6 ms·

Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living

74 points by junkblocker 1y ago

3np 1y ago
Wayland is great and ready for (idk) 95% of users/use-cases. There is a long tail of more-or-less critical stuff that depend on X11 and do not have working Wayland substitutes. While the tail has been shrinking for every year, it will be decades if ever until all can be realistically migrated. Consider the Lindy Effect and that some of these systems have been running for >10y already. Consider shared but secured environments at universities and research institutes. Consider obscure hardware incompatibilities and hardware-specifix performance issues which might never be fixed. On the software side, acessibility aside, there are a lot of VNC and other remote-X setups out there with no viable replacement in sight (yet). Alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire and jack can all coexist and so can display servers. I understand GNOME and RedHat will do things their way. I understand distro and GUI framework maintainers wanting to reduce their load. I understand people who like Wayland, want it to succeed, and want to evangelize. I do not appreciate when it turns into tribalism, forcing of monoculture and insisting "X11 is deprecated". --- OP is from 2023 but as they note in their update, the situation is fundamentally not that different 2y later. Are maintainers and decision-makers really sincerely imagining that a supposed deprecation and removal of X11 can be forced onto the wider community over a couple of years from now?
- superkuh 1y ago
  As an aside, you talk about wayland as if it were one thing. But the wayland protocol is intentionally minimal. Each wayland compositor picks and chooses between different third party libs to support various features. So you never know if something will actually work on the wayland compositor you use. If you stick within your ecosystem, yes, but it's not unified like X11 linux is. It's very fragmented and one's personal experience definitely doesn't say anything about other people's experience. Unlike with X11 where everyone uses the same thing. For example, mouse and keyboard support and libei, libinput, or nothing (looking at you, weston). You never know what you're going to get and so applications that need to do basic keyboard/mouse things have to guess. It doesn't work all the time. In X11 it does. Another example, accessibility features. The only wayland compositor that supports screen reading is GNOME's. They invented two new protocols, incompatible with all existing linux accessibility libraries. Only GNOME's wayland compositor and userspace applications use them. So, in summary: one's experience can't be extrapolated with wayland because there is no single wayland.
  - shmerl 1y ago
    It makes sense for something like accessibility to be part of the protocol because it almost always needs access to stuff that Wayland restricts by design.
  - o11c 1y ago
    Let's do the math. If each Wayland implementation supports an independent 95% of what users need, then: * With 0 implementations, Wayland is good for 100.0% of users * With 1 implementations, Wayland is good for 95.0% of users * With 2 implementations, Wayland is good for 90.2% of users * With 3 implementations, Wayland is good for 85.7% of users * With 4 implementations, Wayland is good for 81.5% of users * With 5 implementations, Wayland is good for 77.4% of users * With 6 implementations, Wayland is good for 73.5% of users * With 7 implementations, Wayland is good for 69.8% of users * With 8 implementations, Wayland is good for 66.3% of users * With 9 implementations, Wayland is good for 63.0% of users * With 10 implementations, Wayland is good for 59.9% of users
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago
    Still with this situation,it will be maybe 10 years before we get accessibility again
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  > On the software side, acessibility aside, there are a lot of VNC and other remote-X setups out there with no viable replacement in sight (yet). I've been using wayvnc for probably 5 years now? Works great. Sway can output fine to virtual-crtc out for headless mide; I expect other compositors can use this part of your GPU too. If you really desperate & your Wayland server just can't for no reason, get a DisplayPort dummy plug for $15. I know less about others but krfb and gnome-remote-desktop are both there. KDE is recently kicking off a bunch of work to make sure their login manager is remote friendly too. > I do not appreciate when it turns into tribalism, forcing of monoculture and insisting "X11 is deprecated". Most of the devs doing X11 agreed en masse that it was at a dead end and not worth caring for anymore. It's not tribalism. It's technics.
  - 3np 1y ago
    Great you found something that works for you and that you managed to dodge the parts of the community that somehow managed to turn this into identity politics. Still, the gaps are there and don't seem to be filled anytime soon, despite the progress you mention.
light_hue_1 1y ago
It's been almost two decades and we're still taking steps backwards on accessibility and features because of Wayland. From day 0 Wayland put their idea of a beautiful design above the needs of users. It's hard to see how we can claim to be inclusive when even our most basic decisions are hostile to large groups of users. I never thought I would say this, but after 30 years of open source and Linux I don't see much of a bright future. Everyone I know from the community back then has moved on to using a Mac because of these issues.
- hwsrtejk 1y ago
  Absurd ideas like "applications shouldn't be able to spy on or manipulate each other without explicit permission from the user".
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    Nobody said anything about that. Is there any reason that Xorg couldn't tack on a permission system, other than that it would be inelegant?
    - fanf2 1y ago
      There were X11 extensions that implemented access controls, eg in TrustedSolaris.
    - cies 1y ago
      > Is there any reason that Xorg couldn't tack on a permission system, other than that it would be inelegant? That's the whole reason for Wayland's existence: such things were not "easily" possible... Linux+Xorg desktop would be hopelessly insecure for ever because these security features were deemed too hard to the point of not being "worth it". So Wayland was started. Someone is developing XLibre, and Xorg fork. It may be pulled off, but I doubt it. Making Xorg safe was tried many times for many safety-holes.
      - antisol 1y ago
jrm4 1y ago
Again. <expletive> ANY Linux project that strongly breaks backwards compatibility. Not surprised that it's still messing with people even this late in the game.
- dismalaf 1y ago
  No one is forcing anyone to use Wayland. There's DEs that use X11 and have no plans to move to Wayland. Also no one is preventing this app from working, for whatever reasons the devs just haven't got it working. Open source software is about freedom. Freedom to say fuck backwards compatibility or freedom to use X11 for the next 100 years. Also the freedom for the X11 devs to say they don't want to maintain it anymore...
  - cmxch 1y ago
    Intentional breaking of Xorg to frustrate use isn’t freedom. It’s harm.
    - dismalaf 1y ago
      Who broke it? It works. It's still there. Plenty of distros use it still... The maintainers just got sick of maintaining it and moved on...
      - jrm4 1y ago
        This is such a "technically true, the worst kind of true" take. Whatever group or person "got Wayland going" collectively or individually made a clear choice to abandon a lot of load-bearing standards, and its disengenuous to not recognize that; and I think why people (like me) still complain is to note that this was at least arguably a mistake. Wayland's rollout was long and terrible, and more cooperation (as opposed to what actually happened, which was likely "move fast and break things because advancement and shiny things since we are now much more corporate" might have been better.
        1y ago
pluto_modadic 1y ago
sounds like some peeps could contribute code to fix wayland / compositors to enable talon's accessibility hooks :D
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  By all means feel free, but know that you commit yourself to an endless task; every compositor has to have every feature implemented independently. The big two, GNOME and KDE, will need to be handled completely independently. After that, you can ease the process by getting support into wlroots, but that merely makes it easier per compositor; you'll still need to submit patches to every consumer of the library to actually wire up support. (For a worked example: wlroots has a way to set the keyboard layout. This does not mean that every compositor using wlroots has a way to set keyboard layout.)
  - nitwit005 1y ago
    You're essentially encouraging people to give up and leave it broken. Sure, a lot of code changes need to happen, but they only need to happen once. There's no real reason to discourage people from stepping closer to the end goal.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
      Like... I don't exactly want to discourage people. As a person using a11y tools that don't yet exist on Wayland, I would kinda like to be able to migrate over. But it remains true that Wayland is set up in such a way that it's inherently a longer uphill struggle, and always will be. If tomorrow someone created a new X11 window manager, I could switch and my tools would still work. If tomorrow someone created a new Wayland compositor, I almost certainly couldn't use it, because they'd need to implement everything over again. They can do that, obviously, but the startup effort will always be higher.
    - antisol 1y ago
      > leave it broken The whole point here is that on X it's not broken at all. And if it was, it would only need to be fixed once.
nitwit005 1y ago
It's impressive how I've seen quite a few accessibility complaints about Linux, and not a single bit of praise when people fix something.
ntnsndr 1y ago
I was speaking at a conference recently and was asked to chair the session at the last minute. It was hybrid, so all the speakers needed to share their slides on Zoom. I have been daily driving Linux for 14 years, and this has almost never been a problem (there was a moment with i3 but it seems better). But I hadn't bothered to test this since installing (and generally loving!) PopOS COSMIC. The problem, at root, is Wayland. Zoom has some kind of workaround it seems, but it's not working yet in COSMIC. The result was sad: speakers having to speak with their slides being run by one of the remote speakers, and anyone who recognized the computer running Zoom as Linux surely strengthened their conviction never to try that.
- cvgbn 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - koiueo 1y ago
    Care to explain what millennials have to do with any of that?
  - nvllsvm 1y ago
    > I just bitch and moan now, because it’s better than killing myself to avoid seeing how fucked up things will become. fwiw - I'm happy to chat if you wanna vent.
- gucci-on-fleek 1y ago
  > The problem, at root, is Wayland. Screen sharing worked fine for me on Wayland 3+ years ago (and still works today), so Wayland isn't inherently the issue.
  - patrakov 1y ago
    And, as explained, it doesn't matter. The problems, at root, are human psychology and incompatible but popular software, and that's sufficient to drive people away. And the issues are not new: we had exactly that with Windows Vista.
jchw 1y ago
The Wayland protocol "lacks" some things "by design" in that they are not specified. However, this is not intentional omissions, not even under the guise of "security", it's stuff that simply hasn't been done yet. The most promising work towards improving accessibility support in Wayland was the work done on the Newton protocol: 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... Unfortunately, the project appears to have stalled. I think the Linux desktop just lacks important strategic investments, and this is one of them. For now, existing accessibility bus support in UI toolkits is mostly being leveraged. Some compositors (i.e. KDE's kwin) also can support some old X11 features used for automation/accessibility (i.e. XTEST works, although applications will need to be granted permission first) The situation is somewhat similar for IME: There are a few protocols for handling basic IME/text input, but it's not really finished, and further work on text input protocols has stalled. This is not an ideal state of affairs at all, and it is a major threat to the future of the Linux desktop. I doubt many Wayland proponents (of which I do consider myself to be one) seriously believes that shipping Wayland-only without robust support for accessibility or internationalization is really a good idea. It's basically only happening because progress on Wayland has been rather slow, for many reasons, a lot of which really aren't in the control of open source contributors or maintainers. However, at the same time, maintaining both X.org and Wayland paths everywhere forever is also not sustainable: with limited resources, there simply has to be a point at which the line is drawn. X.org outside of XWayland has been unmaintained for a fairly long time. On the flip side, if anyone working on Newton or Wayland accessibility has any idea what anyone on the outside can do to help things along, we'd love to know. I really hope that one of the major investors in the free software desktop (Valve? Red Hat?) can be convinced to help shift some resources to this. It's one thing to have some software work somewhat sub-optimally (as is the case with KiCAD), but it's a bigger issue that users who upgrade to newer free operating systems may face a system that is not usable for them because of limited accessibility tools. Possibly a compliance problem for companies that wish to ship systems based on free software desktops.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > The Wayland protocol "lacks" some things "by design" in that they are not specified. However, this is not intentional omissions, not even under the guise of "security", it's stuff that simply hasn't been done yet. Two things: First, yes, a lot of Wayland's missing features absolutely were intentional omissions in the name of security. This is even almost understandable; the only difference between a vital a11y tool and horrible malware is whether the software acts on behalf of the user or against them, there is no technical distinction. Second... Wayland is almost 17 years old. If it was 2010, I would readily accept that it was early WIP software, but we're past the point where 'they just haven't gotten there yet' is convincing. > However, at the same time, maintaining both X.org and Wayland paths everywhere forever is also not sustainable: with limited resources, there simply has to be a point at which the line is drawn. X.org outside of XWayland has been unmaintained for a fairly long time. I'm actually cautiously optimistic that https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback or the like will help significantly; sharing as much of the stack as possible should reduce the maintenance burden.
charcircuit 1y ago
Wayland is a protocol for talking between the compositor and an application. AT-SPI is a protocol for talking between the compositor and an accessibility reader. It's not in Wayland's jurisdiction to define how AT-SPI should be used.
rendaw 1y ago
On the flip side, there's some software that works (somewhat) with wayland but deliberately breaks compatibility. For instance, Scribus uses QT which supports wayland, but they hardcoded a check to explicitly detect wayland and exit if it's found. You get the generic QT "supported backends" message that lists wayland, but if you actually try to use it the logic resets your choice, gaslighting you into thinking you typed the backend detection or override env var isn't working. You can get around it using a wayland-flavor that they forgot to reject, and there are bugs (not sure how many are from wayland itself and not Scribus though) so I get not wanting to handle wayland related bug reports, but having buggy software is often than having no software at all so I wish they didn't choose the nuclear option (and now they get "please support wayland" bug reports instead, so...). I think Krita is the same? There were a couple programs I had to dig into the code to work around blocker mechanisms to get to run.
- spookie 1y ago
  Krita should work now.
- arp242 1y ago
  Scribus doesn't "deliberately" break compatibility; it was completely unusable with Wayland and they added friendly message. It also doesn't really go out of its way to do so as you're suggesting – it just checks Application::platformName() == "wayland" and that's it. Maybe it's better now with Wayland and that check can be removed. I don't know. See: https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=16998 https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=16998 and https://github.com/scribusproject/scribus/commit/74d8d7ef7 https://github.com/scribusproject/scribus/commit/74d8d7ef7
C-Loftus 1y ago
I am a part of the Talon community mentioned here, use Orca, have contributed to the Rust atspi bindings and feel like I know Linux accessibility quite well. It is true to in Wayland you can write protocol extensions or custom compositors to get around these limitations. However, what many fail to realize is that the primary challenge in Linux accessibility is not just a technical problem as it is getting people to actually implement specs and care about it. Even with atspi itself, a standard that has existed for over a decade, major apps like Firefox often do not implement the atspi Collection interface. This is not a criticism but rather a practical statement that accessibility needs to be standardized and easy to implement for it to actually have any use. Orca works on Wayland but only in certain compositors. For assistive technology software developers, this pattern of supporting specific compositors is not feasible. It is important to understand that we need to support assistive tech generally. Not just ad hoc extensions for certain types of disabilities. Wayland has no concept of global coordinates or global key bindings. The protocol itself is designed around atomicity which is a nice concept, but is fundamentally in conflict to the need of assistive technologies to control the entire state of the desktop globally. As such, atspi methods like get_accessible_at_point are impossible in Wayland. I agree that X11 cannot be carried on forever, but with the current state of Wayland, the phasing out of X11 will have the effect of drastically harming the accessibility ecosystem. Accessibility is not a "nice to have", it is essential to the mission of community inclusion and wider goals of adopting desktop Linux in education and government.
- TheChaplain 1y ago
  Accessibility requirement is also something that EU is taking quite seriously lately, and if FOSS wants to be a part of something more than home enthusiasts, then it has to step up.
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
All of this was well known when Wayland was developed. They just didn't give a shit about end-users. They had one or two specific things they personally wanted done, and they made sure that was supported, and that's it. And then a few major players decide they're going to push for this new system to become the system, so it's not just "a bad alternative", it's an unavoidably bad fate. This isn't the first case like this. The Linux desktop ecosystem has been getting worse for years, as a few major players force systemic changes that make the system more complex, more brittle, and less compatible [with anything that came before it, or that doesn't use the same core components]. I've been using a Linux desktop for 25 years and it's never been more complicated or broken. It's part of a larger trend of tech enshittification, but seems especially sad in the Open Source world. I always figured a decentralized, leaderless ecosystem could fight incumbent stagnation and selfishness, through the creation of alternatives. But some things there's just no alternative to. And apparently the list of things without alternatives grows.
- yepitwas 1y ago
  If a good bit of what you’re writing about wasn’t “fire and motion” on Red Hat’s part, the effect, at least, is the same: it’s harder to justify picking a distro other than one connected to Red Hat than it’s ever been before.
- whatevaa 1y ago
  Linux desktop has never worked for me better than today
  - antisol 1y ago
    I say it was better circa ~2008-2012 than it is today.
dpc_01234 1y ago
The way to combat these problems is to form some foundation, secure funding (public and private) and hire devs to work on it across ecosystem.

74 points by junkblocker 1y ago

3np 1y ago

Wayland is great and ready for (idk) 95% of users/use-cases. There is a long tail of more-or-less critical stuff that depend on X11 and do not have working Wayland substitutes. While the tail has been shrinking for every year, it will be decades if ever until all can be realistically migrated. Consider the Lindy Effect and that some of these systems have been running for >10y already. Consider shared but secured environments at universities and research institutes. Consider obscure hardware incompatibilities and hardware-specifix performance issues which might never be fixed. On the software side, acessibility aside, there are a lot of VNC and other remote-X setups out there with no viable replacement in sight (yet). Alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire and jack can all coexist and so can display servers. I understand GNOME and RedHat will do things their way. I understand distro and GUI framework maintainers wanting to reduce their load. I understand people who like Wayland, want it to succeed, and want to evangelize. I do not appreciate when it turns into tribalism, forcing of monoculture and insisting "X11 is deprecated". --- OP is from 2023 but as they note in their update, the situation is fundamentally not that different 2y later. Are maintainers and decision-makers really sincerely imagining that a supposed deprecation and removal of X11 can be forced onto the wider community over a couple of years from now?

superkuh 1y ago
As an aside, you talk about wayland as if it were one thing. But the wayland protocol is intentionally minimal. Each wayland compositor picks and chooses between different third party libs to support various features. So you never know if something will actually work on the wayland compositor you use. If you stick within your ecosystem, yes, but it's not unified like X11 linux is. It's very fragmented and one's personal experience definitely doesn't say anything about other people's experience. Unlike with X11 where everyone uses the same thing. For example, mouse and keyboard support and libei, libinput, or nothing (looking at you, weston). You never know what you're going to get and so applications that need to do basic keyboard/mouse things have to guess. It doesn't work all the time. In X11 it does. Another example, accessibility features. The only wayland compositor that supports screen reading is GNOME's. They invented two new protocols, incompatible with all existing linux accessibility libraries. Only GNOME's wayland compositor and userspace applications use them. So, in summary: one's experience can't be extrapolated with wayland because there is no single wayland.
- shmerl 1y ago
  It makes sense for something like accessibility to be part of the protocol because it almost always needs access to stuff that Wayland restricts by design.
- o11c 1y ago
  Let's do the math. If each Wayland implementation supports an independent 95% of what users need, then: * With 0 implementations, Wayland is good for 100.0% of users * With 1 implementations, Wayland is good for 95.0% of users * With 2 implementations, Wayland is good for 90.2% of users * With 3 implementations, Wayland is good for 85.7% of users * With 4 implementations, Wayland is good for 81.5% of users * With 5 implementations, Wayland is good for 77.4% of users * With 6 implementations, Wayland is good for 73.5% of users * With 7 implementations, Wayland is good for 69.8% of users * With 8 implementations, Wayland is good for 66.3% of users * With 9 implementations, Wayland is good for 63.0% of users * With 10 implementations, Wayland is good for 59.9% of users
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago
  Still with this situation,it will be maybe 10 years before we get accessibility again
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
> On the software side, acessibility aside, there are a lot of VNC and other remote-X setups out there with no viable replacement in sight (yet). I've been using wayvnc for probably 5 years now? Works great. Sway can output fine to virtual-crtc out for headless mide; I expect other compositors can use this part of your GPU too. If you really desperate & your Wayland server just can't for no reason, get a DisplayPort dummy plug for $15. I know less about others but krfb and gnome-remote-desktop are both there. KDE is recently kicking off a bunch of work to make sure their login manager is remote friendly too. > I do not appreciate when it turns into tribalism, forcing of monoculture and insisting "X11 is deprecated". Most of the devs doing X11 agreed en masse that it was at a dead end and not worth caring for anymore. It's not tribalism. It's technics.
- 3np 1y ago
  Great you found something that works for you and that you managed to dodge the parts of the community that somehow managed to turn this into identity politics. Still, the gaps are there and don't seem to be filled anytime soon, despite the progress you mention.

light_hue_1 1y ago

It's been almost two decades and we're still taking steps backwards on accessibility and features because of Wayland. From day 0 Wayland put their idea of a beautiful design above the needs of users. It's hard to see how we can claim to be inclusive when even our most basic decisions are hostile to large groups of users. I never thought I would say this, but after 30 years of open source and Linux I don't see much of a bright future. Everyone I know from the community back then has moved on to using a Mac because of these issues.

hwsrtejk 1y ago
Absurd ideas like "applications shouldn't be able to spy on or manipulate each other without explicit permission from the user".
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  Nobody said anything about that. Is there any reason that Xorg couldn't tack on a permission system, other than that it would be inelegant?
  - fanf2 1y ago
    There were X11 extensions that implemented access controls, eg in TrustedSolaris.
  - cies 1y ago
    > Is there any reason that Xorg couldn't tack on a permission system, other than that it would be inelegant? That's the whole reason for Wayland's existence: such things were not "easily" possible... Linux+Xorg desktop would be hopelessly insecure for ever because these security features were deemed too hard to the point of not being "worth it". So Wayland was started. Someone is developing XLibre, and Xorg fork. It may be pulled off, but I doubt it. Making Xorg safe was tried many times for many safety-holes.
    - antisol 1y ago

jrm4 1y ago

Again. <expletive> ANY Linux project that strongly breaks backwards compatibility. Not surprised that it's still messing with people even this late in the game.

dismalaf 1y ago
No one is forcing anyone to use Wayland. There's DEs that use X11 and have no plans to move to Wayland. Also no one is preventing this app from working, for whatever reasons the devs just haven't got it working. Open source software is about freedom. Freedom to say fuck backwards compatibility or freedom to use X11 for the next 100 years. Also the freedom for the X11 devs to say they don't want to maintain it anymore...
- cmxch 1y ago
  Intentional breaking of Xorg to frustrate use isn’t freedom. It’s harm.
  - dismalaf 1y ago
    Who broke it? It works. It's still there. Plenty of distros use it still... The maintainers just got sick of maintaining it and moved on...
    - jrm4 1y ago
      This is such a "technically true, the worst kind of true" take. Whatever group or person "got Wayland going" collectively or individually made a clear choice to abandon a lot of load-bearing standards, and its disengenuous to not recognize that; and I think why people (like me) still complain is to note that this was at least arguably a mistake. Wayland's rollout was long and terrible, and more cooperation (as opposed to what actually happened, which was likely "move fast and break things because advancement and shiny things since we are now much more corporate" might have been better.
      - 1y ago

pluto_modadic 1y ago

sounds like some peeps could contribute code to fix wayland / compositors to enable talon's accessibility hooks :D

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
By all means feel free, but know that you commit yourself to an endless task; every compositor has to have every feature implemented independently. The big two, GNOME and KDE, will need to be handled completely independently. After that, you can ease the process by getting support into wlroots, but that merely makes it easier per compositor; you'll still need to submit patches to every consumer of the library to actually wire up support. (For a worked example: wlroots has a way to set the keyboard layout. This does not mean that every compositor using wlroots has a way to set keyboard layout.)
- nitwit005 1y ago
  You're essentially encouraging people to give up and leave it broken. Sure, a lot of code changes need to happen, but they only need to happen once. There's no real reason to discourage people from stepping closer to the end goal.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    Like... I don't exactly want to discourage people. As a person using a11y tools that don't yet exist on Wayland, I would kinda like to be able to migrate over. But it remains true that Wayland is set up in such a way that it's inherently a longer uphill struggle, and always will be. If tomorrow someone created a new X11 window manager, I could switch and my tools would still work. If tomorrow someone created a new Wayland compositor, I almost certainly couldn't use it, because they'd need to implement everything over again. They can do that, obviously, but the startup effort will always be higher.
  - antisol 1y ago
    > leave it broken The whole point here is that on X it's not broken at all. And if it was, it would only need to be fixed once.

nitwit005 1y ago

It's impressive how I've seen quite a few accessibility complaints about Linux, and not a single bit of praise when people fix something.

ntnsndr 1y ago

I was speaking at a conference recently and was asked to chair the session at the last minute. It was hybrid, so all the speakers needed to share their slides on Zoom. I have been daily driving Linux for 14 years, and this has almost never been a problem (there was a moment with i3 but it seems better). But I hadn't bothered to test this since installing (and generally loving!) PopOS COSMIC. The problem, at root, is Wayland. Zoom has some kind of workaround it seems, but it's not working yet in COSMIC. The result was sad: speakers having to speak with their slides being run by one of the remote speakers, and anyone who recognized the computer running Zoom as Linux surely strengthened their conviction never to try that.

cvgbn 1y ago
[flagged]
- koiueo 1y ago
  Care to explain what millennials have to do with any of that?
- nvllsvm 1y ago
  > I just bitch and moan now, because it’s better than killing myself to avoid seeing how fucked up things will become. fwiw - I'm happy to chat if you wanna vent.
gucci-on-fleek 1y ago
> The problem, at root, is Wayland. Screen sharing worked fine for me on Wayland 3+ years ago (and still works today), so Wayland isn't inherently the issue.
- patrakov 1y ago
  And, as explained, it doesn't matter. The problems, at root, are human psychology and incompatible but popular software, and that's sufficient to drive people away. And the issues are not new: we had exactly that with Windows Vista.

jchw 1y ago

The Wayland protocol "lacks" some things "by design" in that they are not specified. However, this is not intentional omissions, not even under the guise of "security", it's stuff that simply hasn't been done yet. The most promising work towards improving accessibility support in Wayland was the work done on the Newton protocol: 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... Unfortunately, the project appears to have stalled. I think the Linux desktop just lacks important strategic investments, and this is one of them. For now, existing accessibility bus support in UI toolkits is mostly being leveraged. Some compositors (i.e. KDE's kwin) also can support some old X11 features used for automation/accessibility (i.e. XTEST works, although applications will need to be granted permission first) The situation is somewhat similar for IME: There are a few protocols for handling basic IME/text input, but it's not really finished, and further work on text input protocols has stalled. This is not an ideal state of affairs at all, and it is a major threat to the future of the Linux desktop. I doubt many Wayland proponents (of which I do consider myself to be one) seriously believes that shipping Wayland-only without robust support for accessibility or internationalization is really a good idea. It's basically only happening because progress on Wayland has been rather slow, for many reasons, a lot of which really aren't in the control of open source contributors or maintainers. However, at the same time, maintaining both X.org and Wayland paths everywhere forever is also not sustainable: with limited resources, there simply has to be a point at which the line is drawn. X.org outside of XWayland has been unmaintained for a fairly long time. On the flip side, if anyone working on Newton or Wayland accessibility has any idea what anyone on the outside can do to help things along, we'd love to know. I really hope that one of the major investors in the free software desktop (Valve? Red Hat?) can be convinced to help shift some resources to this. It's one thing to have some software work somewhat sub-optimally (as is the case with KiCAD), but it's a bigger issue that users who upgrade to newer free operating systems may face a system that is not usable for them because of limited accessibility tools. Possibly a compliance problem for companies that wish to ship systems based on free software desktops.

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
> The Wayland protocol "lacks" some things "by design" in that they are not specified. However, this is not intentional omissions, not even under the guise of "security", it's stuff that simply hasn't been done yet. Two things: First, yes, a lot of Wayland's missing features absolutely were intentional omissions in the name of security. This is even almost understandable; the only difference between a vital a11y tool and horrible malware is whether the software acts on behalf of the user or against them, there is no technical distinction. Second... Wayland is almost 17 years old. If it was 2010, I would readily accept that it was early WIP software, but we're past the point where 'they just haven't gotten there yet' is convincing. > However, at the same time, maintaining both X.org and Wayland paths everywhere forever is also not sustainable: with limited resources, there simply has to be a point at which the line is drawn. X.org outside of XWayland has been unmaintained for a fairly long time. I'm actually cautiously optimistic that https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback or the like will help significantly; sharing as much of the stack as possible should reduce the maintenance burden.

charcircuit 1y ago

Wayland is a protocol for talking between the compositor and an application. AT-SPI is a protocol for talking between the compositor and an accessibility reader. It's not in Wayland's jurisdiction to define how AT-SPI should be used.

rendaw 1y ago

On the flip side, there's some software that works (somewhat) with wayland but deliberately breaks compatibility. For instance, Scribus uses QT which supports wayland, but they hardcoded a check to explicitly detect wayland and exit if it's found. You get the generic QT "supported backends" message that lists wayland, but if you actually try to use it the logic resets your choice, gaslighting you into thinking you typed the backend detection or override env var isn't working. You can get around it using a wayland-flavor that they forgot to reject, and there are bugs (not sure how many are from wayland itself and not Scribus though) so I get not wanting to handle wayland related bug reports, but having buggy software is often than having no software at all so I wish they didn't choose the nuclear option (and now they get "please support wayland" bug reports instead, so...). I think Krita is the same? There were a couple programs I had to dig into the code to work around blocker mechanisms to get to run.

spookie 1y ago
Krita should work now.
arp242 1y ago
Scribus doesn't "deliberately" break compatibility; it was completely unusable with Wayland and they added friendly message. It also doesn't really go out of its way to do so as you're suggesting – it just checks Application::platformName() == "wayland" and that's it. Maybe it's better now with Wayland and that check can be removed. I don't know. See: https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=16998 https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=16998 and https://github.com/scribusproject/scribus/commit/74d8d7ef7 https://github.com/scribusproject/scribus/commit/74d8d7ef7

C-Loftus 1y ago

I am a part of the Talon community mentioned here, use Orca, have contributed to the Rust atspi bindings and feel like I know Linux accessibility quite well. It is true to in Wayland you can write protocol extensions or custom compositors to get around these limitations. However, what many fail to realize is that the primary challenge in Linux accessibility is not just a technical problem as it is getting people to actually implement specs and care about it. Even with atspi itself, a standard that has existed for over a decade, major apps like Firefox often do not implement the atspi Collection interface. This is not a criticism but rather a practical statement that accessibility needs to be standardized and easy to implement for it to actually have any use. Orca works on Wayland but only in certain compositors. For assistive technology software developers, this pattern of supporting specific compositors is not feasible. It is important to understand that we need to support assistive tech generally. Not just ad hoc extensions for certain types of disabilities. Wayland has no concept of global coordinates or global key bindings. The protocol itself is designed around atomicity which is a nice concept, but is fundamentally in conflict to the need of assistive technologies to control the entire state of the desktop globally. As such, atspi methods like get_accessible_at_point are impossible in Wayland. I agree that X11 cannot be carried on forever, but with the current state of Wayland, the phasing out of X11 will have the effect of drastically harming the accessibility ecosystem. Accessibility is not a "nice to have", it is essential to the mission of community inclusion and wider goals of adopting desktop Linux in education and government.

TheChaplain 1y ago
Accessibility requirement is also something that EU is taking quite seriously lately, and if FOSS wants to be a part of something more than home enthusiasts, then it has to step up.

0xbadcafebee 1y ago

All of this was well known when Wayland was developed. They just didn't give a shit about end-users. They had one or two specific things they personally wanted done, and they made sure that was supported, and that's it. And then a few major players decide they're going to push for this new system to become the system, so it's not just "a bad alternative", it's an unavoidably bad fate. This isn't the first case like this. The Linux desktop ecosystem has been getting worse for years, as a few major players force systemic changes that make the system more complex, more brittle, and less compatible [with anything that came before it, or that doesn't use the same core components]. I've been using a Linux desktop for 25 years and it's never been more complicated or broken. It's part of a larger trend of tech enshittification, but seems especially sad in the Open Source world. I always figured a decentralized, leaderless ecosystem could fight incumbent stagnation and selfishness, through the creation of alternatives. But some things there's just no alternative to. And apparently the list of things without alternatives grows.

yepitwas 1y ago
If a good bit of what you’re writing about wasn’t “fire and motion” on Red Hat’s part, the effect, at least, is the same: it’s harder to justify picking a distro other than one connected to Red Hat than it’s ever been before.
whatevaa 1y ago
Linux desktop has never worked for me better than today
- antisol 1y ago
  I say it was better circa ~2008-2012 than it is today.

dpc_01234 1y ago

The way to combat these problems is to form some foundation, secure funding (public and private) and hire devs to work on it across ecosystem.