My main thought is “this is a screenshot of a wall of text that’s hard to read”.
You should switch to Wayland
Yeah, @dd56@futurology.today you shouldve made it text
My bad
TL;DR: the author needs to do a better job of citing sources and building an argument.
The author’s argument from self-appointed authority tone aside, I dug into the only two verifiable pieces of evidence cited. These are almost impenetrable to the outsider, and even with plenty of coding experience behind me, I’m having to go deep to make sense of any of it. After all, sometimes, bugs and design decisions are the result of a best effort in the situation at hand and not necessarily evidence of negligence, incompetence, or bad architecture. There’s also something to be said for organizing labor, focusing effort on what matters, and triaging the backlog.
The original author really needs to pony up a deeper digest of the project, with many more verifiable links to back up the various quality claims. If anyone is going to take this seriously, a proper postmortem is a better way to go. Cite the version reviewed, link to every flaw you can find, suggest ways to improve things, and keep it blameless. Instead, this reads like cherry picking two whole things on the public bug tracker and then making unsubstantiated claims that’s a part of a bigger pattern.
My personal take on what was cited:
- I’m grossly unqualified to assess this codebase as a Wayland or GUI programmer, but work plenty in the Linux space as a cloud practitioner and shell coder.
- The first article smells like inadequate QA for cases like placing Wayland programs in the background, which is not typically done for GUI apps under normal usage (IMO).
- The second article is a two-line change that I suppose highlights how ill-suited C is for this kind of software. Developer chatter on the MR suggests that the internal API could use some safeguards and sanity checks.
- 162 open issues, 259 closed, oldest still open is five years old. Not great, but not terrible.
- None of this is particularly egregious, considering the age of the project and the use it enjoys today.
Links:
You aired my frustrations really well. He spent a lot more time making claims and discussing his own background than demonstrating Wayland’s alleged issues and showing that they’re egregious. It’s an entertaining rant at best, but that doesn’t make his points valid nor does it make anything actionable.
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
X.Org developers moved to Wayland, they were the ones who made it happen.
But did they bring the same mistakes with them?
They made Wayland the way it is precisely to NOT make the same mistake.
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.
Wayland has been working perfectly for years now.
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.
(Probable) Source for those who prefer actual text: https://lobste.rs/s/acepul/wayland_is_pretty_good_actually#c_bzr8nr
Op has an Nvidia GPU.
I know you are joking but I’ve been running Wayland (Hyprland) on an Nvidia card for about a year now with in the beginning very few and currently zero issues. Even stuff like screensharing works.
Oh I know. People that actually have an idea of what they’re doing have far less struggles with Nvidia stuff on Wayland. I just poke at it because I know that so many Wayland haters use Nvidia on some DE that isn’t 100% supported like it’s Wayland’s fault.
Huh
I think they mean whoever wrote that text, not you
No not really. Wayland shills constantly use template arguments such as nvidia, dinosaurs, boomers, luddites, etc regardless of context.
lmao you really are out to argue today, aren’t you.
why would they mean you? you posted the image with a title. the comment is a response to that. do you really think the commenter claims you have an nvidia GPU because of the title, asking for thoughts? it is not clear what side you’re on, or whether you even picked a side in the first place from the title and image alone.
edit: just now seeing those other comments from you in this thread. yeah, maybe it was aimed at you.
It was aimed at him. Kids on the struggle bus to Jensen Huang’s leather jacket factory.
that’s a savage insult hahahaha
Just reading the way you type things out proves you’re like 12. No cap fr fr nvidia is bussin’. Jesus Christ… Just admit you struggle with a piece of tech that others have no issues with and move on.
Wayland is here. For a kid bitching about dinosaurs, boomers and other “old” things you sure do have a real fucking problem letting go of old tech.
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.
Which X.Org was not designed to support.
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.
My thoughts on this? I think people should care less about what software other people use.
Man, display servers look hard to develop and I’m glad we have two amazing/successful projects to choose between! I think the devs who work on X are doing an amazing job and it’s amazing to see how passionate the devs/users are for Wayland.
If bobby tables likes to use x because they know how it works and are comfortable with it, let them work with x! If you think it’s okay to judge/pester/shame people because some software they choose to use, shame on you! In the end, does it really matter what you use.
The Devs who work on X are doing an amazing job
There aren’t any Devs working on X. That’s the whole problem. Xorg is the most modern and most popular implementation of X, was started in 2004, it no longer has any permanent maintainers, and it hasn’t been updated since 2018. Nobody alive fully understands the whole codebase, it is an unholy mess of multiple forks and multiple versions of many different projects all smushed together. There is no more room for innovation on Xorg because any time anybody fixes a bug or adds a feature, it breaks something totally unrelated. All of the big players who used to pay developers to maintain it, no longer do. Partly because they can’t find anyone willing to do it.
I’m not saying Wayland is the answer to the problem. Building a new display server protocol does not fix the problems with Xorg, and it has its own slew of problems. It really is a “rock and a hard place” situation. You’re a future-hating troglodyte who shuns innovation if you continue to use Xorg, and you’re a risk-taking early-adopter who forfeits functionality for shiny new toys, if you use Wayland.
aren’t any devs working on X.
Didn’t know about that! Good for them. I would still argue it’s a very popular and successful software despite it’s unholy codebase.
It really is a “rock and a hard place” …
Yeah. I hope it’s just a vocal minority but it’s depressing when you see people act like this in the wild.
Most recent Stable release was December 13, fixing a CVE. Someone is working on it (Red Hat still pays a few to do so, at the very least).
Don’t know anything avout xorg development although I’m profitting for years off it now. Just wanted to chime in and say that the Arch maintainers put out updates pretty constantly. If the code isn’t worked on anymore then what’s happening there?
Edit: There is definitely happening stuff with the xorg-server code.
Edit: Removed chit-chat
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Great comment
The guy’s language is the exact same hand wavey magic he opened up criticizing. “Appeal to my claimed authority. Wayland bad. Missing parts. Analogous to poop.”
I practically never come across anyone who addresses a point directly and don’t think I ever will. Everything is tribalism and politics and sunken cost fallacies.
Please dont just post screenshots of text. Post a link to the content.
Or do both!
I’ve been using Wayland for 5 years. There were a few bugs in the beggining, but now it works great. These threads are such a waste of time.
I have over 100 confirms X11 developments
That’s great dude. Why don’t you go maintain it then, apparently nobody else wants to: https://www.phoronix.com/news/RHEL10-Removing-X.Org
Wayland took too long
Look up how long btrfs has been in development, or at audio subsystem churn. These things take time, because it’s mostly volunteers working on them.
Systemic complexity has doubled in the last two years
What does this even mean?
Mir was better
It turns out the Canonical dumping random stuff over the wall is not the same as creating a legitimate open source community around a project.
Unfixable amount of race conditions
As if there’s never been a synchronization bug in X… But also System76 and others are writing Wayland compositors on Rust anyway.
Systemic complexity has doubled in the last two years
“If wayland is so great why can’t I run
/usr/bin/wayland???” 😎
Most people don’t give a shit and just want a system that works. As a lot of distros switch to / have switched to Wayland I have never noticed any issues in daily usage of any of my devices, in fact my surface laptop 4 can’t do external displays if I’m running x11 but that feels like a surface issue not a display manager issue. Point being that the switch is happening and a majority of users do not care as long as their systems keep running, and in my experience there’s no reason to believe they won’t.
As an enduser my only noticeable issue with Wayland is that Auto-Type with KeepassXC doesn’t work.
Auto-Type will be disabled when run with a Wayland compositor on Linux. To use Auto-Type in this environment, you must set QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb or start KeePassXC with the -platform xcb command-line flag.
https://keepassxc.org/docs/KeePassXC_UserGuide#_auto_type
This works for me.
I tried that, but neither option seems to work. At least not in Wayland programs, like Firefox. It works in Chromium because iirc that runs in Xwayland. That doesn’t solve my issue with Wayland though.
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.
Wayland has mostly positive user reviews because it presents nicely to the user (VRR, scaling, etc.) On the developer front it seems there’s a lot of struggle over things that were solved in X11 but for some reason require a lot of debate in Wayland.
- There’s still no way to universally configure monitors and input devices, so the startup cost to checking out a new “WM” (compositor in Wayland terms) is non-zero - you have to reconfigure everything from the ground up, and for anyone with complex input systems (see: accessibility devices) this will take a lot of time because each compositor insists on using a different format for configuring these things.
- Each compositor is tasked with coming up with solutions for all parts of the user experience (hence the last point) and thus anyone who wants to experiment with making their own WM now has to worry about a billion things that wouldn’t have had to deal with in X11. Yeah, there’s libraries for dealing with that stuff, but it’s not as simple as it was and lot of innovative WMs won’t ever be able to make the jump.
These are the two biggest issues I can see that are entirely chalked up to its design. Technical issues (like the “load balancer” thing that keeps Firefox from crashing on Wayland) will be solved in time. However, the above points are unlikely to ever be addressed. Should they be? I don’t know.
X11 world is just really as bad. It’s just so that Wayland is new and X.Org hacks are so normalized it doesn’t register for people how much work you need to put into X to make it work.
Each compositor is tasked with coming up with solutions for all parts of the user experience (hence the last point) and thus anyone who wants to experiment with making their own WM now has to worry about a billion things that wouldn’t have had to deal with in X11
Well, you would be disappointed to know that it’s somewhat the same fuckery under XOrg as every usable compositor and window manager needs to carry fixes, hacks, and hardcoded workaround for edge cases in X or features that are unsupported today. If you use a Wayland library like you use X libraries it’s not that much harder to make a simple Wayland compositor.
This is one of the most cited “wayland issues” and it’s IMO completely and utterly wrong. Go look at how convoluted existing XOrg codebases (mutter, metacity, compton, compiz, etc.) are. It’s only “simple” if you wish to draw a rectangle upon the screen ( and even then, wlroots exist)
