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I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

drewdevault.com

431–440 of 892 posts

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#431
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my admittedly somewhat distanced opinion, Wayland's biggest mistakes were not launching with a coherent strategy for replicating functionality like screen sharing, screenshots, and to a lesser extent remote desktop/applications. They just punted and said "that's a compositor problem!" as though that was supposed to make it ok. People have thus harbored some inherent resentment ever since. agree 1000% - really do…

Remote windowing is a legacy of the era when universities ran dozens of dumb terminals from a server. It would be bizarre to pursue that in an era of hardware-accelerated graphics. If the Wayland design was weighed down by such things, it could never hope to be progress.

It is actually a common enough use case that Windows supports it now via Remote App, which is bit of a hack over RDP since RDP wasn't really designed for that. The use case may be relatively small but it undeniably still exists.

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#432
post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is actually one of the big, unfixable, conceptual problems of Wayland Why not have a shared implementation?

Because then you end up with something like X11, which we already have. The codebase could be re-engineered, sure, but a lot of people championing Wayland tend to see this duplication of effort as good for some reason, and at least last I engaged with them did not like the idea of a "new X11." Personally I think something like that is an inevitability.

> which we already have.

It'd still solve a lot of issues that X can't.

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry which modular unix philosophy is Wayland replacing? X wasn't modular except by the most generous definitions. X is a weird server that does way too many things and the window manager where the interesting logic was. These days the building blocks have been broken out allowing much more flexibility. If you think that the window manager was modular component you can basically pretend that wlroots is X and the com…

Xorg didnt define policy, which is why things like window management was offloaded to the window manager process. Look and feel was also not part of the policy of Xorg, and was defined by the widget sets, window manager, etc. In the wayland model, these previously modular components that communicated through process boundaries to cobble together those policies that make a desktop are typically subsumed into one proce…

Right, and nothing prevents you from writing a compositor that talks to an external process to handle window management. It just happens that no-one does it, because it's insane and difficult to make work properly. The compositor's job literally is to juggle the clients' buffers, which includes deciding what gets drawn on the screen and how.

There are other processes involved though where the compositor and the client do talk the Wayland protocol via IPC, such that the compositor hands off various responsibilities to external processes.

As far as I understand, X11 ended up with the window manager architecture pretty much by accident; initially, window managers didn't even exist.

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#434
post #303
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reverse is also true. Don't blame people maintaining software for changing your routine. You make a lot of assumptions there but the reality is often much more nuanced. Everything changes, all the time, that's a rule that is true for absolutely everything in life.

> Don't blame people maintaining software for changing your routine. In this case it's people maintaining software that I don't use telling me I'm problematic for not switching to their stack, away from existing software that works perfectly fine and is also actively maintained by people who don't call me a flat-earther. Easy choice.

Sorry but that makes even less sense. If it's software that you don't use, how does it impact you? Nobody is holding a gun against your neck.

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote windowing is a legacy of the era when universities ran dozens of dumb terminals from a server. It would be bizarre to pursue that in an era of hardware-accelerated graphics. If the Wayland design was weighed down by such things, it could never hope to be progress.

This ignores the current tend of hosted gaming services. The pendulum regularly swings back and forth between thin and fat clients as cost and innovation evolve.

Quite true. I've have to switch my desktop back to Windows because the only remote gaming server worth using (Parsec) doesn't work on Linux.

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#436

Oh ffs I’m quite frankly fed up of gargling alpha grade crap from people forcing it down my throats. I don’t have to drink it and praise it if it doesn’t work. When exactly on Linux my NVidia 1660 GTX will do fractional scaling at 150% so a 27” 4K monitor is usable, doesn’t crap out every two minutes and actually ships with some distributions and importantly actually stays working every time I update it, I will stop…

You're getting downvoted, but its not clear why. This is a perfectly valid argument about why wayland doesn't work, from a user's perspective, not a developer's. This is precisely what users expect from the system, and frankly, Xorg made it work , despite the mess it was of a tech stack. Wayland is a very beautiful ivory tech stack, but it was created for a much different use casw than what an average user is going t…

Probably my inflamed tone.

I’m just fed up of being told constantly that something works really well when it doesn’t. I’m fed up of people telling me when it doesn’t that I’m not believing hard enough or have some obscure combination which doesn’t work on Tuesdays.

If I sit down and use something and it doesn’t work then it doesn’t work. It’s Boolean.

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#438
post #14

I’m using a Dell UP2718Q (3840x2160, 144dpi, 60Hz) and a Fujitsu Siemens P17-2 (1024x1280, 96dpi, 75Hz) side by side, and without Wayland this setup isn’t even possible to get working properly. Sadly, KDE still doesn’t support it nicely under Wayland (so I moved to Ubuntu Budgie), but under X11 it’s entirely impossible to run it properly, as except for Qt nothing supports mixed DPI, or mixed refresh rates properly. O…

Professional pentester here - Wayland alone doesn't really do much for you, security wise. It is still very possible for an application simply running under a wayland compositor to do lots of nasty things. The Wayland protocol provides the building blocks for someone to create an Android-like sandboxed environment, but doing so would break every application. Snaps and Flatpak come closer, but still generally miss the…

"But Xorg doesn't have to run as root"

All the hand wringing over root privilege escalation on Linux is almost irrelevant for most single-user systems, as since there's really only one non-root account which usually has all the data the user cares about, getting access to just that non-root account would be disaster enough for the user.[1]

So if Wayland's design is standing in the way of doing useful things because they're concerned about root privilege escalation, they've got their priorities mixed up.

[1] - not to mention that once a non-root account is exploited then getting root in some other way, even if Wayland itself can't be exploited, is usually not difficult.

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#439
Wayland is one of those projects that could die tomorrow and no one would really care. Which is a symptom of them deciding to rearchitect the world to solve a problem they could have solved by doing some hard work with the existing project.

That tells me pretty much everything I need to know about wayland.

Re: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

#440
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If every implementation of a protocol seems stuck with deal-breaking bugs or incompatibilities, it's time to start asking whether the protocol itself has some problems that make it impossible to implement consistently - unstated assumptions, for example, in the reference implementation that never made it to the protocol spec. For a modern example of this in action, see Bluetooth and the madhouse of device 'quirks' yo…

I would agree here, if you could make a reasonable case that the problems trace back the protocol. But my point here is that practically all issues at hand happen outside of what Wayland is used for. Wayland is a display protocol. Practically all of the pain people are experiencing has nothing to do with how Gnome/KDE/Sway really display things differently. The pain everybody experiences is that the realization that…

So there's a terminology conflation issue, then: people attacking Wayland proper for issues that are actually about the 'Wayland ecosystem'. I could see that generating increasing problems if there is no observable gameplan for or encouragement to develop those pieces people have come to expect of a full desktop stack.

Mind that I have no formed opinion of Wayland myself, having not used it. Trying to deduce probable causes from hearing people duke it out here and elsewhere.

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