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.
deleted by creator
90ies
Ninety-ies?
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.
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
Are the Wayland compositors people are using every day exclusively using “stable” Wayland interfaces? Honest question, because I have absolutely no idea.
There is no such thing as a ‘stable’ Wayland interface. Each compositor is responsible for their own interfaces, the Wayland protocol is there to make sure that applications written for Wayland play nicely with them.
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
Wayland has been working perfectly for years now.
Not for every one. For example, I still get random black screens with only mouse trails, windows disappearing, and videos not playing properly. Why yes, I do have an Nvidia card, thank you for asking.
After finally realizing nobody is interested in EGLstreams, Nvidia seems to be on track to make their drivers less of a disaster for Wayland support, so thankfully it is bound to become better
I just want you to know, this isn’t a failure on anything other than Nvidia trying to force their own crap on everyone and failing
I’m on AMD and had so many issues with Wayland. A lot of games were straight up unplayable due to the amount of issues and some other applications straight up not compatible while scaling is also still a freaking mess. Saying Wayland has been working perfectly for years just feels like clownery and is kinda insulting to everyone who experiences those problems.
This also depends on the desktop you use. GNOME is by far the most stable [In My Experience], and KDE spent the whole 5.x series getting their Wayland support into shape. What you’re describing could be XWayland failures (games don’t run on Wayland lol) and desktop environment bugs.
Depending on how long ago you’re talking about, your hardware, and your desktop of choice, things might’ve been improved a lot since the last time you used a Wayland session.
I made a post about my Gnome experiences already, which were just terrible due to how unstable the apps were and how it lacked a ton of even very basic features that I needed. So if their Wayland support is better, it’s completely overshadowed by how shitty everything else is.
Most of the issues were a year or two ago, but I every now and then switched to Wayland to see if things got better and returned to X within like hours due to issues just around the “desktop”.
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.
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:
- He’s not wrong
- 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.
