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

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#71

Post by saurik » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 2:19 PM UTC

dxdm wrote: post #68

saurik wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

Python 3 was a debacle that nearly destroyed the Python ecosystem due to egregious incompatibilities when it was decided that, not only could they fix a few important things, but in the process they might as well throw backwards compatibility entirely away and encourage people to treat it as a new language. It was over a decade between Python 2 being declared dead and Python 3 being usable, and many of the key groups of people who actually used Python during that time actually did give up and move on: as an example, if it were not for that mess, Python would likely own web development. And the big corporate backer that helped popularize it in production -- Google -- largely did give up, and started working on Go, while the community focussed on stuff that Google thought was not just a waste of time but made their efforts constantly break. That data scientists (including at Google) appeared to give it a new life in machine learning was super lucky.

I dunno... maybe read this? (edit: I forgot to add the link, lol; I have now added it ;P.) If you weren't there at the time, maybe it is easy to pretend none of this had happened, but it was a super big deal and there were the same kinds of bullying campaigns to get people to upgrade even when stuff was clearly slower and more broken and you knew it would become easier to port later.

https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2020/01/13/mercurial%27s-journ...

Frankly, it all started to finally turn around in the Python 3.3-3.7 timeframe, with the biggest turning points being 3.6/3.7, which is when Guido finally was cracking under community pressure against his agendas and decided to start forming a committee to manage the language, before stepping down... until just now I hadn't realized that that was probably the thing that truly saved that language.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#72

Post by stinkbeetle » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #54

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…

> 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's not sabotage or self-sabotage, implying some intention behind it. It's just classic second system syndrome: hyper-fixating on real or perceived flaws that were never able to be solved or done right in the previous system, which can be to the detriment of other considerations.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#73

Post by jcelerier » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

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.

for instance as a X11 user I don't want a compositor at all

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#74

Post by dxdm » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 4:40 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #71

dxdm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

Python 3 was a debacle that nearly destroyed the Python ecosystem due to egregious incompatibilities when it was decided that, not only could they fix a few important things, but in the process they might as well throw backwards compatibility entirely away and encourage people to treat it as a new language. It was over a decade between Python 2 being declared dead and Python 3 being usable, and many of the key groups…

I picked up Python around 2.5 and went through the migration to 3. Although it was not smooth and took a while on the whole, it was very painless for me, and in my environment I did not experience it as such a big almost-catastrophe as you describe it. Python is better for it, and personally I'm very grateful for the Unicode compatibility breakage they did.

I get that your experience may have been different, and I appreciate that the transition cannot be said to have gone well (despite ending well); but nevertheless I feel that using words like debacle paints an overdramatic picture that suggests an outcome far removed from where Python is today, and it does not leave much linguistic room for the multitude of possible worse occurrences that would truly deserve to be called a debacle. But that's of course just my opinion.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#75

Post by veeti » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 5:04 PM UTC

johnny22 wrote: post #65

veeti wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure, I quite enjoy it myself now. But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't borderline unusable for years.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#76

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #30

This is analogous to calling unix account separation "fragmentation". Why can't I just run all my services as root? It has worked for years!? The answer is that it is a fragile, unmaintainable security nightmare. Wayland has separation of concerns to fix that problem, with the tradeoffs described in the blog post.

No, this is analogous to forcing everything into separate accounts in the name of "security" and then failing to implement any way to pass data between them. It would be fine to have optional protocols on top of the core wayland protocol, and it would be fine to require a single permission prompt, but only if they actually get implemented and there's actually a way to persistently give permission. Otherwise you've just reduced the functionality of the system.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#77

Post by LocalH » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 5:24 PM 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…

You think Linux isn't widely used at scale?

Phones are a different market from computers, even though they're technically the same thing. A large segment of people own "phones" but not a computer. Linux runs a large chunk of the internet. I think it's used quite well at scale.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#78

Post by saurik » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 5:44 PM UTC

dxdm wrote: post #74

saurik wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python 3 was a debacle that nearly destroyed the Python ecosystem due to egregious incompatibilities when it was decided that, not only could they fix a few important things, but in the process they might as well throw backwards compatibility entirely away and encourage people to treat it as a new language. It was over a decade between Python 2 being declared dead and Python 3 being usable, and many of the key groups…

I picked up Python around 2.5 and went through the migration to 3. Although it was not smooth and took a while on the whole, it was very painless for me, and in my environment I did not experience it as such a big almost-catastrophe as you describe it. Python is better for it, and personally I'm very grateful for the Unicode compatibility breakage they did. I get that your experience may have been different, and I ap…

I guess, in my mind's eye, I see a world in which Python dominated, and that didn't happen: it didn't die the death Perl did, but, in the grand scheme of where it was going -- and even what it had been -- it has become a very niched language: we now only really see it in education, machine learning, and (sometimes) system administration (but even that has been losing to Go). It didn't entirely disappear, and it actually got where it was going (unlike Perl 6), but it seems very strange to say it "ended well"... they squandered a decade on some really bad decisions that they only started to undo around 3.3-3.7, and the ecosystem simply moved on (in some cases quite forcefully, such as Google going to great lengths to get off of Python via Go). What else can we call such a fall from grace? If not somehow a debacle it is certainly a tragedy...

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#79

Post by saurik » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 5:51 PM UTC

jcelerier wrote: post #73

gf000 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

for instance as a X11 user I don't want a compositor at all

(Same... I know people use them to get some pretty effects; but, they add a frame of latency I do not want and require lots of memory and assume acceleration I don't need.)

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#80

Post by seanhunter » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 6:34 PM UTC

dvntsemicolon wrote: post #40

noosphr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overwhelming majority of people who worked on x11 are retired and a growing minority are dead. This is the fourth incarnation of x11 and the people working on it now have nothing to do with the people who developed it. Xorg is the castodian group who started life as a fork, of a fork, of a fork of an spinout from mit. Them trying to kill X11 is laughable to anyone who knows anything about its history. Wayland on…

I mean, Wayland works fine for me. I'm using niri and an nvidia card.

Yeah. From what you read on here you would think it was totally unusable. Yet I use wayland all day every day. I use an AMD card and it even works. Sway for work KDE plasma for games. Everything I use works completely fine in wayland.