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Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

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

#191

Post by mikestorrent »

spudlyo wrote: post #183
tmtvl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Separate scaling fractions on separate monitors doesn't work under X. Well, I lie: it does work under zaphod mode, but no applications other than Emacs support that.

Heh. Just today I started fooling around with a new X11 setup on a barebones Ubuntu Server VM with just xorg, xinit, xterm, Emacs and i3. It's pretty neat learning about iommu groups and doing NVMe passthrough with KVM/Qemu, and also messing around with the new (to me) Spice/virgl 3D acceleration. I was impressed I was able to play YT videos in the Ubuntu Virtual Machine Manager with hand-built mpv/ffmpeg + yt-dlp se…

I miss the simplicity of how I remember XFree86 running on the alt-f7 terminal, and having alt-f1 through alt-f6 for my own needs... a second X on alt-f8 when I got 64MB of ram. ctrl-alt-backspace to quickly kill X and restart it (within a few seconds on a 486).

Then, gradually, these things disappeared from Linux, for no good reason; you can still configure them but someone decided in their infinite wisdom that some of the most compelling features just weren't really needed anymore, in favour of rewriting the XDM again and again until now there's too many of them and none of them are really any better than what we had in the 90s.

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

#192

Post by kibwen »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #184
palata wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, my experience with Wayland has been a lot better than with X11. I have been on Wayland for years, I can't remember the last time I had an issue (running Sway).

I suspect part of that is the Xorg maintainers (who are also behind Wayland efforts) are actively trying to kill it and make it as unbearable as possible

It's all open-source. If you think the maintainers are trying to sabotage the codebase, you have the freedom to fork it.

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

#193

Post by drnick1 »

Rapzid wrote: post #112
martinald wrote: post #7

FWIW I recently switched full time to Linux and have had absolutely 0 problems with GNOME, Wayland and Fedora, though I am using an AMD GPU. wl-copy works fine, askpass works, copy and paste works, screen sharing with Google Meet works, drag and drop works. Using an iphone as a webcam works as does recording my screen. Most importantly using multiple monitors with fractional scaling works perfectly. AFIAK this is not…

I moved away from desktop Linux a few years back after getting a new development laptop with a hiDPI screen and running into fractional scaling issues. Windows wsl2 was just getting real good at the time, so I moved over on my desktop and laptop. Nice to hear fractional scaling situation is better now. Tempted to try it out but.. Man Windows(Pro) is just such a nice desktop and host now, and I can still develop in "l…

> Man Windows(Pro) is just such a nice desktop and host now

Windows is terrible relative to a recent version of GNOME on Wayland, slow, bloated, full of spyware and AI.

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

#194

Post by twothreeone »

ewoodrich wrote: post #151
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a pox that such an old slow moving distro as Mint somehow is people's first port of call. I don't know how this happened, how Mint rooted itself so well (in 2006 it was fresh!), but this perception that you should use the slowest moving oldest possible dustiest Linux is the best possible thing Microsoft and Apple could spread to convince the world to believe. If you are going to jump into Linux, dont sell yourse…

Sorry if I sold myself a delusion about the Linux distro I casually tried but I've been jumping on and off Linux for 20 years at this point and didn't get the memo it was outdated until later on. The significant change here was being able to daily drive it on my laptop instead of living in a VM or secondary dual boot. In the past Ubuntu was always my go-to but the snap thing was irritating, and I'd always used some k…

That's basically what I heard ten years ago from individuals (and even universities) for why they switched to Mint.. but even now, if you ask Perplexity for a "debian-based distro thats not ubuntu" Mint is the second option.

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

#195

Post by boomboomsubban »

whynotmaybe wrote: post #140
dehrmann wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I actually think it's nice to have both Options that are equivalent enough for most end users just cause confusion. There are also too many distros, and the Gnome vs. KDE competition set desktop Linux back another 10 years. That's three dimensions of big, important choices with not much downside if you pick the happy path and a whole lot of downside if you don't.

I don't know what's the difference between x11, wayland, gnome, kde and all the others. The fact that people always debate over which one is best is one of the reason why I don't switch to Linux desktop. Theres always the sane debate of Macos VS Windows VS Linux. That's a good one for me because there are many pros and cons for each of them. But then, when you try to really look into Linux, it's an unstoppable flow o…

>What am I supposed to do? Spend a few hours to try each one and find the best for my 13 years old i5 with a Nvidia gt440 that's used 3 hours per month?

The performance difference will be minimal. It's an aesthetic choice, pick the one you like the look of or give a few of them a try.

It's like cars. Some people have extreme opinions on matters, some would be fine picking almost any car, and most test drive a few before picking their favorite.

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

#196

Post by QuantumNoodle »

MBCook wrote: 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.

I'm just lurking in the comments with popcorn, but if what you said is true and the maintainers of X decided it was a lost cause and unfixable, well that is the most informed opinion of them all. Nobody knows better then the maintainers. Sure, the replacement might have feature gaps initially but that is a transient issue.

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

#197

Post by lhl »

BowBun wrote: post #46
palata wrote: post #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 r…

> Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already. This is my understanding of his actual concern - Linux corps are pushing Wayland as a replacement for X11 when it is full of issues. Anecdotally my experience was the same. I'm a dev so I'm fine in a terminal, but trying to switch to KDE actually sent me BACK to Windows. Basic windowing stuff just does not work, and like the OP says, to…

Funy that you mention multi-monitor since it's one of the reasons I eventually moved to Wayland. The only way to support different DPI monitors in X was to do janky scaling or even jankier multiple X servers.

I don't use KDE (or GNOME anymore) but while I had to deal with a lot of initial speedbumps a couple years ago, these days instead of a full DE, I'm using a Niri setup and it's worked out great for me.

For my laptop, I have my own monitor-detection/wl-mirror script for example that is faster and more reliable for plugging into projectors/meeting room HDMI than even my old Macs.

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

#198

Post by wild_egg »

nickelpro wrote: post #106
tapoxi wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no "Wayland" to address these issues. It's like asking "web" to address its issues. Wayland is a protocol with multiple different implementations.

But this is sort of the nature of the problem? In X11, the problem was Xserver. Now, X11's design philosophy was hopelessly broken and needed to be replaced, but it wasn't replaced. As you correctly point out, there is no "Wayland", Wayland is a methodology, a description, of how one might implement the technologies necessary to replace X11. This has led to hopeless fracturing and replication of effort. Every WM is f…

I miss the Unix philosophy

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

#199

Post by spudlyo »

mikestorrent wrote: post #191
spudlyo wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. Just today I started fooling around with a new X11 setup on a barebones Ubuntu Server VM with just xorg, xinit, xterm, Emacs and i3. It's pretty neat learning about iommu groups and doing NVMe passthrough with KVM/Qemu, and also messing around with the new (to me) Spice/virgl 3D acceleration. I was impressed I was able to play YT videos in the Ubuntu Virtual Machine Manager with hand-built mpv/ffmpeg + yt-dlp se…

I miss the simplicity of how I remember XFree86 running on the alt-f7 terminal, and having alt-f1 through alt-f6 for my own needs... a second X on alt-f8 when I got 64MB of ram. ctrl-alt-backspace to quickly kill X and restart it (within a few seconds on a 486). Then, gradually, these things disappeared from Linux, for no good reason; you can still configure them but someone decided in their infinite wisdom that some…

    setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp
I had to put that in my .xinitrc, because like you I really missed that feature. I also made a .Xresources file and had to remember that xrdb was a thing. Good times, good memories. I also remember the jump to 64MiB of memory, it was a big deal! I think I got a Gravis UltraSound right around then too.

I stopped my nostalgia journey short of pimping out my console (sadly now only fbcon works, and the old vga modes are a legacy BIOS thing I think) with fonts and higher resolution, and enabling in the kernel the Alt+SysReq+g key for dropping into the kernel debugger, but there is always tomorrow!

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

#200

Post by jcranmer »

MBCook wrote: post #165
jmclnx wrote: post #5

people may remember 'Y' from many years ago, AFAIK it was suppose to replace X, but never got to the point were Wayland is now. >The original conceit behind Wayland is to only implement what is needed for a simple Linux desktop And this is my biggest issue with Wayland. If it started out with portability in mind maybe I would give it a try. But I am sticking with X because it is fully usable on the BSDs.

I don’t blame the developers. I do wonder what the BSDs will do. The Wayland developers were the X developers. The problems with X all still exist. How big a share of the desktop market do the BSDs have compared to Linux? I imagine it’s quite small, unfortunately.

> How big a share of the desktop market do the BSDs have compared to Linux? I imagine it’s quite small, unfortunately.

Good stats are hard to come by, but the Linux : BSD ratio is probably no larger than the Windows : Linux ratio (which is actually running relatively low these days--Linux seems to be closing in on ~3% desktop share). That puts the BSD overall in the 0.01% range, which is really too little market share to accurately measure.

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