Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I hate: Programming Wayland applications

p4m.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 184 posts

Re: I hate: Programming Wayland applications

#171

Post by graemep »

vasvir wrote: post #145
adrian_b wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having some kind of access control list or other method of enforcing access rights for windows and clipboards is definitely a good thing. However, such a thing could be relatively easily added to X11 without changing the X protocol, so this does not appear as a sufficient motivation for the existence of Wayland. I have not tried Wayland yet, because I have never heard anyone describing an important enough advantage o…

In the same sense windows are not network transparent when in fact RDP works perfectly, certainly much better that X11 over WAN. Actually for wayland there is wprs for remote display of apps so here it goes the network transparency argument...

I have used X11 over WAN and it worked fine. Even connecting to a different country, which a significantly slower connection than I have now.

I do not know the current state of RDP etc., but does it allow you to open a single application rather than an entire desktop on Linux, and does it display correctly for the device you are using rather than the one the app is running on?

Re: I hate: Programming Wayland applications

#172

Post by queenkjuul »

James_K wrote: post #153
ranger_danger wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you wrote an application that supports global, unfocused keybinds (OBS is one popular example). Instead of implementing it one way that works forever with any WM/DE (X11), now you must rely on each individual wayland compositor to implement one or more optional extensions correctly, and constantly deal with bug reports of people that are using unsupported or broken compositors.

Or you could write portable software that doesn't rely on reading global input. OBS you give as an example, and it is a good one. They could simply register a D-Bus handler and provide a second binary that sends messages to the running instance. The software is more general in this way as it allows full programmatic control. A Sway user, for instance, could add bindsym $mod+r exec obs-control toggle-recording to thei…

So either every user needs to manually bind every command using their WM's bespoke global hotkey mechanism, or the developer needs to ship keybinds for every possible WM.

Sounds like a nightmare for everyone involved to me

Re: I hate: Programming Wayland applications

#173

Post by queenkjuul »

hedgehog wrote: post #127
adrian_b wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having some kind of access control list or other method of enforcing access rights for windows and clipboards is definitely a good thing. However, such a thing could be relatively easily added to X11 without changing the X protocol, so this does not appear as a sufficient motivation for the existence of Wayland. I have not tried Wayland yet, because I have never heard anyone describing an important enough advantage o…

Having a medium understanding of graphics hardware and software stack, and being an everyday desktop Linux user recently, it's hard to square these kinds of complaints with the actual technical situation. Like, people say X11 is network transparent but that's not in practice true. People argue the same problems could be solved in X11, but in practice despite a decade + of complaining about Wayland nobody did the work…

I use X over SSH all the time. And as a fun aside, i can run an ancient Linux distro on my 386, and it can use a modern machine as its X display! Not useful, but cool. I've actually done this with modern SBCs as well, and i don't think there's any way to replicate this on Wayland.

Window positioning API seems like the biggest oversight to me, as someone developing a multi window desktop app at work. That and global hotkeys and accessibility.

Due to my reliance on X over SSH i only run Wayland where i strictly need it (my HDR display, namely)

Re: I hate: Programming Wayland applications

#174

Post by queenkjuul »

graemep wrote: post #171
vasvir wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same sense windows are not network transparent when in fact RDP works perfectly, certainly much better that X11 over WAN. Actually for wayland there is wprs for remote display of apps so here it goes the network transparency argument...

I have used X11 over WAN and it worked fine. Even connecting to a different country, which a significantly slower connection than I have now. I do not know the current state of RDP etc., but does it allow you to open a single application rather than an entire desktop on Linux, and does it display correctly for the device you are using rather than the one the app is running on?

Only certain Linux RDP clients support per-app windows and I'm not sure how to actually set that up on Linux (only used WinBoat which is a Windows host and does all the Linux config automatically)

Re: I hate: Programming Wayland applications

#175

Post by queenkjuul »

adrian_b wrote: post #115
izacus wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing "niche" about plugging in a modern (e.g. made within last 5 years) laptop into an external display. These kind of posts just show how disconnected from reality some of y'all are from what most Linux desktop users nowadays actually need from the desktop platform.

I always plug my laptop into one or two external displays. Even without configuring distinct DPIs per monitor that was not a problem for me, because on the small screen of the laptop I kept only some less important application, like the e-mail program, while working on the bigger external displays, so I had no reason to move windows between the small screen of the laptop and the bigger external displays. But like I s…

Asymmetric laptop+monitor setups are very popular, people buy stands to prop their laptop up next to their monitor and just use both as normal displays. When i only had one monitor at my desk, i did this a lot, but i see people at work propping up their MBP next to two other monitors and using all 3. The idea that people wouldn't regularly go back and forth between both screens is sadly completely wrong.

Re: I hate: Programming Wayland applications

#176

Post by James_K »

queenkjuul wrote: post #172
James_K wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could write portable software that doesn't rely on reading global input. OBS you give as an example, and it is a good one. They could simply register a D-Bus handler and provide a second binary that sends messages to the running instance. The software is more general in this way as it allows full programmatic control. A Sway user, for instance, could add bindsym $mod+r exec obs-control toggle-recording to thei…

So either every user needs to manually bind every command using their WM's bespoke global hotkey mechanism, or the developer needs to ship keybinds for every possible WM. Sounds like a nightmare for everyone involved to me

I think you've got it backwards. Applications like OBS do not typically register default global keybindings to avoid clobbering, you have to do it manually in their settings menu. The only difference with a generic interface is that the dialogue opened from the setting menu would be from the WM instead of OBS.

Re: I hate: Programming Wayland applications

#177

Post by Brian_K_White »

vasvir wrote: post #144
diath wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's a problem, now instead of knowing that something just works in the WM you're using, you have to cross-reference a matrix of features for basic tasks across different WMs because the bare minimum features are not found in the core protocols. Nothing is standardized, it's just a pile of different WMs developing their own sets of custom protocols.

like the web and we saw how that went... Oh wait!

I'm not sure what point you thought you were making. The web is a complete mess.

I can't count the number of things that either no longer work or no longer even exist at all because of nothing other than the fragmented and ever-changing nature of the web. Aside from sites and apps that required flash or silverlight, I have several different pieces of expensive aactual hardware that either partially or wholly became unusable because the built in and non-updatable web interface requires an old version of java or activex.

Indeed we do all know how that went. It went like to total dogshit.

Re: I hate: Programming Wayland applications

#178

Post by Brian_K_White »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #152
incrudible wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t effectively dismiss a critique of something missing from the core protocol by declaring it to not be its concern.

I can, I just did. It's just not a thing that should be there at all, and it's obvious once you take a second to look at what's actually in it and why (spoiler: there's too much in it and not much can be done about it now).

You did not. You dismissed something, but not effectively.

Re: I hate: Programming Wayland applications

#179

Post by vidarh »

James_K wrote: post #176
queenkjuul wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So either every user needs to manually bind every command using their WM's bespoke global hotkey mechanism, or the developer needs to ship keybinds for every possible WM. Sounds like a nightmare for everyone involved to me

I think you've got it backwards. Applications like OBS do not typically register default global keybindings to avoid clobbering, you have to do it manually in their settings menu. The only difference with a generic interface is that the dialogue opened from the setting menu would be from the WM instead of OBS.

The problem with Wayland in this respect is that there is no such generic interface that works everywhere - each compositor may choose not to support it at all, or support it in different ways.

If there was a single standard way, great. In the meantime I'll stick to X11, which isn't this incredibly user-hostile.

Re: I hate: Programming Wayland applications

#180

Post by James_K »

vidarh wrote: post #179
James_K wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've got it backwards. Applications like OBS do not typically register default global keybindings to avoid clobbering, you have to do it manually in their settings menu. The only difference with a generic interface is that the dialogue opened from the setting menu would be from the WM instead of OBS.

The problem with Wayland in this respect is that there is no such generic interface that works everywhere - each compositor may choose not to support it at all, or support it in different ways. If there was a single standard way, great. In the meantime I'll stick to X11, which isn't this incredibly user-hostile.

That is not a problem with Wayland because specifying this is not a within the purview of Wayland. People like you don't seem to understand that Wayland is specification, and not an implementation like X11.
Post reply on HN