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I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

drewdevault.com

731–740 of 892 posts

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

#731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but still someone has to convince the customers to pay for that, and sometimes they won't. I've been on far too many projects where the customer won't even pay for unit tests and gets angry at the suggestion.

Well, is that a contract scenario? If so, they can pay now, or pay later, just make sure you manage expectations so they actually do pay. If, somehow that ended up on you, of course they refuse! Why pay for a free lunch? So don't allow that. Seriously.

You're preaching to the choir. I wouldn't work on such a project again, but when you say "manage expectations" what usually happens there is the customer realizes it doesn't match their expectations and then goes somewhere else and finds something that's in their price range. The point is, there is a class of customers that aren't going to pay for this. Ever. They either can't afford it or have decided it's not valuable.

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

#732
post #450

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…

> 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. And any program can (on a relatively default box) trace arbitrary programs under your gid and scan memory for passwords. The real issue here is that there are very weak process boundaries within a gid (because it is historically most c…

Wayland’s security is not sufficient but necessary for a safe OS. (As others mentioned X-on-X can also be a sufficient solution for that)

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

#733
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on if the precise argument is closer to "Wayland, as experienced by everyday users, is shit" or "Wayland, as a Platonic ideal, is shit." People, especially people trying to work done on their computers, usually mean the former.

Just say Mutter or Kwin are shit then. Saying Wayland is shit is like HTML is shit because you don't like Firefox.

HTML was complete *it until CSS, flex box, grid, web components, etc. are invented, so users are escaped to Flash, ActiveX, and Java applets.

It still smells, because I cannot load my own web components library or/and my own CSS for use on all sites, so every site MUST reinvent wheel.

When Firefox for Linux used native GTK+ UI elements in web pages, with user theme applied, every web page looked like native applications. It was excellent. Then this feature was cut, because "every page must have the same look on every device/OS combination". F><k. Now every web application tries to reimplement the look of Gnome 2.x, and does it poorly.

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

#734
post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, when Wayland acts like X then X apps sometimes work. In the process you abandon the security and performance features of Wayland. Getting xwayland working is another story. I can't seem to get it to work at all on my PinePhone; but to Wayland's credit, the phone crashes for all sorts of reasons.

Why would you abandon the security of wayland by an xwayland app? It only sees at most other xwayland apps. As for the pinephone part, I may not understand your point about “to Wayland’s credit”, do you think stability issues on the pinephone is due to wayland?

The PinePhone has unstable hardware, it doesn't matter if I run X or Wayland and it doesn't matter what distribution I use. I can't keep it operating for more than 5 minutes before the screen goes to blank and/or it gets stuck in an endless reboot cycle that requires removing the battery to halt.

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

#735
post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every other boundary can be restricted relatively easily. For example, flatpak already solves the issue you mention. But the X11 boundary can’t be resolved unless you put a whole X server into every single application’s container with XonX, or you replace X11. Which is part of why wayland exists.

Can be restricted when appropriate. Removing the ability to share resources and calling Wayland complete is what people are laughing at.

Putting holes into a solid block is a lot easier than patching something that looks like swiss cheese.

(Sorry for butchering up the quote)

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

#736
post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, its not a programming problem, its a herding problem. That person will have to have the ability to get all 3 implementations to agree to read and write compositing configuration the same way, so users don't have to suffer.

The thing is, Wayland actually is an improvement here, because now you only have to reconcile the configuration between those implementations, compared to before where you had to do that in addition to munging configuration and state stored in the X server and in xorg.conf. It would be nice if all desktops agreed on a configuration format and a default set of options, but I don't know that we will ever get there.

At least between-app DPI inconsistency was not a thing before this. Now its a thing, added to the stack of configuration problems.

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

#737
post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some domains stability and correctness is a feature. You can't omit stability in life-critical software for example. On the other hand software's usefulness can outinfluence unstability, if there are no alternatives.

Hey, if you have the kind of money that medical companies spend on testing and stability, and you want to spend that on Linux desktop environments, I won't complain. Although it probably is better to spend that on developing life saving devices than it is on fixing outdated desktop paradigms.

Sidebar: desktop paradigms are hardly outdated.

There are competing paradigms now, and that is good, but they have not yet actually reached use value and productivity levels where it is appropriate to say the desktop paradigm is out of date.

At the worst, both will become more generally flexible to keep their value to the users.

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

#738
I haven't gone back to re-examine Wayland for a while now, because forever I have used RDP to access my headless servers.

And before you waste time with "Instead of RDP you should..."

Save the effort, I have no interest. RDP works with XFCE exactly the way I want it to. But I understand there is a working GNOME RDP interface now, so maybe I'll give it a shot with Wayland when I bring up a new server.

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

#739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many will not evaluate software that is unstable, because that is a clear sign the whole effort is not yet suitable for any meaningful time investment. Play it how you will, of course. I will pass hard personally. Lack of stability is very high on my qualification list. To be blunt, where it exists there are other priority problems. One may just be flashy speed and other sizzle done at the general expense of the solu…

>The team that did not make stability a priority did a lot of market building for the ones who did. I personally am very frustrated by this constantly, but there is no way around it that will always work. Someone has to pay the cost of market building, it is a separate cost from stability, and sometimes you can't afford both.

And there is an argument for not being able to afford the effort in that scenario too.

At the least, risk will be higher than it needs to be, and that puts the other validation into question as well.

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

#740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, is that a contract scenario? If so, they can pay now, or pay later, just make sure you manage expectations so they actually do pay. If, somehow that ended up on you, of course they refuse! Why pay for a free lunch? So don't allow that. Seriously.

You're preaching to the choir. I wouldn't work on such a project again, but when you say "manage expectations" what usually happens there is the customer realizes it doesn't match their expectations and then goes somewhere else and finds something that's in their price range. The point is, there is a class of customers that aren't going to pay for this. Ever. They either can't afford it or have decided it's not valua…

So let them. That's what I do. And I do that because someone, somewhere will pay now, or pay later.

Maybe the customer finds someone hungry enough to pay for them.

Or, maybe that customer pays hard going through this cycle a few times too.

Not my problem and it does not have to be yours.

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