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Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

omar.yt

11–20 of 502 posts

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#11
post #4

You could make this same post and replace any component with Wayland. At the end of the day the Linux community will continuously set the Linux Desktop back by N years. The most obvious case of this is Linus Tech Tips trying Linux to replace Windows for gaming, getting lost in what distro to pick, and then being flamed online for choosing the "wrong" distro. It's impossible for anyone without the time and curiosity t…

I think your hope touches on what I think the issue partly is: a lack of empathy for any type of user that doesn’t resemble themselves. I think the deeper into tech you go, the more you find it. And Linux devs/fans are very deep into tech.

The commercial force behind SteamOS is largely the financial motivation to deeply care about the user who doesn’t get an apt about the technical details. They’re not there to do computers, they’re there to play a game or watch a movie or whatever. And the Linux community may benefit from the result of that goal, despite likely being salty about not being the audience.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#14
Again, we may live in a parallel universe. Because I am using KDE and wayland and NVIDIA, and it works beautifully. Although NVIDIA really started to work great only fairly recently (last couple of years).

And using X is a noticeably worse experience.

I'am excited to follow the still very early development of xfwl to see how a classic DE works in wayland.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#16
I have been thoroughly enjoying Wayland with Niri. It is snappy, looks beautiful on my 4K monitor, and handles X11 emulation perfectly (via xwayland-satellite). I have not seen any major issues with OBS, clipboard handling, or any application I have had to run.

So as an end user, I don’t get all the hubbub. Reminds me a bit of the whole systemd craze from some time ago.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#17
Disclaimer: I don't have any skin in this game, I was fine with X11 and I am fine with Wayland, and I actually think it's nice to have both (and more, like Xlibre I think?).

I understand complaints about systemd, I don't understand the complaints about Wayland. This whole article sounds like a big rant and doesn't seem to bring much information.

> I also don't care for the "security" argument when parts of the core reference implementation are written in a memory-unsafe language.

Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at security (not even mentioning that Wayland was started in 2008, and Rust was not a thing). One can also say that "as long as you run X11, there is no need to think about security because X11 just defeats it all".

> In fact, you can find examples showing roughly a 40% slowdown when using Wayland over X11! I'm sure there are similar benchmarks claiming Wayland wins and vice versa (happy to link them as well if provided).

"I am gonna make a bad argument and follow it by saying that you could make the same bad argument to say the opposite". Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at performance.

> Anecdotal experience is not enough to say this is a broad issue, but my point is that when an average user encounters graphical issues within 60 seconds of using it, maybe it's not ready to be made the default!

So the whole article is built around ranting while saying "I don't have anything meaningful to say, I'll just share an anecdote and directly say it's not worth much because it's an anecdote"?

> But the second actual users are forced to use it expect them to be frustrated!

Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#18
post #4

You could make this same post and replace any component with Wayland. At the end of the day the Linux community will continuously set the Linux Desktop back by N years. The most obvious case of this is Linus Tech Tips trying Linux to replace Windows for gaming, getting lost in what distro to pick, and then being flamed online for choosing the "wrong" distro. It's impossible for anyone without the time and curiosity t…

I think your hope touches on what I think the issue partly is: a lack of empathy for any type of user that doesn’t resemble themselves. I think the deeper into tech you go, the more you find it. And Linux devs/fans are very deep into tech. The commercial force behind SteamOS is largely the financial motivation to deeply care about the user who doesn’t get an apt about the technical details. They’re not there to do co…

Not just the user, but Valve also has a financial incentive to care about developers too. Especially developers of apps who may never be updated ever again. Developers do not want to waste time trying to fight the desktop Linux software stack.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#19
post #4

You could make this same post and replace any component with Wayland. At the end of the day the Linux community will continuously set the Linux Desktop back by N years. The most obvious case of this is Linus Tech Tips trying Linux to replace Windows for gaming, getting lost in what distro to pick, and then being flamed online for choosing the "wrong" distro. It's impossible for anyone without the time and curiosity t…

He clearly doesn't care about using Linux, he should just ignore it. It's fine.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#20
post #6

The major comitters and maintainers of X decided it was a lost cause and unfixable. Were they just supposed to keep working on the massive pile of hacks they felt needed abandoning? They did what they thought was best. You hate it. Fine. Do you think things would be better if they kept working on the unfixable mess? I trust them to know what was going on better than random commenters.

That is fine. X11 needed fresh start. But they also failed to learn any lessons from X, just assuming "if X11 did it it must've been a bad idea, let's do it differently".

X11 did chalk many lines of abstractions in absolutely the right places, it's just the implementation was crufty in places, and just not designed for modern hardware in some other places, while wayland just tried to kick as much as possible to the WM side, making it so instead one place where those things need a bunch of code (the display system/its plugins), now every WM have to repeat that work and (more importantly) add incompatibilities because of that

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