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Please Don't Promote Wayland

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61–70 of 90 posts

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#61
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks to me like there are quite a few more basic features fundamentally incompatible with Wayland's architecture than X's. Maybe X has issues but Wayland is still a regression.

That seems at odds with what the people who wrote both of them believe.

But that doesn't make it necessarily untrue for the person you replied to.

People have different requirements and I heard tons of stories of "this doesn't work, that doesn't work".

It's been slowly improving, but many people also just got burnt because of early hype. I don't remember any specific wayland problem in my personal recent history, but it took years to get there.

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#62
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems at odds with what the people who wrote both of them believe.

But that doesn't make it necessarily untrue for the person you replied to. People have different requirements and I heard tons of stories of "this doesn't work, that doesn't work". It's been slowly improving, but many people also just got burnt because of early hype. I don't remember any specific wayland problem in my personal recent history, but it took years to get there.

It's not just the hype, it's the "you're holding it wrong" gaslighting. I have zero tolerance for that sort of thing these days. At this point I'll use kernel virtual terminals before I use Wayland.

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They expect screensavers to be able to lock the screen. https://web.archive.org/web/20250714073924/https://www.jwz.o...

Yeah I'm so, just so upset XScreensaver can't lock a Wayland session. Jfc, good company there with a jwz link. There's so much wrong with wanting or thinking an XScreensaver app would somehow work with a random Wayland compositor. But it does require ignorance of the exact security changes made to the model when moving from X11 to Wayland. I can't. I can't. I should never waste my time in these threads. Edit: i do al…

Keep working on your Project Xanadu. I won't wait around for it be finished.

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#64
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks to me like there are quite a few more basic features fundamentally incompatible with Wayland's architecture than X's. Maybe X has issues but Wayland is still a regression.

That seems at odds with what the people who wrote both of them believe.

But they aren't the authority on whether things actually work or not. Reality is.

It's very common for developers to want to toss everything out and rewrite even to the detriment of the product, business or users. It's also very common for the rewrite to go wrong and end up worse than an incremental improvement path would have been. It's so common it's got a name: Second System Syndrome.

Is Wayland the result of SSS? I don't use it, but it sounds like maybe it is. If it is then "the X developers said it's cool" isn't a very compelling answer. In commercial organizations developers are routinely blocked from doing pointless rewrites or gigantic refactors because a certain type of developer will happily screw everything up chasing utopian dreams of a tech debt free platform whilst the userbase rots on the vine. And very often, there were better and less disruptive ways to get to the desired destination.

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#65
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…

A lot of the complaints are about supposedly missing features when X11 and Wayland aren't the same things, IIRC. X11 is a big ball of mud with all kinds of features. Wayland is an attempt to do one thing, and only one thing. You must bring in the other features (like window management and remote networking) as adjacent components.

"This Phillip's-head screwdriver can't cut cheese or open a wine bottle."

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#66
post #59

I run FreeBSD, virtualise OpenBSD using bhyve and run Arch using the Linuxulator. The ability to run X applications over the network is crucial to me.

BSD is not switching to Wayland. You might have to switch to a Linux distro that ships XLibre or something but you may also be able to switch to BSD.

The real hazard is that you won't be able to get drivers for X11 and XLibre in the future, because only BSD would be using it.

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#67
post #60

I help (or administrate) a couple of elderly relatives with their Linux desktops. The systems use Fedora Kinoite (an older version which still runs X), a immutable distribution which updates itself without any necessary user action (flatpack and rpm-ostree). This setup is simply perfect. From time to time I log into those machines to check if everything is ok (updates ran through, backups were made and so on) or at t…

I believe Chrome Remote Desktop worked for me in the past?

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#68
post #59

I run FreeBSD, virtualise OpenBSD using bhyve and run Arch using the Linuxulator. The ability to run X applications over the network is crucial to me.

BSD is not switching to Wayland. You might have to switch to a Linux distro that ships XLibre or something but you may also be able to switch to BSD. The real hazard is that you won't be able to get drivers for X11 and XLibre in the future, because only BSD would be using it.

I still wish to run Linux in the Linuxulator.

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#69
post #60

I help (or administrate) a couple of elderly relatives with their Linux desktops. The systems use Fedora Kinoite (an older version which still runs X), a immutable distribution which updates itself without any necessary user action (flatpack and rpm-ostree). This setup is simply perfect. From time to time I log into those machines to check if everything is ok (updates ran through, backups were made and so on) or at t…

I believe Chrome Remote Desktop worked for me in the past?

Thanks for the tip but only firefox is available on those systems. (And mine)

Re: Please Don't Promote Wayland

#70

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…

In case anyone is unaware, X and Wayland are developed by the same group (freedesktop.org) - https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver - https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland It's not just that developers migrated to a new project. Wayland is essentially the successor to X and is developed by the same group. (That doesn't mean there aren't still lots of bugs and sharp corners.)

Not sure how "hosted on the same domain" transforms into "developed by the same group". I've seen many independent small github projects that were transferred to freedesktop, how they banned Hyprland, etc. They also host a variety of topics (and even more in mailing lists, from systemd to libreoffice), not just desktop-related, managed by different teams.
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