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Wayland on OpenBSD

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Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#71

Post by throwawaylinux »

orbital-decay wrote: post #52
growse wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's fine to have the "works on my machine" attitude for a user discussing this on the web. I just hope the devs of what is being pushed as a replacement for what works don't have it. (and the signals aren't good) The people "pushing" Wayland are the people who previously worked on X. They stopped because it's ancient, broken and untenable.

If Wayland just existed on its own, nobody would have had a problem. The people pushing Wayland are not just its authors, but the distro devs, and the entire fuss is about Wayland being declared as the "future" by certain distro developers recently. This future has an issue - it only supports an opinionated subset of maybe 3/4 use cases of the "past". However broken the past was, replacing it with something that is s…

The existence of Wayland does nothing to detract from the existence of X or its users or developers. Nothing stops anybody from maintaining and developing X. You can download and install X for your Wayland distro.

Not sure that anybody who "has a problem" has stepped up to really do much about it (most X development in the past few years is to support Xwayland), so it can't be that much of a problem.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#72

Post by kaba0 »

hist_thr wrote: post #4
themerone wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is about preparing for a post X11 future. As Wayland continues to mature, classic X will attract fewer developer resources. I think it will eventually start to suffer benign neglect, and stop keeping up with new hardware.

Wayland is a replacement for X11 in the same way that a tricycle is a replacement for a tractor. They have thrown everything difficult out of the spec and only implemented the most trivial functionality around a security model which you must actively break to get actual work (like screen shots) done. That Wayland is 10 years old and still barely usable should tell you how far software developers have fallen in the la…

Yeah, please repeat the same bullshit for the umpteenth time. This happens under every goddamn wayland-related thread from people who have never ever touched anything graphics related with this typical cocky attitude - at this point this is just fake news.

So if X is so great, why exactly have the very developers who worked on it all switched to Wayland? Like, if they could made something you believe is good, shouldn’t you trust their expertise in this also?

> security model which you must actively break to get actual work

That’s literally how security models should work: you put tiny holes into a solid block. You can’t plug a swiss cheese’s holes after the fact.

> That Wayland is 10 years old and still barely usable

What exactly is your thought process here, what kind of process could change such an inherent protocol in a bazaar style ecosystem faster? It’s not apple who can just say “we are using this protocol from next year. If you wanna work, port your software”. Even if something is so much more superior than the status quo, it would need a huge amount of time to spread. Also the first 5 years of Wayland was very different from the last 5 - and it has definitely reached critical mass in the latter 5. A year now may easily introduce more progress than 5 at the beginning, from the cumulative effect of more contributors, more testers, etc.

And that barely usable part is pure bullshit again — how else would it be the default protocol for plenty distros already?

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#73

Post by kaba0 »

orbital-decay wrote: post #39
kiwijamo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Wayland daily and haven't run into the issues you mention. It has worked better than X11 as a daily driver for a few years now. I appreciate may not work for some To be honest I associate 'barely usable' more with X11. I haven't forgotten the good old days when I had to hack various configuration files just to get a working desktop and then hack some more to work around issues with tearing, video acceleration,…

> I use Wayland daily and haven't run into the issues you mention. I appreciate may not work for some Such as having a modern wide gamut/HDR display, or a display without a blue spectrum spike. Or printing anything in color. Or doing photography or digital painting. Or switching to another compositor on a non-default keyboard layout (as Wayland doesn't have the replacement for this basic X functionality, compositors…

> Such as having a modern wide gamut/HDR display, or a display without a blue spectrum spike. Or printing anything in color. Or doing photography or digital painting.

As if it ever worked properly on X. I’m sure every professional used linux for tasks requiring color accuracy.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#74

Post by AJRF »

I am an outside observer but in any discussion of Wayland I always see this article referenced: https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d...

It seems like so much stuff is broken but the devs deny it is broken? And even with that situation - every major distro is making in roads to adopting it?

Is that a fair characterisation or am I off the mark?

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#75

Post by kaba0 »

orbital-decay wrote: post #52
growse wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's fine to have the "works on my machine" attitude for a user discussing this on the web. I just hope the devs of what is being pushed as a replacement for what works don't have it. (and the signals aren't good) The people "pushing" Wayland are the people who previously worked on X. They stopped because it's ancient, broken and untenable.

If Wayland just existed on its own, nobody would have had a problem. The people pushing Wayland are not just its authors, but the distro devs, and the entire fuss is about Wayland being declared as the "future" by certain distro developers recently. This future has an issue - it only supports an opinionated subset of maybe 3/4 use cases of the "past". However broken the past was, replacing it with something that is s…

No one “pushes” wayland, it is just infeasible to make people work on a legacy and fundamentally broken codebase in their spare time.

Feel free to set up a fund and sponsor X11 maintenance - there is surely a price where people will start working on it.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#76

Post by orbital-decay »

growse wrote: post #59
orbital-decay wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Wayland just existed on its own, nobody would have had a problem. The people pushing Wayland are not just its authors, but the distro devs, and the entire fuss is about Wayland being declared as the "future" by certain distro developers recently. This future has an issue - it only supports an opinionated subset of maybe 3/4 use cases of the "past". However broken the past was, replacing it with something that is s…

I disagree. The distro devs are pushing it because it furthers their mission, which on the face of it (for a lot of them) seems to be "ship software that works for people and have them stop bugging us". > However broken the past was, replacing it with something that is similarly broken but in different non-overlapping ways is not the proper way forward. That "opinion" is well founded. Most people don't care about net…

This is a strawman. There's a reason I mentioned color management in particular. Most people who aren't aware (even software developers) tend to make two assumptions:

- that color management is needed for a tiny subset of users (those weird guys with printers and calibrators...).

- that it can be delegated to 3rd parties or implemented later when the time comes.

Neither of that is true. Color management is just another word for correct rendering of everything that comes through your stuff. Every pixel must have a well defined path from the physical input to the application to the physical output, you can't just implement a part of it and move everything else out of scope. To display anything in HDR, you have to build your entire pipeline around color management from the ground up.

The reason you are ignoring it is that you're using an sRGB display, in any other case it would be immediately apparent to you. sRGB also needs color management but everything assumes sRGB so you're able to mostly get away with it. This no longer holds in the modern hardware. You need a properly managed pipeline for gaming, movies, web, YouTube, GUI, smartphone family photos, and basically everything else.

Wayland developers actually found it the hard way, and are trying to implement it for, what, 3 years? That this wasn't a feature of a display server protocol from the start is a massive design flaw.

Same with the input methods handling being forced to be lumped up together in the downstream software, without at least specifying how it should be done. They took a well understood problem, and moved it out of scope; it might not have been an issue, but the lack of a spec will lead to fragmentation and less options. This affects most of the userbase, not "weirdos with remote desktops".

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#77

Post by kaba0 »

nine_k wrote: post #67
growse wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The distro devs are pushing it because it furthers their mission, which on the face of it (for a lot of them) seems to be "ship software that works for people and have them stop bugging us". > However broken the past was, replacing it with something that is similarly broken but in different non-overlapping ways is not the proper way forward. That "opinion" is well founded. Most people don't care about net…

Many, many people care about: - Screenshots and sharing the screen; - Global hotkeys; - Alternative / switchable / tunable keyboard layouts and input methods. Not fancy stuff, just, say, typing Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, and Japanese characters. All these things are is some sort of disarray under Wayland currently. Once they are properly implemented, I may consider switching. I want Wayland to succeed. But it's not enti…

> Screenshots and sharing the screen

Works for years.

And global hotkeys are not trivial - no, that “everything listens to everything” that X did is not a proper solution.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#78

Post by kaba0 »

didntcheck wrote: post #69
happymellon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that would imply that it's not a Wayland issue but a compositor. Or is all maths broken because I found a calculator that doesn't have a working addition key?

But why is my window manager now also my display server? The (relatively simple) program that decides how to lay out my windows is clearly a separate concern to the (complex) program that actually interfaces with the GPU to render the screen Having to worry if your WM supports your GPU is like having to worry if your web browser supports your NIC

Gnome is not your window manager - it’s your display server. You can trivially install/write an extension to manage your windows differently and reuse everything gnome provides for example.

A wm has always been trivial compared to a display manager, people just mistake one for the other.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#79

Post by kaba0 »

sprash wrote: post #43
rodgerd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software developers who were maintaining X? Perhaps you could show them how it's done, since apparently you can do a better job. They've certainly been clear that they're happy for anyone who wants to take over Xorg, yet no-one from the peanut gallery ever does.

It's a matter of funding. X11 development is not funded anymore whereas Wayland is heavily funded through proxies like Collabora or Igalia. It is unclear who are the originators of that money since those proxy orgs don't disclose who funds them. Since Wayland is a horribly complicated protocol that makes doing even the simplest tasks a major chore I would consider it sabotage. There are multiple billion+ dollar corps…

Oh, can I also get some of that sweet Wayland money? I’m sure that sub-3% desktop users is such a good market. Seriously, these conteo people really have trouble with rational thought — a goddamn chrome extension would be a bigger market.

Re: Wayland on OpenBSD

#80

Post by vetinari »

AJRF wrote: post #74

I am an outside observer but in any discussion of Wayland I always see this article referenced: https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... It seems like so much stuff is broken but the devs deny it is broken? And even with that situation - every major distro is making in roads to adopting it? Is that a fair characterisation or am I off the mark?

It not broken. The complains on the linked gist remind me complaining, how introducing protected memory broke applications. And you couldn't read or write i/o ports directly in our app anymore, you had to go through so-called kernel! So much bloat!

So I put wayland is broken, because it doesn't allow what x11 did in the same way, ideally stomping on the others into the same category. For screenshots and capture, there's an API now (controlled, user is in the control, cannot be done behind his back. Scoped also, with granularity from window to desktop). For global shortcuts, there's an API in the making.

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