6 ms·

Wayland was simpler because it was just a compositor. It meant people interested in graphics acceleration could focus on just that, iterating faster without the

by wahern 27d ago

Wayland was simpler because it was just a compositor. It meant people interested in graphics acceleration could focus on just that, iterating faster without the friction of the rest of the stack. But now that the Wayland ecosystem has to reinvent everything else, it's clearly at least as much work, if not more so. The initial switch moved the tightly knit rendering developers to a better local optimum, at the expense of a worse global optimum.

BadBadJellyBean 27d ago
It forces some kind of modularity. Maybe that is a good thing. We don't have all features of X11 in Wayland but we also have features in Wayland that are missing in X11. I have been on Wayland for a while now and I can't say I am really suffering. There are some tings I'd like improved further but the protocol is evolving all the time. I think we'll get there. Also the decision is already made by the big distros anyways. They seem to be mostly happy.
- wahern 27d ago
  > It forces some kind of modularity. Wayland is the complete opposite of modular; that's why the compositor has to handle everything. The claimed problem with X11 was it was too modular, easy for different clients to control various aspects of the environment, but perhaps too easy, lacking a security policy framework to limit client access. (Or at least a framework that was fully baked. Wayland put an end to such initiatives.) The lack of modularity in Wayland has been widening the rift between the desktop environments. It's as-if KDE and GNOME each forked X11 and went their own ways.
  - throwaway84932 27d ago
    > Wayland is the complete opposite of modular Not true. Wayland simply cuts out the middleman. Making the compositor the display server is one of the best things Wayland did. This brings so many advantages, such as true tear-free graphics and lower input latency.
    - account42 26d ago
      The middle man was there to make sure everyone understood each other. Now simple things like taking a screenshot requires programs to speak multiple different languages.
      - throwaway84932 26d ago
        Again, not true: if you want to take a screenshot in a generic way, you have to go through the XDG portal API, which is generic across all the compositors that support them, i.e. most of them.
        wahern 26d ago
        The XDG Portal framework is obscenely complex (PipeWire, D-BUS over separate channels, etc), still requires each individual compositor and other components to specifically implement various aspects for things like screen sharing, and there's a ton of broken edges between the myriad interacting components. All-in-all the complete opposite of modular. And that's the point. X11 provided a framework for all of this. Not perfect, but deliberately extensible. The Wayland alternatives are so much more complicated and brittle, and have to work around the limitations of Wayland. The effort expended by groups like freedesktop.org to architect and standardize new features would have been (and was) so much more productive in the X11 world.
        throwaway84932 26d ago
        I understand where you're coming from, but there is no turning back at this point. Sure, you could still run dwm on Xorg or Xlibre and pretend Wayland doesn't exist, but the reality is that the vast majority of Linux distributions and desktop environments have already committed to this stack, and application developers are going to target these portals. There's also talk of D-Bus eventually being replaced with Varlink [0], showing that this whole ecosystem is still very much a moving target. What feels like endless breakage and friction right now is really just the noise of a massive architectural migration in progress. Eventually, the dust will settle, the APIs will stabilize, and the whole stack will become boring, reliable, and really good. That is how I prefer to look at it. If you want to see things move in a specific direction or address any particular problem, the best path forward is to get involved and participate in the projects that interest you. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsVhkz2Xl0E&t=1415s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsVhkz2Xl0E&t=1415s

by wahern 27d ago

BadBadJellyBean 27d ago

It forces some kind of modularity. Maybe that is a good thing. We don't have all features of X11 in Wayland but we also have features in Wayland that are missing in X11. I have been on Wayland for a while now and I can't say I am really suffering. There are some tings I'd like improved further but the protocol is evolving all the time. I think we'll get there. Also the decision is already made by the big distros anyways. They seem to be mostly happy.

wahern 27d ago
> It forces some kind of modularity. Wayland is the complete opposite of modular; that's why the compositor has to handle everything. The claimed problem with X11 was it was too modular, easy for different clients to control various aspects of the environment, but perhaps too easy, lacking a security policy framework to limit client access. (Or at least a framework that was fully baked. Wayland put an end to such initiatives.) The lack of modularity in Wayland has been widening the rift between the desktop environments. It's as-if KDE and GNOME each forked X11 and went their own ways.
- throwaway84932 27d ago
  > Wayland is the complete opposite of modular Not true. Wayland simply cuts out the middleman. Making the compositor the display server is one of the best things Wayland did. This brings so many advantages, such as true tear-free graphics and lower input latency.
  - account42 26d ago
    The middle man was there to make sure everyone understood each other. Now simple things like taking a screenshot requires programs to speak multiple different languages.
    - throwaway84932 26d ago
      Again, not true: if you want to take a screenshot in a generic way, you have to go through the XDG portal API, which is generic across all the compositors that support them, i.e. most of them.
      - wahern 26d ago
        The XDG Portal framework is obscenely complex (PipeWire, D-BUS over separate channels, etc), still requires each individual compositor and other components to specifically implement various aspects for things like screen sharing, and there's a ton of broken edges between the myriad interacting components. All-in-all the complete opposite of modular. And that's the point. X11 provided a framework for all of this. Not perfect, but deliberately extensible. The Wayland alternatives are so much more complicated and brittle, and have to work around the limitations of Wayland. The effort expended by groups like freedesktop.org to architect and standardize new features would have been (and was) so much more productive in the X11 world.
        throwaway84932 26d ago
        I understand where you're coming from, but there is no turning back at this point. Sure, you could still run dwm on Xorg or Xlibre and pretend Wayland doesn't exist, but the reality is that the vast majority of Linux distributions and desktop environments have already committed to this stack, and application developers are going to target these portals. There's also talk of D-Bus eventually being replaced with Varlink [0], showing that this whole ecosystem is still very much a moving target. What feels like endless breakage and friction right now is really just the noise of a massive architectural migration in progress. Eventually, the dust will settle, the APIs will stabilize, and the whole stack will become boring, reliable, and really good. That is how I prefer to look at it. If you want to see things move in a specific direction or address any particular problem, the best path forward is to get involved and participate in the projects that interest you. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsVhkz2Xl0E&t=1415s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsVhkz2Xl0E&t=1415s