Wayland is growing up. and now we don't have a choice • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by holowoodman » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:23 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #40

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…

Do you mean dbus as the other protocol? Because that's an intentional choice to separate out the protocol for drawing windows and responding to events and "desktop stuff" that's not related to being a window on the screen. They're not plastering over anything, that stuff is intentionally out of scope for Wayland. The advantage is that anything can use the desktop stuff (cli tools) just by talking to dbus instead of h…

Tons of stuff aren't in wayland that are actually graphics and window related. Wayland just forgot about it, then later on people realized that their design was far too primitive and simplistic.

DMA buffers, color management and pixel formats, scaling and DPI, image and video capture, tons of keyboard and mouse related things, all initially forgotten, now incompatible extras that are inconsistently implemented, frequently broken and forever in beta/staging/unsupported hell...

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

#72

Post by jauntywundrkind » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:27 PM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #55

> GNOME’s Wayland session is now stable and usable with Orca. They did that via an out-of-band D-Bus protocol, rather than going full Wayland. I'm all for keeping D-Bus around for backwards-compatibility (lots of things use AT-SPI2, and I certainly don't want a repeat of the CORBA -> D-Bus migration), but Wayland's AT support should be first-class, not relegated to proprietary GNOME extensions. Per Matt Campbell's ar…

Excellent excellent call out. This feels very wrong direction, this using a side-band for accessibility!!! I had no idea.

It's surprising to me that security would prompt the push to D-Bus. Wayland's design with the compsitor as the message bus center was built to center security in the architecture, to make the compositor the arbiter of data flows. I'm struggling to picture what the issue was here with sandboxed applications.

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

#73

Post by anonym29 » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:28 PM UTC

opticfluorine wrote: post #30

anonym29 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an RTX 4060 Ti with latest drivers installed, KDE on Debian. On the login screen, I can select X11 or Wayland. Selecting X11 lets me log in fine, selecting Wayland and logging in results in a black screen and the only thing I can do to get any video out at all is switching to another TTY.

I have an RTX 4060 with latest drivers, KDE, and Arch. Wayland works perfectly for me. Maybe Debian has some outdated packages that haven't caught up yet?

"Works on my machine, just use my OS" isn't a solution to my problem, whereas X11 is a solution to my problem.

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

#74

Post by holowoodman » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:35 PM UTC

ChocolateGod wrote: post #38

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…

> X11 had problems, but instead of fixing them You can't fix a protocol that simply isn't designed for how modern graphics hardware works. Both macOS and Windows have upgraded their display stacks over the decades, but it was seamless because unlike Linux, nearly all applications dynamically link the system library which they can upgrade. Linux is late to the party here because everyone wants to make their own toolki…

Wayland also doesn't even remotely resemble anything that would be fit to talk to modern graphics hardware. DMA buffers and DRM (direct rendering manager, not the digital restrictions management) are an afterthought, a separate protocol that is not even all in stable yet. Vulkan usually doesn't work. Latency with Wayland got worse and won't get better because "frames have to be perfect". Tons of unnecessary blitting and latency be damned. All while actually tearing in Wayland is as bad as in X11 here.

Fixing X would require a protocol that is mostly X, but of course incompatible because you have to rip out some protocol bugs. But Wayland isn't X minus the bugs. Wayland started as a little bit of broken bitmap-pushing and a whole lot of hot air. And even with tons of extension and auxilliary protocol development, multiplied by tons of unnecessary reimplementations in tons of compositors, it isn't even where X11 was when Wayland started. Wayland fixed nothing yet, broke a lot, fragmented the community, brought pain and misery.

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

#75

Post by Spivak » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:39 PM UTC

holowoodman wrote: post #71

Spivak wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean dbus as the other protocol? Because that's an intentional choice to separate out the protocol for drawing windows and responding to events and "desktop stuff" that's not related to being a window on the screen. They're not plastering over anything, that stuff is intentionally out of scope for Wayland. The advantage is that anything can use the desktop stuff (cli tools) just by talking to dbus instead of h…

Tons of stuff aren't in wayland that are actually graphics and window related. Wayland just forgot about it, then later on people realized that their design was far too primitive and simplistic. DMA buffers, color management and pixel formats, scaling and DPI, image and video capture, tons of keyboard and mouse related things, all initially forgotten, now incompatible extras that are inconsistently implemented, frequ…

If you mean what Wayland literally calls "staging" it means that compositors should adopt it now, it doesn't mean pre-release. Once multiple compositors implement the protocol it can become stable.

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

#76

Post by ChocolateGod » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:42 PM UTC

holowoodman wrote: post #74

ChocolateGod wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> X11 had problems, but instead of fixing them You can't fix a protocol that simply isn't designed for how modern graphics hardware works. Both macOS and Windows have upgraded their display stacks over the decades, but it was seamless because unlike Linux, nearly all applications dynamically link the system library which they can upgrade. Linux is late to the party here because everyone wants to make their own toolki…

Wayland also doesn't even remotely resemble anything that would be fit to talk to modern graphics hardware. DMA buffers and DRM (direct rendering manager, not the digital restrictions management) are an afterthought, a separate protocol that is not even all in stable yet. Vulkan usually doesn't work. Latency with Wayland got worse and won't get better because "frames have to be perfect". Tons of unnecessary blitting…

> Wayland also doesn't even remotely resemble anything that would be fit to talk to modern graphics hardware. DMA buffers and DRM (direct rendering manager, not the digital restrictions management) are an afterthought

You don't use Wayland to talk to graphics hardware, you use Wayland to communicate with the display server.

The Wayland protocol lets apps negotiate an area to write it output to and how it gets written there is completely up to the application, whether it involves the GPU or not, OpenGL, Vulkan etc.

This is in contrast to X where the app use X APIs to draw textures, which are then pulled by the compositor (copy, rip latency/performance), and then sent back to the X server to display.

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

#77

Post by vidarh » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

bmacho wrote: post #60

tom_ wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite possible that there are just people flagging things without commenting. I do this all the time if the discussion looks particularly stupid, unproductive, bad-tempered, pointless, and so on - or some combination thereof. (I haven't done it in this case, but only because I was silly enough to comment. This thread has been quite reasonably flagged, I'd say.) This is part of the how this particular site works.…

> It's quite possible that there are just people flagging things without commenting. I do this all the time if the discussion looks particularly stupid, unproductive, bad-tempered, pointless, and so on - or some combination thereof. Huh? Wait, really? I never ever once considered to flag an article based on the discussion. I've flagged some articles, which I think are bad (as articles). What's the reasoning behind do…

> XLibre having haters that flag it, or randomly appear calling the creator jerk, arsehole, nutjob and more should not be connected for it to be hidden--according to the guidelines, that is. The only remaining option is deliberate censorship I believe.

You can dislike it as much as you like, but it is how HN works, and have worked, for many years, and complaining about it is not going to change that.

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

#78

Post by holowoodman » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:45 PM UTC

Joker_vD wrote: post #48

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…

> designed something completely byzantine and weird. Time was invested, so no stopping now or ever. [...] is a dead horse. Made edible by sufficient fermentation and mobile towards the finish line by declaring the rot spreading over the line to be a victory. This applies perfectly well as a criticism of X11, you know.

Yes, but X11 has the excuse of being very old. Wayland was supposed to be a clean redesign, learning from the mistakes of the past. They learned from some mistakes, but they also completely ignored all of the good ideas, functionality and necessary additions that X11 and other systems like MacOS and Windows had.

They designed a system that was as simple as they could make it, trying to push the complexity that wasn't just bitmap-blitting onto others. And they isolated Wayland from all possibilities of making proper, compatible, common extensions. They tried to be the opposite of X11, because they recognized "push absolutely everything into the X11 server" as a mistake. Nobody ever used the XPrint extension. But they went too far, cut away all the useful stuff, all the necessary extensions, even cut away the "server" and just went with a library plus protocol. Now everyone has to reimplement their own server (compositor in wayland lingo), producing tons of busywork, splitting the community, ensuring incompatibility and pain. And everyone has to keep up to date on all the tons of necessary extra protocols that all the compositors have to implement all over again.

Yes, the same words do apply. But for different reasons.

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

#79

Post by holowoodman » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:47 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #75

holowoodman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tons of stuff aren't in wayland that are actually graphics and window related. Wayland just forgot about it, then later on people realized that their design was far too primitive and simplistic. DMA buffers, color management and pixel formats, scaling and DPI, image and video capture, tons of keyboard and mouse related things, all initially forgotten, now incompatible extras that are inconsistently implemented, frequ…

If you mean what Wayland literally calls "staging" it means that compositors should adopt it now, it doesn't mean pre-release. Once multiple compositors implement the protocol it can become stable.

Staging still means it is untested because not widely implemented. And still unsupported by the majority of compositors. So basically still unusable.

Also, "can become stable" is a very rare thing. Only a single-digit percentage of staging ever became stable.

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

#80

Post by vidarh » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:48 PM UTC

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #65

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.

To me, the only thing that'd be troublesome to replace would be a browser, but worst case I'll run a Wayland compositor on my X11 server for that.

(And yes, I'd rather do that than go all in on Wayland)