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Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living

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

#41

Post by BrenBarn »

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…

> anyone who recognized the computer running Zoom as Linux surely strengthened their conviction never to try that.

It always boggles me how supporters of Wayland (or other things that are new and better and worth deprecating the old one for) miss this. It only takes one experience like this to make the average person view Wayland (or Linux as a whole) as a total failure.

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

#42

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jchw wrote: post #34
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

1 - Oh, yes of course Wayland could support all these things, but that's not terribly interesting. It's like a programming language with an inadequate standard library: It keeps the core language lean and flexible, while ensuring that the ecosystem will remain fragmented and anyone trying to do normal work will forever have an uphill slog to get anywhere. In practice, in 2025, there are 3 incompatible ways to take screenshots in Wayland (the GNOME way, the wlroots way, and the KDE way that supposedly will get combine with wlroots real soon now), and we're just now starting to get to the point where theoretically the APIs exist to do a11y but the practical side isn't there yet.

2 -

> This isn't a project with full time employees like at your job, it's a distributed open source effort.

It's not a hobby project, either. AFAICT, Wayland has always been predominately a corporate project. It's a loose proxy, but https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/graphs/main... matches my impression; started at Red Hat, with lots of help from Intel, Samsung, and Collabora.

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

#43

Post by BrenBarn »

jchw wrote: post #34
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

> I think people get the wrong idea that Wayland is telling them they can't ever do this, but it's really just telling application developers they can't absolutely count on being able to do it like they can in X.org.

That's still worse than what X.org provides. "You can maybe do it" is worse than "You can definitely do it".

> Secondly, the "Wayland is x years old" thing just doesn't make sense, this has to stop. This isn't a project with full time employees like at your job, it's a distributed open source effort.

That's fine. What's not fine is then insisting that this new thing that has spent 17 years to get to a point of not being able to provide an equivalent experience to X11 should be the default and/or should replace X11.

No one should even think about deprecating X11 until functionality under Wayland is a strict superset of functionality under X11.

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

#44

Post by [deleted] »

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".

[deleted]

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

#45

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

nitwit005 wrote: post #35
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actu…

You're essentially encouraging people to give up and leave it broken. Sure, a lot of code changes need to happen, but they only need to happen once. There's no real reason to discourage people from stepping closer to the end goal.

Like... I don't exactly want to discourage people. As a person using a11y tools that don't yet exist on Wayland, I would kinda like to be able to migrate over. But it remains true that Wayland is set up in such a way that it's inherently a longer uphill struggle, and always will be. If tomorrow someone created a new X11 window manager, I could switch and my tools would still work. If tomorrow someone created a new Wayland compositor, I almost certainly couldn't use it, because they'd need to implement everything over again. They can do that, obviously, but the startup effort will always be higher.

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

#46

Post by cies »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #27
hwsrtejk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Is there any reason that Xorg couldn't tack on a permission system, other than that it would be inelegant?

That's the whole reason for Wayland's existence: such things were not "easily" possible...

Linux+Xorg desktop would be hopelessly insecure for ever because these security features were deemed too hard to the point of not being "worth it". So Wayland was started.

Someone is developing XLibre, and Xorg fork. It may be pulled off, but I doubt it. Making Xorg safe was tried many times for many safety-holes.

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

#47

Post by jchw »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #42
jchw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

1 - Oh, yes of course Wayland could support all these things, but that's not terribly interesting. It's like a programming language with an inadequate standard library: It keeps the core language lean and flexible, while ensuring that the ecosystem will remain fragmented and anyone trying to do normal work will forever have an uphill slog to get anywhere. In practice, in 2025, there are 3 incompatible ways to take sc…

The point with 1. isn't that it's interesting that such APIs could be made, it's that a whole bunch of non-sense discourse has flourished because people don't understand what it means that Wayland can't do screen capture.

That said, there is a standard way to capture the screen now, via XDG Desktop Portals + Pipewire. For better or worse, that is the standard that works whether you're on GNOME, KDE, COSMIC, Hyprland, etc.

Anyway, I really feel I said enough regarding the "17 years" thing. I think Wayland definitely was much closer to a hobby project for about half it's life, and while we have some big names investing in it, frankly I doubt the investment in Wayland desktops really compare to pretty much any other commercial windowing systems and probably still nowhere near the effort put into X11 over the years. But regardless, it's not really about that. The point is that the investments made by each party is not unilateral, they all had specific things they were working on. This is very different, IMO, than having a full time team. The closest you will see to that is Red Hat, but Red Hat also doesn't invest in all of the important areas for a full proper desktop.

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

#48

Post by nurettin »

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".

"There should be global hooks and applications should be able to register themselves should they wish" would solve all these cases, but horse blinders are also very important to wear.

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

#49

Post by patrakov »

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #39
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…

> The problem, at root, is Wayland. Screen sharing worked fine for me on Wayland 3+ years ago (and still works today), so Wayland isn't inherently the issue.

And, as explained, it doesn't matter. The problems, at root, are human psychology and incompatible but popular software, and that's sufficient to drive people away. And the issues are not new: we had exactly that with Windows Vista.

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

#50

Post by roenxi »

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".

Wayland, traditionally, has not believed that. It believed "applications shouldn't be able to spy on or manipulate each other" and doesn't give users any mechanism to suggest that they might have permission to do so because the idea of that happening was just not on their radar.

I'm not sure about the modern state of Wayland but last time I saw it the situation was terribly messy and I was forced back to X11 because I rely on screensharing to do my job properly.

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