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

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

#511

Post by hatsunearu » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

>What do anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, 9/11 truthers, and anti-Wayland activism all have in common?

Bro what, are you kidding me?

When systemd got jammed down our throats all I felt was "well, I'm against it by principle, but I guess strictly speaking nothing is getting worse"...

If this half baked Wayland nonsense gets shoved down our throat, I am toast. I need good functioning color management and Wayland seems to say "well, nobody buys displays more than 100 dollars, so sRGB it is"

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

#512

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #431

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.

It is actually a common enough use case that Windows supports it now via Remote App, which is bit of a hack over RDP since RDP wasn't really designed for that. The use case may be relatively small but it undeniably still exists.

[deleted]

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

#513

Post by cycloptic » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

spijdar wrote: post #363

kuschku wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is ... not true, either broadly or generally I’m saying that because if you ever type in your password, e.g. into a screenlocker, into a terminal with sudo, or an apt-get gui, every application can listen to those input events. Every application has the ability to be a keylogger by default. And with that captured password, it then can either inject input events into your terminal, or run sudo itself. > The Way…

Ah, that's fair. Still, assuming a lack of other sandboxing, running a keylogger is pretty trivial. It's not by default , as you put it, but an un-sandboxed application has enough access to your filesystem to perform tomfoolery and get your credentials. At that point, there's no need to start a terminal, you just load some shellcode in whatever process you control, and say goodbye to your data. As for sandboxing, wel…

It actually is feasible to sandbox X11 in that way, I believe this is what security-focused distributions like Qubes and Whonix do. But yeah, it is essentially working around the problems with X11 and not really suitable for ordinary use.

To me the real progress needed is that applications need to move to using sandbox-friendly APIs so they don't break when put in the sandbox, and moving to Wayland is a key part of that. Applications built around the X11 idea of always having full access to everything will need changes regardless of what sandboxing solution is in use.

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

#514

Post by SEJeff » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #334

h_anna_h wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In their defence until a few years ago it was nvidia that had the good linux drivers while AMD was stuck with bad ones. The tables turned after AMDGPU as far as I know.

That’s true, but that’d mean running a 900 series Nvidia card or even earlier, which wouldn’t be able to handle multiple 4K monitors natively at 60Hz with or without the proprietary driver. Which means that the author bought an nvidia GPU at a point in time when it was already obvious that nvidia would treat linux as a second class citizen. And even if not, you should first complain to the company you paid hundreds o…

Nvidia treats Linux as a first class citizen. In fact, the CUDA stuff on Linux is industry leading. As a result, machine learning on Nvidia is really good. I work with Nick Wilt, the author of the book on CUDA. Nvidia on Linux is amazing. Nvidia on Linux without X11 (for guis) is not, sadly.

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

#515

Post by btinker » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

> Wayland works for almost everyone, and works for more people than is even possible with X11. Most of the lies you’ve heard about ways that it’s broken are just that: lies. And if you insist on living in that fantasy, then keep it to yourself, asshole.

But it doesn't work for me (aka. important features are buggy in the gnome/wayland/whatever stack I am using if I select wayland in gdm). Am I now a lier or an unimportant victim of the March of technology?

I am using wayland on my laptop anyway, as it comes with better scaling. I actually want to like it and I am very thankful for the developers putting so much work into it.

But the rollout, especially of gnome-wayland, was a disaster. It wasn't ready* when it came to fedora and it wasn't ready when it first came to Ubuntu and it is barely ready today. The developers (and some diehard fans) repeatly insisting it was robbed many of any faith in the project.

People are saying so much about it because they tried and something broke. And yes it may be QT's (still problems with clipboard) or Firefox's or Gnome's or Nvidia's (half of all linux desktops) fault, not the Wayland core teams or the Wayland protocol's. Doesn't matter in the end.

* With ready I mean feature parity with gnome-x11. Working for "almost everyone" (and with a very, very, significant almost at that nvidia) is just not good enough. Not if you want to replace one of the most important components of a user's desktops. At least for my day to day usage it is pros and cons, but all the pros are something we learned to live without, all the cons are fresh wounds.

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

#516

Post by SEJeff » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #290

SEJeff wrote: 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?

CUDA is primarily developed for Linux. You’re showing me that you totally misunderstand the problem by assuming Nvidia doesn’t build these GPUs for Linux. There is a reason that Nvidia gpus + Linux servers top the top 500 supercomputer list. It is because they’re built to work together:

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

#517

Post by betterunix2 » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

foldr wrote: post #413

betterunix2 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"people who owe them absolutely nothing" What makes you think people owe nothing to each other in the open source ecosystem? I maintain a package for Fedora, I have submitted a few patches to the Linux Kernel, and I regularly report bugs. Do the Wayland developers not benefit from any of the above? Even my mother, who is not very technical, has managed to identify bugs here and there which I report on her behalf. Do…

Giving a project feedback does not impose any obligation on the maintainers of that project to help you – even if they find the feedback useful. In general, it's rude (and ineffective) to try to unilaterally impose non-trivial obligations on people without getting their prior agreement. Actual contributions are another matter. If you contribute to a project, then sure, you should get a say proportional to the size of…

"I wonder how many of the people who complain about Wayland have made sizeable contributions?"

How many people asked for their distro to switch to Wayland?

You seem to think that these critical packages that millions of people depend on can be treated like hobbyist projects. Yes, when your project is a hobby, you can tell people that their complaints are not your problem and that they should just fork the code if they need something different. However, distros should not make hobbyist projects core components that users are unable to avoid, nor should anyone push their hobbyist project as a replacement for a core component.

The fact is that the Wayland developers set out to replace X11. In what world are they not opening themselves to criticism from people whose use-case was supported by Xorg but not supported by Wayland? By now a decision made by the Wayland maintainers will affect the vast majority of desktop Linux users; why should they be immune from complaints? When people depend on your software you have to deal with their complaints, that is just a fact.

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

#518

Post by spion » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

DCKing wrote: post #315

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…

I honestly think this complaint is completely bogus. This is not something conceptual about Wayland, or intrinsic to it. Any display protocol can have multiple client/server implementations. It just so happens that most of the free desktop standardized around the X.org implementation for X11, but even for X11 there were multiple client and server implementations. The second thing is that software duplication efforts…

Once there are 2 implementations already, a 3rd reusable one won't fix the problem (the problem being that the users need to configure everything in 3 places).

What you want at that point is to agree where to read and write common configuration. I'm not sure this is likely to happen either, as gnome has gsettings/dconf and kde has simple files and you will now awaken the plaintext vs efficiency dragon.

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

#519

Post by pmarin » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

creata wrote: post #50

BoysenberryPi wrote: post #31

I have no beef with Wayland specifically and I agree that if you are harassing maintainers of any project you're probably an asshole. However, >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. I'm a game developer. None of the software I use works reliably or at all on Wayland. None of…

If it's not too much trouble, can you list the software you use which doesn't work on Wayland?

xeyes

https://blogs.gnome.org/wjjt/2012/03/14/looking-around-wayla...

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

#520

Post by bitwize » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #28

> 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…

> 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.

It's not just about replicating this functionality. It's about having an open framework that makes building these tools, and other unforeseen tools, easy. X11 was very accommodating of this.

For example, I like to run xsnow during the holidays. Wayland's answer to xsnow is -- we don't support that, but tell you what, draw up an RFC for a D-Bus API for desktop snow and wait 5-7 years for compositor implementors to consider incorporating it. Or something completely different. You know, whatever. It's like you have to prove your use case is valid to the community before you can even start hacking on it in a way that you can expect it to work with more than one DE.

For Wayland the attitude is "Fuck you. You get a buffer for a desktop window and that's it. [Wayland does not support nested windows.] Oh, that's not enough? You're not writing a desktop app? You want snow on the desktop/a desktop magnifier/a hall of mirrors effect toy/an anime window sitter/pinnable menus/something that responds to global hotkeys/etc.? I'm sorry, did we not anticipate your pwecious widdle use case? Fuck you. No one actually writes applications that way any more, nerd. Go back to the nerd table. We're trying to get the cool popular Mac-using kids to notice us here."

The X11 security issues are mitigatable with some changes to the server implementation. The Wayland approach really never was about security. It's about letting the cool kids define the shape of the Linux desktop to the exclusion of ordinary users/hackers.