8 ms·

This is a great project! I like and use Wayland but the portal protocols and extension mechanism does leave a lot to be desired. Wayland is still quite a way be

by ccakes 9mo ago

This is a great project! I like and use Wayland but the portal protocols and extension mechanism does leave a lot to be desired. Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need An X11 rewrite with some security baked in is an awesome approach. Will be watching!

drpixie 9mo ago
I thought for a long time that rather than move to Wayland, we could come up with a tidied-up version of X. Sounds like a good and useful project, I hope it progresses.
- reactordev 9mo ago
  I thought this too and originally thought that’s what Wayland was going to do but it went off and did its own thing. I’m all for an X12.
  - sho_hn 9mo ago
    An X12 was briefly considered by the community before adopting Wayland: https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/ https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/ If you take the time to read through that (very partial) list of cruft and footguns in X11 it probably makes it a little easier to understand why a clean-slate approach was able to attract momentum and why many hands-on involved developers were relatively tired of X11. Critics would of course respond that backwards compatibility is worth the effort and rewrites are often the wrong call, etc. It's the Python 2/3 debate and many others.
    - glzone1 9mo ago
      Python 3 was actively antagonistic to Python 2 code for no reason other than to lecture us about how we were doing things wrong, writing code to support 2 and 3 to help transition was dumb etc etc. For example, in python 2 you could explicitly mark unicode text with u"...". That was actively BLOCKED with python 3.0 which supposedly was about unicode support! The irony was insane, they could of just no-oped the u"". I got totally sick of the "expert" language designers with no real world code shipping responsibilities lecturing me. Every post about this stuff was met by comments from pedantic idiots. So every string had to have a helper function around it. Total and absolute garbage. They still haven't explained to my satisifaction why not support u"..." to allow a transition more easily to 3. Luckily sanity started prevailing around 3.5 and we started to see a progression - whoever was behind this should be thanked. The clueless unicode everything was walked back and we got % for bytes so you could work with network protocols again (where unicode would be STUPID to force given the installed base). We got u"" back. By 3.6 we got back to reasonable path handling on windows and the 3 benefits started to come without antagonistic approaches / regressions from 2. But that was about 8 years? So that burnt a lot of the initial excitement.
      - reactordev 9mo ago
        There’s a reason they’re called Pythonistas It’s always drama and they’re the center of it. (I’m joking of course, Merry Christmas)
      - someguyiguess 9mo ago
        Python is really one of the worst designed languages. It always baffles me that people recommend it to beginners.
        zbentley 9mo ago
        Except for all the others (that anyone uses)…
        IshKebab 9mo ago
        I dunno there's a lot to pick from when it comes to "worst designed"! It's definitely not well designed though. And I agree about recommending it to beginners. Sure, a for-loop and a simple function look very friendly and easy, but good luck explaining to them why they can't import from a file in a different directory...
        cons0le 9mo ago
        15 years ago I tried it and got that path error. 1 year ago I tried again and still got the same error. I'm well aware that it's simple enough to fix. But I was baffled that the same error was still there.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago
        > Python 3 was actively antagonistic to Python 2 code for no reason other than to lecture us about how we were doing things wrong, writing code to support 2 and 3 to help transition was dumb etc etc. > [...] > By 3.6 we got back to reasonable path handling on windows and the 3 benefits started to come without antagonistic approaches / regressions from 2. But that was about 8 years? So that burnt a lot of the initial excitement. So it's a great analogy. Wayland started out proudly proclaiming that it intentionally didn't support features in the name of "security" but everyone should "upgrade" because this was totally better, and has been very slowly discovering that actually all the stuff it willfully dropped was useful and has mostly evolved back to near feature parity with Xorg.
    - reactordev 9mo ago
      I’ve been here since the beginning. I remember Usenet. X11 was built for multi-user terminals a kin to today’s Microsoft VDI garbage. There’s some good. A lot of bad. And some WTF in there.
    - PunchyHamster 9mo ago
      Realistically rewrite would keep X11 compatibility layer and just do same wayland did, make new protocol. Just... without all that mess that turned out to be at best +/-, at worst outright negative causing problems for everyone involved. And near all of the "advantages" are "the server is built from scratch" not "the protocol was the limitation"
  - bdhcuidbebe 9mo ago
    Be the change you want to see. Also happy winter solstice.
- viraptor 9mo ago
  It was always an option, but "just" needed someone to dedicate all their time to it and pull in a group of long term maintainers. The real question is what will happen with the project in 2 years and will it be stable for day to day use.
  - bsder 9mo ago
    The fact that you can "assume Vulkan exists" helps a lot (both hardware and software renderers exist). Do remember--Wayland predates Vulkan by almost a full decade. In addition, you can offload OpenGL compatibility to Zink (again leaning into Vulkan). > pull in a group of long term maintainers. "Use new cool language" seems to be a prerequisite for this nowadays ... At least Zig is very compatible with C.
    - throwaway92841 9mo ago
      You can't "assume Vulkan exists". Any pre-2016 hardware won't have proper hardware support for Vulkan and that's a lot of hardware still in use. Software renderers are unworthy of any serious consideration due to the perfomance drawbacks. Just use OpenGL. I don't know when this trend to overcomplicate everything using Vulkan began, but I hate it.
      - MindSpunk 9mo ago
        Nvidia had a driver for Vulkan for Kepler which launched in 2012, AMD had support all the way back to GCN 1.0 (also 2012). Intel did have issues supporting it, I can't recall if it was for hardware reasons or just lack of desire for a driver. Vulkan has substantial advantages for multi-threaded code, as well as exposing the underlying asynchronous nature of running code on the GPU. The kind of thing you want to be able to control with a desktop compositor where controlling vsync and present timing is very important.
      - bmacho 9mo ago
        There are Xorg and XLibre for pre-2016 hardware.
redeeman 9mo ago
BS, windows and macos cant even do proper window managing for a start, and then it just goes downwards from there on.. You can perhaps install various weird third party things, but it does not come with it by default. If you took people who absolutely never tried any computing, and gave them macos, windows, and for example Plasma, they would NOT consider windows or macos to be ready for the desktop. If you go 15 years back, even way more so. even in the early 2000s, windows was so hilariously crappy that you had to make floppy disks to even get to install the thing. If PCs didnt come preloaded with windows, regular users would never ever be able to install it, versus the relative ease a typical linux distribution was to install. This is also one of the large reasons that when their windows slowed down due to being a piece of shit with 1000000 toolbars, people threw it out and bought a new, despite the fact that a reinstall would have solved it.
- MangoToupe 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Arch-TK 9mo ago
    I don't use a Mac, but have you ever used Windows? I mean, maybe you have, but if you are not fussy then at worst MacOS is quirky and Windows and Linux are identical and merely have different icons. If you pay a little bit of attention you will notice that on linux things seem more flexible and intuitive. If you are very finnicky, there is nothing that comes close to X11 window managers when it comes to window management flexibility, innovation and power.
    - II2II 9mo ago
      Windows allows you to launch applications from a menu or via search. You can switch between windows with a mouse or keyboard shortcuts. Windows can either be floating, arranged in pseudo-tiled layers, or full screen. KDE can pretty much do the same under Wayland. Ditto for Gnome under Wayland, albeit to a lesser degree. That covers the bases for most people. X11 window managers were a mixed bag. While there were a few standouts, most of the variation was in the degree to which they could be configured and how they were configured. There may be fewer compositors for Wayland because of the difficulty in developing them, but the ones that do exist do standout.
reppap 9mo ago
I don't really understand what is supposedly missing in Wayland for productivity users? At work I have been using gnome with the wayland backend for years at this point and I can't really figure out anything that's missing.
- sillystuff 9mo ago
  Accessibility is apparently a big problem with wayland. E.g., the most popular / ?only? app that supports hardware eye trackers on Linux does not work with wayland, and states that it likely never will as wayland does not provide what it needs to add support (it is also the most popular app for voice/noise control). Even basic things like screen readers are apparently still an issue with wayland. Without a strong accessibility story, systems running wayland would have been banned at my last employer (a college). Personally, I have a 3200x2400 e-ink monitor that has a bezel that covers the outer few columns of pixels. I use a custom modeline to exclude those columns from use. And, a fractional scaling of .603x.5 on this now 3184x2400 monitor to get 1920x1200 effective resolution. Zero idea how to accomplish this with wayland-- I do not think it is possible, but if anyone knows a way, I am all ears. I ran into, at least, ten issues without solutions/work-arounds (like the issue with my monitor) when I tried to switch this year, after getting a new laptop. Reverted to a functional, and productively familiar, setup with X.
  - pezezin 9mo ago
    I don't know about other DE, but at least with Plasma there is a "overscan" option to compensate for hidden borders.
    - sillystuff 9mo ago
      Thanks for that. Overscan is not supported in wlroots yet. Seems the issue is that handling overscan is display driver specific. But, now I know the keyword to look for.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo ago
  Autoclickers and screen macros on Wayland are all janky
nish__ 9mo ago
> Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need What's missing?
- quantummagic 9mo ago
  Ads in the start menu, forced screenshotting of all your activity, and AI integration in every aspect of the desktop experience.
  - nish__ 9mo ago
    lol
- gen2brain 9mo ago
  Window positioning? You cannot position the window, you cannot send a hint, nothing? So my pop-up with GTK4 will randomly be placed somewhere, anywhere, without any control. OK, GTK4 went further and also removed popups without the parent, so you hack that with an invisible anchor window and then write platform-specific code for sane platforms that CAN, of course, move the window. And let's not talk about window icons that you have to put somewhere on the file system?
  - bloppe 9mo ago
    It's not technically behind on window positioning. Rather, it was a deliberate choice not to support it. You can very reasonably object to that, but it is sorta a necessary measure to prevent clickjacking.
    - gen2brain 9mo ago
      Did such an attack with crazy moving windows happen in the past?
      - hanikesn 9mo ago
        It does on Android

by ccakes 9mo ago

drpixie 9mo ago

I thought for a long time that rather than move to Wayland, we could come up with a tidied-up version of X. Sounds like a good and useful project, I hope it progresses.

reactordev 9mo ago
I thought this too and originally thought that’s what Wayland was going to do but it went off and did its own thing. I’m all for an X12.
- sho_hn 9mo ago
  An X12 was briefly considered by the community before adopting Wayland: https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/ https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/ If you take the time to read through that (very partial) list of cruft and footguns in X11 it probably makes it a little easier to understand why a clean-slate approach was able to attract momentum and why many hands-on involved developers were relatively tired of X11. Critics would of course respond that backwards compatibility is worth the effort and rewrites are often the wrong call, etc. It's the Python 2/3 debate and many others.
  - glzone1 9mo ago
    Python 3 was actively antagonistic to Python 2 code for no reason other than to lecture us about how we were doing things wrong, writing code to support 2 and 3 to help transition was dumb etc etc. For example, in python 2 you could explicitly mark unicode text with u"...". That was actively BLOCKED with python 3.0 which supposedly was about unicode support! The irony was insane, they could of just no-oped the u"". I got totally sick of the "expert" language designers with no real world code shipping responsibilities lecturing me. Every post about this stuff was met by comments from pedantic idiots. So every string had to have a helper function around it. Total and absolute garbage. They still haven't explained to my satisifaction why not support u"..." to allow a transition more easily to 3. Luckily sanity started prevailing around 3.5 and we started to see a progression - whoever was behind this should be thanked. The clueless unicode everything was walked back and we got % for bytes so you could work with network protocols again (where unicode would be STUPID to force given the installed base). We got u"" back. By 3.6 we got back to reasonable path handling on windows and the 3 benefits started to come without antagonistic approaches / regressions from 2. But that was about 8 years? So that burnt a lot of the initial excitement.
    - reactordev 9mo ago
      There’s a reason they’re called Pythonistas It’s always drama and they’re the center of it. (I’m joking of course, Merry Christmas)
    - someguyiguess 9mo ago
      Python is really one of the worst designed languages. It always baffles me that people recommend it to beginners.
      - zbentley 9mo ago
        Except for all the others (that anyone uses)…
      - IshKebab 9mo ago
        I dunno there's a lot to pick from when it comes to "worst designed"! It's definitely not well designed though. And I agree about recommending it to beginners. Sure, a for-loop and a simple function look very friendly and easy, but good luck explaining to them why they can't import from a file in a different directory...
      - cons0le 9mo ago
        15 years ago I tried it and got that path error. 1 year ago I tried again and still got the same error. I'm well aware that it's simple enough to fix. But I was baffled that the same error was still there.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago
      > Python 3 was actively antagonistic to Python 2 code for no reason other than to lecture us about how we were doing things wrong, writing code to support 2 and 3 to help transition was dumb etc etc. > [...] > By 3.6 we got back to reasonable path handling on windows and the 3 benefits started to come without antagonistic approaches / regressions from 2. But that was about 8 years? So that burnt a lot of the initial excitement. So it's a great analogy. Wayland started out proudly proclaiming that it intentionally didn't support features in the name of "security" but everyone should "upgrade" because this was totally better, and has been very slowly discovering that actually all the stuff it willfully dropped was useful and has mostly evolved back to near feature parity with Xorg.
  - reactordev 9mo ago
    I’ve been here since the beginning. I remember Usenet. X11 was built for multi-user terminals a kin to today’s Microsoft VDI garbage. There’s some good. A lot of bad. And some WTF in there.
  - PunchyHamster 9mo ago
    Realistically rewrite would keep X11 compatibility layer and just do same wayland did, make new protocol. Just... without all that mess that turned out to be at best +/-, at worst outright negative causing problems for everyone involved. And near all of the "advantages" are "the server is built from scratch" not "the protocol was the limitation"
- bdhcuidbebe 9mo ago
  Be the change you want to see. Also happy winter solstice.
viraptor 9mo ago
It was always an option, but "just" needed someone to dedicate all their time to it and pull in a group of long term maintainers. The real question is what will happen with the project in 2 years and will it be stable for day to day use.
- bsder 9mo ago
  The fact that you can "assume Vulkan exists" helps a lot (both hardware and software renderers exist). Do remember--Wayland predates Vulkan by almost a full decade. In addition, you can offload OpenGL compatibility to Zink (again leaning into Vulkan). > pull in a group of long term maintainers. "Use new cool language" seems to be a prerequisite for this nowadays ... At least Zig is very compatible with C.
  - throwaway92841 9mo ago
    You can't "assume Vulkan exists". Any pre-2016 hardware won't have proper hardware support for Vulkan and that's a lot of hardware still in use. Software renderers are unworthy of any serious consideration due to the perfomance drawbacks. Just use OpenGL. I don't know when this trend to overcomplicate everything using Vulkan began, but I hate it.
    - MindSpunk 9mo ago
      Nvidia had a driver for Vulkan for Kepler which launched in 2012, AMD had support all the way back to GCN 1.0 (also 2012). Intel did have issues supporting it, I can't recall if it was for hardware reasons or just lack of desire for a driver. Vulkan has substantial advantages for multi-threaded code, as well as exposing the underlying asynchronous nature of running code on the GPU. The kind of thing you want to be able to control with a desktop compositor where controlling vsync and present timing is very important.
    - bmacho 9mo ago
      There are Xorg and XLibre for pre-2016 hardware.

redeeman 9mo ago

BS, windows and macos cant even do proper window managing for a start, and then it just goes downwards from there on.. You can perhaps install various weird third party things, but it does not come with it by default. If you took people who absolutely never tried any computing, and gave them macos, windows, and for example Plasma, they would NOT consider windows or macos to be ready for the desktop. If you go 15 years back, even way more so. even in the early 2000s, windows was so hilariously crappy that you had to make floppy disks to even get to install the thing. If PCs didnt come preloaded with windows, regular users would never ever be able to install it, versus the relative ease a typical linux distribution was to install. This is also one of the large reasons that when their windows slowed down due to being a piece of shit with 1000000 toolbars, people threw it out and bought a new, despite the fact that a reinstall would have solved it.

MangoToupe 9mo ago
[flagged]
- Arch-TK 9mo ago
  I don't use a Mac, but have you ever used Windows? I mean, maybe you have, but if you are not fussy then at worst MacOS is quirky and Windows and Linux are identical and merely have different icons. If you pay a little bit of attention you will notice that on linux things seem more flexible and intuitive. If you are very finnicky, there is nothing that comes close to X11 window managers when it comes to window management flexibility, innovation and power.
  - II2II 9mo ago
    Windows allows you to launch applications from a menu or via search. You can switch between windows with a mouse or keyboard shortcuts. Windows can either be floating, arranged in pseudo-tiled layers, or full screen. KDE can pretty much do the same under Wayland. Ditto for Gnome under Wayland, albeit to a lesser degree. That covers the bases for most people. X11 window managers were a mixed bag. While there were a few standouts, most of the variation was in the degree to which they could be configured and how they were configured. There may be fewer compositors for Wayland because of the difficulty in developing them, but the ones that do exist do standout.

reppap 9mo ago

I don't really understand what is supposedly missing in Wayland for productivity users? At work I have been using gnome with the wayland backend for years at this point and I can't really figure out anything that's missing.

sillystuff 9mo ago
Accessibility is apparently a big problem with wayland. E.g., the most popular / ?only? app that supports hardware eye trackers on Linux does not work with wayland, and states that it likely never will as wayland does not provide what it needs to add support (it is also the most popular app for voice/noise control). Even basic things like screen readers are apparently still an issue with wayland. Without a strong accessibility story, systems running wayland would have been banned at my last employer (a college). Personally, I have a 3200x2400 e-ink monitor that has a bezel that covers the outer few columns of pixels. I use a custom modeline to exclude those columns from use. And, a fractional scaling of .603x.5 on this now 3184x2400 monitor to get 1920x1200 effective resolution. Zero idea how to accomplish this with wayland-- I do not think it is possible, but if anyone knows a way, I am all ears. I ran into, at least, ten issues without solutions/work-arounds (like the issue with my monitor) when I tried to switch this year, after getting a new laptop. Reverted to a functional, and productively familiar, setup with X.
- pezezin 9mo ago
  I don't know about other DE, but at least with Plasma there is a "overscan" option to compensate for hidden borders.
  - sillystuff 9mo ago
    Thanks for that. Overscan is not supported in wlroots yet. Seems the issue is that handling overscan is display driver specific. But, now I know the keyword to look for.
OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo ago
Autoclickers and screen macros on Wayland are all janky

nish__ 9mo ago

> Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need What's missing?

quantummagic 9mo ago
Ads in the start menu, forced screenshotting of all your activity, and AI integration in every aspect of the desktop experience.
- nish__ 9mo ago
  lol
gen2brain 9mo ago
Window positioning? You cannot position the window, you cannot send a hint, nothing? So my pop-up with GTK4 will randomly be placed somewhere, anywhere, without any control. OK, GTK4 went further and also removed popups without the parent, so you hack that with an invisible anchor window and then write platform-specific code for sane platforms that CAN, of course, move the window. And let's not talk about window icons that you have to put somewhere on the file system?
- bloppe 9mo ago
  It's not technically behind on window positioning. Rather, it was a deliberate choice not to support it. You can very reasonably object to that, but it is sorta a necessary measure to prevent clickjacking.
  - gen2brain 9mo ago
    Did such an attack with crazy moving windows happen in the past?
    - hanikesn 9mo ago
      It does on Android