this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Wayland development. Tons of folks yelling “X is good enough!” Where they just ignore that no one is actively developing XOrg which is pretty much the biggest X11 implementation.
Plenty maintaining XOrg but new things aren’t coming to XOrg, there’s just no one there the XOrg devs moved to Wayland.
So all these people shouting, they’re telling you keep a piece of software that’s very fragile, in a space that hardware makers are progressing at rapid pace, has decades of hot fixes, duct tape, and cruft, and nobody is actively developing for.
Like I just don’t understand the people yelling that Wayland is raping peoples wives and setting fire to their dogs. The yelling group is screaming for people to use something that nobody wants to work on and nobody is paying enough for people to work on. The code base is horrible and it easily causes burnout in three weeks or less. No one in their right mind is picking it up for shits and giggles.
So if everyone abandons Wayland, what’s the end goal? Keep riding XOrg till hardware outpaces it completely? Like I don’t understand what the Wayland haters are trying to get at. There’s so little going on in XOrg at this point and everyone seems to universally hate the code base. And a rewrite of the base sounds a whole lot like Wayland but artificially adding in X11 restrictions that make no sense since we all aren’t using PDP-11 to run the clients.
I get that Wayland has configurations that don’t work yet. All software has bugs, including X11 implementations. But Wayland is arguably a technology that is more in line with how modern hardware works than the X11 protocol will ever be. And Wayland is designed to be easy for devs to work with, not a cobble of archaic limitations due to a protocol that was designed for 1970s era computers.
That level of hate for Wayland is just this confusing Luddite cry for software that hardware that properly supports it no longer exists. The reason modern video cards do run on X at this point is because of a lot of hacks. I thought everyone understood this when we did the whole AIGLX vs XGL thing.
You're listening to loud asshats and assuming they're the majority. They're not.
One day Wayland will reach a tipping point where it will replace X. Until then, most users will just stick with whatever their distro installs. Most people don't care one way or another.
As for me, I'm probably gonna to stick with X until I have no choice because I actually use the network features that Wayland isn't replacing. That doesn't mean I hate Wayland - I've never used it - it just means it's not the best software for me at this time. Most people never do anything with X that Wayland can't do and won't notice when it becomes the default.
You know you can run XWayland and have clients connect via network?
There's still some development going on in Xorg and it's pretty much all XWayland, it's going to stay alive as a compatibility layer for the forseeable future and beyond. And as a network layer until someone thinks of something better (no, sending video isn't better, the strength of X as a network protocol is that it doesn't need much bandwidth). It's the hardware interface stuff, actually throwing pixels on screen, that's thoroughly dead.
That's cool and all, but why would I want to? Display systems are invisible when they work right, and X has worked right for me (save for some pre-EDID config issues) since the 90s. I run a program, it pops up on my screen and I interact with it. That's all I ask of it.
None of the issues I've had with X (drivers, mostly) will be resolved with Wayland. For me, it's a solution in search of a problem. The only reason I have even a passing interest is that it's (theoretically) easier to maintain and change as computing changes.
I'll move to Wayland when I have to, but right now there's no reason to not use X.
You're welcome to continue to develop and maintain X, wrapping even more duct tape around all that duct tape, noone is stopping you. Or, alternatively, you simply never had a look at the X source code -- I cannot fathom a developer who would be masochistic enough to actually maintain that codebase. It was unsalvageable when the devs started to abandon it for Wayland, fifteen years ago, it's not any more salvageable now.
And if you want to "Fix X" -- that, precisely, is wayland: X is a buggy mess of fundamentally insecure software, developed before "buffer overflow" was a thing people acknowledged as security issue. It's software from the age of
strlen. It cannot be fixed while keeping it compatible and if you have used X "since the 90s" you know very well how much of a shitshow it is, and it does not just "pop things up on your screen and lets you interact with them". Random thing: In wayland, programs can't focus fight.Yes, there is: Making the transition faster. All this griping people are doing right now and during the last what five years could've been avoided if DEs, window managers, toolkits, etc, had actually paid attention to what the X devs were doing. All those screen sharing and global shortcut protocols could have been ready ten years ago.
Why do I care about the state of the code? It works. Perhaps all these people complaining are really just sick of your proselytization.
To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, "You only get one life. You can pick up five causes on any street corner."
its crazy to think that such an old display server is still being used and even defended to this day. X these days feels like a small thing with way too many extensions.
It has many neat little features that will never get implemented into Wayland for security reason (e.g. want to play a video on a button in your spreadsheet app using mpv?). It was fun while it lasted, but the next generation will never be able to experience it.
You can definitely do that as wayland supports sub-compositors. You probably shouldn't, though.
How do you that in wayland? I'm very interested with crazy and useless stuff like this. On X11, you can pass a window ID to mpv with
--wid, it'll attach the player to that window, even if that window is actually a button in a spreadsheet app.You implement the wayland server interface, launch mpv with the right environment to connect to you, then you take the buffer mpv gives you and compose it onto your window.
New things bad.
I feel like this is the answer to almost any case where many people hate on something.
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