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The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

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Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#41

Post by michaelt »

There are some technical problems - especially in areas like introducing new security controls - where the upsides are relatively obscure from the perspective of end users while the downsides are obvious.

Changes where there are plenty of chances to garner negative attention, but almost none to garner positive attention, and the ultimate success would be for the work to go completely un-noticed.

From an end user's perspective, they used to be able to Y in Z and it's stopped working, they google the problem and that's their first introduction to Wayland or Snap or Pipewire or Systemd or whatever.

One of the benefits to a traditional yearly product release cycle is to bundle such changes with a bunch of other, more obviously beneficial changes to sweeten the bitter medicine.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#42

Post by csdreamer7 »

ntietz wrote: post #16

I’m in one of the “other smaller groups not included here”: people who rely on accessibility tooling that isn’t supported by Wayland. My options are: - keep using X and stay healthy - switch to Wayland and get strong nerve pain again - switch to Windows or Mac If Wayland were my only option, I would have to leave Linux for my health. So the technical merits of Wayland truly don’t matter. Accessibility is an oft forgo…

Would you please talk more about this?

* What is your condition exactly?

* What were you using on X that made you healthy?

* How is it broken on Wayland?

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#43

Post by Filligree »

mpsprd wrote: post #13

The last time I played with Wayland: * It broke screen sharing things * It removed X forwarding * It made my copy-paste life more complicated * It made steam ui ever slower Were these points fixed? what is the current usability of Wayland on these fronts?

Now it also breaks Electron apps.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#45

Post by ntietz »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #42
ntietz wrote: post #16

I’m in one of the “other smaller groups not included here”: people who rely on accessibility tooling that isn’t supported by Wayland. My options are: - keep using X and stay healthy - switch to Wayland and get strong nerve pain again - switch to Windows or Mac If Wayland were my only option, I would have to leave Linux for my health. So the technical merits of Wayland truly don’t matter. Accessibility is an oft forgo…

Would you please talk more about this? * What is your condition exactly? * What were you using on X that made you healthy? * How is it broken on Wayland?

Various nerve stuff in my arms, limiting my use of keyboards. With an ergonomic keyboard I can get through most days, but I’m having more flare ups lately so I’m doing more voice coding.

I use Talon. It simply doesn’t support Wayland, and I believe its maintainer who says that there are issues with Wayland which make support infeasible. Using it on X makes my nerve pain much less.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#47

Post by rlkf »

Currently using XFCE on a remote desktop. This configuration has in the last ten years been met with "theoretically, someone could maybe maybe write something one day that makes this work on Wayland".

Well, until it is, then I frankly hope that Wayland fails and is abandoned, because as it is now it sucks up all the mindshare of desktop Linux into what it consider a dead end: having each and everyone doing their own owner-draw. One can see the same in all these "cross-platform" toolkits that pops up, where all accessibility and themeability has just been thrown out the window (figuratively).

It doesn't matter if "everyone has been doing it like this for the last ten years": That doesn't make it right.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#48

Post by Galanwe »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #42
ntietz wrote: post #16

I’m in one of the “other smaller groups not included here”: people who rely on accessibility tooling that isn’t supported by Wayland. My options are: - keep using X and stay healthy - switch to Wayland and get strong nerve pain again - switch to Windows or Mac If Wayland were my only option, I would have to leave Linux for my health. So the technical merits of Wayland truly don’t matter. Accessibility is an oft forgo…

Would you please talk more about this? * What is your condition exactly? * What were you using on X that made you healthy? * How is it broken on Wayland?

> What were you using on X that made you healthy?

Well my WM for a start. It did not migrate to Wayland.

And I also need to share screen from time to time (teams, Google chat, etc), which results in a dark screen for viewers in Wayland.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#49

Post by qwerty456127 »

alkonaut wrote: post #15

No one really cares deeply about what a compositor or low level windowing system does since it shouldn't be a thing you notice. Desktop OS'es have simple criteria and user expectations: they should work no worse than Windows or OS X, and that's it. Whether you need Wayland or not to reach feature and performance parity with commercial desktop OSes isn't very interesting to people, only that you actually do.

> No one really cares deeply about what a compositor

I never even wanted a compositor, I always disable composition (because why have it working if I don't need it) if this can be done easily enough on a system I would use without making it too ugly. KDE has a handy hot key (Shift+Alt+F12 IIRC) for this - it helped me prevent crashes in the past and I still use it even though it became more stable.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#50

Post by Arch-TK »

I would love to switch to Wayland, but so far, Xwayland still works worse for non-96 DPI setups than just X11 with Xft.dpi set to a non-96 value. I can't understand why Xwayland opts to have applications render at 96-dpi and upscale as a default (with the only option to change this apparently involving code for some reason). My current setup of using Xft.dpi just works for me. Where applications support it, they render correctly, where applications don't support it, there is normally some application scaling setting I can easily change.
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