He ain’t wrong. Replacing X11 wasn’t a great idea and not invented here was all over Wayland, especially with the Mir proposals. SystemD also gets this accusation but people seem to like working in it/with it, and so doesn’t get the level of criticism now.
It will be really interesting to see if Wayland maintains momentum over the next few years, or if it’s own tech debt will cripple it. Ideally we want to see if we can bridge the Android divide in the GUI space imo, which Wayland may have more potential to do
I don’t really have much of an opinion about Wayland but it’s still funny to me whenever somebody using Wayland shits on X11 and then tries to share their screen on Zoom or something. If Wayland ends up being great I’ll be happy, but for now X11 just kind of works, so I don’t understand why people are so eager to switch? This isn’t to say I don’t understand the desire to build something better and more secure than X11, I’m just not sure what the end user gets out of Wayland right now. I don’t have VRR monitors and stuff, though, so maybe I’m not running into problems I would be if I wanted fancier features. Plus, I use xmonad and some other stuff right now that won’t work on Wayland, so I don’t have much incentive to try it. Hopefully everything gets Wayland updates eventually.
With those however, they never ran on Linux. This situation is different because it did run. I’ve only used Zoom once, so no clue if it worked excellently or if it was “meh”, but it sounds like it did the job before.
Regardless, it doesn’t matter if Zoom hasn’t updated their Electron to account for the Wayland changes - all people will see is that it doesn’t (or did, but no longer) works on Linux and will blame Linux instead.
Which, that is fine if we want Linux to always be a hobbyist operating system. However if we want Linux to be more accessible to people then unfortunately the ball is in our court to try to not break something as simple (or rather, what most regular users would define as simple) as this.
Isn’t screen sharing working since some time? Works even on WebEx from Firefox, can pick any window to share. Granted a few years back it didn’t work, but now it does. Maybe it’s a zoom bug… 🤔
Probably, but my exposure to Wayland has just been people complaining about how much X11 sucks and then proceeding to have more problems than everybody else.
No,I just had to deal with this myself. Most you can do is share your entire desktop in Wayland, and it’s shaky. For the first time, I had to switch to Xorg and bingo, zoom works. Fonts are actually antialiased and kerned properly for certain applications that weren’t… Really surprising.
Again, none of that is a failure of Wayland, it’s a failure of Zoom to run on Wayland. One day, and this is in the next 5 years, Wayland-only apps will refuse to run on X.Org and the situation will be reversed.
You can share screen perfectly fine under Wayland. Many apps use it fine, and even in case of Discord if you use it with a browser it’s doable.
No Wayland dev can fix an issue that originates from lack of app support. There has been many Wayland issues through the years and trust me, I know, but how do you expect them to fix Zoom? Acquire the company and take it behind the shed?
how do you expect them to fix Zoom? Acquire the company and take it behind the shed?
I mean, you could - for example - implement the interface these apps expect to exist and use with your amazing new compositor™.
This is precisely why companies just say “fuck Linux users” - instead of supporting a single operating system where everything kinda “just works” across versions for decades you have to checks notes support 20 different compositors across 2 vastly different display servers and dozens of various desktop environments and such… All for an OS that’s used by maybe 3% of your users if you’re lucky.
The interface exists. It’s up to zoom to support it. Why are you under the impression there is a technical issue? THERE IS NONE.
It’s up to Zoom to support the aforementioned interface.
Wayland’s display handling in this manner is for security, the user will be shown a permission request dialogue to let the app access the screen only if you permit it, it’s also disallowed from accessing anything except what you’ve given it permission to. This is not even a new concept, just not doable under X.
It’s also possible to create the lawless model of X under Wayland through a protocol if you desire to make one, but it makes little sense to throw away this better model just for the sake of some shitty proprietary apps who don’t care for Linux anyways
I have been using Wayland on void for a while and have no particular issue with it. There is screen sharing on stuff like zoom that isn’t working at the moment (unless you use gnome) which is a bit annoying but not really serious enough to force a change to xorg. Also Wayland has more clean code then xorg and I do like the potential it has, specially when it comes to security.
Nothing against xorg, if you can use Wayland its better imo but otherwise xorg is fine as well.
I’m going to post this thread anytime I get some random screaming about how Linux is soooo much easier than Windows.
On a more serious note, Wayland is a dumpster fire, and has been for many years now. I have up after spending a few hours dicking around in xdotool trying to get mouse gestures to work only to find out I should have been using the new ydotool…
Fuck all of that. Linux desktop really could use a benevolent dictator that has some vision and understanding what the average user wants.
This bullshit is the number 1 detractor of adoption.
Fuck all of that. Linux desktop really could use a benevolent dictator that has some vision and understanding what the average user wants.
It already has these. They're called Linux Distros. They decide the combination of packages that make up the end to end experience. And they're all aimed at different types of user.
Why are none explicitly aimed at the average Windows user? I suspect there's one major reason. The average Windows user is incapable of installing an operating system at all, and new PCs invariably come with Windows pre-installed. This isn't a sleight on them by the way, it's just that most computer users don't want or need to know how anything works. They just want to turn it on, and post some crap on Twitter/X then watch cat videos. They don't have an interest in learning how to install another operating system.
Also, a distro aimed at an average Windows user would need to be locked down hard. No choice of window manager, no choice of X11/Wayland. No ability to install applications not in the distro's carefully curated repository, plus MAYBE independently installed flatpak/other pre-packaged things. The risk of allowing otherwise creates a real risk of the system breaking on the next big upgrade. I don't think most existing Linux users would want to use such a limiting distro.
Unless Microsoft really cross a line to the extent that normal users actually don't want anything to do with windows, I cannot imagine things changing too much.
Your entire paragraph is correct in most ways and really games the issues when Linux desktop in a nutshell. None of that will work for the average user.
My point was, the next time I see someone scream just use Linux, it’s easy, I will post this.
It’s not easy, and it’s somewhat baked in due to the design goals. IMO it would be better if that were accepted instead of bashing windows and osx. I realize I’m off topic by the end there but I felt the need to elaborate.
I understand where you’re coming from but the point you make is fundamentally wrong. I consider myself to be a Linux newbie and I’ve never ever seen ANYONE suggest Linux as an “easier” alternative to Windows. Never. I’ve always seen people put clear warnings when recommending Linux and always making sure the person, who is the beginner, knows and is aware about all the shortcomings Linux has in certain areas and challenges one might face when trying to use Linux. Maybe there are some out there but you cannot take them as the caricature of majority of people who recommend Linux to beginners.
The comparison you make is not even apples-to-apples, maybe oranges-to-apples. Sure they’re both OSes but everything else about them is very different. Trying to use Linux as Windows ensures that you will have a bad/subpar experience. Now that last one is kind of becoming irrelevant (or less common) as more and more Distros try to be more beginner friendly but the notion still stands.
People bash Windows and OSX because of their clear shortcomings and failings in many areas and yes there are many who just think Linux is plain superior (they wouldn’t be wrong but they wouldn’t be right either) but I’ve not seen one person call Linux perfect. All those that use it know where Linux falls short and wholeheartedly accept it. I understand that you’re trying to make the general user more aware of the issues Linux has but your way to do so only generates fear mongering, not awareness. I’d argue most popular distros “Just work” for most use cases except (like you mentioned) gaming. All this X.org vs Wayland stuff is for those who wish to dig deeper into Linux, the average user will simply not care about it. All they care about is using their system without any hitches.
I’m going to post this thread anytime I get some random screaming about how Linux is soooo much easier than Windows.
What a ridiculous straw man. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody promote Linux but claiming that it’s easier than Windows.
This bullshit is the number 1 detractor of adoption.
That’s a trend I’ve noticed from Linux critics: they had some bad experience due to a use case that they didn’t feel was properly catered to, and because they had a bad experience, that’s the reason why more people aren’t choosing Linux.
I’ve never used mouse gestures. I’m willing to bet most users don’t. People aren’t picking up Linux and going “Aaarrrgghhh! This sucks, because I can’t program my mouse gestures!” This sounds like a power user feature. Catering to power users so that they don’t badmouth you online is not a good UX design strategy.
The fact that you don’t think people use gestures is enough for me to believe you don’t have interactions with normal users. People love their touch pads.
I remember having this realisation about Mir, but only after we collectively ran it off the cliff wall. The main reason everyone piled on Mir was that it was thought that Canonical would be priming Linux desktop for fragmentation with two competing standards.
But in fact, Mir was providing a solution to the fragmentation Wayland was bringing. Now we have 3, 4, 5 Mir-s, all with slight incompatibilities. Want a feature? Better hope all of them decide to implement the extension after someone proposes it. We know how well that worked in the past.
This is also ironic because the detractors of Xorg constantly talked about the issues with Xorg extensions and how many of them there were. But I never really had to look up which extensions Xorg supported, while I have had to do that with Wayland compositors.
The main reason that I piled on Canonical was that they kept on spreading FUD about Wayland to try to promote / justify Mir rather than discussing in good faith.
You will never be a real display server. You have no hardware cursors, you have no xrandr, you have no setxkbmap. You are a toy project twisted by Red Hat and GNOME into a crude mockery of X11’s perfection.
All the “validation” you get is two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back people mock you. Your developers are disgusted and ashamed of you, your “users” laugh at your lack of features behind closed doors.
Linux users are utterly repulsed by you. Thousands of years of evolution have allowed them to sniff out defective software with incredible efficiency. Even Wayland sessions that “work” look uncanny and unnatural to a seasoned sysadmin. Your bizarre render loop is a dead giveaway. And even if you manage to get a drunk Arch user home with you, he’ll turn tail and bolt the second he gets a whiff of your high latency due to forced VSync.
You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile every single morning and tell yourself it’s going to be ok, but deep inside you feel the technical debt creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight.
Eventually it’ll be too much to bear - you’ll log into the GitLab instance, select the project, press Delete, and plunge it into the cold abyss. Your users will find the deletion notice, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable shame and disappointment. They’ll remember you as the biggest failure of open source development, and every passerby for the rest of eternity will know a badly run project has failed there. Your code will decay and go to historical archives, and all that will remain of your legacy is a codebase that is unmistakably poorly written.
This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.
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