This has Systemd vs Runit vibes. No matter how many anti-systemd folks scream to me about how horrible it is for XYZ technical reasons, every Linux distro I’ve ever used for years, desktop and server, has used systemd and I’ve never experienced single problem that those users claim I will.
Same here with Wayland. All the major desktop environments and distros have or are implementing Wayland support and are phasing out X. The only reason I’m not on Wayland on my main computer already is because of a few minor bugs that should be ironed out in the next 6-12 months with the newest release of plasma.
It’s not because Wayland is unusable. I try switching to Wayland about every 6-9 months, and every time there have been fewer bugs and the bugs that exist are less and less intrusive.
Any time you get hardcore enthusiasts and technical people together in large community, this will happen. The mechanical keyboard community is the same way, people arguing about what specific formula of dielectric grease is optimal to lube your switches with and what specific method of applying it is best.
At a certain point, it becomes fundamentalism, like comic book enthusiasts arguing about timeline forks between series or theology majors fighting about some minutia in a 4th century manuscript fragment. Neither person is going to change their views, they are just practicing their arguments back and forth in ever-narrowing scopes of pros and cons, technical jargon, and the like.
Meanwhile the vast majority of users couldn’t care less, and just want to play games, browse the web, and chat with friends, all of which is completely functional in Wayland and has been for a while.
This has Systemd vs Runit vibes. No matter how many anti-systemd folks scream to me about how horrible it is for XYZ technical reasons, every Linux distro I’ve ever used for years, desktop and server, has used systemd
You’ll one day learn the difference between Popular and Correct.
Trump is popular, for instance.
and I’ve never experienced single problem that those users claim I will.
This is a “everyone tells me to get smoke detectors and I’ve never had a fire in all my 23 years of life” comment.
There’s a reason we have building codes, seat belts, traffic lights, emergency brakes, FDIC, and pilots’ licenses.
Systemd isn’t “correct” what does that even mean? If you don’t agree with the standards and practices of the systemd project, that’s fine, but don’t act like there is some golden tablet of divine standards for system process management frameworks.
I wasn’t making an argument that systemd is perfect or that other frameworks like runit are inferrior. My argument was that I’ve been running a lot of Linux servers and desktop systems for years and I’ve never experienced the “huge stability problems and nightmare daemon management” that multiple systemd haters claim I will inevitably experience.
Maybe I’m incredibly lucky, maybe I’m not actually getting deep enough into the guts of Linux for it to matter, or maybe systemd isn’t the devil incarnate that some people make it out to be.
And also, free software is a thing. So I absolutely support and encourage alternatives like runit to exist. If you want your distros and servers to only use runit, that’s totally fine. If it makes you happy, or you have some super niche edge-case that makes systemd a bad solution, go for something else, you have my blessing, not that you need it.
All of the technically-minded posts I’ve read about systemd have been positive. The only detractors seem to be the ones with less technical knowledge, complaining about “the Unix philosophy” and parroting half-understood ideas, or worse, claiming that it’s bad because they have to learn it.
I know xorg has problems, but it was good to get some insight into why Wayland is falling short. Every argument I’ve seen in favor of Wayland has been “xorg bad”.
X code is convoluted, so much so that the maintainers didn’t want to continue. AFAIK, no commercial entity has put any significant money behind Xorg and friends. Potentially unmaintained code with known bugs, unknown CVEs and demands for permission system for privacy made continuing with Xorg a near impossibility.
If you don’t want new features and don’t care about CVEs that will be discovered in future as well as the bugs (present and future), then you can continue using Xorg, and ignore all this. If not, then you need to find an alternative, which doesn’t need to be Wayland
Oh, and you might need to manage Xorg while other people and software including your distro move onto something else.
So yeah, “xorg bad” is literally the short summary for creating Mir and Wayland
Meanwhile the vast majority of users couldn’t care less, and just want to play games, browse the web, and chat with friends, all of which is completely functional in Wayland and has been for a while.
The last couple of times I tried Wayland, it broke my desktop so badly that I couldn’t even use it.
Granted, that was “a while” ago, so my experience might be better now, but it’s made me very wary of it.
What does “broke my desktop so badly that i coudlnt even use it” even mean? Such an over the top statement lol, makes it seem as if wayland is malware or smt.
I think the vast majority of users won’t change their display server without doing a fresh install, so I’m not sure if that’s a fair comparison to the average use case. That being said, you experiencing that issue is a fair reason for staying wary.
Been using Wayland through Fedora for years on multiple systems and its all been transparent. I’m not even sure what “it broke my desktop” could even mean except that you were using KDE, and that has been a buggy mess for a while when using their Wayland fork. That’s not Wayland, that’s KDE as Sway and Gnome have been stable for me for a very long time.
every Linux distro I’ve ever used for years, desktop and server, has used systemd and I’ve never experienced single problem that those users claim I will.
That means simply that you have never used systemd. You have only used a linux distro.
When you use a car only from the backseat and have some driver driving it for you, then you aren’t going to have any complaint about the engine.
Systemd becomes the more horrible, the closer you get to it.
I run a bunch of Linux servers, multiple desktop instances, manage multiple IT clients, and took my first Linux certs working with Systemd management, all for years now.
But I’ll be sure to switch away from systemd when it becomes an issue…
It’s a mess, but honestly so are a lot of critical FOSS projects (e.g.: OpenSSH, GNUPG, sudo). Curmudgeons gonna curmudgeon. There was a point of no return and that was years ago – now that Wayland’s finally becoming useable despite itself it’s probably time to come to terms with the fact that better alternatives would have arisen had anyone thought they could truly manage it.
it’s probably time to come to terms with the fact that better alternatives would have arisen had anyone thought they could truly manage it.
This is the most important takeaway. There’s a lot of people whining about Wayland, but Wayland devs are currently the only people actually willing to put in the work. Nobody wants to work on X and nobody wants to make an alternative to Wayland, so why do we keep wasting time on this topic?
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.
Sounds like a heap of crap. X.Org developers moved to Wayland, they were the ones who made it happen. Now, I wonder where this dude with his XOrg Forks and PhD and shit was during all that 15 years it took to conceptualize wayland.
You all need a lesson in taking everything people say, including and most importantly their qualifications with a huge grain of salt.
Wayland has been working perfectly for years now. Many of the supposedly “impossible to implement” functions of the old hunk of junk Xorg were either found to be bogus anyways or have been made available on Wayland.
Sincerely– Someone who’s been using wayland since 2016
Most of the xorg “mistakes” are design choices in the x11 protocol and have been there since some MIT undergrad smoked too much ganja over Christmas break 1986 and wrote the implementation that became the de facto standard.
Not for every one. For example, I still get random black screens with only mouse trails, windows disappearing, and videos not playing properly. Why yes, I do have an Nvidia card, thank you for asking.
After finally realizing nobody is interested in EGLstreams, Nvidia seems to be on track to make their drivers less of a disaster for Wayland support, so thankfully it is bound to become better
I just want you to know, this isn’t a failure on anything other than Nvidia trying to force their own crap on everyone and failing
I'm on AMD and had so many issues with Wayland. A lot of games were straight up unplayable due to the amount of issues and some other applications straight up not compatible while scaling is also still a freaking mess. Saying Wayland has been working perfectly for years just feels like clownery and is kinda insulting to everyone who experiences those problems.
Interesting, what model is your GPU? I’ve been using Wayland for months on an RX 6650 XT and for about a year before that on an RX 570 and I’ve had so many less problems than I used to on X. Maybe I’m just lucky with my GPU choices?
This also depends on the desktop you use. GNOME is by far the most stable [In My Experience], and KDE spent the whole 5.x series getting their Wayland support into shape. What you’re describing could be XWayland failures (games don’t run on Wayland lol) and desktop environment bugs.
Depending on how long ago you’re talking about, your hardware, and your desktop of choice, things might’ve been improved a lot since the last time you used a Wayland session.
I made a post about my Gnome experiences already, which were just terrible due to how unstable the apps were and how it lacked a ton of even very basic features that I needed. So if their Wayland support is better, it's completely overshadowed by how shitty everything else is.
Most of the issues were a year or two ago, but I every now and then switched to Wayland to see if things got better and returned to X within like hours due to issues just around the "desktop".
Very good point. Mr x11 expert maybe seems pissed he’s gotta learn a new tech and refuses to, so will bash it and hope it goes away. But if they were an expert, they’d probably know the things you mentioned.
Most of the post is an “argument from authority”: Trust me, I have a PhD and maintain my own X server, and I assure you that Wayland is a pile of shit!
OP claims that “actually nothing will actually run” because the stable Wayland protocols lack so much important functionality. In reality, many people use Wayland every day, and multiple large distributions use it as the default display server. This doesn’t inspire confidence in OP’s knowledge.
Admittedly, the first bug they linked is a real issue and it should be fixed, but it’s not a Wayland design flaw. It’s an (arguably important) feature that hasn’t been implemented by all compositors yet. With the second bug OP laments that Wayland compositors are implemented in C, an unsafe language. This is true about X.org too, so I don’t really see the point. Arguably Wayland improves on X11 here, because someone could develop a new Wayland compositor in Rust, while in X11 this is a core part of the display server.
OP claims that “actually nothing will actually run” because the stable Wayland protocols lack so much important functionality. In reality, many people use Wayland every day
Are the Wayland compositors people are using every day exclusively using “stable” Wayland interfaces? Honest question, because I have absolutely no idea.
Neither do I. I’ve had a sensor net watching for Wayland news (because sooner or later I’m going to have to migrate to it, just want to know when) but so far there hasn’t been any executive summary.
There is no such thing as a 'stable' Wayland interface. Each compositor is responsible for their own interfaces, the Wayland protocol is there to make sure that applications written for Wayland play nicely with them.
It does give anti-SystemD “why make new when what we got now is good vibes”.
Their Java bashing was more a criticism of design patterns than Java, but fell into the meme bashing of tech based on one example. Find an old bug and say tech is dreadful as a result.
With the second bug OP laments that Wayland compositors are implemented in C, an unsafe language.
That’s not what they’re saying. They’re saying wlroots is full of race conditions, which will be very hard to fix because they’re part of a fundamental design problem.
That is a serious problem, but advocating X11 will not solve anything. Wayland is being improved every day, while X.org is in deep maintenance mode.
And let’s not pretend that X.org is perfect. Race conditions at least can be fixed, even if it takes a lot of time and effort. Worst case, someone will rewrite wlroots in Rust. But in X11 any application can kill other applications, install a key logger, pin itself to the foreground, etcetera. This is by design: it’s what makes window managers, xkill and xeyes work. It’s also a huge security flaw that can never be fixed.
That security argument is like advocating wearing a motorcycle helmet when walking down the street. It sounds like a great idea and super safe, but it’s also super impractical and the things it’s supposed to protect against are extremely unlikely.
But ok, more security isn’t a bad thing. But why not make it an option, like SELinux for example? That way users can choose a degree on a scale between security and convenience that suits their use case and circumstances. Why make it all or nothing?
It’s a valid concern IMO. Any application on X11 can install a key logger, record your screen, and influence other applications in a myriad of ways. With open source software from a trusted repository, this is not an issue, but an increasing number of people run random binary blobs from Steam, the Snap Store and Flathub. I am 100% certain that some less-conscientious publishers are already using X11 features to build ad profiles of their users; it’s a matter of time before the first ransomware will appear. The only sensible way to prevent this, is to confine applications to their own space.
But ok, more security isn’t a bad thing. But why not make it an option, like SELinux for example? That way users can choose a degree on a scale between security and convenience that suits their use case and circumstances. Why make it all or nothing?
Wayland simply doesn’t have protocols for most of this stuff. (Applications are supposed to use D-Bus and portals.) Developing new protocols that offer X11-like functionality is a large investment and will also need changes in the toolkits and apps to make it work.
xorg letting a malicious program to record keys is not a security issue, its a weakness
having that malicious program on the system, thats the security issue
if you are implementing a display protocol that aims to replace the xorg, the focus should be compatibility not fixing security weaknesses especially if you dont have any better solutions, and wayland does not have a better solution for global keys, compositors are just implenting it on their own hacky way
No one is advocating X11. It’s hard to have a constructive conversation about the shortcomings of Wayland when every apologist seems to immediately go off topic.
“I don’t want to listen because you don’t know the technical challenges. Oh, you have a long list of credentials? I don’t want to listen to an argument from authority. X11 bad, therefore Wayland good.”
OP even brings up Mir, but you never see Wayland proponents talk about why they think Wayland is better.
In the end this is also a pointless argument though. Like, sure: “Wayland is shit”, but also, “Xorg is even worse and ‘noone is advocating for it’”. And when there is no third alternative I guess we have to deal with (and improve) Wayland then?
OP’s expertise would then be better spent by contributing to Wayland.
Most of the post is an “argument from authority”: Trust me, I have a PhD and maintain my own X server, and I assure you that Wayland is a pile of shit!
It’s amazing that he’s so well qualified, even runs his own X fork, but isn’t volunteering to do any actual work to maintain the project.
Because that’s what this ultimately boils down to, isn’t it. Nobody’s forcing anyone to use Wayland or drop X. But, all the X.org developers have moved on to Wayland and aren’t coming back, and all the major DEs are also migrating to Wayland. So if you want to keep using X, you’re going to need to do the work that other people used to do for you.
For most users that’s a fairly empty statement, as most users don’t have the expertise to maintain X and window managers even if they wanted to. But apparently this guy is hot stuff; a highly qualified, highly experienced king of the display server world. So when are we going to see his X.org fork?
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 remember reading through that thread when it came out and those are extremely worrying points. Wayland has extremely deep core issues. #2 there alone is horrible.
There are and were alarm bells ringing all around btw with Wayland. From a software developing perspective the approach is terrible. You cannot solve super complex problems by throwing away 30 years worth of code and redoing everything from scratch. You’ll just run into the exact same issues again. Which no, haven’t gone away as the technology advanced as many people would like to believe, we’re still using displays and networking and keyboards and mice.
There is a lot of legacy in X but there’s also a lot of accumulated experience and battle-hardened code. The obvious path would have been to keep the good and remove the bad.
Wayland will eventually since those issues but it will take just as long as it took X, because that’s what happens when you start everything from scratch again.
This is filling me with deja vu because it’s exactly what some of us went through with X, trying to piece together a working desktop out of dozens of pieces. But when you point that out you get “ha ha grandpa that’s old stuff, this new stuff won’t have that problem because [insert magic here]!”
Keep in mind that when Wayland started it was supposed to be a mini-server, to be used for the login screen only. Then the idea came to make it usable for stable, controlled and simple devices where there isn’t a lot of user configuration or hardware variation.
How it got from there to “let’s use it for everything on the Linux desktop and ditch X” I’ll never understand.
Which no, haven’t gone away as the technology advanced as many people would like to believe, we’re still using displays and networking and keyboards and mice.
Do you mean not initially designed to support? Because at least for displays and networking (in the sense of being able to send X events over the network) that seems wrong, a network capable display server is basically X’s entire purpose? And for keyboards and mice there are extensions now, so x.org as a standard now very much supports those by design. Actually to my knowledge Wayland basically just forked their keyboard standard, the X Keyboard Extension.
XOrg is designed so a central server (mainframe) sends and receives data from smaller terminals, and that not only includes a heap of devices that haven’t been in use since the 90s it also has a ton of features that nobody uses. (See: X native fonts, X native widgets, X driver model…)
X’s way of handling events and sending draws to clients as such is somewhat convoluted. Once you start to really dig into it, it’s amazing how much people managed to stack on top of it until today.
Besides, modern day X over Network is a somewhat niche and possibly broken function
I mean xwayland is the best supported X implementation today, and will only get better. You’re not ditching everything when you maintain backwards compatibility.
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