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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

#81

Post by charcircuit »

LocalH wrote: post #77
charcircuit wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even in the server market the success of having a stable app platform can be attributed to Linux, the kernel, solely for having a policy to never break userspace. The base of the app platform was already figured out a long time ago, and if you look at the bulk of Linux contributions you will see that they are coming from companies using Linux commercially.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#82

Post by suby »

flohofwoe wrote: post #57
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

> they made sure that the replacement was much much easier to maintain and develop... for them Tbh, if that were the case I would expect much faster progress.

The reason Wayland progress is slow is not technical. We have a coordination problem, people have differing priorities and views on what should be allowed.

There are people opposed to things like a allowing windows to specify their own bounds, and unless all the stakeholders agree to implement such protocols in their respective projects, the ecosystem will remain fragmented. Multiply this against every feature that people want.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#83

Post by dxdm »

saurik wrote: post #78
dxdm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actua…

Maybe I am just in a happy little Python niche, then. I'm saying this in all earnesty. Maybe Python could have been bigger, I don't know. It still seems very present, it did not die, but came out better than before.

Given the performance difference between Python and Go, and the rationale given for its invention, I'm not convinced Google would somehow have a chosen Python as their blessed language, as you seem to suggest.

Anyway, we seem to have different measuring sticks for things like debacles and tragedies. :)

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#84

Post by rweichler »

Srs question, I keep reading everywhere from experienced people Wayland sucks. I need to start learning of these stacks, should I go with Wayland or should I go with Xorg?

If I didn't know any better I would learn the Wayland API. Just like how: if I didn't know any better I would learn Swift (instead of Objective-C). But thankfully I do know better and I know to stay far away from Swift [1]. Is it the same deal with Xorg/Wayland? It seems like noobs prefer Wayland but the experts prefer Xorg.

1. https://youtu.be/ovYbgbrQ-v8?t=1456

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#85

Post by broken-kebab »

codedokode wrote: post #37

Yes the international keyboard support is pretty bad in both X and Wayland. For example, try using Left Shift to switch to layout 1 (while retaining its shift functionality) without patching Gnome. It's impossible. Or, try making a virtual on-screen keyboard that would send characters that are not in the layout (for example, Greek character with US keyboard layout). Again, you cannot do that, and it's difficult to un…

>try using Left Shift to switch to layout 1 (while retaining its shift functionality) without patching Gnome. It's impossible.

It's certainly possible with X. Not sure about compatibility with Gnome, but then it's a Gnome's problem, not X's

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#86

Post by MangoToupe »

jemmyw wrote: post #67
charcircuit wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> A lot of people who write the gui stuff for Linux do it because they want to.

Think about how many people might want to write for it if it had a compelling ui stack, tho

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#87

Post by MangoToupe »

LocalH wrote: post #77
charcircuit wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You think Linux isn't widely used at scale?

Certainly not in a high-productivity environment. Google has to swap out most of the runtime components with distributed alternatives to make it compelling in a corporate (distributed) environment.

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#88

Post by gf000 »

saurik wrote: post #79
jcelerier wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

There is no way to avoid a frame of latency without "racing the beam", which AFAIK quite complicated and not compatible with most GUI frameworks. That is, if you don't want tearing.

But I may be wrong here

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#89

Post by flohofwoe »

gf000 wrote: post #88
saurik wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.)

There is no way to avoid a frame of latency without "racing the beam", which AFAIK quite complicated and not compatible with most GUI frameworks. That is, if you don't want tearing. But I may be wrong here

One frame of latency and adding a frame of latency are different things. The first is required (without tearing) the second should be avoided at all cost (athough high display refresh rates reduce the problem of "long" swapchains quite a bit).

Re: Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

#90

Post by flohofwoe »

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…

Linux (the kernel) is also open source and doesn't suffer from the fragmentation problem. It's pretty much unique to the Linux desktop because there are too many cooks involved.

But even if there's only one cook, it could be worse (if that cook is the gnome team). At least with multiple cooks we can pick kde instead of gnome.

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