Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wayland is growing up. and now we don't have a choice

fireborn.mataroa.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 134 posts

Re: Wayland is growing up. and now we don't have a choice

#61

Post by elsjaako »

vidarh wrote: post #42
holowoodman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is a perfect example of the second system effect and the sunk cost fallacy. X11 had problems, but instead of fixing them, developers threw the baby out with the bathwater, designed something completely byzantine and weird. Time was invested, so no stopping now or ever. The design of wayland introduces more problems than it solves, only by plastering over with yet another extra protocol that you have to implem…

I'm sorely tempted to take the backend of a Wayland compositor and write a new X server on top of it, with a focus on deprecating everything not actually used by modern X apps that don't have alternatives, which would be a lot. I bet you could benefit from quite a bit of the Wayland compositor work on modernising the lower levels, and end up with something much simpler than current Xorg without ditching much compatib…

I think XWayland is basically an X server that supports Wayland. It is based on Xorg though. But if you really think it has a bunch of features nobody uses, you could try to delete those simplify that way.

Or am I misunderstanding what you want to do?

Re: Wayland is growing up. and now we don't have a choice

#62

Post by vidarh »

bmacho wrote: post #47
vidarh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep assuming that it's HN staff, but HN articles very often get flagged by regular users when they get political, and having seen some of the comments on one of the other articles, including some of yours, I'm not the slightest bit surprised they got flagged. If people want Xlibre to have a shot at HN at all, those are things to fix. Making unsubstantiated claims about HN staff is not going to change anything -…

No, a project or a project leader having haters (just this thread there are 3 distinct people jumping in with various insults or fake news on normal questions) should not be enough for something to get censored. What kind of 'Why are you hitting yourself?' logic is that? > You keep assuming that it's HN staff, It's HN staff, and I've already explained it. Read back.

You have assumed it is HN staff, without evidence. I've read what you've written.

You've then further demonstrated exactly why these threads gets flagged by being hostile and making unsubstantiated allegations.

If you care about this project, the best you could do is to stop pushing this.

I'm pretty much the perfect audience for this project, and at this point not just the project leader looks like a problem, but supporters of it like you as well.

If you're intent on pushing away potential supporters, this is the way to do it.

Re: Wayland is growing up. and now we don't have a choice

#63

Post by vidarh »

elsjaako wrote: post #61
vidarh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorely tempted to take the backend of a Wayland compositor and write a new X server on top of it, with a focus on deprecating everything not actually used by modern X apps that don't have alternatives, which would be a lot. I bet you could benefit from quite a bit of the Wayland compositor work on modernising the lower levels, and end up with something much simpler than current Xorg without ditching much compatib…

I think XWayland is basically an X server that supports Wayland. It is based on Xorg though. But if you really think it has a bunch of features nobody uses, you could try to delete those simplify that way. Or am I misunderstanding what you want to do?

I don't want an X server that supports Wayland. I want a leaner, simpler X server without Wayland.

EDIT: To clarify, the reason I mentioned Wayland compositors is that it'd be an opportunity to pick a low-level rendering backend that has been written from scratch without the baggage of Xorg.

The "good parts" of X that modern apps actually use are comparatively simple compared to the low level bits - the protocol is trivial-ish, and you can get 90% there by implementing a small-ish subset of the protocol.

Re: Wayland is growing up. and now we don't have a choice

#64

Post by DonaldFisk »

bpfrh wrote: post #59
DonaldFisk wrote: post #51

I understand that Wayland doesn't support Xlib function calls. What are the options for those of us who rely on C code which which uses Xlib for 2d graphics and event handling? If I have to switch to e.g. GTK, I'd not only have to rewrite all the Xlib calls, but all the code which depends on this, as Xlib and GTK do graphics ad events quite differently.

Isn't libwayland-client the replacement? E.g. you now use the wayland calls instead of x11 calls

Specifically, I mean functions such as XCreateSimpleWindow, XDrawRectangle, XDrawArc, XmbDrawString, XNextEvent, etc.

Re: Wayland is growing up. and now we don't have a choice

#65

Post by tetraodonpuffer »

cardanome wrote: post #45

I am still perfectly happy running X11. I am not going to switch any time soon. Never change a running system. The fact that only Gnome kind-off supports basic accessibility on wayland already shows what a giant failure wayland is.

it only takes popular distributions making it default, then all sorts of things will start depending on it, and it will be difficult to not switch eventually. As somebody that has written a lot of xlib/xt/motif code years back, and that still has the full O'Reilly X series set on my bookshelves, I would prefer X11 to continue; but just like sysv->systemd it seems things are moving against that being the case.

Re: Wayland is growing up. and now we don't have a choice

#66

Post by beej71 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #49
Fr3ck wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What in particular drove you to leave this comment? I am just curious. This doesn't strike me as Gen AI slop like other posts I see sometimes.

It's got an —, and apparently these are called "ChatGPT hyphens" now – even though they're on my keyboard .

Bad news for all my programming guides that use em dashes properly... ;D Luckily I have a Git history on them that predates LLMs, for whatever that's worth.

In Vim, the digraph is ^K-M.

Re: Wayland is growing up. and now we don't have a choice

#67

Post by tarboreus »

I like that this article isn't just a bunch of GNOME hate. But I freely admit to being frustrated that this switch is being forced when they're still developing basic accessibility functionality for GNOME. Once I switch to Wayland, I have to find new ways of:

- Adding hotkeys

- Replacing all my utilities that involve screenshot + OCR

- Making sure Orca works to some extent (low expectations here, but I need some of it to work)

- Reversing the gamma ramp

- Screen magnification

I have mapped out some approaches to most of these, but I full anticipate one or more to be show-stoppers or items I have to attempt to implement from scratch. I'm looking at 100 hours of work, minimum, to make this switch, and am basically just left out in the cold to figure all these workflows out under more hostile circumstances. It's also a chicken and egg, since I need to bootstrap into the new environment without any of my old tools working.

It's great that GNOME is taking some of this seriously, but they're forcing a very difficult transition, and it's frustrating that they think accessibility is in a usable state, or that we're low prioritiy enough to not matter. I'vbe heard the word "edge case" used a lot, it really stinks to be in a category where your entire computer use and professional career are considered an edge case.

Re: Wayland is growing up. and now we don't have a choice

#68

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

tarboreus wrote: post #67

I like that this article isn't just a bunch of GNOME hate. But I freely admit to being frustrated that this switch is being forced when they're still developing basic accessibility functionality for GNOME. Once I switch to Wayland, I have to find new ways of: - Adding hotkeys - Replacing all my utilities that involve screenshot + OCR - Making sure Orca works to some extent (low expectations here, but I need some of i…

> Making sure Orca works to some extent (low expectations here, but I need some of it to work)

It sounds like this actually is supposed to work? At least on GNOME?

Re: Wayland is growing up. and now we don't have a choice

#69

Post by [deleted] »

vidarh wrote: post #62
bmacho wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, a project or a project leader having haters (just this thread there are 3 distinct people jumping in with various insults or fake news on normal questions) should not be enough for something to get censored. What kind of 'Why are you hitting yourself?' logic is that? > You keep assuming that it's HN staff, It's HN staff, and I've already explained it. Read back.

You have assumed it is HN staff, without evidence. I've read what you've written. You've then further demonstrated exactly why these threads gets flagged by being hostile and making unsubstantiated allegations. If you care about this project, the best you could do is to stop pushing this. I'm pretty much the perfect audience for this project, and at this point not just the project leader looks like a problem, but sup…

[deleted]

Re: Wayland is growing up. and now we don't have a choice

#70

Post by DonaldFisk »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #56
DonaldFisk wrote: post #51

I understand that Wayland doesn't support Xlib function calls. What are the options for those of us who rely on C code which which uses Xlib for 2d graphics and event handling? If I have to switch to e.g. GTK, I'd not only have to rewrite all the Xlib calls, but all the code which depends on this, as Xlib and GTK do graphics ad events quite differently.

XWayland is still supported, and afaik will be for some time. It's only standalone Xorg which isn't.

Thanks, this might be what I'm looking for. It's covered here: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html and https://www.mankier.com/1/Xwayland
Post reply on HN