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Please Don't Promote Wayland

stoppromotingwayland.netlify.app

31–40 of 90 posts

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#31

I’m not a fan of Wayland or a detractor of X. I’m not personally invested in either of them. I couldn’t care less what’s pushing pixels at my screen as long as it works. That said, what you need to know about Wayland is that the X.org devs mostly migrated to it en masse because they said X had hit an evolutionary dead end and couldn’t be dragged into the present, by the design of it. These were the people who were al…

> I couldn’t care less what’s pushing pixels at my screen as long as it works.

I didn't know or care what was pushing the pixels on my Debian install, since it works. Being Debian, it could go either way: some of the desktop environments are committed to Wayland while other desktop configurations only work under X. (Incidentally, I checked. My setup uses Wayland.)

> It’s not like someone invented Wayland and shoved the X devs out of the way.

They sure make it sound as though X application developers are being shoved out of the way. I don't understand their argument though. Most modern software is built upon libraries that support either Wayland or X (assuming it has a GUI), so they should be blissfully ignorant of whether their application is running under Wayland or X. Most of the outliers are older programs that are built on top of libraries that haven't been updated for Wayland, but most of those programs will work under Wayland assuming that xwayland is installed. Again, there is no reason for the developer to concern themselves with the distinction between Wayland and X. That only applies to a relatively small subset of outliers that are interacting with X or the compositor directly. But you're not going to escape that problem, because you're either doing something unique or you are doing something you shouldn't be doing.

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#32

> Hardware Support: Nvidia users face particular challenges, and many specialized hardware configurations simply don't work reliably. > The XLibre project continues this legacy with active community development. Guess what? Nvidia users also "face particular challenges", and many normal hardware configurations simply don't work reliably under XLibre either. I guess Linus was right, don't use Nvidia.

The page describes it as if it was Wayland's mistake for causing Nvidia customers so much grief. It was Nvidia who insisted on basing Wayland on EGLStreams instead of on GBM like everybody else. Even the open source nouveau driver used GBM on Nvidia graphics. But even those problems are a few years in the past at this point after Nvidia decided to offer GBM support on their proprietary drivers. And consistent effort has been put into solving outstanding issues like screen glitches that were eventually resolved with explicit sync.

These complaints remind me of how Linux was criticized more than a decade ago for not not being compatible with proprietary applications, while foss applications worked just fine on proprietary platforms. While technically correct, it misses the whole point, seemingly rather intentionally.

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#33
post #16

This reads as significantly AI-assisted and repetitive. And some of the points are really questionable, like claiming “Color management becomes inconsistent” when X11 doesn’t even support HDR, claiming that Linux containers and namespaces somehow mitigate X11’s security issues (that’s not how it works!), and talking about some outdated issues like NVIDIA support and SSH forwarding (both of which shouldn’t be an issue…

The website layout also looks a lot like what I've seen Claude 4 generate via VS Code.

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#35
post #4

I am very open to Wayland in theory but I legit worry because it's been in the air for years and years and it still feels so far away. And some of the Wayland-y points around things like security just never felt relevant to me. Though the real pain points for me have been around the various containerization things that just cause things like my IME to barely function. At least Python 3 if you started your project on…

It’s mostly application support that’s lagging, right? And of course window managers like i3 needing complete replacement, but those seem to be mostly down already.

Some stuff like global hotkeys and remote desktop are Wayland problems inherently

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#36
post #4

I am very open to Wayland in theory but I legit worry because it's been in the air for years and years and it still feels so far away. And some of the Wayland-y points around things like security just never felt relevant to me. Though the real pain points for me have been around the various containerization things that just cause things like my IME to barely function. At least Python 3 if you started your project on…

> it's been in the air for years and years and it still feels so far away

Wayland is the Project Xanadu of UI software.

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#37
post #22
post #4

I am very open to Wayland in theory but I legit worry because it's been in the air for years and years and it still feels so far away. And some of the Wayland-y points around things like security just never felt relevant to me. Though the real pain points for me have been around the various containerization things that just cause things like my IME to barely function. At least Python 3 if you started your project on…

X11 session support is being removed from the default install of Ubuntu with the upcoming 25.10 release. Gnome and KDE Plasma plan to remove X11 session support entirely within the next few years. Ready or not, Wayland is here.

> X11 session support is being removed from the default install of Ubuntu with the upcoming 25.10 release.

Currently I can SSH from my MacBook/XQuartz onto an Ubuntu/Linux system and run xterm (or whatever). How does that work in the future?

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#38
post #16

This reads as significantly AI-assisted and repetitive. And some of the points are really questionable, like claiming “Color management becomes inconsistent” when X11 doesn’t even support HDR, claiming that Linux containers and namespaces somehow mitigate X11’s security issues (that’s not how it works!), and talking about some outdated issues like NVIDIA support and SSH forwarding (both of which shouldn’t be an issue…

If SSH isn't an issue anymore, I've yet to find the solution

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#39

Unfortunate that this page largely shills XLibre, the X fork by the guy who got ejected from contributing to Xorg when he landed a bunch of code that was blatantly untested, leading to tons of his commits getting reverted. Like, I am not a fan of Wayland, still using X on my machine, but from what I've seen of his posting, this guy isn't great PR for the "X is fine actually" camp.

Came here to say this.

>What We're Losing

>1987-2024: X11 Evolution

>37 years of continuous development, bug fixes, and feature additions. Stable, predictable, and extensively documented. The XLibre project continues this legacy with active community development.

This is a very charitable interpretation of the situation, and to suggest XLibre, which got forked 2 months ago, is the future is insane. Would be a different story if XLibre had been around a few years but 2 months is very young..

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