9 ms·

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

59 points by mmoya 1y ago

ThrowOregonAway 1y ago
XLibre talk is banned here, we DO have a choice.
- bmacho 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - tom_ 1y ago
    I figured enough people just flag the submission, because they don't want to put up with the Xlibre guy's specific category of shit, or that of his inevitable hangers-on. Are they right? Are they wrong? Well, it's their decision. I've seen enough stuff I've flagged myself disappear quickly, and then reappear later (with more surprisingly reasonable discussion than I at least had predicted), to suggest that the admins will retrieve any popular discussion that was unreasonably assigned to the naughty step. (Of course, admin intervention in the other direction is always a possibility, and that's fair enough too. If you want unmoderated discussion, you'll need to go somewhere else.)
    - bmacho 1y ago
      > I've seen enough stuff I've flagged disappear quickly, and then reappear later (with surprisingly reasonable discussion), to suggest that the admins will retrieve any popular discussion that was unreasonably assigned to the naughty step. That's the whole point. The default for everything that has at least a small hater base is to disappear, until for manual reenabling by moderators. This is not community moderation, it is de-facto pre-moderation. Which, in this case has a strong bias against xlibre despite it having literally nothing wrong with it (like the other stuff reappearing). It's gross censure (for the sake of a gross, user hostile corporate), and the moderators should be called out for it.
      - vidarh 1y ago
        While I find the moderation on HN a bit heavyhanded at times: When the originator of the XLibre fork decided to push a heavily partisan political stance right there in the README, he made a choice that ensured that the project will be controversial. He can fix that very easily if he wants to. As someone who detest Wayland, I would very much like to see Xlibre be sucessful, but I'm not surprised a lot of people will reflexively downvote or flag stuff about it given the circumstances. (EDIT: Having seen some of the other stuff he's said, I'm now not convinced he can do anything to salvage this as long as he's the figure-head for this new project)
        bmacho 1y ago
        I don't think it is a good reason or even an acceptable reason to actively censor the news about the project, and prevent people to communicate about it. While XLibre is unfortunately political at the moment, this is not an excuse for what the HN staff is doing.
        vidarh 1y ago
        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 - if anything that too is likely to attract flagging.
        bmacho 1y ago
        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.
- Ezhik 1y ago
  What's XLibre? Are they taking Linux desktop accessibility more seriously?
  - resoluteteeth 1y ago
    It's a fork of x.org that's trying to keep actively developing it more than the x.org developers are interested in doing (because they are working on wayland and see x.org as basically obsolete). That in itself is a reasonable goal but given the person responsible for it I would not be too optimistic about it.
  - bananapub 1y ago
    > What's XLibre? a fork of X allegedly maintained by an arsehole > Are they taking Linux desktop accessibility more seriously? no
  - lotharcable 1y ago
    XLibre is a fork of Xorg X11's codebase started by a developer who got kicked out of the Xorg project because he was making lots of changes that broke everything and had a hard time getting along with the other devs. Another dev blindly applied his MRs assuming he had tested stuff before submitting the request and they had to go back and revert a bunch of stuff. Broke nvidia compatibility, broke xrandr extension, and a bunch of other stuff.
    - wizzwizz4 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - ThrowOregonAway 1y ago
      Googler, NSA'er, or Red Hatter?
    - LightHugger 1y ago
      This is false, he we the sole person submitting large amounts of code for about a year and was widely praised, until he forked and red hat went nuclear on his account for opposing their corporate goals, he was not kicked out for bad changes or anything of the sort. Trying to revise history on this is malicious. The people like OA are spreading misinformation because the developer stated everyone was welcome to contribute and would oppose excessive politics. Keep in mind red hat is currently getting sued 3x over for blatantly racist policies which they used to ban other contributors and forced on their managers, they are evil people.
- anonym29 1y ago
  Can you elaborate more on discussions about XLibre being banned on here? Are accounts that mention it getting banned? Is there just mass downvoting by partisans with some kind of agenda? I get that X11 has security issues, but NVIDIA drivers and Wayland still seem to have no support now and no support planned for the future, so Wayland is a non-negotiable non-option for many (most?) Linux desktop users, including myself. That said, with the custodian of X11 refusing to merge 1000+ patches including various bug fixes and security fixes, I'm excited for the prospect of XLibre - this is exactly what Open Source, as an idea, was invented to facilitate - user choice.
  - mkesper 1y ago
    Wayland supports nvidia cards, that they are not supported is FUD at this point in time.
    - anonym29 1y ago
      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.
      - colanderman 1y ago
        Same exact experience here. Nearly borked my entire installation trying to get that to work.
      - opticfluorine 1y ago
        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?
        anonym29 1y ago
        "Works on my machine, just use my OS" isn't a solution to my problem, whereas X11 is a solution to my problem.
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  [flagged]
- dang 1y ago
  It'd be odd indeed if we'd banned something we hadn't heard of. After looking into it, I think what happened is that a few submissions were flagged by users, for the cromulent reason that the articles weren't very substantive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44332956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44332956 Edit: There also seems to be an aura of flamedrama around it. I didn't look closely, so I may be wrong, but if that's true, it's another reason why HN users would (cromulently) flag it.
curtisszmania 1y ago
[dead]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mkesper 1y ago
TLDR (non-AI): The author raises very valid points about accessibility under Wayland. The "And Now We Don’t Have a Choice" subtitle seems to address that only Gnome seems to have usable accessibility under Wayland right now but can easily be misunderstood as "we have no alternative to Wayland". The author also mentions X11 sucked in many ways and that this transition also is a moment to rethink what proper accessibility should fulfill.
- holowoodman 1y ago
  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 implement in addition to wayland you might regain some lost functionality. Or paper over a design bug that will never be fixed. Wayland 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. That Gnome just now gains parts of the functionality it had in X11, years later, while still being actually behind X11, while being an incompatible mess that leaves behind all other desktop environments to the detriment of the Linux ecosystem as a whole isn't actually a victory. Its the victory of the slightly-less-ruined after a devastating war.
  - ChocolateGod 1y ago
    > 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 toolkit. X was designed for multiple remote terminals receiving drawing commands over a network, not locally hardware accelerated graphical interfaces and functions that rely on close coordination between the hardware and display server (e.g. hardware planes, vrr, hdr). Fixing X would require a new protocol to the point that it isn't X anymore, aka Wayland. There are arguments that not having a reference display server has led to problems though.
Kim_Bruning 1y ago
More and more people are using GPT for editing. I admit to sometimes using AI to help me too. To be fair, I'm not sure what to think of this particular slick style quite yet.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Fr3ck 1y ago
  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.
  - abhinavk 1y ago
    People see an em dash and dismiss it as slop. Maybe they don't know but some of us love them and have keyboards which have an em-dash/en-dash key or use an OS where they are easy to type.
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    It's got an —, and apparently these are called "ChatGPT hyphens" now – even though they're on my keyboard.
    - beej71 1y ago
      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.
  - Kim_Bruning 1y ago
    Ah, a lot of people do use LLMs for editing. And when I read this I can just hear GPT-4.x's style and tone of voice in my head. None of the following are smoking guns, but together... well, either it's GPT or it's https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ . * Bullet point lists * emdash * extensive use of bold * sentence fragments * "Here's the good news:" * juxtaposition over emdash: "This transition is happening — but we’re not being ignored anymore." * Bullet points that simply MUST have a conclusion " The entire workflow? Gone." , " not just for me, but for every user who deserves to choose how they compute.", "And they shouldn’t have to." , "But we have to start over." * "I hope it’s done right — not half-baked, not bolted on." * "We lost an ecosystem." * "That has to change. / And it starts with every compositor agreeing on what “accessible” actually means. " etc.... Maybe it's A) A human who is a very skilled writer with a particular style B) GPT4.x but my best guess is C) Both: Human did the rough draft, then had GPT4 edit it into shape.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
cardanome 1y ago
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.
- tetraodonpuffer 1y ago
  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.
  - vidarh 1y ago
    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)
    - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
      > but worst case I'll run a Wayland compositor on my X11 server for that This is actually surprisingly easy, too. My first experiments ran a wayland app in cage ( https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage ), but in order to better handle multiple windows I switched to sway with a lightly tweaked config, and other than some input weirdness (I think it struggles with modifiers held while switching focus) it works pretty well.
- justoreply 1y ago
  I like how Wayland provides some isolation between applications, so I switched
DonaldFisk 1y ago
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.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  XWayland is still supported, and afaik will be for some time. It's only standalone Xorg which isn't.
  - DonaldFisk 1y ago
    Thanks, this might be what I'm looking for. It's covered here: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html and https://www.mankier.com/1/Xwayland https://www.mankier.com/1/Xwayland
    - wizzwizz4 1y ago
      Ariadne Conill is turning Xwayland into a full X11 replacement: https://github.com/kaniini/wayback https://github.com/kaniini/wayback. She doesn't want to maintain it long-term, so if you're interested in contributing, please do: the more people understand the codebase, the better.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bpfrh 1y ago
  Isn't libwayland-client the replacement? E.g. you now use the wayland calls instead of x11 calls
  - DonaldFisk 1y ago
    Specifically, I mean functions such as XCreateSimpleWindow, XDrawRectangle, XDrawArc, XmbDrawString, XNextEvent, etc.
wizzwizz4 1y ago
> 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 article https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the-wayland-native-accessibility-project/ https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the..., this decision has something to with security: > Assistive technologies or other accessibility clients currently connect to the compositor through a D-Bus protocol, defined in the Mutter repository linked above. By exposing this interface via D-Bus rather than Wayland, we make it easy to withhold this communication channel from sandboxed applications, which shouldn’t have this level of access.
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  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.
  - holowoodman 1y ago
    Compositors are incompatible with one another and have totally different levels of functionality. Most compositors don't do any proper kind of security and permissions and just limit data flows in the most primitive and restrictive way possible. Using something with existing security but the possibility of cross-communication like DBUS is just easier here. Although I expect a lot of confused deputy type of exploits there...
    - jauntywundrkind 1y ago
      > Compositors are incompatible with one another and have totally different levels of functionality. I see far more similar about compositors than different. They have freedom of implementation & do different things, but they offer to apps a very common set of protocols, and some of the newer edgier protocols have more varied adoption. But I see standards & growth & development forward as 'what Wayland is', not "incompatibility" (that's why Wayland proper is purely 100% protocols & not a bespoke impl) and "totally different" (???). Finding formal concensus to make special stable has been hard. But there is a pleasantly large amount of overlap and interop, even if compositors end up implementing more than one flavor of say gamma control. > Most compositors don't do any proper kind of security and permissions and just limit data flows in the most primitive and restrictive way possible. When starting a composite yeah, you figure out who has input and send it there. You render the surface the apps give you. Dataflow is inherently quite unidirectional for a long time when beginning a desktop compositor. But that doesn't feel true at all today. Most compositors support advanced screen sharing, virtual pointers, and other fairly advanced data-flow protocols, almost all built security in mind, requiring more advanced routing & permissioning, as is very visible with the screen share flows of most apps. > Using something with existing security but the possibility of cross-communication like DBUS is just easier here. Agreed, but you yourself in your very negative comment on Wayland in this topic seem quite opposed to second systems in broad basis (and pretty radically down on Wayland in general). I'd like to see the display system protocols able to better tackle talking about and managing what's on the screen, rather than building a second parallel system for saying and working with what's on the screen. I also think there's a decently strong basis already there in the current protocols. There's a security context to start. https://wayland.app/protocols/security-context-v1 https://wayland.app/protocols/security-context-v1 We see more advanced flows like XDG Foreign for apps to expose surfaces and mix them onto our own apps. At-spi d-bus was already right there & done, and it felt easy to keep using it. It was mostly convenience I feel like, and the justification of security feels like a blunt hammer to deny exploration. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/at-spi2-core/ https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/at-spi2-core/
tarboreus 1y ago
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.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > 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?
rcarmo 1y ago
There is a missing piece in Wayland tha I’m worried about—or rather, a key functionality that will need to be sorted out: Remote Desktop, but not in the sense of access to an existing display — rather, fully in-memory accelerated compositing for multi-user, concurrent desktop sessions to the same machine. FreeRDP has been doing some work on that, but we need a mature Xrdp replacement and I don’t think that is around just yet.

59 points by mmoya 1y ago

ThrowOregonAway 1y ago

XLibre talk is banned here, we DO have a choice.

bmacho 1y ago
[flagged]
- tom_ 1y ago
  I figured enough people just flag the submission, because they don't want to put up with the Xlibre guy's specific category of shit, or that of his inevitable hangers-on. Are they right? Are they wrong? Well, it's their decision. I've seen enough stuff I've flagged myself disappear quickly, and then reappear later (with more surprisingly reasonable discussion than I at least had predicted), to suggest that the admins will retrieve any popular discussion that was unreasonably assigned to the naughty step. (Of course, admin intervention in the other direction is always a possibility, and that's fair enough too. If you want unmoderated discussion, you'll need to go somewhere else.)
  - bmacho 1y ago
    > I've seen enough stuff I've flagged disappear quickly, and then reappear later (with surprisingly reasonable discussion), to suggest that the admins will retrieve any popular discussion that was unreasonably assigned to the naughty step. That's the whole point. The default for everything that has at least a small hater base is to disappear, until for manual reenabling by moderators. This is not community moderation, it is de-facto pre-moderation. Which, in this case has a strong bias against xlibre despite it having literally nothing wrong with it (like the other stuff reappearing). It's gross censure (for the sake of a gross, user hostile corporate), and the moderators should be called out for it.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      While I find the moderation on HN a bit heavyhanded at times: When the originator of the XLibre fork decided to push a heavily partisan political stance right there in the README, he made a choice that ensured that the project will be controversial. He can fix that very easily if he wants to. As someone who detest Wayland, I would very much like to see Xlibre be sucessful, but I'm not surprised a lot of people will reflexively downvote or flag stuff about it given the circumstances. (EDIT: Having seen some of the other stuff he's said, I'm now not convinced he can do anything to salvage this as long as he's the figure-head for this new project)
      - bmacho 1y ago
        I don't think it is a good reason or even an acceptable reason to actively censor the news about the project, and prevent people to communicate about it. While XLibre is unfortunately political at the moment, this is not an excuse for what the HN staff is doing.
        vidarh 1y ago
        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 - if anything that too is likely to attract flagging.
        bmacho 1y ago
        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.
Ezhik 1y ago
What's XLibre? Are they taking Linux desktop accessibility more seriously?
- resoluteteeth 1y ago
  It's a fork of x.org that's trying to keep actively developing it more than the x.org developers are interested in doing (because they are working on wayland and see x.org as basically obsolete). That in itself is a reasonable goal but given the person responsible for it I would not be too optimistic about it.
- bananapub 1y ago
  > What's XLibre? a fork of X allegedly maintained by an arsehole > Are they taking Linux desktop accessibility more seriously? no
- lotharcable 1y ago
  XLibre is a fork of Xorg X11's codebase started by a developer who got kicked out of the Xorg project because he was making lots of changes that broke everything and had a hard time getting along with the other devs. Another dev blindly applied his MRs assuming he had tested stuff before submitting the request and they had to go back and revert a bunch of stuff. Broke nvidia compatibility, broke xrandr extension, and a bunch of other stuff.
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - ThrowOregonAway 1y ago
    Googler, NSA'er, or Red Hatter?
  - LightHugger 1y ago
    This is false, he we the sole person submitting large amounts of code for about a year and was widely praised, until he forked and red hat went nuclear on his account for opposing their corporate goals, he was not kicked out for bad changes or anything of the sort. Trying to revise history on this is malicious. The people like OA are spreading misinformation because the developer stated everyone was welcome to contribute and would oppose excessive politics. Keep in mind red hat is currently getting sued 3x over for blatantly racist policies which they used to ban other contributors and forced on their managers, they are evil people.
anonym29 1y ago
Can you elaborate more on discussions about XLibre being banned on here? Are accounts that mention it getting banned? Is there just mass downvoting by partisans with some kind of agenda? I get that X11 has security issues, but NVIDIA drivers and Wayland still seem to have no support now and no support planned for the future, so Wayland is a non-negotiable non-option for many (most?) Linux desktop users, including myself. That said, with the custodian of X11 refusing to merge 1000+ patches including various bug fixes and security fixes, I'm excited for the prospect of XLibre - this is exactly what Open Source, as an idea, was invented to facilitate - user choice.
- mkesper 1y ago
  Wayland supports nvidia cards, that they are not supported is FUD at this point in time.
  - anonym29 1y ago
    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.
    - colanderman 1y ago
      Same exact experience here. Nearly borked my entire installation trying to get that to work.
    - opticfluorine 1y ago
      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?
      - anonym29 1y ago
        "Works on my machine, just use my OS" isn't a solution to my problem, whereas X11 is a solution to my problem.
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
[flagged]
dang 1y ago
It'd be odd indeed if we'd banned something we hadn't heard of. After looking into it, I think what happened is that a few submissions were flagged by users, for the cromulent reason that the articles weren't very substantive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44332956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44332956 Edit: There also seems to be an aura of flamedrama around it. I didn't look closely, so I may be wrong, but if that's true, it's another reason why HN users would (cromulently) flag it.

curtisszmania 1y ago

[dead]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

mkesper 1y ago

TLDR (non-AI): The author raises very valid points about accessibility under Wayland. The "And Now We Don’t Have a Choice" subtitle seems to address that only Gnome seems to have usable accessibility under Wayland right now but can easily be misunderstood as "we have no alternative to Wayland". The author also mentions X11 sucked in many ways and that this transition also is a moment to rethink what proper accessibility should fulfill.

holowoodman 1y ago
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 implement in addition to wayland you might regain some lost functionality. Or paper over a design bug that will never be fixed. Wayland 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. That Gnome just now gains parts of the functionality it had in X11, years later, while still being actually behind X11, while being an incompatible mess that leaves behind all other desktop environments to the detriment of the Linux ecosystem as a whole isn't actually a victory. Its the victory of the slightly-less-ruined after a devastating war.
- ChocolateGod 1y ago
  > 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 toolkit. X was designed for multiple remote terminals receiving drawing commands over a network, not locally hardware accelerated graphical interfaces and functions that rely on close coordination between the hardware and display server (e.g. hardware planes, vrr, hdr). Fixing X would require a new protocol to the point that it isn't X anymore, aka Wayland. There are arguments that not having a reference display server has led to problems though.

Kim_Bruning 1y ago

More and more people are using GPT for editing. I admit to sometimes using AI to help me too. To be fair, I'm not sure what to think of this particular slick style quite yet.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Fr3ck 1y ago
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.
- abhinavk 1y ago
  People see an em dash and dismiss it as slop. Maybe they don't know but some of us love them and have keyboards which have an em-dash/en-dash key or use an OS where they are easy to type.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  It's got an —, and apparently these are called "ChatGPT hyphens" now – even though they're on my keyboard.
  - beej71 1y ago
    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.
- Kim_Bruning 1y ago
  Ah, a lot of people do use LLMs for editing. And when I read this I can just hear GPT-4.x's style and tone of voice in my head. None of the following are smoking guns, but together... well, either it's GPT or it's https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ . * Bullet point lists * emdash * extensive use of bold * sentence fragments * "Here's the good news:" * juxtaposition over emdash: "This transition is happening — but we’re not being ignored anymore." * Bullet points that simply MUST have a conclusion " The entire workflow? Gone." , " not just for me, but for every user who deserves to choose how they compute.", "And they shouldn’t have to." , "But we have to start over." * "I hope it’s done right — not half-baked, not bolted on." * "We lost an ecosystem." * "That has to change. / And it starts with every compositor agreeing on what “accessible” actually means. " etc.... Maybe it's A) A human who is a very skilled writer with a particular style B) GPT4.x but my best guess is C) Both: Human did the rough draft, then had GPT4 edit it into shape.

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cardanome 1y ago

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.

tetraodonpuffer 1y ago
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.
- vidarh 1y ago
  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)
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    > but worst case I'll run a Wayland compositor on my X11 server for that This is actually surprisingly easy, too. My first experiments ran a wayland app in cage ( https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage ), but in order to better handle multiple windows I switched to sway with a lightly tweaked config, and other than some input weirdness (I think it struggles with modifiers held while switching focus) it works pretty well.
justoreply 1y ago
I like how Wayland provides some isolation between applications, so I switched

DonaldFisk 1y ago

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.

wizzwizz4 1y ago
XWayland is still supported, and afaik will be for some time. It's only standalone Xorg which isn't.
- DonaldFisk 1y ago
  Thanks, this might be what I'm looking for. It's covered here: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html and https://www.mankier.com/1/Xwayland https://www.mankier.com/1/Xwayland
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    Ariadne Conill is turning Xwayland into a full X11 replacement: https://github.com/kaniini/wayback https://github.com/kaniini/wayback. She doesn't want to maintain it long-term, so if you're interested in contributing, please do: the more people understand the codebase, the better.
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bpfrh 1y ago
Isn't libwayland-client the replacement? E.g. you now use the wayland calls instead of x11 calls
- DonaldFisk 1y ago
  Specifically, I mean functions such as XCreateSimpleWindow, XDrawRectangle, XDrawArc, XmbDrawString, XNextEvent, etc.

wizzwizz4 1y ago

> 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 article https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the-wayland-native-accessibility-project/ https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the..., this decision has something to with security: > Assistive technologies or other accessibility clients currently connect to the compositor through a D-Bus protocol, defined in the Mutter repository linked above. By exposing this interface via D-Bus rather than Wayland, we make it easy to withhold this communication channel from sandboxed applications, which shouldn’t have this level of access.

jauntywundrkind 1y ago
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.
- holowoodman 1y ago
  Compositors are incompatible with one another and have totally different levels of functionality. Most compositors don't do any proper kind of security and permissions and just limit data flows in the most primitive and restrictive way possible. Using something with existing security but the possibility of cross-communication like DBUS is just easier here. Although I expect a lot of confused deputy type of exploits there...
  - jauntywundrkind 1y ago
    > Compositors are incompatible with one another and have totally different levels of functionality. I see far more similar about compositors than different. They have freedom of implementation & do different things, but they offer to apps a very common set of protocols, and some of the newer edgier protocols have more varied adoption. But I see standards & growth & development forward as 'what Wayland is', not "incompatibility" (that's why Wayland proper is purely 100% protocols & not a bespoke impl) and "totally different" (???). Finding formal concensus to make special stable has been hard. But there is a pleasantly large amount of overlap and interop, even if compositors end up implementing more than one flavor of say gamma control. > Most compositors don't do any proper kind of security and permissions and just limit data flows in the most primitive and restrictive way possible. When starting a composite yeah, you figure out who has input and send it there. You render the surface the apps give you. Dataflow is inherently quite unidirectional for a long time when beginning a desktop compositor. But that doesn't feel true at all today. Most compositors support advanced screen sharing, virtual pointers, and other fairly advanced data-flow protocols, almost all built security in mind, requiring more advanced routing & permissioning, as is very visible with the screen share flows of most apps. > Using something with existing security but the possibility of cross-communication like DBUS is just easier here. Agreed, but you yourself in your very negative comment on Wayland in this topic seem quite opposed to second systems in broad basis (and pretty radically down on Wayland in general). I'd like to see the display system protocols able to better tackle talking about and managing what's on the screen, rather than building a second parallel system for saying and working with what's on the screen. I also think there's a decently strong basis already there in the current protocols. There's a security context to start. https://wayland.app/protocols/security-context-v1 https://wayland.app/protocols/security-context-v1 We see more advanced flows like XDG Foreign for apps to expose surfaces and mix them onto our own apps. At-spi d-bus was already right there & done, and it felt easy to keep using it. It was mostly convenience I feel like, and the justification of security feels like a blunt hammer to deny exploration. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/at-spi2-core/ https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/at-spi2-core/

tarboreus 1y ago

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.

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
> 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?

rcarmo 1y ago

There is a missing piece in Wayland tha I’m worried about—or rather, a key functionality that will need to be sorted out: Remote Desktop, but not in the sense of access to an existing display — rather, fully in-memory accelerated compositing for multi-user, concurrent desktop sessions to the same machine. FreeRDP has been doing some work on that, but we need a mature Xrdp replacement and I don’t think that is around just yet.