Linux

This has Systemd vs Runit vibes. No matter how many anti-systemd folks scream to me about how horrible it is for XYZ technical reasons, every Linux distro I've ever used for years, desktop and server, has used systemd and I've never experienced single problem that those users claim I will.

Same here with Wayland. All the major desktop environments and distros have or are implementing Wayland support and are phasing out X. The only reason I'm not on Wayland on my main computer already is because of a few minor bugs that should be ironed out in the next 6-12 months with the newest release of plasma.

It's not because Wayland is unusable. I try switching to Wayland about every 6-9 months, and every time there have been fewer bugs and the bugs that exist are less and less intrusive.

Any time you get hardcore enthusiasts and technical people together in large community, this will happen. The mechanical keyboard community is the same way, people arguing about what specific formula of dielectric grease is optimal to lube your switches with and what specific method of applying it is best.

At a certain point, it becomes fundamentalism, like comic book enthusiasts arguing about timeline forks between series or theology majors fighting about some minutia in a 4th century manuscript fragment. Neither person is going to change their views, they are just practicing their arguments back and forth in ever-narrowing scopes of pros and cons, technical jargon, and the like.

Meanwhile the vast majority of users couldn't care less, and just want to play games, browse the web, and chat with friends, all of which is completely functional in Wayland and has been for a while.

I don’t really have much of an opinion about Wayland but it’s still funny to me whenever somebody using Wayland shits on X11 and then tries to share their screen on Zoom or something. If Wayland ends up being great I’ll be happy, but for now X11 just kind of works, so I don’t understand why people are so eager to switch? This isn’t to say I don’t understand the desire to build something better and more secure than X11, I’m just not sure what the end user gets out of Wayland right now. I don’t have VRR monitors and stuff, though, so maybe I’m not running into problems I would be if I wanted fancier features. Plus, I use xmonad and some other stuff right now that won’t work on Wayland, so I don’t have much incentive to try it. Hopefully everything gets Wayland updates eventually.

(Probable) Source for those who prefer actual text: https://lobste.rs/s/acepul/wayland_is_pretty_good_actually#c_bzr8nr

He ain't wrong. Replacing X11 wasn't a great idea and not invented here was all over Wayland, especially with the Mir proposals. SystemD also gets this accusation but people seem to like working in it/with it, and so doesn't get the level of criticism now.

It will be really interesting to see if Wayland maintains momentum over the next few years, or if it's own tech debt will cripple it. Ideally we want to see if we can bridge the Android divide in the GUI space imo, which Wayland may have more potential to do

I remember reading through that thread when it came out and those are extremely worrying points. Wayland has extremely deep core issues. #2 there alone is horrible.

There are and were alarm bells ringing all around btw with Wayland. From a software developing perspective the approach is terrible. You cannot solve super complex problems by throwing away 30 years worth of code and redoing everything from scratch. You'll just run into the exact same issues again. Which no, haven't gone away as the technology advanced as many people would like to believe, we're still using displays and networking and keyboards and mice.

There is a lot of legacy in X but there's also a lot of accumulated experience and battle-hardened code. The obvious path would have been to keep the good and remove the bad.

Wayland will eventually since those issues but it will take just as long as it took X, because that's what happens when you start everything from scratch again.

This is filling me with deja vu because it's exactly what some of us went through with X, trying to piece together a working desktop out of dozens of pieces. But when you point that out you get "ha ha grandpa that's old stuff, this new stuff won't have that problem because [insert magic here]!"

Keep in mind that when Wayland started it was supposed to be a mini-server, to be used for the login screen only. Then the idea came to make it usable for stable, controlled and simple devices where there isn't a lot of user configuration or hardware variation.

How it got from there to "let's use it for everything on the Linux desktop and ditch X" I'll never understand.

try and squeeze in a Java-90ies-OO style of factoryinstancemanagerfactoryfactory

This one made me laugh out loud :-)

Most of the post is an "argument from authority": Trust me, I have a PhD and maintain my own X server, and I assure you that Wayland is a pile of shit!

OP claims that "actually nothing will actually run" because the stable Wayland protocols lack so much important functionality. In reality, many people use Wayland every day, and multiple large distributions use it as the default display server. This doesn't inspire confidence in OP's knowledge.

Admittedly, the first bug they linked is a real issue and it should be fixed, but it's not a Wayland design flaw. It's an (arguably important) feature that hasn't been implemented by all compositors yet. With the second bug OP laments that Wayland compositors are implemented in C, an unsafe language. This is true about X.org too, so I don't really see the point. Arguably Wayland improves on X11 here, because someone could develop a new Wayland compositor in Rust, while in X11 this is a core part of the display server.

Sounds like a heap of crap. X.Org developers moved to Wayland, they were the ones who made it happen. Now, I wonder where this dude with his XOrg Forks and PhD and shit was during all that 15 years it took to conceptualize wayland.

You all need a lesson in taking everything people say, including and most importantly their qualifications with a huge grain of salt.

Wayland has been working perfectly for years now. Many of the supposedly "impossible to implement" functions of the old hunk of junk Xorg were either found to be bogus anyways or have been made available on Wayland.

Sincerely-- Someone who's been using wayland since 2016

I remember having this realisation about Mir, but only after we collectively ran it off the cliff wall. The main reason everyone piled on Mir was that it was thought that Canonical would be priming Linux desktop for fragmentation with two competing standards.

But in fact, Mir was providing a solution to the fragmentation Wayland was bringing. Now we have 3, 4, 5 Mir-s, all with slight incompatibilities. Want a feature? Better hope all of them decide to implement the extension after someone proposes it. We know how well that worked in the past.

This is also ironic because the detractors of Xorg constantly talked about the issues with Xorg extensions and how many of them there were. But I never really had to look up which extensions Xorg supported, while I have had to do that with Wayland compositors.

90ies

Ninety-ies?

You will never be a real display server. You have no hardware cursors, you have no xrandr, you have no setxkbmap. You are a toy project twisted by Red Hat and GNOME into a crude mockery of X11’s perfection.

All the “validation” you get is two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back people mock you. Your developers are disgusted and ashamed of you, your “users” laugh at your lack of features behind closed doors.

Linux users are utterly repulsed by you. Thousands of years of evolution have allowed them to sniff out defective software with incredible efficiency. Even Wayland sessions that “work” look uncanny and unnatural to a seasoned sysadmin. Your bizarre render loop is a dead giveaway. And even if you manage to get a drunk Arch user home with you, he’ll turn tail and bolt the second he gets a whiff of your high latency due to forced VSync.

You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile every single morning and tell yourself it’s going to be ok, but deep inside you feel the technical debt creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight.

Eventually it’ll be too much to bear - you’ll log into the GitLab instance, select the project, press Delete, and plunge it into the cold abyss. Your users will find the deletion notice, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable shame and disappointment. They’ll remember you as the biggest failure of open source development, and every passerby for the rest of eternity will know a badly run project has failed there. Your code will decay and go to historical archives, and all that will remain of your legacy is a codebase that is unmistakably poorly written.

This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.

Please dont just post screenshots of text. Post a link to the content.

My eyes...

I'm a layman on this, but generally all I'd heard was that x11 had so much defunct code designed around supporting old hardware that no one uses anymore that it had become to large and unwieldy to maintain properly. And this is why Wayland was introduced, how long ago was this post, I wonder if they've addressed these issues yet as the x11 project is now all but abandoned now?

Posting pictures of text is annoying. The letters are too tiny, i can't read it comfortably. That is my first thought.

I don't have any technical insight unfortunately, but from a user perspective Wayland is just not there for me yet, though maybe because I'm on KDE. I mean, it runs, but it's laggy, especially on my laptop which only has integrated gpu. And I get way lower frame rate with games. Fractional scaling is also not implemented yet on KDE. And I keep hearing that screen sharing doesn't quite work though I haven't tried myself. So, way too many deal breakers for me for now, granted many of these might only be problems on KDE, but I won't switch to Gnome just so I can maybe run Wayland. I recently finally ditched Nvidia and was kinda hoping Wayland will be an option for me now but unfortunately no.

I took wayland a decade to become usable. It tells me all I need to know about it simplicity and usefulness.

Isn't Linux about choice? If you don't like Wayland/SystemD etc. then you can just not use it lol

I am of two minds:

1. He's not wrong
2. It doesn't matter at this point

It's a mess, but honestly so are a lot of critical FOSS projects (e.g.: OpenSSH, GNUPG, sudo). Curmudgeons gonna curmudgeon. There was a point of no return and that was years ago -- now that Wayland's finally becoming useable despite itself it's probably time to come to terms with the fact that better alternatives would have arisen had anyone thought they could truly manage it.

Most people don't give a shit and just want a system that works. As a lot of distros switch to / have switched to Wayland I have never noticed any issues in daily usage of any of my devices, in fact my surface laptop 4 can't do external displays if I'm running x11 but that feels like a surface issue not a display manager issue. Point being that the switch is happening and a majority of users do not care as long as their systems keep running, and in my experience there's no reason to believe they won't.

My thoughts on this? I think people should care less about what software other people use.

Man, display servers look hard to develop and I'm glad we have two amazing/successful projects to choose between! I think the devs who work on X are doing an amazing job and it's amazing to see how passionate the devs/users are for Wayland.

If bobby tables likes to use x because they know how it works and are comfortable with it, let them work with x! If you think it's okay to judge/pester/shame people because some software they choose to use, shame on you! In the end, does it really matter what you use.

I've been using Wayland for 5 years. There were a few bugs in the beggining, but now it works great. These threads are such a waste of time.

I have over 100 confirms X11 developments

That's great dude. Why don't you go maintain it then, apparently nobody else wants to: https://www.phoronix.com/news/RHEL10-Removing-X.Org

Wayland took too long

Look up how long btrfs has been in development, or at audio subsystem churn. These things take time, because it's mostly volunteers working on them.

Systemic complexity has doubled in the last two years

What does this even mean?

Mir was better

It turns out the Canonical dumping random stuff over the wall is not the same as creating a legitimate open source community around a project.

Unfixable amount of race conditions

As if there's never been a synchronization bug in X... But also System76 and others are writing Wayland compositors on Rust anyway.

As an enduser my only noticeable issue with Wayland is that Auto-Type with KeepassXC doesn't work.

Op has an Nvidia GPU.

TL;DR: the author needs to do a better job of citing sources and building an argument.

The author's argument from self-appointed authority tone aside, I dug into the only two verifiable pieces of evidence cited. These are almost impenetrable to the outsider, and even with plenty of coding experience behind me, I'm having to go deep to make sense of any of it. After all, sometimes, bugs and design decisions are the result of a best effort in the situation at hand and not necessarily evidence of negligence, incompetence, or bad architecture. There's also something to be said for organizing labor, focusing effort on what matters, and triaging the backlog.

The original author really needs to pony up a deeper digest of the project, with many more verifiable links to back up the various quality claims. If anyone is going to take this seriously, a proper postmortem is a better way to go. Cite the version reviewed, link to every flaw you can find, suggest ways to improve things, and keep it blameless. Instead, this reads like cherry picking two whole things on the public bug tracker and then making unsubstantiated claims that's a part of a bigger pattern.

My personal take on what was cited:

1. I'm grossly unqualified to assess this codebase as a Wayland or GUI programmer, but work plenty in the Linux space as a cloud practitioner and shell coder.
2. The first article smells like inadequate QA for cases like placing Wayland programs in the background, which is not typically done for GUI apps under normal usage (IMO).
3. The second article is a two-line change that I suppose highlights how ill-suited C is for this kind of software. Developer chatter on the MR suggests that the internal API could use some safeguards and sanity checks.
4. 162 open issues, 259 closed, oldest still open is five years old. Not great, but not terrible.
5. None of this is particularly egregious, considering the age of the project and the use it enjoys today.

Links:

• https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/159
• https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/merge_requests/4157/diffs
• https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues

My main thought is "this is a screenshot of a wall of text that's hard to read".

I have been using Wayland on void for a while and have no particular issue with it. There is screen sharing on stuff like zoom that isn't working at the moment (unless you use gnome) which is a bit annoying but not really serious enough to force a change to xorg. Also Wayland has more clean code then xorg and I do like the potential it has, specially when it comes to security.

Nothing against xorg, if you can use Wayland its better imo but otherwise xorg is fine as well.

Wayland has mostly positive user reviews because it presents nicely to the user (VRR, scaling, etc.) On the developer front it seems there's a lot of struggle over things that were solved in X11 but for some reason require a lot of debate in Wayland.

• There's still no way to universally configure monitors and input devices, so the startup cost to checking out a new "WM" (compositor in Wayland terms) is non-zero - you have to reconfigure everything from the ground up, and for anyone with complex input systems (see: accessibility devices) this will take a lot of time because each compositor insists on using a different format for configuring these things.
• Each compositor is tasked with coming up with solutions for all parts of the user experience (hence the last point) and thus anyone who wants to experiment with making their own WM now has to worry about a billion things that wouldn't have had to deal with in X11. Yeah, there's libraries for dealing with that stuff, but it's not as simple as it was and lot of innovative WMs won't ever be able to make the jump.

These are the two biggest issues I can see that are entirely chalked up to its design. Technical issues (like the "load balancer" thing that keeps Firefox from crashing on Wayland) will be solved in time. However, the above points are unlikely to ever be addressed. Should they be? I don't know.

The guy's language is the exact same hand wavey magic he opened up criticizing. "Appeal to my claimed authority. Wayland bad. Missing parts. Analogous to poop."

I practically never come across anyone who addresses a point directly and don't think I ever will. Everything is tribalism and politics and sunken cost fallacies.