years so it's created a bit of pushback when you say it is now.

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

#465

Post by cbpowell » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

Miraste wrote: post #241

lewispollard wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been down this road a lot with FOSS software: "I don't use it because it doesn't do what I need", "sure it does!", "no, it really doesn't", "well you don't need that anyway!"... Just recently (I was on a Fedora box temporarily) I was trying to figure out how to get Nautilus to stop starting a search whenever I typed something, and instead highlight the nearest match in the current directory, y'know, like prett…

In my experience Gnome is the worst major FOSS project for this. Ever since Gnome 3 the design philosophy of all of their projects seems to be "find out what the users want and do the opposite."

Agreed. And yet it's somehow ascended to being the default environment for Fedora, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS...

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

#466

Post by throwaways885 » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #352

throwaways885 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that's fair, but they have done a good job of bringing much of the industry on board, rather than just being an esoteric hobbyist project.

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

#467

Post by folmar » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #72

phone8675309 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Under X11, you are basically running every application with root, always. This is not even remotely true. You are able to snoop on events that use the X server - typically programs run as your user or programs that you have chosen to forward to your X server. You are correct that the X server gets all events from all clients and therefore can log keys.

> This is not even remotely true. You are able to snoop on events that use the X server - typically programs run as your user or programs that you have chosen to forward to your X server. Such as your screen locker, your terminal with a sudo prompt in it, or your graphical Apt client?

> Such as your screen locker, [...] or your graphical Apt client?

No, not if input is grabbed, sorry.

> your terminal with a sudo prompt in it,

Pinentry&co are mainstream for a number of years.

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

#468

Post by R0b0t1 » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #441

R0b0t1 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because then you end up with something like X11, which we already have. The codebase could be re-engineered, sure, but a lot of people championing Wayland tend to see this duplication of effort as good for some reason, and at least last I engaged with them did not like the idea of a "new X11." Personally I think something like that is an inevitability.

Because the Xorg mono-culture was bad. There was no ability to write other X11 display servers from the spec alone. You either did what Xorg did bug for bug or apps broke. By having many different implementations all speaking a common protocol you make it harder to calcify the behaviors of any one implementation and ensure that the spec is what apps code against. People seem to like that we have many browser implemen…

That's fine, I know. But acting like Wayland is feature complete when it obviously isn't is pretty ridiculous. Instead of solving hard problems the Wayland maintainers are acting like you're stupid to want to have the features solving the hard problems enables.

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

#469

Post by tych0 » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

t0astbread wrote: post #416

tych0 wrote: post #54

People are dicks to maintainers of X11-based software too. I think people are just dicks. It's one of the reasons I love stale closing bots. I don't have to pay attention to people who are dicks. I can just unsubscribe from their issues and let a bot handle it.

Okay but why not close angry issues immediately with a cookie-cutter response and avoid stale closing bots? Stale closing bots also have the tendency to close real issues just because nothing has changed regarding the issue in a while.

Because it's hard to write a "you're being a dick" cookie cutter response for every possible case. People are dicks in a huge variety of ways. I don't enjoy figuring out prose that won't offend people, I enjoy writing and reviewing code, so I do that instead.

No solution is perfect, but this one keeps me sane.

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

#470

Post by zug_zug » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

This just sounds like the heavy cost of software development. Part of providing a good user-experience is documentation, patience, user-research, understanding the sophistication level (or lack thereof) of your users, etc. From what I've observed most FOSS software doesn't have time/interest for that kind of hand-holding (and I can't blame them, they aren't getting paid and probably don't like that part).

The counterpoint is that a lot of great FOSS software that is 80-90% great but with a terrible UI, terrible documentation, or glaring incompatibility that makes the experience entirely unpalatable for a swath of users. And so a lot of people don't use it. Which is also fine.