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I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

drewdevault.com

591–600 of 892 posts

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

#591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is reasonable to want remote desktop access. I am unfamiliar with the RDP technique you raise, but expect it could be achieved through VNC or similar systems. X-Windows is itself a weak response to remote access. I have memories of trying to use Oracle Forms over a modem connection to uni, and finding it far inferior to VNC connections to work systems - effectively unusable. The remote-windowing mechanisms of X-Wi…

this is sort of exactly my point but inverse - X windows is awesome on a lan & due to the 'native' support for individual applications, but there is definately huge room for improvement w/r/t display protocol performance / latency issues which are largely a result of relying on X server drawing architecture

don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, in other words

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

#592

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…

> I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made. Those hundreds of user are: 1. A vocal minority, most likely. People happy about it don't go on bug trackers to support devs. 2. Not making the software, not part of the decision making process. Don't like the end result ? Fork it if you have the ability. Give constructive criticism if you want and you…

They are (predominantly) not doing this for free. They are employed by RedHat.

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

#593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So developers should bend to abusive business partners with a big track record off being assholes just because they are currently (!) the biggest player? > it seems like there is not a single PC in my house, or any of my family, that can run Wayland. Huh, here at work and also privately all can run Wayland just fine; just always had issues with NVIDIA, so we would see it exactly the opposite way. We vote with our wal…

> So developers should bend to abusive business partners with a big track record off being assholes just because they are currently (!) the biggest player?

That's not at all what GP is saying. They're saying that X handles their use case, and Wayland doesn't, and that most end users won't care about who's fault that is.

A lot of the criticism of Wayland comes from uninformed jerks who want to trash the protocol over stuff that isn't a real problem, but there is also a bit of reflexive lashing out that comes from Wayland advocates. GP is just saying they can't switch to Wayland until the ecosystem around it matures. That's not an attack, you don't have to take it personally.

> you will need to buy a GPU from a different vendor than NVIDIA

I run a 4K monitor on my desktop with an ~6 year old NVidia graphics card. I run modern software on that machine, I watch movies, I run games, I do 4K art, I even boot into Blender occasionally. I'm not seeing significant slowdown or framerate problems as long as I use NVidia's proprietary drivers in X. But on Nouveau, it's unusable. Who's fault is that? Probably NVidia's! But it doesn't matter, my computer currently works well, I have no plans to upgrade in the immediate future, and this was put together during a period where NVidia was very clearly the sensible choice for anyone who cared about Linux graphics performance.

It's reasonable for people to use older hardware, and it's reasonable for them to want that hardware to work well. We're not talking about people running 32 bit OSes or something, not everybody upgrades their graphics card every 2 years, and it's not really feasible for the surrounding Wayland ecosystem to only target the people who do.

I don't have a proposal for that, I'm not saying anybody has to do anything. I'm actively rooting for Wayland, I do think it is the future. But I'm also describing why I don't run Wayland on my Arch setup and why I don't recommend it to people who ask me about getting into the more technical side of Linux. If someone wants to take even that as some kind of anti-Wayland screed instead of as a completely neutral, factual representation of the current state of the world and the Wayland ecosystem, then that's their problem, not mine.

There's this thing I'm seeing where anyone bringing up these issues just gets asked, "well, what's your suggestion? You want to force developers to do X?" I'm not suggesting anything! I'm describing why I don't use Wayland on my desktop. That's it, that's the only thing I'm doing. I don't know how to solve the problem, but the problem exists, even if it's not your fault.

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

#594
post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:

Nvidia supports exactly one use case on Linux: running their GPUs in servers or workstations purely with their proprietary drivers purely for ML and CAD work. Everything else is completely unsupported, and if you’ve got an issue with that, you’ve got to complain to Nvidia, not open source projects. You expect a single unpaid volunteer maintaining a wayland compositor alone to somehow be able to add support for nvidia…

I don't expect anything from anyone, it's about what I need. I need Nvidia GPUs in my setup to run my trainings. If Wayland maintainers wants me to move on from X11 they will have to make it work. Right now they don't want to (which is fine!) but that means I can say I do not consider Wayland to be a viable alternative to X11 for me.

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

#595

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…

This hits the spot. People are acting like Wayland developers are taking X and everything they liked about it away from them when in reality you can just continue running X if you don't like any particular Wayland compositor.

The Wayland world will continue improving and chances are your problems will be sorted out one way or another in the future. But attacking people working to improve the status quo without any obligations on your side is fucked up beyond reason.

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

#596
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

Wow, so he writes an article about people being assholes about him not writing free extra stuff, and this other article saying literally “nvidia- fuck you” (and its “shitty consumers”) for not writing this other free extra stuff. He says that’s treating Linux users like shit, when a massive part of nvidia’s business is supporting Linux (GPGPU stuff), which works fantastically. Reading OP, I figured it was righteously…

> when a massive part of nvidia’s business is supporting Linux (GPGPU stuff)

I've spent the last few months doing GPGPU stuff on Nvidia Jetson devices and my experience has been the complete opposite. I've rarely seen something with such bad support and documentation.

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

#597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand where this thinking comes from but I still think it's kind of a simplistic attitude. People depend on the technology they use. When you convince someone to rely on something you've produced (and, crucially, continue working on), I think you do actually create a duty to be responsive to them. They depend on your work. Are we really so limited in our ethical thinking that we require an exchange of money to…

If you read the fine print there is, quite literally, no obligation at all. From the MIT license: THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. You will find that most other FOSS licenses contain a similar clause.

That's a legal disclaimer designed to head off a specific commercial legal liability. If you go looking to use law as a foundation for right and wrong, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

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

#598
post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea why it has become so common on here to dog on GNOME for being "user-hostile" because they targeted a different kind of user than the average HN engineer/startup person. You can use one of the "GNOME 2 revival" type desktop environments if that's your fancy.

Because the user they were hostile to were the users that had been until then the majority of Gnome's users. It may be a good business move to ditch your existing userbase in favour of a potential larger one but the userbase you've moved on from have no obligation to be happy about that

I don't expect the community to be happy, I would say I more expect a community of engineers to be realistic. The ship has unfortunately sailed long ago and it's not coming back.

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

#599
post #272

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…

that's imho the core problem with wayland advocates: - if you rely on something that doesn't currently work on wayland and you write about it on (for example) hacker news then you're the asshole and you should be dropping that something and switch to wayland (which of course, most of us cannot do) - if your current setup works and you'd rater spend your time doing your stuff instead of rebuilding on wayland, you're a…

> ost wayland advocates can't seem to understand the philosopy of "I don't really care about xorg vs wayland, my current xorg-based setup works well enough for me, i'll switch when I can be equally productive on wayland".

Because usually the part "my current xorg-based setup works well enough for me" is not true. It will be said, when it comes to wayland, and they don't want to switch... but once hidpi or mixed-dpi displays or reliable screen-lock or something other comes on topic, then suddenly "linux" (not xorg, but linux) is behind the times, doesn't work out of the box as other systems do and requires hours and hours of configuring.

That's the "my current xorg-based setup works well enough for me" in the full glory.

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

#600

> 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…

Every 6 months I try switching to Wayland. I spend an hour or so using it for regular desktop gnome use and fixing minor bugs (ie. The kind I can fix with a config tweak). I then switch back again because it just isn't there yet. Recent issues: * The brightness control for my screen doesn't work with it. * The mouse sometimes lags * Graphical corruption in Chromium when on webgl sites. * Blank screen after resume fro…

Happy user of Sway for almost a year already(https://github.com/rvolosatovs/infrastructure/commit/b765860...). Some of the issues you mention I have experienced on X11, but they were fixed once I switched to Wayland. One of the most notable changes for me was hotplug - I struggled with it on X for many years, now it just works by default and I didn't even need to script anything(https://github.com/rvolosatovs/infrastructure/blob/0e17a1421... and I even wrote my own tool to handle this, because the X11 ecosystem is full of crap https://github.com/rvolosatovs/gorandr).

Overall, my Linux GUI experience has never been as smooth as it is now on Wayland and I tried pretty much all common DEs/WMs in last 8 years.

X11 is not even remotely close to being "there" compared to Wayland and if Gnome implementation sucks, then please first try better implementations first before writing comments like this.

No, Wayland protocol is not perfect and yes, some niche use cases are still not covered, which is why various extensions of the protocol are still being developed. X11 at it's current state is nothing but a collection of hacks glued together. Wayland is, however, a very robust, secure and well-designed modern protocol, which, most importantly and contrary to X11, actually works.

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