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

Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

omar.yt

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 502 posts

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

#251

Post by somat »

lhl wrote: post #197
BowBun wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 la…

The funny thing about this myth is that wayland does not even try to support Mixed DPI setups, the only thing it supports is, as you put it, janky scaling. Not that X is any better in the end but at least it has the data available if any application wants to try to do correct Mixed dpi (nobody does)

http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/

So in yet another case of worse is better, wayland has the reputation of supporting mixed DPI environments, but not because it has any support for actual mixed DPI but because it is better at faking it (fractional scaling).

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

#252

Post by resonious »

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…

This seems more like a KDE thing then a Wayland thing. At least for me on GNOME Wayland is strictly better. And the newer Wayland-only desktops like Niri are arguably better then that.

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

#253

Post by uecker »

nickelpro wrote: post #228
wild_egg wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the Unix philosophy

Wayland is far more aligned with the Unix philosophy than Xorg ever was. Xorg was a giant, monolithic, do everything app. The Unix philosophy is fragmentation into tiny pieces, each doing one thing and hoping everyone else conforms to the same interfaces. Piping commands between processes and hoping for the best. That's exactly how Wayland works, although not in plain text because that would be a step too far even fo…

In X you have server, window manager, compositing manager, and clients and all is scoupled by a very flexible protocol. This seems nicely split and aligned with Unix philosophy to me. It also works very well, so I do not think this should be monolithic.

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

#254

Post by uecker »

nickelpro wrote: post #111
JSR_FDED wrote: post #107

LLMs didn’t exist when Wayland was started. Now that we have them, would it be feasible to use LLMs to go after the historical crud that X11 accumulated due to age? I don’t like vibe coding, but using LLMs to dig into a huge legacy code base like X11 could be very useful.

No. X11's problems were rooted in the abstractions presented by the X11 core protocol and its extension mechanisms. The interface, not merely the implementation. Wayland was correct in first focusing on replacing this interface. The problem is the effort stopped there and left the ecosystem to figure out the implementation part.

What exactly do you think are the problems in X11 core protocol and extension mechanism that required to start from scratch?

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

#255

Post by darthoctopus »

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.

I can no longer use GNOME on X11, and the decision to remove support was a deliberate one. Users are definitely being forced.

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

#256

Post by fulafel »

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.

Data point: On my current and previous work laptops (iGPU ThinkPads) I switched from the default Wayland back to X11 because of various bugs (hangs, stutters, resume failures), in X11 they don't happen, seems to work flawlessly.

Sometimes it's worse to live in a mess that is being constantly fixed I guess.

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

#257

Post by __d »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #212
__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…

Not only that, the situation with Wayland also made me kind of afraid of the future of open source because it dawned on me that many of the figureheads in open source are actually simply put mentally unstable and extremely zealous and lack nuance. It didn't occur to me before but look at all the figureheads in free software: Theo de Raadt, Richard Stallman, Ulrich Drepper, Lennart Poettering, Linus Torvalds, Drew Dev…

I wouldn't say "mentally unstable", but zealous is probably fair.

To create something like the GNU project, or OpenBSD, or Linux, takes serious levels of commitment. You really have to believe in it, and to a degree, you have to _will_ it into being. Along the way, you need to explain why your crazy idea is worth all the sacrifice, discourage those who would distract your team members, maintain your own and the team's focus through years of not actually having the thing you want in any useful form, etc, etc. You have to be an unreasonable person to take it on, and then continue it.

There are people who become "fans". They can be even more zealous than the project leader(s). Maintaining direction (aka control) of a horde of over-zealous fans takes aptitude and patience. It's easy, I think, for projects to devolve into vitriol, and denigration of those who think differently, even if it starts out from a good place.

All group endeavors are ultimately political. A group endeavor with a multi-year payoff period and no tangible rewards? It's bound to be very political.

That said, we all enjoy the fruits of their labors ...

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

#258

Post by __d »

Polizeiposaune wrote: post #147
lostapathy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From one perspective, the XLibre folks seem to be taking the Perl5 path, and hoping Wayland is Raku.

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

#259

Post by gentleman11 »

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…

I've used linux desktop environments using Wayland and others using x11. No real problems with either.

Let's instead get excited by all the new linux users coming in thanks to SteamOS and Valve. If the trend continues, we might start seeing larger software companies releasing native linux versions of their software -- and then, the year of the linux desktop will start becoming an actual possibility!

(I heard affinity suite is linux friendly now btw, and davinci resolve too -- not sure if proton is necessary or not, but either way, really cool)

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

#260

Post by kombine »

I've been running Plasma Desktop for years and had to put up with graphical glitches in its X11 iteration. I switched to Wayland to years ago when Plasma 6 was released and all the glitches were gone. Additionally, overall snappiness and responsiveness of the desktop and window management improved markedly, I felt like a got a new computer. Granted, I had to acquire an AMD GPU for this transition but it was well worth it.
Post reply on HN