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Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living

rykarn.se

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Re: Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living

#21

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

pluto_modadic wrote: post #10

sounds like some peeps could contribute code to fix wayland / compositors to enable talon's accessibility hooks :D

By all means feel free, but know that you commit yourself to an endless task; every compositor has to have every feature implemented independently. The big two, GNOME and KDE, will need to be handled completely independently. After that, you can ease the process by getting support into wlroots, but that merely makes it easier per compositor; you'll still need to submit patches to every consumer of the library to actually wire up support. (For a worked example: wlroots has a way to set the keyboard layout. This does not mean that every compositor using wlroots has a way to set keyboard layout.)

Re: Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living

#22

Post by cvgbn »

ntnsndr wrote: post #13

I was speaking at a conference recently and was asked to chair the session at the last minute. It was hybrid, so all the speakers needed to share their slides on Zoom. I have been daily driving Linux for 14 years, and this has almost never been a problem (there was a moment with i3 but it seems better). But I hadn't bothered to test this since installing (and generally loving!) PopOS COSMIC. The problem, at root, is…

[flagged]

Re: Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living

#23

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jchw wrote: post #14

The Wayland protocol "lacks" some things "by design" in that they are not specified. However, this is not intentional omissions, not even under the guise of "security", it's stuff that simply hasn't been done yet. The most promising work towards improving accessibility support in Wayland was the work done on the Newton protocol: https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the... Unfortunately, the projec…

> The Wayland protocol "lacks" some things "by design" in that they are not specified. However, this is not intentional omissions, not even under the guise of "security", it's stuff that simply hasn't been done yet.

Two things: First, yes, a lot of Wayland's missing features absolutely were intentional omissions in the name of security. This is even almost understandable; the only difference between a vital a11y tool and horrible malware is whether the software acts on behalf of the user or against them, there is no technical distinction. Second... Wayland is almost 17 years old. If it was 2010, I would readily accept that it was early WIP software, but we're past the point where 'they just haven't gotten there yet' is convincing.

> However, at the same time, maintaining both X.org and Wayland paths everywhere forever is also not sustainable: with limited resources, there simply has to be a point at which the line is drawn. X.org outside of XWayland has been unmaintained for a fairly long time.

I'm actually cautiously optimistic that https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback or the like will help significantly; sharing as much of the stack as possible should reduce the maintenance burden.

Re: Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living

#24

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

charcircuit wrote: post #20
jrm4 wrote: post #8

Again. ANY Linux project that strongly breaks backwards compatibility. Not surprised that it's still messing with people even this late in the game.

xwayland still exists for backwards compatibility.

xwayland exists for application compatibility, but is essentially worthless for a11y tools

Re: Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living

#25

Post by koiueo »

cvgbn wrote: post #22
ntnsndr wrote: post #13

I was speaking at a conference recently and was asked to chair the session at the last minute. It was hybrid, so all the speakers needed to share their slides on Zoom. I have been daily driving Linux for 14 years, and this has almost never been a problem (there was a moment with i3 but it seems better). But I hadn't bothered to test this since installing (and generally loving!) PopOS COSMIC. The problem, at root, is…

[flagged]

Care to explain what millennials have to do with any of that?

Re: Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living

#26

Post by rendaw »

On the flip side, there's some software that works (somewhat) with wayland but deliberately breaks compatibility.

For instance, Scribus uses QT which supports wayland, but they hardcoded a check to explicitly detect wayland and exit if it's found. You get the generic QT "supported backends" message that lists wayland, but if you actually try to use it the logic resets your choice, gaslighting you into thinking you typed the backend detection or override env var isn't working.

You can get around it using a wayland-flavor that they forgot to reject, and there are bugs (not sure how many are from wayland itself and not Scribus though) so I get not wanting to handle wayland related bug reports, but having buggy software is often than having no software at all so I wish they didn't choose the nuclear option (and now they get "please support wayland" bug reports instead, so...).

I think Krita is the same? There were a couple programs I had to dig into the code to work around blocker mechanisms to get to run.

Re: Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living

#27

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

hwsrtejk wrote: post #6
light_hue_1 wrote: post #5

It's been almost two decades and we're still taking steps backwards on accessibility and features because of Wayland. From day 0 Wayland put their idea of a beautiful design above the needs of users. It's hard to see how we can claim to be inclusive when even our most basic decisions are hostile to large groups of users. I never thought I would say this, but after 30 years of open source and Linux I don't see much of…

Absurd ideas like "applications shouldn't be able to spy on or manipulate each other without explicit permission from the user".

Nobody said anything about that. Is there any reason that Xorg couldn't tack on a permission system, other than that it would be inelegant?

Re: Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living

#28

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

superkuh wrote: post #3
3np wrote: post #2

Wayland is great and ready for (idk) 95% of users/use-cases. There is a long tail of more-or-less critical stuff that depend on X11 and do not have working Wayland substitutes. While the tail has been shrinking for every year, it will be decades if ever until all can be realistically migrated. Consider the Lindy Effect and that some of these systems have been running for >10y already. Consider shared but secured envi…

As an aside, you talk about wayland as if it were one thing. But the wayland protocol is intentionally minimal. Each wayland compositor picks and chooses between different third party libs to support various features. So you never know if something will actually work on the wayland compositor you use. If you stick within your ecosystem, yes, but it's not unified like X11 linux is. It's very fragmented and one's perso…

Still with this situation,it will be maybe 10 years before we get accessibility again

Re: Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living

#29

Post by nvllsvm »

cvgbn wrote: post #22
ntnsndr wrote: post #13

I was speaking at a conference recently and was asked to chair the session at the last minute. It was hybrid, so all the speakers needed to share their slides on Zoom. I have been daily driving Linux for 14 years, and this has almost never been a problem (there was a moment with i3 but it seems better). But I hadn't bothered to test this since installing (and generally loving!) PopOS COSMIC. The problem, at root, is…

[flagged]

> I just bitch and moan now, because it’s better than killing myself to avoid seeing how fucked up things will become.

fwiw - I'm happy to chat if you wanna vent.

Re: Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living

#30

Post by 3np »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #16
3np wrote: post #2

Wayland is great and ready for (idk) 95% of users/use-cases. There is a long tail of more-or-less critical stuff that depend on X11 and do not have working Wayland substitutes. While the tail has been shrinking for every year, it will be decades if ever until all can be realistically migrated. Consider the Lindy Effect and that some of these systems have been running for >10y already. Consider shared but secured envi…

> On the software side, acessibility aside, there are a lot of VNC and other remote-X setups out there with no viable replacement in sight (yet). I've been using wayvnc for probably 5 years now? Works great. Sway can output fine to virtual-crtc out for headless mide; I expect other compositors can use this part of your GPU too. If you really desperate & your Wayland server just can't for no reason, get a DisplayPort…

Great you found something that works for you and that you managed to dodge the parts of the community that somehow managed to turn this into identity politics.

Still, the gaps are there and don't seem to be filled anytime soon, despite the progress you mention.

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