Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure • Hacker News Board

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#11

Post by charcircuit » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 2:21 AM UTC

jemmyw wrote: post #6

charcircuit wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There wasn't a need to have 10s of different wayland compositors. There is not a need to endlessly bikeshed over extentions instead of delivering user value. These are failures of leadership in driving the replacement of X. Just compare this to Windows and how they made this rearchitecture of making their compositor more modern without splitting into 10s of compositors and breaking a ton of apps.

Here you're just comparing proprietary closed source development to open source development. In the proprietary version the goal is to improve a product. The OSS goals are much harder to pin down and can be different person to person, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a goal of "make it so that other devs can make their own compositors easily" and therefore you're describing an obvious success. Short term this…

Perhaps proprietary closed source development is better for making operating systems. Is it a coincidence that Google was able to scale Linux to billions of devices while open source development ones weren't? Open source development should take some lessons if they want to be successful and not aggrevate developers writing apps for your platform like what happened in the article, forcing them to do extra work.

If development for X is ceasing now, there isn't time to experiment on finding the true successor.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#12

Post by PunchyHamster » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 2:29 AM UTC

dvntsemicolon wrote: post #2

You'll never find me saying that Wayland development is good in its present state. I think it's a mess and it has a lot of issues. But let's be honest about Xorg. The overwhelming majority of people who worked on Xorg are now developing Wayland. Why? Because developing Xorg is a massive pain in the butt. It is a 400K LOC behemoth of a project and it has a ridiculous amount of technical debt. I would have to imagine t…

That begs a question: if they had that much experience why they chose to structure wayland in a way that's such PITA to write for ? This just looks like some massive second system effect.

They just decided X11 did everything wrong and did it differently rather than pick up the pieces (if in spirit of idea, not code) that work and fix parts that don't

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#13

Post by com2kid » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 2:34 AM UTC

jemmyw wrote: post #6

charcircuit wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There wasn't a need to have 10s of different wayland compositors. There is not a need to endlessly bikeshed over extentions instead of delivering user value. These are failures of leadership in driving the replacement of X. Just compare this to Windows and how they made this rearchitecture of making their compositor more modern without splitting into 10s of compositors and breaking a ton of apps.

Here you're just comparing proprietary closed source development to open source development. In the proprietary version the goal is to improve a product. The OSS goals are much harder to pin down and can be different person to person, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a goal of "make it so that other devs can make their own compositors easily" and therefore you're describing an obvious success. Short term this…

> Short term this might be a far slower and worse approach.

We are way past the short term with Wayland!

Wayland is 17 year old.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#14

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 2:37 AM UTC

PunchyHamster wrote: post #12

dvntsemicolon wrote: post #2

You'll never find me saying that Wayland development is good in its present state. I think it's a mess and it has a lot of issues. But let's be honest about Xorg. The overwhelming majority of people who worked on Xorg are now developing Wayland. Why? Because developing Xorg is a massive pain in the butt. It is a 400K LOC behemoth of a project and it has a ridiculous amount of technical debt. I would have to imagine t…

That begs a question: if they had that much experience why they chose to structure wayland in a way that's such PITA to write for ? This just looks like some massive second system effect. They just decided X11 did everything wrong and did it differently rather than pick up the pieces (if in spirit of idea, not code) that work and fix parts that don't

Well, yes. As you say:

Q: if they had that much experience why they chose to structure wayland in a way that's such PITA to write for ?

A: Because they were reacting to Xorg, so they wrote the exact opposite of that.

And for bonus points, because one of the problems they wanted to solve was "Xorg is hard to maintain", they made sure that the replacement was much much easier to maintain and develop... for them. Not for application devs, not for users, but for the folks making wayland, I have no doubt it's very well streamlined and easy to work on.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#15

Post by dadoum » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 2:40 AM UTC

PunchyHamster wrote: post #12

dvntsemicolon wrote: post #2

You'll never find me saying that Wayland development is good in its present state. I think it's a mess and it has a lot of issues. But let's be honest about Xorg. The overwhelming majority of people who worked on Xorg are now developing Wayland. Why? Because developing Xorg is a massive pain in the butt. It is a 400K LOC behemoth of a project and it has a ridiculous amount of technical debt. I would have to imagine t…

That begs a question: if they had that much experience why they chose to structure wayland in a way that's such PITA to write for ? This just looks like some massive second system effect. They just decided X11 did everything wrong and did it differently rather than pick up the pieces (if in spirit of idea, not code) that work and fix parts that don't

I wrote an app using Wayland and XCB/X11 and honestly, I found the Wayland part to be much easier to write than the XCB part, even though it required me to write more code.

This is partly due to the fact that everything you can do with Wayland is defined in protocols that are straightforward to use whereas in X11 you have atoms and messages with arcane name and structures for everything, a lackluster documentation and terrible error handling.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#16

Post by bryanlarsen » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 2:42 AM UTC

resonious wrote: post #9

bryanlarsen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Failures of leadership" implies that leadership actually exists. Does it?

Right, this is basically peoples' hobby projects. Nobody is incentivized to "lead" the Wayland project.

Actually, that'd probably be a better outcome. But as it is, Red Hat & Ubuntu et al pay people to work on Wayland and those people follow corporate priorities rather than centralized priorities.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#17

Post by kjellsbells » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 2:44 AM UTC

Second system effect is the curse of FOSS projects. It's been that way for decades. I don't see a reliable solution for the structural problem that doesn't somehow end up like a Benevolent Dictatorship. At the end of the day, designing complex systems by committee is hard to do. Maybe there is a maximum size of a group beyond which the communication matrix between the members starts to fracture?

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#18

Post by davidsainez » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 3:12 AM UTC

charcircuit wrote: post #11

jemmyw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you're just comparing proprietary closed source development to open source development. In the proprietary version the goal is to improve a product. The OSS goals are much harder to pin down and can be different person to person, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a goal of "make it so that other devs can make their own compositors easily" and therefore you're describing an obvious success. Short term this…

Perhaps proprietary closed source development is better for making operating systems. Is it a coincidence that Google was able to scale Linux to billions of devices while open source development ones weren't? Open source development should take some lessons if they want to be successful and not aggrevate developers writing apps for your platform like what happened in the article, forcing them to do extra work. If dev…

Access to virtually infinite cash had more to do with Android's success than the source being proprietary.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#19

Post by MangoToupe » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 3:15 AM UTC

jemmyw wrote: post #6

charcircuit wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There wasn't a need to have 10s of different wayland compositors. There is not a need to endlessly bikeshed over extentions instead of delivering user value. These are failures of leadership in driving the replacement of X. Just compare this to Windows and how they made this rearchitecture of making their compositor more modern without splitting into 10s of compositors and breaking a ton of apps.

Here you're just comparing proprietary closed source development to open source development. In the proprietary version the goal is to improve a product. The OSS goals are much harder to pin down and can be different person to person, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a goal of "make it so that other devs can make their own compositors easily" and therefore you're describing an obvious success. Short term this…

> it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a goal of "make it so that other devs can make their own compositors easily"

I can't say i've ever wanted a second compositor to choose from. Ideally it would just be part of the window server.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#20

Post by cycomanic » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 3:16 AM UTC

I don't understand a lot of the complains. It asks for a remote connection? That's because of xwayland (which is x11 inside) not wayland AFAIK. Also all the comments about how that is weird on a single system, mmh the whole X server/client architecture always sounded like one was running like on a remote system.

I actually like the approach that compositors are much more different from each other than WMs used to be, that allows people to experiment much more. Also let's not forget that X was a plethora of different plugins and incompatabilities. The reason many didn't encounter that was that the almost everyone was running xorg with all plugins, that said I still remember the hoops one had to jump through to get transparency etc. You needed a compositor and not all compositors were compatible with all WMs (and all had different capabilities).

That said I do also wish that the protocol would evolve faster. It is my impression that if it wasn't for the wlroots people not much would have happened, especially because the gnome guys seem to rather just implement something for themselves and don't try to use or push the standard.