Every change will bring it’s fair share of complainers, not much we can do about that. LILO to GRUB, SysV to systemd and now X11 to Wayland. No one is forcing your hand (unless you use a pre-packaged distro like Ubuntu/Fedora, in which case you go with whatever the distro provides), keep using X11 if you want stability, if you wanna dip your toes in bleeding-edge software and increase it’s userbase to show hardware manufacturers that their drivers need to be updated (I’m looking at you, NVIDIA) then feel free to mess around.
Eventually the day will come when Wayland apps will simply not launch on X11 and you’ll migrate too.
In case of Gnome it was addressed, just by different people. Gnome 2 continues to live on as MATE, so anyone who doesn't like Gnome 3 can use it instead.
I don’t understand why anyone ever expects a different outcome. They fork something that has quite some investment into the original version. How do they expect to keep up?
There were news about Ubuntu doing it too some time ago, maybe they realized it’s not feasible yet. I don’t follow their development as I don’t use those distros
Go tell Fedora that then lol. They want it gone to the point where Nate is telling users who want X to stay away on that post. Xwayland I believe will still be around though.
They’ll recant after their usage drops to a fraction. This move makes zero sense no matter how you look at it. As a generalist distro it’s too early to drop X.
If they want to become a niche distro whose only claim to fame is “we only pack Plasma 6”, big whoop, like there’s any shortage of that. What kind of distro defines itself by what it does not offer? And is that the kind of distro that Fedora aims to be?
lmfao Wayland is already ready for over 90% of use cases. Hell, GNOME has been wayland-default since twenty-fucking-sixteen if I remember my dates right. You’re overestimating the value X.Org provides.
It was not sysv to systemD, and it was forced (by making udev not work without it).
Other then nvidia, wayland is still missing some protocols (example: what virtual desktop you want your window to be on). But those protocols are (still) being worked on. And you will always be able to run x11 programs on wayland.
The advantages of wayland are a more direct path to hardware, and trowing away lots of code.
I’d say that’s already becoming the case in a few places. Hyprland isn’t just “Wayland good”, it’s “You should use Wayland good”.
Yes, I know the devs behind it act like pissants. That’s bad and I’m sorry for liking their software. I use Emacs too and RMS was kind of an asshole. Hell, I use Lemmy even though one of the devs has slighted me on more than one occasion.
… has gotten some help and is now a pretty well-adjusted human being, who still tells right wing trolls to go suck it, and still tells paid professionals that they should have known better when they should have known better, but in language that isn’t abusive.
I think you’re like 5 years behind on this. It’s true, just read up on it. Linus took time off after criticism for his language got too much. And he improved by a lot. You’ll find no more name calling directed at contributors after a certain date.
I daily drive Hyprland too, there are some shortcomings with how the mouse behaves with XWayland but I don’t think it’s a Hyprland issue and Gamescope remedies that problem so overall, it’s a great experience.
KDE devs making gestures only available on wayland because memes (there is literally a 3rd party github script to achieve the same thing on X11)
X11 being reliable because Xorg devs aren’t stupid
My real issue with Wayland is that it took like 15 years to become acceptably usable. I’ll switch once XFCE moves over in several years, but until then, there is no incentive for worse performance and non exitestent support.
Exactly. For 10 years the groupthink was that Wayland doesn’t offer anything interesting and X is just fine. Now suddenly everyone who’s still using X is stupid. Amazing what couple of memes can do.
it’s that wayland wasn’t ready, and now is ready. it took a long time, because building a new protocol like that takes a while if you want to do it well, and lots of coordination between many people. it still has issues, but they’re being adressed. slowly, because x11 was full of half-assed solutions done quickly, and they don’t want that to happen again
It’s not about reliability though, X11 is hard to maintain and the devs themselves feel burned out. Wayland at least offloads some of that burden to the desktops
X11 being reliable because Xorg devs aren’t stupid
xorg devs are wayland devs. nowadays, most of the people that used to work on xorg now work on wayland. they’re not stupid, they realised that x11 is too dated for modern systems (see asahi linux) and now are working on a replacement
I don’t see why we need convincing that Wayland’s better. Most Linux users either use it currently or are possibly looking to switch in the future. The other people who are not are likely going to use X for eternity
I think real X11 fanboys are almost non-existent. Wayland wouldn't be so rejected if it wasn't that it still has a lot of compatibility issues, I think most people just want everything to work and don't care whose fault it is.
Yeah I don’t get why some people would think sticking to X is fanboyism. Nobody likes X, let alone love it. Most people’s relation to X is pragmatic, it’s “it works and does everything I need”.
If anything, fanboyism is telling people they have to use Wayland when it doesn’t yet work for what they need it to do.
Just keep improving the damn thing and people will switch when it’s ready. There’s no convincing needed.
I remember some 10-15 years ago when I’d look at the y windows website every couple of months hoping for some news of progress, simply because I was sick of x11 being so crappy. I hated it, it was so fiddly, it didn’t work right, I just wanted something that worked.
So you can imagine how happy I was when Wayland started taking off. Here was the promise of something better, something that just worked, it sounded amazing. And yet, today I’m still running xorg and I will be for the foreseeable future.
The reason is simply that in the time passed xorg just became usable, I don’t have to think about it, it works reliability, it has all the features I need and I hardly ever have to touch it. Meanwhile, I log into my Wayland session and instantly 3 or 4 of the applications I use daily either don’t work or act weird. I go and try and fix the issues and I’m told to just accept it, or that I actually don’t exist because Wayland works perfectly for everyone. And I’m not even using an Nvidia card, just plain Radeon.
So I quit and go back to what works. Maybe in a couple of years, until then: no thanks.
I had to force it to run in xwayland because in wayland it no longer remembers window positions, so with wayland it was opening all my windows in a big pile on the current desktop, instead of putting them in the positions and on the desktops they belong.
That sounds more like a compositor problem - typically a client should not have control over where windows are placed, and that X11 allowed that got heavily abused with negative impact on UI. Wayland fortunately fixed that, so it is now up to the compositor where to place windows. Those can send hints, but the compositor is free to ignore them.
In your situation your compositor should remember where to stick the windows.
And if I ever browse away from that page and forget to return to it before closing firefox…
This has a million caveats and isn’t even close to a solution for how I use firefox. Each desktop has their own windows and I want them to stay there because the tabs open are relevant to that desktop.
Until my distro forces wayland on me I’ll stick with xorg+XFCE. I’ve played with sway and hyprland but I need my application choices to actually work well. (no I’m not going to list them).
As for the cube desktop in the image: We had this with compiz and learnt then that this is pointless.
There’s a big difference between Working on vs is working. They’re Working on a full port, other than that you have preliminary access that’s not intended for casual users; only developers, tinkers/enthusiast & testers.
This design document is intended for Xfce developers to begin brainstorming ideas for future development. This is a work in progress and does not imply any future implementation commitments.
No blame on the XFCE devs because they’re trying to get a lot done with few people, but XFCE just managed to transition to GTK3, I wouldn’t hold my breath for comprehensive Wayland support any time soon.
They’ve made great strides towards Wayland support, considering that the vast majority of the work is being done by 1 guy.
It’s not just a lack of devs that’s contributing to slow development time either, it’s also the fact their goal is to port every single component to native Wayland without relying on Xwayland at all; which is obviously going to take way longer than just porting the essentials and saying “fuck it, use Xwayland”.
I think we may be looking at these wrong. Yes there’s a visible throughput/latency improvement here but what about other factors? Power savings? Cache efficiency? CPU cycles saved for other co-running processes?
These are going to be pretty hard to measure without an x86_64 simulator. So I don’t fault them for not including such benches. But there might be more to the story here.
No, they’re discussing the way forward and what they think makes sense. In fact, they’re even clearly stating that there will be pain, because Wayland intentionally does less than X11. And they’re encouraging people with unsolved pain points to speak up.
One of the specific issues from those who've worked with Wayland and is echoed here in Nate's other post that you mentioned.
Wayland has not been without its problems, it’s true. Because it was invented by shell-shocked X developers, in my opinion it went too far in the other direction.
I tend to disagree. Had say the XDG stuff been specified in protocol, implementation of handlers for some of that XDG stuff would have been required in things that honestly wouldn't have needed them. I don't think infotainment systems need a concept of copy/paste but having to write:
Is really missing the point of starting fresh, is bytes in the binary that didn't need to be there, and while my example is pretty minimal for shits and giggles IRL would have been a great way to introduce "randomness" and "breakage" for those just wanting to ignore this entire aspect.
But one of those agree to disagree. I think the level of hands off Wayland went was the correct amount. And now that we have things like wlroots even better, because if want to start there you can now start there and add what you need. XDG is XDG and if that's what you want, you can have it. But if you want your own way (because eff working nicely with GNOME and KDE, if that's your cup of tea) you've got all the rope in the world you will ever need.
I get what Nate is saying, but things like XDG are just what happened with ICCCM. And when Wayland came in super lightweight, it allowed the inevitably of XDG to have lots of room to specify. ICCCM had to contort to fit around X. I don't know, but the way I like to think about it is like unsalted butter. Yes, my potato is likely going to need salt and butter. But I like unsalted butter because then if I want a pretty light salt potato, I'm not stuck with starting from salted butter's level of salt.
I don’t think infotainment systems need a concept of copy/paste but having to write:
Having lived through the whole “phones don’t need copy and paste debate”, which fortunately got solved by now having it everywhere I’m in the camp “just stick that everywhere, just in case somebody might use it one day”
Would be interesting if this is more on Firefox side, or on compositor side. I’ve been running Firefox in Wayland for about 9 months now, without any issues.
this is a wayland issue. Due to how wayland works, it cannot drop messages, this means if the messages stop being accepted (IE. the program becomes very slow and not very responsive) the application will wind up dying. EEVDF helped resolve a lot of these issues. but they arent gone yet.
a fairly easy replication cause is to start a large rust project compile since cargo will thread to oblivion if it gets the chance, then use the PC on wayland. Applications can frequently die, Firefox, MPV, Kate, gnome web, chromium, games, etc. it also doesn’t matter what compositor you use right now as gnome, kde sway all share the issue
EEVDF really does help stop a lot of these crashing though
You’re describing Wayland running into issues due to overall high system load, and not been given enough scheduler time to accept messages?
edit: This issue? gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/…/159 - didn’t find anything else matching the description, and personally have never seen that, both on my low specs notebook or my workstation, which probably counts as higher spec.
correct, this is the same issue, this generally really only happens with a sustained all core workload that will consistently leave you cpu at 100%, since if it’s not sustained, the kernel will allot some time to the programs, and the crash wont happen
I agree. The proxy solution they’re proposing seems like a band-aid on a fundamental design issue to me. It’s easier to just tack yet another library onto a big project than to refactor large amounts of code. This is exactly why a lot of software is getting more and more shit.
Also this is the kind of issues Wayland will be facing now that it’s starting to see widespread adoption, issues that arise from more and more complex situations created by interconnecting more apps with it in more ways.
How the devs handle this will be crucial and imo it can make or break the project in the long run. It’s one thing to successfully run a hobby project at a small scale, it’s another to shoulder the entire Linux desktop for the foreseeable future. That’s the bar that X had to meet; if Wayland intends to be the Linux desktop it has to step up. “Not our problem, deal with it outside Wayland” will not do.
while this is good on theory, when your CPU is being absolutely hammered, you need to re-adjust priorities to make a system responsive again, it’s actually not a simple thing to do without a context aware scheduler. Even though EEVDF is pretty good, it still struggles some times
Ah. For me it’s not the search bar only but also if I select text and press Ctrl+C/press context menu Copy as well.
Interestingly, if sites put something in the clipboard (eg. Mastodon toot Copy link button) it works anywhere else.
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