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

461–470 of 502 posts

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

#461

Post by fulafel »

scheeseman486 wrote: post #214
wildredkraut wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just some of the so many reasons why the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will never see the light. Linux is doomed to run mainly headless on a dark chamber hardware. As always when the Linux Desktop is just starting to take off, somebody comes up with a new great self destructive idea(wayland), it always has been like that and probably will never change.

Wayland is why Steam Deck is a product. Gamescope, the compositor it uses for all the features that makes it compelling to buy, uses it and it's features heavily. Desktop Linux was never going to go anywhere stuck on X. Wayland is happening, it's currently going through it's trial by fire and in the end (and for a lot of people, right now) it'll be better for it. It's easy to say Wayland has been around forever and b…

Gamescope is custom sw built by Valve, and all the games run under X (via Xwayland). I'd suspect you could build similar functionality without Wayland (for example a custom X server talking to directly to the kernel DRM).

I'd wager in a alternate universe where Wayland didn't have all the mindshare, Steam Deck would still be a product (unless some butterfly effect nixed it).

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

#462

Post by vova_hn2 »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #442
vova_hn2 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one "forced" you to make some code that you downloaded from the Internet "a fundamental component" of your system. You made this decision yourself. They even warned you about the lack "warranties ... of fitness for a particular purpose". Why are you now trying to blame someone else for this decision? Honestly, this attitude is so irresponsible and childish.

That attitude says no one should ever use Linux for anything - is that what the Linux community wants?

I don't know, I personally use Linux for almost everything (it has been my main OS for the last 10+ years), but I do not feel entitled to contributions that other people gift me for free.

Every time something works as intended on the first try without me having to manually configure it first, it always feels like magic.

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

#463

Post by antisol »

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."

Isn't it interesting how perspectives differ?

See, I'd argue that the "nobody is forcing you" rhetoric, spoken out loud and with a straight face while vendors drop support for decades-old, stable, and well-established standards in favour of immature, incompatible, broken new shininess, is an extremely dated argument strategy.

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

#464

Post by antisol »

gentleman11 wrote: post #259
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…

Davinci resolve has had native Linux support for like a decade now.

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

#465

Post by antisol »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #205
Cyph0n wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Python 2 to 3 migration took a decade, isn’t it reasonable for a display server migration to take even more time to stabilize? Especially given: (1) The (relatively) fragmented reality of Linux distros and desktop managers. I am sure that such a migration could have been executed faster had the Linux desktop world been more centralized like Windows or macOS. (2) The age and maturity of X11

The python 2 to 3 situation was a similar colossal mistake of honestly incompetent developers who really enjoy programming in their free time who don't understand that time is money for most people. By comparison, Rust with its edition system understands this. But this is the major issue. They don't understand that even if Wayland had feature-parity with X11. The simple fact that it works differently means that if I…

Indeed. And what many seem to fail to notice is that at it's core it's exactly the same mistake being made all over again. A mistake that I've seen so many times over and over again, increasingly commonly in recent years, which can be summed up thusly:

"I want to make some incompatible changes in my thing that is being widely used by (say) thousands or millions of people. I could spend a bunch of time ensuring I'm backwards compatible as much as possible, or doing a compatibility layer which would make the transition seamless for most, but that's not sexy work, and it would be something I would have to maintain (also not sexy), and it would take me (let's say) 1000 hours to do. Instead, I'll just insist that each and every one of those thousands/millions of people put (say) 100 hours each into adapting to what I want to do"

It's disrespectful of your users. It devalues their time. It says that your (say) 1000 hours is more valuable than (say) a million people putting in (say) 100 hours each. And it's inefficient - wasting the time of many to save the time of a few.

It also undermines their trust in you: if you're willing to force them to spend a bunch of time re-writing something that already works just to suit your whims, what's to say you won't do it again next year when you have a newer and even shinier whim?

Now someone will jump in to argue about how "FOSS developers are volunteers, they do it for free, you can't expect them to do the boring stuff". Which is false, false, and false: You'll find that for a large number of these projects (like say gnome and wayland) the core developers are indeed professionals who are paid (by e.g redhat) to work on it, even if they started off as volunteers. And the boring stuff is part of the job, too, otherwise don't call yourself a software engineer.

If you're working on a widely-used piece of software, then the users should be your god.

  > They don't understand that even if Wayland had feature-parity with X11
See, I don't think you're giving them enough credit. Or is it too much credit? These are not stupid people. I say they do understand this, they just don't care about your time enough to do anything about it.

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

#466

Post by pjmlp »

naikrovek wrote: post #444
pjmlp wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I thought this was supposed to be how much better Plan 9 happens to be in operating system design for graphical interfaces. Apparently not.

I was talking about taking what Plan9 and Rio had done, with virtual devices for every window and using that kind of a system in Linux as a starting point. Wayland is certainly smaller than Plan9 but it is not smaller than Rio, and Rio is already designed and working. It might have been a great starting place and a real opportunity to rethink how Linux UIs work on a fundamental level. Putting syscalls in place of som…

Our industry certainly did not forgot that, people putting UNIX on a pedestal did.

It is no accident that many of the most successful graphical technologies that originated in UNIX world, came from UNIX vendors that went beyond being yet another UNIX clone, like NeXT and SGI.

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

#467

Post by antisol »

Mawr wrote: post #277
jasoneckert wrote: post #40

In short, this reads like a mix of valid historical pain points and outdated assumptions. The post frames Wayland security as “you can’t do anything,” but that’s a misunderstanding. Even under X11, any app can log keystrokes, read window contents, and inject input into other apps. Wayland flips this to isolation-by-default: explicit portals/APIs for screen capture, input, etc. Moreover, the performance argument is we…

This reads like AI/FSD-bro speak: "no, that's all old news, you clearly haven't tried the new cutting edge model/build bro! it's all fixed now!". > Wayland security Okay, that's great, but why would I care? If you can implement those security wins transparently in the background, cool. Otherwise, what I care about is being able to take a screenshot, not about some theoretical "security threat" from already vetted pro…

  > "no, that's all old news, you clearly haven't tried the new cutting edge model/build bro! it's all fixed now!"
Exactly. And it's standard rhetoric for the wayland fanboys. "The fix for this was committed 15 minutes ago! You just need to check out the unstable branch and recompile!"

  > what I care about is being able to take a screenshot, not about some theoretical "security threat" from already vetted programs I run on my machine.
Yeah, the security theatre thing is also part of their standard rhetoric. It's a good bit of rhetoric because it scares people who don't know better. They all love to talk about how it's just so insecure to allow us to do things that every desktop environment has been able to do for 30+ years.

But strangely, in decades, I've never seen a single example of anyone taking advantage of this horrible security design and it becoming a widespread problem in the wild. I keep asking the wayland bros to give me an example of this happening in the wild and causing a problem that's even mildly widespread. Strangely when I ask that question they always seem to forget to respond to that part of my post and move on to their next piece of standard rhetoric.

  > Oh, the clipboard works mostly correctly now, after some 17 years of development? Could not have come up with a more damning statement. Complete misalignment of priorities
Tsk tsk, now you're just being cynical. We should be celebrating that wayland has managed to kinda-sorta get a feature working which was working just fine in X11 by ~1998, and which worked just fine in Windows <3.1, and which worked just fine in Mac OS in the 1980s. And they've managed to do it in only ~3 years longer than it took to get Duke Nukem Forever into stores! Yay them!

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

#468

Post by coldtea »

kibwen wrote: post #405
coldtea wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you don't like the direction of a multi-decade-long, hundreds of manyears, deeply esoteric project, you have the freedom to go in, fork it, and maintain it" is the most technically true, practically meaningless argument in FOSS

And? I'm tired of thoughtless drive-by comments pointing out problems with a given solution without proposing any alternatives, which tends to be a tacit admission that there is no better solution. If you think you have a better solution, let's hear it:

>I'm tired of thoughtless drive-by comments pointing out problems with a given solution

And? Fortunately, free speech and criticism doesn't stop when someone is tired of hearing it.

The alternative doesn't need to be some new solution. A course reversal or change on the existing ones is enough. In which case the criticism already highlights the solution. Besides, the first step of fixing a problem is identifying it.

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

#469

Post by pjmlp »

scheeseman486 wrote: post #457
pjmlp wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My comment is a fact, without the Windows games ecosystem, by developers living and breathing on Windows, with Windows development tools, Proton has nothing to play, even if many of Windows games are developed on top of cross-platform engines. Unfortunely Valve failed to make native Linux gaming a reality, not even game studios targeting Android NDK bother, which has the same 3D and audio APIs as GNU/Linux.

> Unfortunely Valve failed to make native Linux gaming a reality Who cares? What would that actually achieve and how would they have practically achieved it anyway? Use their store platform to force or coerce developers? Hold a gun to developers heads? Valve don't owe anyone shit, neither did PC compatible BIOS manufacturers, nor anyone else who creates a clean room implementation of a pre-existing API. Getting Windo…

Linux users will care when the fountain of Windows games needed to feed Proton dries out.

Do you think Valve and Gabe will be around forever?

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

#470

Post by antisol »

genthree wrote: post #417
dralley wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing with Pulse Audio People cursed the name for years, because it exposed all of the terrible, glitchy audio hardware drivers and refused on general principle to work around the issues to the degree that previous audio solutions had. And the result was that while the experience was inconsistent and buggy for years, it did eventually drag the Linux audio stack into a better place.

It also used a large multiple more memory than Alsa + basically any existing plausible combo of mixer software on top of alsa. While doing nothing. For no clear reason. And chewed processor cycles, while doing nothing. Back when 50MB was a meaningful amount of memory, and most machines were still single-core. It was plainly really poorly-architected, just looking at its resource use patterns made this obvious in a he…

It also introduced fun new audio bugs and indeterminate latency. Which still haven't gone away entirely in 2026. To such an extent that any time I have an audio issue, I reflexively `pkill -9 pulseaudio` and about 99% of the time the problem just vanishes.

On the first machine where I had pulseaudio foisted on me - an 800mhz single core Duron - pulseaudio used literally 20% of my CPU time...

...At idle. When no audio was playing...

...To do software audio mixing which my creative labs audio hardware was capable of doing better and for free.

When I filed an issue with the pulseaudio people, saying "hey, you're wasting 20% of my CPU time at idle when no audio is playing because you're ignoring the fact that I have superior hardware that can do audio mixing for free", they closed the issue saying that pulseaudio wasn't meant to be used in situations where you have dedicated hardware for audio mixing.

Post reply on HN