8 ms·

For me wayland offers only downsides, without any upsides. I feel the general idea behind it (pushing all complexity and work onto other layers) is broken. I'll

by jgb1984 9mo ago

For me wayland offers only downsides, without any upsides. I feel the general idea behind it (pushing all complexity and work onto other layers) is broken. I'll stick to xorg and openbox for many years to come.

benrutter 9mo ago
I think then big part is maintenance, xorg doesn't look likely to be maintained long into the future in the way Wayland will be. And a lot of the Xorg maintainers are now working in Wayland. So good or bad idea, Wayland is slowly shifting to being the default in virtue of being the most maintained up to date compositor.
- safety1st 9mo ago
  There's actually a very active fork of Xorg called Xlibre, started by a former Xorg contributor, which seeks to "revitalize and modernize" X: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver?tab=readme-ov-file https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver?tab=readme-ov-file
  - Hendrikto 9mo ago
    This guy started that Xlibre fork over throwing a fit because he was told not to break Xorg with his contributions, and he ranted that he just wants to be able to merge whatever he wants. I would not trust the stability of that fork at all.
    - safety1st 9mo ago
      Looks to me like he's a belligerent personality, but probably not wrong when he says Redhat has an agenda that involves suppressing progress on Xorg and forcing Wayland on users instead. I was open minded toward Wayland when the project was started... in 2008. We are 18 years down the road now. It has failed to deliver a usable piece of software for the desktop. That's long enough for me to consider it a failed project. If it still exists, it's probably for the wrong reasons (or at the least, reasons unrelated to any version of desktop Linux I want to run, like perhaps it has use in the embedded space).
      - GCUMstlyHarmls 9mo ago
        Taking the proposition as true, what goal does Redhat have in "forcing wayland on users"? I am asking this in good faith, I literally naively do not understand what the "bad" bit is. Like, ok, its 2030 and X11 is dead, no one works on it anymore and 90% of Linux users use Wayland, what did they gain? I know they did employ Pottering but not anymore, and AFAIK they contribute a non-trivial amount of code up stream to, Linux, Gnome? KDE? If more users are on wayland they can pressure Gnome to ... what? I sort of get an argument around systemd and this, in that they can push I guess their target feature sets into systemd and force the rest of the eco-system to follow them, but, well I guess I don't get that argument either, cause they can already put any special sauce they want in Redhat's shipped systemd implementation and if its good it will be picked up, if its bad it wont be? I guess, if Redhat maintains systemd & wayland, then they could choke out community contributions by ignoring them or whatever, but wouldn't we just see forks? Arch would just ship with cooler-systemd or whatever?
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
        simoncion 9mo ago
        > ...what goal does Redhat have in "forcing wayland on users"? The same goal any group of savvy corporate employees has when their marquee project has proved to be far more difficult, taken way longer, and required far more resources than anticipated to get within artillery distance of its originally-stated goal? I've personally seen this sort of thing play out several times during my tenure in the corporate environment.
        GCUMstlyHarmls 9mo ago
        I honestly dont know what that means, I've never worked in a big company/corporation. Try and disown it? How does that fit with xlibres anti-corporate control stance? I guess it they push wayland then drop it, we're left with X11 ignored and a non-financially supported alternative? I guess I just don't get how the third E in EEE plays out in an open source environment.
    - sylware 9mo ago
      I build my own distro, I build myself Xorg: I did witness his Xorg breakage all over the place. I did welcome happily the revert of all his code.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
  - jeltz 9mo ago
    There is also Phoenix: https://git.dec05eba.com/phoenix/about/ https://git.dec05eba.com/phoenix/about/
    - hulitu 9mo ago
      Current state Phoenix is not ready to be used yet.
- franga2000 9mo ago
  Wayland is not a compositor. Being more maintaned than Xorg doesn't mean anything because wayland doesn't do a tenth of the things Xorg did. What used to be maintained in one codebase by Xorg devs is now duplicated in at least three major compositors, each with their own portal implementation and who knows what else. And those are primarily maintaned by desktop environment devs who also have the whole rest of the DE to worry about.
terribleperson 9mo ago
Moving complexity from the layer you only have one of, to the layers where there are many, many competing pieces of software, was an absolutely bonkers decision. There's just no way to make that make sense.
- jauntywundrkind 9mo ago
  It's hard to imagine a statement that could fly more in the face of open source. It's absolutely an essential characteristic for long term survival, for long term excellence. To not be married to one specific implementation forever. Especially in open source! What is that organizational model for this Authoritarian path, how are you going to - as Wayland successfully has - get every display server person onboard? Who would had the say on what goes into The Wayland Server? What would the rules be? Wayland is the only thing that makes any sense at all. A group of peers, fellow implementers, each striving for better, who come together to define protocols. This is what made the internet amazing what made the web the most successful media platform, is what creates the possibility for ongoing excellence. Not being bound to fixed decisions is an option most smart companies lust but somehow when Wayland vs X comes up, everyone super wants there to be one and only one path, set forth three decades ago that no one can ever really overhaul or redo. It's so unclear to me how people can be so negative and so short and so mean on Wayland. There's no viable alternative organization model for Authoritarian display servers. And if somehow you did get people signed up, this fantasy, there's such a load of pretense that it would have cured all ills? I don't get it.

by jgb1984 9mo ago

benrutter 9mo ago

I think then big part is maintenance, xorg doesn't look likely to be maintained long into the future in the way Wayland will be. And a lot of the Xorg maintainers are now working in Wayland. So good or bad idea, Wayland is slowly shifting to being the default in virtue of being the most maintained up to date compositor.

safety1st 9mo ago
There's actually a very active fork of Xorg called Xlibre, started by a former Xorg contributor, which seeks to "revitalize and modernize" X: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver?tab=readme-ov-file https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver?tab=readme-ov-file
- Hendrikto 9mo ago
  This guy started that Xlibre fork over throwing a fit because he was told not to break Xorg with his contributions, and he ranted that he just wants to be able to merge whatever he wants. I would not trust the stability of that fork at all.
  - safety1st 9mo ago
    Looks to me like he's a belligerent personality, but probably not wrong when he says Redhat has an agenda that involves suppressing progress on Xorg and forcing Wayland on users instead. I was open minded toward Wayland when the project was started... in 2008. We are 18 years down the road now. It has failed to deliver a usable piece of software for the desktop. That's long enough for me to consider it a failed project. If it still exists, it's probably for the wrong reasons (or at the least, reasons unrelated to any version of desktop Linux I want to run, like perhaps it has use in the embedded space).
    - GCUMstlyHarmls 9mo ago
      Taking the proposition as true, what goal does Redhat have in "forcing wayland on users"? I am asking this in good faith, I literally naively do not understand what the "bad" bit is. Like, ok, its 2030 and X11 is dead, no one works on it anymore and 90% of Linux users use Wayland, what did they gain? I know they did employ Pottering but not anymore, and AFAIK they contribute a non-trivial amount of code up stream to, Linux, Gnome? KDE? If more users are on wayland they can pressure Gnome to ... what? I sort of get an argument around systemd and this, in that they can push I guess their target feature sets into systemd and force the rest of the eco-system to follow them, but, well I guess I don't get that argument either, cause they can already put any special sauce they want in Redhat's shipped systemd implementation and if its good it will be picked up, if its bad it wont be? I guess, if Redhat maintains systemd & wayland, then they could choke out community contributions by ignoring them or whatever, but wouldn't we just see forks? Arch would just ship with cooler-systemd or whatever?
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      - simoncion 9mo ago
        > ...what goal does Redhat have in "forcing wayland on users"? The same goal any group of savvy corporate employees has when their marquee project has proved to be far more difficult, taken way longer, and required far more resources than anticipated to get within artillery distance of its originally-stated goal? I've personally seen this sort of thing play out several times during my tenure in the corporate environment.
        GCUMstlyHarmls 9mo ago
        I honestly dont know what that means, I've never worked in a big company/corporation. Try and disown it? How does that fit with xlibres anti-corporate control stance? I guess it they push wayland then drop it, we're left with X11 ignored and a non-financially supported alternative? I guess I just don't get how the third E in EEE plays out in an open source environment.
  - sylware 9mo ago
    I build my own distro, I build myself Xorg: I did witness his Xorg breakage all over the place. I did welcome happily the revert of all his code.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- jeltz 9mo ago
  There is also Phoenix: https://git.dec05eba.com/phoenix/about/ https://git.dec05eba.com/phoenix/about/
  - hulitu 9mo ago
    Current state Phoenix is not ready to be used yet.
franga2000 9mo ago
Wayland is not a compositor. Being more maintaned than Xorg doesn't mean anything because wayland doesn't do a tenth of the things Xorg did. What used to be maintained in one codebase by Xorg devs is now duplicated in at least three major compositors, each with their own portal implementation and who knows what else. And those are primarily maintaned by desktop environment devs who also have the whole rest of the DE to worry about.

terribleperson 9mo ago

Moving complexity from the layer you only have one of, to the layers where there are many, many competing pieces of software, was an absolutely bonkers decision. There's just no way to make that make sense.

jauntywundrkind 9mo ago
It's hard to imagine a statement that could fly more in the face of open source. It's absolutely an essential characteristic for long term survival, for long term excellence. To not be married to one specific implementation forever. Especially in open source! What is that organizational model for this Authoritarian path, how are you going to - as Wayland successfully has - get every display server person onboard? Who would had the say on what goes into The Wayland Server? What would the rules be? Wayland is the only thing that makes any sense at all. A group of peers, fellow implementers, each striving for better, who come together to define protocols. This is what made the internet amazing what made the web the most successful media platform, is what creates the possibility for ongoing excellence. Not being bound to fixed decisions is an option most smart companies lust but somehow when Wayland vs X comes up, everyone super wants there to be one and only one path, set forth three decades ago that no one can ever really overhaul or redo. It's so unclear to me how people can be so negative and so short and so mean on Wayland. There's no viable alternative organization model for Authoritarian display servers. And if somehow you did get people signed up, this fantasy, there's such a load of pretense that it would have cured all ills? I don't get it.