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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?

#361

Post by cwnyth »

esseph wrote: post #326
cwnyth wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, Cities Skylines still (last tried: about 2 months ago) crashes for me when I try to load it in Wayland on Fedora, which has removed Xorg from its updates. Wayland has broken dozens of my Steam games.

I just played Skylines last night via Proton-GE. AMD GPU. Fedora 43. Gnome.

CS1, right? If so, can you please detail what you might have done differently?Load options? Some package or another I might be missing? All I know is that with Xorg it worked perfectly, I upgraded Fedora, and now that I only have Wayland, whatever I was doing before no longer works. I'd be grateful for the help.

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

#362

Post by drob518 »

I use MacOS, so I don’t have a dog in this hunt, but it seems like the foremost issue is distributions making Wayland the default before it’s ready to accept that responsibility, not with Wayland itself. That said, 17 years is a long time to wait for it to mature, so another question would be about the Wayland developers’ goals, both short and long term. Do the Wayland developers actually want to replace X11 with Wayland in large distros? If so, they need a plan to get it mature enough to do that. If not, fine, then distros need to back off and continue with X11 as the default.

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

#363

Post by Havoc »

To me as an end user this feels a lot like the systemd debate. Vague awareness that there are people that care deeply but to me it seems to work fine and X11 did seem to be carrying a lot of legacy baggage so a renew seems like a good idea.

From an end user perspective I struggle to reconcile that with „set Linux back 10 years“

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

#364

Post by xtracto »

drob518 wrote: post #362

I use MacOS, so I don’t have a dog in this hunt, but it seems like the foremost issue is distributions making Wayland the default before it’s ready to accept that responsibility, not with Wayland itself. That said, 17 years is a long time to wait for it to mature, so another question would be about the Wayland developers’ goals, both short and long term. Do the Wayland developers actually want to replace X11 with Way…

I also use MacOS, but have used Linux since 1997 (way too many distros), so i hold it close to my heart.

For me the Wayland story is a great example of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

They started saying "let's rewrite from scratch, X is too complicated "; 17 years later, they have realized the reasons for all the complexity that was written during 25 years (1984 by MIT).

I guess in around 8 years we will have 2 implementations of X.

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

#365

Post by naikrovek »

pjmlp wrote: post #300
naikrovek wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people behind Plan 9 did a much better job than was done with X11 and that was completely ignored as a path forward from what I can tell. It’s tiny, secure, graphics subsystem independent (it’ll work on just about anything with or without a GPU, I would expect, given the API is so damn simple) and already designed. Maybe it wouldn’t work, but I bet it would have.

Everything is a file doesn't play well with how GPUs work, especially modern ones. Plan 9 and later Inferno, just had plain 2D rendering.

the interface doesn't have to remain a file if that's not suitable.

rendering to a texture (an image) then displaying the image is what window compositors do, and what some games do. plan9 has a file you can write to which just dumps the image to the window/screen. there is no reason this could not work for Plan9. And if you don't want to open a file, write to it, then close it every frame, don't. implement a faster system. writing syscalls for plan9 is not difficult.

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

#366

Post by palata »

jrm4 wrote: post #136
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" is an extremely dated argument strategy that has absolutely no place whatsoever in modern computing. Linux is far too ubiquitous for such a notion to be taken seriously. It's not far from "who is forced to use Macs instead of Windows."

To be fair, I am not the one bringing that point up. The author says "I am forced to use it", they bring it up.

I may be on the "Wayland" side here, but I have the exact same reasoning when I am on the other side: I hate systemd, but I genuinely cannot say that "I am forced to use it". I have the freedom to choose a distro that supports alternatives, and that is what I do.

For Wayland it seems even easier: it's just something you install on top (unlike the init system or the libc).

I think it's fine to hate Wayland and to believe that it is the wrong direction, just like it is fine to hate systemd and believe it is the wrong direction. But I don't think I am forced to use any of those.

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

#367

Post by xtracto »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #292
QuantumNoodle wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Sure, the replacement might have feature gaps initially but that is a transient issue. It has been 17 years .

X11 was started in 1984 in MIT. That means, when Wayland was first conceived in 2008, there had been 24 years of X development.

I guess Kristian grossly underestimated the effort required to write a full features Display manager.

FWIW, innmy career the times I've had to perform very impactful changes in software, I always start from the current codebase and remove/simplify stuff.

As an example, once I was in a company that had built a huge Ruby monolith which was not scaling at all. It had APIs for everything, including "high frequency trading" in the same codebase server, under a METAL aws instance (that's how they scaled).

What we did initially was simply copy the repo N times (sign up, compliance, risk, trading, etc), spin up an copies of the same server and use a balancer to route APIs to the different boxes.

Then we started removing unused stuff from each of the repository to specialize them. Fiinally we simplified complexity on each separate codebase.

I would have approached X11 codebase similarly.

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

#368

Post by Pxtl »

ehnto wrote: post #273
Pxtl wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience Mint still has the smoothest process for Nvidia drivers, making it the first suggestion for gamers. And Snap causes some embarrassing bugs in Firefox in the Ubuntu family, so people thinking "I want an Ubuntu-like OS but without Canonical's mistakes" still gravitate to Mint.

EndeavourOS works really well in this regard. It also smoothes out working with Arch without being too opinionated. It was a GUI install, defaults to KDE Plasma, auto installs and manages the graphics drivers. Very smooth, better than Windows install in most ways.

I've always been stuck on the deb/apt system because it seems to have the best support but I probably need to move on at this point. It just doesn't work that well.
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