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Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

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Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#61

Post by cycomanic »

themafia wrote: post #35
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…

> The overwhelming majority of people who worked on Xorg are now developing Wayland. I've never seen this documented. > It is a 400K LOC behemoth of a project and it has a ridiculous amount of technical debt. So we have people who want to create features but do not want to pay for technical debt. So.. they create more technical debt? Is there some indication that the wisdom of the crowd is particularly valuable here?…

> > The overwhelming majority of people who worked on Xorg are now developing Wayland.

> I've never seen this documented.

What do you mean you can look at the history of wayland on Wikipedia (it was started by Kristian Høgsberg) the person who wrote the DRI2 implementation for xorg. Other major xorg contributors like Hutterer have also been major wayland contributors.

I think the misconception is that people thought there are lots of xorg developers. That's just false, around the time when wayland was started there were maybe 10. And now there are even less.

> > It is a 400K LOC behemoth of a project and it has a ridiculous amount of technical debt.

> So we have people who want to create features but do not want to pay for technical debt. So.. they create more technical debt? Is there some indication that the wisdom of the crowd is particularly valuable here?

But that's not what they did?

> > I would have to imagine that if the Xorg developers thought they could fix Xorg, they would do that instead of making a new thing.

> It seems like all the paid developers are working on Wayland while many of the volunteers are working hard to continue Xorg despite all the sponsored efforts to artificially shutter the project.

Who? Looking at xorgs git there is essentially 1 developer making changes that are not related to xwayland?

> The article authors main complaint seems to be that distributions forced users to choose between one or the other when, at this point in history, there are zero good reasons to have done that.

> Open source used to be about choice. Now it's about paid interests bullying you out of that choice. And Hacker News readily defends this in the name of modernity for it's own sake. It's truly a bizarre outcome to me.

You mean the choice not to work on xorg? You're welcome to use X, but you can't bully others into keeping it going for you.

The reoccurring theme in these comments is that the people complaining have little knowledge of X internals, have usually not done any work programming a WM, a compositor or X or wayland libraries. Listening to the people who have done that (e.g. Rasterman, deVault...) are widely positive about wayland over xorg. It's also an indication that most recent interesting desktop experiments/projects (niri, sway, hyprland...) have been happening under wayland. And AFAIK none were corporate sponsored.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#62

Post by akimbostrawman »

com2kid wrote: post #13
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…

> 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.

Existing != used

It does not matter if the devs alone worked on it in isolation but at what point there was public use and how it has evolved. The earliest you could argue it was being used by user on a distro would be 2016 in fedora. Actual mainstream use in ubuntu around 2021 but optional and default literally only just this year.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#63

Post by foul »

wahern wrote: post #51
ux266478 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, Xorg and X11 should be abandoned and for good reason. That should have happened decades ago. But Wayland doesn't actually fix anything that really needed fixing, other than wiping the slate clean. It's a good thing that Arcan exists, or the future of Unixland would be quite bleak.

How big is the Arcan development team? Is there any prospect of Gtk or Qt adding at least basic native support?

I don't know about GTK (and frankly hope anything will be ported to something else and the whole GNOME project get nixed), about QT they recently implemented a QPA. https://codeberg.org/vimpostor/qtarcan

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#64

Post by dxdm »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #10
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…

Right, I think we can all mostly agree that the old state of things wasn't great/sustainable. The problem, IMHO, is that they went hard on the second-system syndrome and went way too far the other way. This allowed them to replace a massive messy codebase with a nice clean codebase that doesn't do the things people actually need from it. Xorg put everything - way too many features - into one single display server (Xo…

Because I had to look it up:

a11y = accessibility

There's some irony here, I think. =]

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#65

Post by johnny22 »

veeti wrote: post #58
flohofwoe wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because developing Xorg is a massive pain in the butt. That's really no reason to build an entirely new system, and then half-ass it the way Wayland did. The Wayland gang should have started with a new, modernized, cleaned up window system API running as a layer on top of X11 and then start replacing the cruft piece by piece while keeping both the original X11 API and the new API working all the time, basically bui…

> It almost smells like sabotage (at least self-sabotage). See also: Ubuntu Unity, Gnome 3, KDE 4... all widely panned by their most loyal users. 2010s were the lost decade of Linux.

there were many of us who really liked gnome 3 though. Not that it was issue free, but the workflow was very appealing.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#66

Post by hulitu »

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…

> The overwhelming majority of people who worked on Xorg are now developing Wayland. Why?

CADT.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#67

Post by jemmyw »

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…

> Perhaps proprietary closed source development is better

Perhaps...

> Open source development should take some lessons if they want to be successful

A lot of people who write the gui stuff for Linux do it because they want to. Success is not necessarily the same metric as a company making a product.

There are companies working within the space and I doubt the licensing really makes much difference to the outcome (i.e. your Google example)

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

Why? Again, the people working on it because they want to don't need to do anything, they can experiment. Someone can still fix up issues in X. Some companies will fund the development of things that are important to them. You make it sound like the oss community should be acting like one entity to achieve something, but there is no overarching goal nor a reason for there to be one. People will continue pulling in different directions.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#68

Post by dxdm »

saurik wrote: post #41
kjellsbells wrote: post #17

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?

I would claim the dictators -- even the "benevolent" ones--tend to do this more often than committees, as they have more inherent power to do so: the committees tend to get stuck in backwards compatible land forever (for better or for worse). I mean, look at Larry Wall or Guido Van Rossom with their respective debacles. Bjarne Stroustrop couldn't mess up in that way even if he seems to want to. As another example, HT…

Which Guido van Rossum debacle are you referring to? I can't think of one where he unilaterally caused a mess by dictating a hampered "second system" into life, as your comment seems to imply, but may just me misunderstanding or being ignorant.

The closest thing I can imagine is where he actually resigned as benevolent dictator after having to meditate the walrus operator design committee/community, which is not a good example for your argument. Python 3 also does not seem to fit the bill as a "debacle" or a "second system" in the usual parlance.

I'm asking because I'm interested to learn of a significant event in Python's history I might not be aware of.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#69

Post by saurik »

gf000 wrote: post #49
saurik wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't particularly easier to make your own compositor either, as you now also have to bring your own window manager. What made the X architecture much more interesting is that it avoided coupling the window manger to the compositor. Hell: there even are multiple popular compositors for X, as they also managed to avoid coupling the compositor to the display server (which would be the one part of the system that you…

But why would I ever want to have a separate compositor and window manager? Like the display stack benefits from "vertical integration", being modular is a tradeoff, often of performance and significant complexity. Why not just make a display server (which handles everything rendering related, compositing included), and then add a window manager as a plugin/extension on top? Window managers are not that complicated.

I dunno: I have never ever wanted to make a compositor -- which, to me, feels like a really boring piece of graphics infrastructure -- and yet I have used multiple window managers over the years and have absolutely wanted to make my own window manager? In X, making your own window manager was so popular of an activity that it honestly felt kind of unreasonable just how many window managers existed, and yet everyone used one of a handful of compositors and I'm honestly not sure why anyone in their right mind would bother making their own display server?

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#70

Post by saurik »

charcircuit wrote: post #50
saurik wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't particularly easier to make your own compositor either, as you now also have to bring your own window manager. What made the X architecture much more interesting is that it avoided coupling the window manger to the compositor. Hell: there even are multiple popular compositors for X, as they also managed to avoid coupling the compositor to the display server (which would be the one part of the system that you…

>What made the X architecture much more interesting is that it avoided coupling the window manger to the compositor This is the industry standard, putting the compositor and window manager in separate processes. Android separates SurfaceFlinger and WindowManagerService. iOS separates quartz compositor and springboard. Windows separates dwm and explore. MacOS separates WindowServer and Dock.

Tell that to the Wayland people? ;P
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