KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future

Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate.

“In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!”

Nate’s Original Blog Post

Kristof12, (edited )
@Kristof12@lemmy.ml avatar

Trying to gaslight others? nice

Ephera,

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.

bitcrafter, (edited )

Alternatively, instead of reading a Phoronix article that has a couple of short snippets from a much longer blog post, you can read the original blog post yourself to see the full context.

Edit: Also, it is worth noting that the author of the original blog post had previously written another relatively recent post criticizing the way in which Wayland was developed, so it’s not like they are refusing to see its problems.

IHeartBadCode,
@IHeartBadCode@kbin.social avatar

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:

Some_Sort_Of_Return handle_copy(wl_surface *srf, wl_buffer* buf) {
//Completely ignore this
return 0;
}

Some_Sort_Of_Return handle_paste(wl_surface *srf, wl_buffer* buf) {
//Completely ignore this
return 0;
}

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 know, maybe I'm just weird like that.

aard,
@aard@kyu.de avatar

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”

mr_MADAFAKA,
@mr_MADAFAKA@lemmy.ml avatar

Oh boy, the Phoronix’s comment section 💀

Rustmilian, (edited )
@Rustmilian@lemmy.world avatar

Phoronix’s comment section is usually full of trolls, shills, and people afflicted with brain rot. So I don’t even bother reading them anymore.

lntl,

Wayland developer says X11 is bad, not Wayland

Vincent,

Notably absent: X11 developer saying Wayland is bad, not X11.

bluGill,

Mostly they are the same people.

Vincent, (edited )

Well, yes, except that those X11 developers agree that Wayland is better.

jjlinux,

Nobody, other than you and them, cares. Have a good day.

danielfgom,
@danielfgom@lemmy.world avatar

Undoubtedly Wayland is the way forward and I think it’s a good thing. However I wouldn’t piss all over X because it served us well for many years. My LMDE 6 still runs X and probably will for the next 2 years at least because both the Mint Team and Debian team don’t rush into things. They are taking it slow, testing Wayland to make sure no-one’s system breaks when they switch to Wayland.

This is the best approach. Eventually it will all be Wayland but I never understood why this is such an issue. Like any tech it’s progress, no need for heated debates. It’s just a windowing system after all.

chitak166,

Eh, I always discredit people when they say X is bad.

It’s been around for over 20 years. That kind of longevity should be praised.

Omega_Jimes,

I love Wayland until I don’t. I honestly don’t think about it, it gets out of my way and my system is stable, until I go to use something like scrcpy that just doesn’t work at all. Luckily, the amount of things that straight up don’t work is shrinking.

Dio9sys,

It’s super impressive to see Wayland having its big breakthrough moment. I remember reading about Wayland 10 years ago and worrying it was going to end up as a dead project.

taanegl,

Wayland on an Intel iGPU runs flawlessly and has for several years. However, that’s a matter of drivers. AMD is in the forefront regarding having dGPU support, while NVIDIA is playing catch-up.

In any case, the future is bright.

DumbAceDragon,
@DumbAceDragon@sh.itjust.works avatar

Really looking forward to the day nvidia drivers properly support wayland. Getting tons of bugs, stutters, and general usability issues with plasma wayland on my 3060. X11 just works on the other hand, even with multiple monitors running at different refresh rates (something a friend of mine said X11 doesn’t work well with). But I want all the nice benefits wayland offers.

MonkderZweite, (edited )

Because Wayland is only a protocol and you write the platform yourself (be it badly or not).

Would be cool if the reference implementation (Weston) were not an unusable monolith but a small plugin-based thing.

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