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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?

#141

Post by tapoxi »

AlienRobot wrote: post #126
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.

This is same cop out people use to talk about "Linux." "No, Linux isn't bad, your distro/DE is bad, if you used XYZ then you wouldn't have this problem." And then you waste your time switching to XYZ and you just find new problems in XYZ that you didn't have in your original distro. I'm genuinely tired of this in the Linux community. You can't use the "Wayland" label only for the good stuff like "Wayland is good for…

But that's what we signed up for in the Linux wirld. Linux systems are smorgasbord of different components by design, and that means being specific. I'm using KDE Plasma 6, that's a different experience than someone using Cosmic or Sway.

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

#142

Post by MBCook »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #31
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…

My experience lately has been similar. Most things work well now. But, I think the article has some valid points about how long it's taken to get even this far. And it just kinda sucks that some things are still broken or don't have alternatives (the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop). HDR gaming on linux is possible thanks to Valve but it's still nowhere near a…

Does HDR work anywhere other than Mac?

I’ve heard reports of issues on Windows were you often have to switch between HDR and non-HDR modes to get the colors or brightness to appear correctly. Something about tone mapping I think?

I don’t know if that’s fixed in newer versions or if it has to do with specific drivers or what. But it didn’t sound like it worked very well.

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

#143

Post by themafia »

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.

> They did what they thought was best.

My problem with it is their proxy for "best" seemed to be "opposite of X11." This was not a solid engineering choice, and I think this post is trying to demonstrate, that had costs.

I'd probably be completely fine with Wayland if it didn't have this obsession with military style desktop security. If it was as open as extensible as X11 by default then we all would have switched. X11 isn't pretty to write code for, but when it works, it works exceptionally well. Wayland seems to have made the wrong sacrifices where it mattered most.

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

#144

Post by MBCook »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #31
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…

My experience lately has been similar. Most things work well now. But, I think the article has some valid points about how long it's taken to get even this far. And it just kinda sucks that some things are still broken or don't have alternatives (the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop). HDR gaming on linux is possible thanks to Valve but it's still nowhere near a…

The amount of time it’s taken to get here I think is THE fair criticism.

They had an absolute ton of work to do to design it and get it all running. It was never going to be fast. And it’s not like they could order any of the desktop environments to do what they want.

There have always seemed to have been commenters who were annoyed it didn’t come practically done with every feature from X plus 30 more from the day of announcements.

But, we’re here now.

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

#145

Post by MBCook »

wildredkraut wrote: post #82
iknowstuff wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow what a showstopper!

It's just some of the so many reasons why the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will never see the light. Linux is doomed to run mainly headless on a dark chamber hardware. As always when the Linux Desktop is just starting to take off, somebody comes up with a new great self destructive idea(wayland), it always has been like that and probably will never change.

Have you USED macOS 26?

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

#146

Post by wildredkraut »

mmmore wrote: post #113

I've used Wayland (via sway) for multiple years including on machines with a 1060 and 5080 (mainly for good fractional scaling support). The only major issues I've had with it have to do with XWayland apps. I think there are some issues with providing a consistent experience with things like screen recording, 3rd party proprietary apps, etc. across different DEs/distros, but that's more of something that comes with t…

Of course redhat is indirectly enforcing it, by having people in key roles of the KDE, GNOME,systemd and wayland development, who are making decisions, accepting or blocking ideas and commits. It all goes hand in hand and is mainly driven by the key "Sponsors".

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

#147

Post by Polizeiposaune »

lostapathy wrote: post #124
__d wrote: post #99

So, compare this with say the Python2 to Python3 migration. Similar motivations: the developers had some legacy decisions that were unfixable without breakage. But they were sick of it, and decided to just go for it. Most end users didn’t care about those issues. The few that did were happy to pay the cost of switching. Everyone else clung to Python2 for years because migrating was high cost and low value. It took ab…

Did perl5 to perl6 actually happen? I feel like perl mostly fell out of favor along the way.

It's a good example of a migration that mostly didn't happen.

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

#148

Post by octorian »

geophile wrote: post #48

I have been using Pop_OS for many years, and I’m still on 22.04, which uses X11. I don’t understand the pros and cons of X11 vs. Wayland, I just want a working desktop. 24.04 uses Wayland, and while some people have had no problems migrating, many people are having serious problems. From what I can tell, it’s not a good choice for me yet. This article tells me that it may not be a good choice ever. I am a huge fan of…

I recently upgraded to Pop_OS 24.04 because I was sick and tired of being stuck with an outdated base.

But after trying the new Cosmic desktop, I basically ran screaming back to Gnome/X11 (with a couple of extensions to give me the old desktop experience from 22.04).

Once 26.04 drops, along with Cosmic Epoch 2, I may give it another serious try. Or I'll just go to KDE6/Wayland and see how that goes. (I do use KiCad from time to time, so I wonder how usable it'll be on Wayland down the line.)

(For reference, my biggest gripe with Cosmic right now is how it can't seem to figure out how to manage window focus. Modal dialogs can lose focus to their base window, and sometimes become covered by that base window. And focus-follows-mouse hasn't been done right ever. Both have issues written up, I just hope they get attention. Meanwhile, throngs of people seem to "swear" it "works fine for them.")

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

#149

Post by adrian_b »

vova_hn2 wrote: post #80

> forced to make the switch > users that are now being forced to use unfinished software > frustration of being forced to use the new hotness > actual users are forced to use it Can confirm, Kristian Høgsberg and Drew DeVault personally came to my house and and installed Wayland on every computer I own. They made me watch it. It was horrible. Jokes aside, I think that it is worth remembering that open source develope…

The open source developers can definitely force you to do a lot of work.

Whenever they make changes to the program that they are maintaining, which break backwards compatibility, for which an example is replacing X11 with Wayland in the Linux distribution that you may have used for many years, then that forces the users affected by the changes to do potentially a lot of work, in order to find alternatives.

For some special application that you use from time to time, finding an alternative and switching to it may be simple, but when the incompatible changes affect a fundamental system component, which must be used all the time and without which nothing works, e.g. Wayland or systemd, then you must change not some single application, but the entire Linux distribution, and that can be time-consuming, because you may have to learn to do a lot of things in a different way than you are accustomed to.

So obviously, users are not happy about such changes that push work on them without any benefits.

The better Linux distributions may offer their users choices even for such important components like X11 vs. Wayland or OpenRC vs. systemd, for example Gentoo, but the most popular Linux distributions tend to not offer choices for this kind of system components, so when they replace such a component, the users must either accept the change or stop using that Linux distribution, and both choices are bad, because they must adapt their workflow.

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

#150

Post by octorian »

sourcegrift wrote: post #66

ITT: "it works fine on my desktop" or in other words, fuck you I got mine. People the problem isn't whether you're able to run it, wayland does work fine for mainstream, the problems that anyone who's not mainstream cannot even take a fucking screenshot and that's bad for openness. Or open the window at the position of closed last time. That's bad for openness (and opening)

And this is a case where there's a long tail of "niche issues" that they end up becoming major issues when taken in aggregate.
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