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I'm still waiting to see a list of "what Wayland improves over X".
The only things that i heard of is fractional scalling and suppport for bigger colour depths.
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You may be right that Linux is a security disaster even with X11 replaced by Wayland, but ChromeOS is pretty secure and uses Wayland whereas I can't imagine its ever choosing to use X11.
> You may be right that Linux is a security disaster How so? If you run a program that you trust, like "ls", "vim", "firefox", "cat" or "rm", then you absolutely want it to be able to access all your data. That's the whole point of running a program: to read/write your data. If, for some reason, you want to run a program that you don't trust, you can run it easily inside a container or a virtual machine. I fail to se…
Externally, seeing chaos & churn is easy, takes no effort. Yes, a lot of screenshots & device emulation protocols were left undefined. But that doesn't seem like a weakness to me. The bazaar finds interesting good approaches, slowly, over time, by way of it's many voices. X extensions also evolved out of some organic growth as well, but gee it sure seems like everyone remotely involved says there's basically no more juice to squeeze, that the limitations of the architecture have come & are hard & fast (and that getting many modern necessities has been hell after hell).
Wayland's minimalism is such a great guard against running into deadends. It invents less, uses the OS more (rather than inventing it's own controllers), relies on protocols more. X had to be a perfect cathedral, and it got really far & severed many well, but issues like hidpi, multiple refresh rates, screen tearing a video seemed basically unsolvable. No one had purchase on the monolith to keep things moving forward, and something had to be done.
There really wasn't any choice. And it's almost certain a new monolith that tried to be X, that tried to do everything, would have fizzled. Letting the compositors figure stuff out slowly made success possible. Success, progress, has to mature. And that's hard and takes patience. And maybe people don't appreciate the wins, and this being unfrozen; but we were stuck where we were, we couldn't really budge at all, and we found a really smart way to start. Wayland is much less and that's huge. The bazaar iterating forwards is glorious & great, an exchange where we prevent crufting ourselves in like we had in the past.
Whatever the technical decisions are here (and I for one see huge wins), theres so many other concerns. Compositors can be remarkably complete for being absolutely tiny, because we actually use the OS now; that's a stunning win that doesn't affect users of a particular env, but actually means so much. Keeping the door open to new futures matters, and Wayland bestows that possibility, something of great importance. The political decision/merit to let protocols work things out over time, to find agreement & allow divergence is as important and even greater a win, a way to insure adaptability forwards, a colossal jump over X monocultures & monolith fiddling. Wayland's merit is that it makes sense in the world. That it is a basis for creation. It's easy as an end user to underrate that, to feel upset over a proprietary hardware vendors lagged adoption and your videoconferencing software's lazy negligence. A viable open ended future isn't much comfort to present suffering. It's still stunning to me the vehemence of such avid consumerdom, such strong consumeristic expectation, such unbroked unwillingness to face difficulty, and such staunch tying oneself to the past. I'm so excited for this future - difficulties and discovery and all - and I want to much to see some respect & appreciation for the technical & political merits of Wayland, of the bazaar, of figuring stuff out, of improving. It matters.
Very true. Wayland is now stable enough to be used in a lot of "production" environments and I've been using Sway as my desktop for years , and yet still, there is work left to be done: - Hardware support. NVIDIA support is spotty still. Easily the biggest issue IMO, though it's better than it was. - Network operation. X will always be better here because it was designed to be (at least with toolkits that can still t…
> Network operation. X will always be better here because it was designed to be Excuse me, but BS. At least for anything of actual relevance. X11 networking works okay for stuff that looks like a classic X11 app. That's things like xcalc. Any modern text editor, web browser, or anything else is going to be dog slow. X11 has a bad networking protocol that's way too latency sensitive, and as a result is nigh unusuable…
That's very wrong, the whole point was to run over the network.
It worked exceedingly well even in the earliest 90s (modulo bandwidth expectations of the time) and continues to work wonderfully 30+ years later.
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> Network operation. X will always be better here because it was designed to be Excuse me, but BS. At least for anything of actual relevance. X11 networking works okay for stuff that looks like a classic X11 app. That's things like xcalc. Any modern text editor, web browser, or anything else is going to be dog slow. X11 has a bad networking protocol that's way too latency sensitive, and as a result is nigh unusuable…
> No, I'd say X11 wasn't designed to be run on the network That's very wrong, the whole point was to run over the network. It worked exceedingly well even in the earliest 90s (modulo bandwidth expectations of the time) and continues to work wonderfully 30+ years later.
Modern apps draw all their UI client-side onto a surface which is then sent to X for display. IF ONLY we had a windowing system that was based around simply compositing together the various surfaces that the apps draw into a complete image of the desktop. Since this is a step away from the complexity of X, we could give it a name starting with W...
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> No, I'd say X11 wasn't designed to be run on the network That's very wrong, the whole point was to run over the network. It worked exceedingly well even in the earliest 90s (modulo bandwidth expectations of the time) and continues to work wonderfully 30+ years later.
No, it doesn't, it works like shit because that's not how modern apps work anymore. Modern apps draw all their UI client-side onto a surface which is then sent to X for display. IF ONLY we had a windowing system that was based around simply compositing together the various surfaces that the apps draw into a complete image of the desktop. Since this is a step away from the complexity of X, we could give it a name star…
Don't know what to tell you, your experience is different.
Many of my computers are on a rack and I run everything on them over X displaying to my desktop. Works just fine.
I’m in one of the “other smaller groups not included here”: people who rely on accessibility tooling that isn’t supported by Wayland. My options are: - keep using X and stay healthy - switch to Wayland and get strong nerve pain again - switch to Windows or Mac If Wayland were my only option, I would have to leave Linux for my health. So the technical merits of Wayland truly don’t matter. Accessibility is an oft forgo…
Wayland kind of reminds me of the CORBA->DBus rewrite. GNOME 2 was awesomely accessible. Then came the "qwe need to switch to DBus" people, and basically destroyed the hard work of many years. For me, GNOME Accessibility never recovered from that blow. And then came Wayland, which made things even worse.
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> No, I'd say X11 wasn't designed to be run on the network [...] That's just wrong. X11 was designed from the ground up to be used on the network. It just happens that nowadays requirements are different from when it was originally designed. Running X11 on the network was quite a thing in Unis all over the world, where you could have dedicated dozens of X11 graphic terminal servers (tektronix used to make good ones)…
Also, X networking was mostly used within local university and company networks, and not over the internet backbone. Well-designed local networks can be very low latency, often noticeably lower latency than disk I/O.
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Is this not really this way? Do you mean a person building a GTK or a Qt app actually has to check whether the app is running under Wayland and do something special to support it nowadays?
No that situation is fine. The problems start if you don't want to use GTK or Qt, because in that situation Wayland provides only a subset of features compared to X11 (like not universally supporting window chrome rendering, so a native Wayland application needs to render its own window chrome which won't look consistent with other applications). I actually wonder what happens if you run a Gnome app on KDE, or a KDE…
If you run a "real" Gnome app (that uses libadawaita) on KDE, it will look exactly like what it looks like in Gnome (giant titlebar with stuff on it, no minimize button, etc).
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Would you please talk more about this? * What is your condition exactly? * What were you using on X that made you healthy? * How is it broken on Wayland?
> What were you using on X that made you healthy? Well my WM for a start. It did not migrate to Wayland. And I also need to share screen from time to time (teams, Google chat, etc), which results in a dark screen for viewers in Wayland.