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

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

#481

Post by forgotpwd16 » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #360

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…

An interactive introduction (now unmaintained as author wrote to an HN submission) to X windowing system:

https://magcius.github.io/xplain/article/index.html

That covers the graphics part which is the same for the two windowing systems. See Wayland's FAQ[1] and architecture[2] page for why it was made and how they differ.

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html

Though not primary goal according to their FAQ, Wayland also improves security. For this see:

https://lwn.net/Articles/517375/

http://mupuf.org/blog/2014/02/19/wayland-compositors-why-and...

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

#482

Post by regularfry » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

Enginerrrd wrote: post #148

richrichardsson wrote: post #120

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.

There's all the difference in the world between asking "why do you want to do that?" and "why would you want to do that?"

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

#483

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

throwaways885 wrote: post #466

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't mean to imply that Valve's contributions have not been significant in improving the situation with Wine, only that unlike the other examples Wine was already good before the involvement of a wealthy company.

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

#484

Post by boudin » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

thatguy0900 wrote: post #340

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.

Is that really true? I can get into basically any car and understand everything immediately because they are all mostly the same. If Linux could software update the insides of a Linux car it would be unrecognizable every year.

Cars changes a lot. Basics do not change, but it's the same for computers to. Keyboard, mouse, display, touchscreen, all this has been there for decades. Details though do change a lot. Compare the controls of 2 cars, one from the 70s, one from now, I'm quite sure you'll have much more buttons, a touchscreen, things to learn like how to disable airbags when needed, where to get the maintenance information. Even something like starting the car itself is likely to be different.

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

#485

Post by kuschku » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

folmar wrote: post #467

kuschku wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That’s true, but doesn’t solve the underlying issue of X11 security. You can patch some individual holes, but you can’t fix X11 to actually be properly isolated and secure (especially as that’d make compositors and DEs impossible to use).

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

#486

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

Jarolis wrote: post #426

cturner wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote windowing is a legacy of the era when universities ran dozens of dumb terminals from a server. It would be bizarre to pursue that in an era of hardware-accelerated graphics. If the Wayland design was weighed down by such things, it could never hope to be progress.

How many people use TeamViewer, Anydesk, etc? I don't see how remote windowing is legacy. The feature would be a huge hit if it were modernized and made more accessible and efficient (akin to Microsoft's RDP), and that's only possible if it's a core part of the protocol.

[deleted]

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

#487

Post by oconnor663 » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

_coveredInBees wrote: post #137

So many comments here are missing the point of the rant. If it doesn't work for you, fine, move on. But it takes a special type of asshole to go around harassing maintainers and continuously putting down their hard work and in many cases just making overly broad and incorrect generalizations or propagating outright lies. There is a big difference between constructive criticism and what drove the author to write that…

Weird social effects of being online:

If we were in a room of 100 people, and two folks got into a shouting match, everyone would start listening. And then a group decision would get implicitly made. Is it a personal argument, best to stay out of it? Or is someone getting attacked unfairly, and it makes sense to intervene? Everyone in the room starts watching, and everyone starts thinking about what the group is going to do.

Online is nothing like that. If someone behaves like a complete asshole on one thread, most people don't see it. Especially if the asshole is "some random guy" with no standing in the community. Since there's no real drama, the incident doesn't come to the community's attention. The person on the receiving end of the abuse never gets to have that moment that you'd have in a room of 100 people, where you know everyone sees you and supports you, and maybe you get some "points" for keeping your cool. There's no points for that online, just silence. I think it can feel very isolating and frustrating, and I'm not sure how to address it.

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

#488

Post by stevepike » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

Ok, here is my use case that wayland doesn't work for. I have an AMD graphics card (5700xt) and two 4k screens. I want to run firefox, chrome, emacs, and a terminal.

Using KDE or Sway, if I set my desktop scaling to 2x, all programs that run through XWayland have extremely blurry display (they've been rendered at 1x and then crudely scaled up). This includes firefox, chrome, and emacs. The browsers have ongoing work to support wayland natively, but neither is stable for me.

If I set my desktop scaling to 1x, I can then scale up individual xwayland programs with flags like `--force-device-scale-factor` if they support them. This gets me close to the behavior on X but on X I can just set a global 2x scale.

I totally understand the frustration of OSS maintainers when people demand they fix things with no intention of getting into the code. On the other hand, the marketing behind wayland encourages some unrealistic expectations. I went out and bought a new graphics card and it turns out I can't even run firefox! That was not what I expected to happen.

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

#489

Post by bluefox » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

arghwhat wrote: post #420

bluefox wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I can understand people working on software X for a long time getting fed up with it and start working on software W. I can also understand that these people have strong opinions on why W is so much better. The only trouble is that others, who are possibly not developers of window systems, may not care, or may find that it breaks their software, or may not want to write software that depends on W and doesn't wo…

There are not enough developers to even create a new release or review contributor patches. The Wayland community contributes a fair share due to xwayland, and we get stuck on this quite often. And yeah, it'll need fixes. over time. It's big, complex, and interacts with device drivers that are very much in flux.

I'm a bit confused about your post.

Why would Xorg users care about XWayland, or new releases or contributor patches?

Those who contribute to Xorg and feel stuck could step up to maintain it, if they wish. (Don't they do it already?)

If they don't wish to maintain it, maybe their contributions are a waste of everyone's time? (Then again, maybe they get paid to do it, in which case it's their money-misery trade-off to make.)

Over time, Xorg users may indeed need fixes. Then, I'm sure someone will step up.

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

#490

Post by hyperion2010 » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

However bad people think X11 is, the engineering decision (or more likely lack of any intentional design decisions beyond the initial extremely narrow use cases?) to "replace" a huge portion of its functionality with windowing toolkits is a disaster for open source. I have written about this before, but the amount of waste and rework that it induces is completely unsustainable. If you want to see another generation wasted in the bazaar then stick with wayland. Wayland is very good at the use case it was developed to serve, which is fast booting systems for automobile backup cameras. Everything beyond that is at best an afterthought. Forcing dbus on everyone to replace xlib is like chopping off your legs because you heard that you can run faster with the new carbon fiber prosthetics -- it will work fine on a track, but the second you try to go hiking off the trail with boulders you will fall and break your skull.