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AnIdiotOnTheNet
lewispollard
> I've been down this road a lot with FOSS software: "I don't use it because it doesn't do what I need", "sure it does!", "no, it really doesn't", "well you don't need that anyway!"...
Just recently (I was on a Fedora box temporarily) I was trying to figure out how to get Nautilus to stop starting a search whenever I typed something, and instead highlight the nearest match in the current directory, y'know, like pretty much every other file manager in existence. Eventually I found a thread where the core Gnome contributors were saying "it sounds like you don't want this feature, what you really want is a better search function". They probably should never have enabled "reactions" on their bug tracker since it was piled 100's high with negative reactions - yet they still doubled down and said it's not something they're going to support (despite having supported it in the past, and Ubuntu even bundling patches to make it happen up until recently).
It's a frustrating trend in FOSS that contributors feel like "we're doing this for FREE don't you know, so whatever we say is lore and since you're not paying, we don't have to listen to you". Yes, I understand how amazing it is that this software is truly free and created by volunteers, no, I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made.
Miraste
In my experience Gnome is the worst major FOSS project for this. Ever since Gnome 3 the design philosophy of all of their projects seems to be "find out what the users want and do the opposite."
Lammy
Case in point: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-June/m...
"Facilitating the unrestricted use of extensions and themes by end users seems contrary to the central tenets of the GNOME 3 design."
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Yeah seriously. The Gnome project is go-to example of non-ad-driven user-hostile FOSS software development.
cbpowell
Agreed. And yet it's somehow ascended to being the default environment for Fedora, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS...
dancek
I've heard this from a couple of power users before. But maybe GNOME does not optimize for power users?
vidarh
It gives them dictatorial power because it's their project.
I don't use Gnome because I don't like the direction they've taken it in. But they have absolutely every right to do with it as they please. And I have every right to insist it's totally not fit for my purposes and refuse to use it.
The same way I have no (current) interest in using Wayland because it'd be too much hassle to try to replicate my workflow with it. But they're free to ignore me the way I ignore them.
dancek
> dictatorial power over 100s of users
GNOME has tens of millions of users.
I do understand your sentiment. I don't like GNOME myself. But there are alternatives. If you don't like it, try using something else, contributing patches with configurable behavior or maintaining a fork.
FLOSS maintainers are a rare breed. We as a community need to find ways to not burn them out. Even if you have millions of happy users, just a couple of really toxic ones can make it feel not worth it.
lewispollard
> GNOME has tens of millions of users.
I was referring to the hundreds of users who "reacted" to the bugzilla thread on this issue, but I'm sure it effects many many more.
> I do understand your sentiment. I don't like GNOME myself. But there are alternatives. If you don't like it, try using something else, contributing patches with configurable behavior or maintaining a fork.
Generally I don't use GNOME, on this occasion I was working on a laptop supplied by an employer. The frustrating thing isn't that they don't support a feature that I want, it's that they strip away features that existed before, and completely ignore and talk down to users who tell them that the feature is very useful and much wanted.
ohgodplsno
> I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made.
Those hundreds of user are:
1. A vocal minority, most likely. People happy about it don't go on bug trackers to support devs.
2. Not making the software, not part of the decision making process. Don't like the end result ? Fork it if you have the ability. Give constructive criticism if you want and you think the team is receptive to it (or even cares about it. Sometimes, I just don't want your genius idea).
So, yes. They're doing this for free. Don't like it? Fork it, or don't be an ass. If you can't do either of those, the third option is to fuck off.
akho
They are (predominantly) not doing this for free. They are employed by RedHat.
Null-Set
Why are these people not part of the decison making process?
zabzonk
> I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made.
It doesn't - you are completely free to roll back those changes, or make different changes of your own.
unethical_ban
Hot take: Maybe, if you're building something (or especially changing something) as a SME that many people use, and you fuck it up in a way most people don't like, you're still a jerk.
Maybe.
I think the discussion should happen.
Because I don't think "I wrote it, if you don't like it, you write it" is a 100% defense to hordes of upset users.
michaelmrose
Imagine if you asked what makes Steven Spielberg dictatorial power over all our screens! Not even paying him money gives you a veto on his casting choices. What you are experiencing is the expectation of continuing to receive a benefit, useful software, interpreting no longer receiving the same quality software as a loss, and intuiting that you have a rights to avoid that loss. You don't because the benefit was unearned in the first place.
This doesn't mean you don't have a right to discuss or critique and discuss and if appropriately fork or write you own.
pjc50
> I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made.
The option always remains to change it yourself or stop using it. It's not as if it's bound to the hardware (Apple) or shipped with the machine (Windows). It's not a SaaS that may vapourise or change underneath you.
There's no way to force consensus in situations like this. The best you can do is force out those maintainers you don't like with a harassment campaign.
betterunix2
"The option always remains to change it yourself or stop using it."
If I changed every bit of software I dislike, I would have no time left for my actual job. Yeah, I get it, these volunteers found the time to work on this one project and therefore get more of a say about what changes will be made, but you know what? They also have to use other software, and they would not have time to work on something like Gnome if they were busy making changes to Wayland or the Kernel or whatever else.
Worse, in my experience, Gnome developers will turn down patches that do not align with their ideas about how things should work. I have had it happen to me, I have seen it happen to others -- even when we find time to change something, we cannot commit to maintaining our own private fork, and dealing with merge after merge or trying to keep up with a project that has as much activity as Gnome or Wayland. Obviously some patches need to be rejected, but in the case of Gnome I have found that rejection often comes down to their notorious "less configurability is better" attitude.
As for stopping using it, how does that work with critical packages like systemd? At some point you wind up having to ditch an entire distribution, with all its infrastructure and maintainers, just to get one use case to work. In some cases you are left with a choice between a project that has the features you need but has received no updates (including security updates) in years, or a project that does not have the features you need but is actively maintained. More often than not people will just give up on their use case, which in some cases means giving up on open source software entirely since that use case was the reason they were using open source in the first place. Some might think that is fine, users have the freedom to choose what software to run, but the fact is that fewer users means fewer contributors (including many people who make only the small but very important contribution of reporting bugs) and a less robust open source ecosystem.
foldr
> Yes, I understand how amazing it is that this software is truly free and created by volunteers, no, I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made.
To be honest I don’t see how you can understand the first bit but not the second. Yes, they can make changes that you don’t like without consulting you.
barrkel
They can; but they shouldn't expect a life free of complaints.
Commercial software, like most things in life, is responsive to incentives. The people who buy things get the most say in the product.
For open source where the end users aren't buying anything, and the developers are either creating product for their own gratification, or for some more nebulous corporate goal, the incentives are rather indirect. And that makes a big difference. Software, under those conditions, will frankly be worse for the majority of users.
phkahler
>> To be honest I don’t see how you can understand the first bit but not the second. Yes, they can make changes that you don’t like without consulting you.
People in charge of large FOSS projects like Gnome should not pretend it's just some hobby project they can do whatever they want with. Those projects are essentially public infrastructure and should be treated as such. It's not their personal plaything.
Yes, people who do the work have the most say, but sometimes they really use that to do stupid things with the code. I don't know how to correct that though. Commercial software is no better about this.
patrickaljord
> I can certainly understand the frustration at having to deal with a community that gets annoyed at anything that changes simply because they're already so used to the garbage pile they have that they now hold the delusion that it's actually not garbage.
It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones). It really makes people angry when things don't work the same anymore, let alone when it doesn't even work anymore for their use case.
> In my admittedly somewhat distanced opinion, Wayland's biggest mistakes were not launching with a coherent strategy for replicating functionality like screen sharing, screenshots, and to a lesser extent remote desktop/applications. They just punted and said "that's a compositor problem!"
My guess is that it wasn't a deliberate strategy, it just that like anything related to the Linux desktop, the project was underfunded so they had to focus on certain issues. In this case it was focusing on improving from xorg and making sure it doesn't break anything on the main use cases of whoever was funding the project (mainly redhat). Apple and Microsoft can afford to pour billions in their display server/protocol/windowing system. Not so much for Linux.
AnthonyMouse
> It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones). It really makes people angry when things don't work the same anymore, let alone when it doesn't even work anymore for their use case.
As well it should. Because now things that used to take three seconds will take 15 minutes for a month until you learn the new interface.
The designer will respond that yes, but then once you learn the new thing it will take two seconds. And if you save one second twice a day then you'll have made back that 10 hours you spent learning the new thing in less than 50 years!
Except that they're going to change it again in less than 50 years.
And that's assuming that the new design is actually better and not just different or worse, because also, this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25950351
Rule of thumb: If the new thing isn't better enough to cause people to switch to it voluntarily without any prodding or the removal of the option to use the old thing, it isn't better enough to be worth it.
cortesoft
Your calculation doesn't take into account the time savings for brand new users. Since they don't have to unlearn anything, they start saving the time immediately.
Not saying it is right or wrong, but a lot of the upsetting changes for existing users are for the benefit of new users.
KingOfCoders
I was working at a large real estate marketplace. Product management came up with a nice new UI for the backend every two months, because that was what they loved to do - also lots of designers hanging around that need to work! Real estate broker - the customers - hated it of course, they only wanted to get their job done, not relearn the UI every two months.
volgar1x
Rule of thumb: do not listen to the vocal minority, code for all the satisfied and silent customers.
Edit: unless there is a majority of unsatisfied customers (:
pmlnr
> It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones). It really makes people angry when things don't work the same anymore, let alone when it doesn't even work anymore for their use case.
Most of them are too frequent, automatic, plus they are not actual improvements.
michaelmrose
As an aside if you use gmail have you checked out the old basic html view recently?
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en
Old gmail is faster and normal things like opening a link in a new tab actually works like any other page and its actually a lot easier to read because of it.
In the new interface you are only given a fraction of the horizontal space for the actual mail, and I actually have to scroll sideways to see the pop out in new window control which for aesthetic reasons is only a graphic with no text label except on mouse over. Popping it out gives you a window that you may or may not need to resize or move for optimal reading and as far as I can see there is no way to just read the mail in a new tab in the same window at all which breaks most people's methodology for managing multiple tabs.
It's not merely bad its actively hostile.
innagadadavida
> Most of them are too frequent, automatic, plus they are not actual improvements.
It seems like the developers and product managers want to show progress but the uses just want you to fix boring bugs. It will help if the product folks think of memory, perf and stability as very important features and stop chasing new features for the sake of it.
formerly_proven
> It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones). It really makes people angry when things don't work the same anymore, let alone when it doesn't even work anymore for their use case.
Like you note, this isn't a problem unique to Linux/"free Unixy OSes". In some ways Linux is actually worse than others, consider Gnome/Gtk Updates for example. Or how things like having a library to read a particular image format are quite normal around here; except that library has like half a dozen incompatible but actively used versions and around 1000 released versions. The Linux environment is very volatile and everything constantly changes and breaks. Modern applications bitrot exceptionally fast in Linux, while the community points to "but look this Xchess binary from 1992 still works". That's neat but covers few real use cases. The same community is then bewildered that both people and enterprises opt for distributions which move at a glacial pace and only releases updated software once every five years or so.
throwaways885
I think a big issue is there's no discipline in the Linux community. The Kernel team has done an amazing job of preserving ABI compatibility through every last byte, but then you look at projects like glib or GNOME which seem to pride themselves on huge, sweeping, changes and don't care if downstream consumers are hurt by the changes.
Edit: glib not glibc
nescioquid
> It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI
This seems to point to the general situation of change fatigue. If you pick up a random Android device, what does the "settings" app icon look like? Individually, these things are small, but the small impedances these changes introduce does take a toll on people, especially when you're trying to just get stuff done.
I don't think there's an easy answer here when the developer needs to make fundamental changes, though.
gregmac
> Individually, these things are small, but the small impedances these changes introduce does take a toll on people, especially when you're trying to just get stuff done.
One of the problems is a parity disconnect. A developer/PM often has very different perspective from their users: They see the new changes as they're happening and so they're all small, incremental changes, plus they're closely following development.
A lot of users only infrequently update and/or infrequently use certain features, and so for them, all these small incremental features add up to be massive change for the sake of change. This will often manifest as "Every time I go to do x, it's totally different and I have to re-learn everything!".
I find a lot of software -- especially FOSS -- also communicates change poorly. Release notes are the primary way to get across changes, yet there are several bad things people do that make it basically impossible to read:
* List every change or commit message, especially without categorizing or simplifying the wording
* Don't properly highlight feature changes (eg with screenshots and/or reasoning)
* Have dozens of betas/pre-releases, but don't consolidate the release notes into a final "here's what's changed since the last main release" document
Some examples of exceptionally good release notes: Visual Studio Code [1], Jira [2], Gitlab [3] (though if they only provided their changelog [4] it would be a good example of being overly verbose to the point of unusable).
[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_52
[2] https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftware/jira-software-...
[3] https://about.gitlab.com/releases/categories/releases/
[4] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/blob/master/CHAN...
_0w8t
In many cases the UI changes are driven by the desire to attract new users under assumption that the previous UI was not sufficiently attractive.
toyg
> the main use cases of whoever was funding the project (mainly redhat)
But this is a real problem: it's not good that the Linux ecosystem has been reduced to "we shall eat whatever dogfood Redhat cooks for us". Wayland didn't even start as a RH project, iirc, and didn't really gain any traction for ages, but now it's a Big Deal because RH pushes it...?
icefo
I agree that's not good but redhat seems to be one of the few organization that pays developers to improve parts of the linux ecosystem. So when redhat endorse a project it probably means it tries to address some pain points of the status quo.
That's how I see systemd and wayland. For systemd the consensus seems to be that's it's better than the previous init systems as most distributions have adopted it. It seems we're going in that direction with wayland but we'll see how it goes.
UIZealot
> It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones).
Nice try Google/Microsoft developer! I'm pretty technical, your sh*t change is still sh*t.
I remember a time when updates from gmail, outlook, or excel improved upon the previous version, sadly that was about 15/20 years ago for Google/Microsoft, respectively.
cafard
Hah. I greatly prefer the Windows start menu that went away with Windows 8, and had previously configured this Windows 10 machine to use it. Then yesterday I installed patches, and it's back to the Windows 10.
jjoonathan
Windows patch auto-revert-settings is cancer. It breaks my bluetooth every time and my setup is very typical so it probably does it to millions of others.
Details: Bluetooth headphones with microphones actually show up as 3 sound devices, one high quality output device and a pair of low quality input and output devices. Whenever a microphone is requested, the low quality pair is selected. Output quality goes to shit and any apps that don't get the memo will still send its audio to the high quality output device which has since become an inactive sinkhole. Since many apps request microphone access for non-obvious reasons, the symptoms are that you do something non-audio-related and sound in the rest of the system does some combination of {go to shit, stop working} on a per-app basis. The solution is to disable the low quality input and output devices, which keeps sound output functional and high-quality until Windows Update reverts your settings and sets the stage for the next microphone access to break bluetooth audio again. Ugh.
_0w8t
In case of Gmail many changes were to grab more attention from the user, not to improve anything.
londons_explore
Every 6 months I try switching to Wayland. I spend an hour or so using it for regular desktop gnome use and fixing minor bugs (ie. The kind I can fix with a config tweak). I then switch back again because it just isn't there yet.
Recent issues:
* The brightness control for my screen doesn't work with it.
* The mouse sometimes lags
* Graphical corruption in Chromium when on webgl sites.
* Blank screen after resume from hibernate.
* Seems to randomly freeze forever sometimes after an OOM killer run.
* Chromecast wouldn't work
DCKing
I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but there's no such thing as "switching to Wayland".
What most people mean when they "switch to Wayland" is that they're switching from Gnome on X11 to a "pure Gnome" stack that uses Wayland and a bunch of other Freedesktop standards for interopability. There is absolutely no code from the "Wayland project" running there, because the Wayland implementation is Gnome's own (it's called Mutter). Similarly, KDE's implementation is in KWin itself. The source article is from an author of yet another window manager (Sway) implementing Wayland.
What you're observing is not "Wayland not being there yet", it's Gnome not being there yet. All of these deficiencies have nothing to do with Wayland itself: they're general QA issues that plague an underfunded Linux desktop that's making a slow technology transition.
corty
It is actually one of the big, unfixable, conceptual problems of Wayland that all the effort is duplicated in each compositor. The Wayland concept pushes out most of the work to the DEs. That of course will result in tons of predictable inconsistency, incompatibility, bugs, delays, consolidations and general pain. Wayland devs are then generally in the lazy "worksforme, use sway (or whatever)" position while the user (of some other compositor) will be out there complaining to yet another maintainer duplicating yet another feature badly. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Wayland is bad design, and it shows in the users' and maintainers' attrition.
cheaprentalyeti
You're dancing around the problem: Wayland works (such as it is) by offloading functionality that was part of X to the desktop software like gnome or kde and then saying "but that's not our problem!" when something breaks. Never mind that program collection 'A' (including X11) was working and program colleciton 'B' (the Wayland way) wasn't.
gnulinux
Why does this distinction matter? Gnome on X works perfectly fine, Gnome on Wayland does not. Why does it matter it to state that Wayland is a protocol, not the implementation?
zepto
This is be a fine distinction to make if there is an implementation of Wayland that is there. Then we can say this is just about a particular implementation, and not Wayland itself.
If no implementation of Wayland is ‘there’, it seems pretty reasonable to say Wayland is not there yet.
phkahler
>> What you're observing is not "Wayland not being there yet", it's Gnome not being there yet. All of these deficiencies have nothing to do with Wayland itself.
While technically true, that is a bit of deflection. In some cases none of the compositors have implemented certain things yet.
My biggest issue with gnome is that it doesnt remember where my windows were last time I ran an app. Someone over in way-land probably should have told them that would become a their-problem so it could be addressed it sooner. Same with window decorations, they should be handled by the compositor IMHO. Sometimes a new thing should come with recommendations for use.
londons_explore
I completely agree. But as a user the distinction doesn't matter.
welterde
On the face of it that does sound even worse.. Instead of just having to fix those issues once you will now have to fix them in every desktop environment/window manager equivalent?
alisonkisk
"3 incomplete implementations and 0 complete implementations." Is Desktop Linux's epitaph.
rvolosatovs
Happy user of Sway for almost a year already(https://github.com/rvolosatovs/infrastructure/commit/b765860...). Some of the issues you mention I have experienced on X11, but they were fixed once I switched to Wayland. One of the most notable changes for me was hotplug - I struggled with it on X for many years, now it just works by default and I didn't even need to script anything(https://github.com/rvolosatovs/infrastructure/blob/0e17a1421... and I even wrote my own tool to handle this, because the X11 ecosystem is full of crap https://github.com/rvolosatovs/gorandr).
Overall, my Linux GUI experience has never been as smooth as it is now on Wayland and I tried pretty much all common DEs/WMs in last 8 years.
X11 is not even remotely close to being "there" compared to Wayland and if Gnome implementation sucks, then please first try better implementations first before writing comments like this.
No, Wayland protocol is not perfect and yes, some niche use cases are still not covered, which is why various extensions of the protocol are still being developed. X11 at it's current state is nothing but a collection of hacks glued together. Wayland is, however, a very robust, secure and well-designed modern protocol, which, most importantly and contrary to X11, actually works.
l0b0
Anecdotal after using Wayland for the last few months:
* The brightness control for my screen doesn't work with it.
* The mouse sometimes lags
* Graphical corruption in Chromium when on webgl sites.
* Blank screen after resume from hibernate.
The last two aren't applicable, since if anything has been OOM killed recently I didn't notice, and I don't have a Chromecast.
eyelidlessness
> Graphical corruption in Chromium when on webgl sites.
Can’t speak to Chromium or Wayland, but Chrome on Mac has this problem for me and I just had to completely disable hardware acceleration.
corndoge
Did you report any of these?
londons_explore
They all come up with plenty of Google results when you search for them, so I assume the devs are well aware but have other things on their plate to work on.
silisili
Agreed. Tried Wayland again last year. Screen sharing in Electron doesn't work, so can't share screen in Slack. Googled, known issue.
I don't care how much better Wayland is...if it can't do something I'm used to and need, it's going in the trash. I don't have time or interest to read mailing lists and bug trackers to know when it's fixed.
vetinari
So Slack didn't bother building with `rtc_use_pipewire=true` and that's Wayland's problem?
Complain to Slack.
zamadatix
Pipewire is still 0.x as of today, let alone when they last tried it, so I don't think anybody should be going to Slack like they were too lazy to build it "right". Besides even if it was built with that the screensharing via pipewire isn't at feature parity with normal screen/monitor/window level sharing so it's not a 1:1 drop in quite yet.
Wayland said screen sharing is something to be solved outside of Wayland itself. That solution is still early and not complete. It's not anybody's problem, it's just how things are. It'll get fixed eventually, in the meantime X11 still runs fine for most users and in 6-12 months switching to Wayland should have fewer tradeoffs. Until then Wayland is missing some use cases X11 easy fulfills. Unfortunately X11 is also missing many use cases Wayland fills. As a result we should expect different users to be better served by different answers about how ready a Wayland environment is for them and both to be equally correct.
rcxdude
Support from popular apps absolutely is a problem for the platform. It might not be caused by them, but it is their problem. The user doesn't care who's fault it is, they're just going to go with the combination which works for them.
utxaa
complaining won't help me join a meeting.
away_throw
I believe that this is being fixed soon if you compile Electron with "Ozone" support. Otherwise, I use the current workaround of using OBS with a "virtual webcam" which allows me to stream OBS to a webcam and just use my webcam as the screenshare. Actually ends up working better than any screenshare utility that I've used.
axaxs
This doesn't seem as straightforward as 'click the screenshare button to share your screen', which is how it works in xorg mode.
Editing since I can't reply - I didn't mean to come across as rude, sorry for that. Just explaining that as a user, it doesn't work out of the box. Having to explain to users to do the above is not an ideal solution.
senko
... sounds like you should complain to Slack?
richrichardsson
> "well you don't need that anyway!"
Something similar used to frustrate me no end when asking the Python community for help trying to solve a problem.
Regularly someone would comment, "Why would you want to do that?".
I wouldn't be asking if I didn't have a need to do it!
It's bizarre that some people can't see beyond the end of their own nose and imagine different use cases to their own.
Veen
As an amateur developer, I've often found that "Why would you want to do that?" is followed by an explanation of a much better way that I hadn't even thought of. Sometimes it's asshole-behaviour, but it's often people sharing the benefit of their experience; my thinking has gone awry at some point several steps back and they want to make life easier for me.
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> As an amateur developer, I've often found that "Why would you want to do that?" is followed by an explanation of a much better way that I hadn't even thought of.
Unfortunately in my experience it is often followed by an explanation of why what I'm trying to do isn't what I should want to do, as though I am not aware of my own goals and constraints.
Enginerrrd
To be fair, there's a lot of people asking for help on X-Y problems in the programming world, especially on python, and often the fastest way to sort out someone's issue is to walk it back to the original problem X they were trying to solve.
at_a_remove
Yeah, but if you don't have an XY problem, you have to spend a lot of your question pre-defending the "it's not an XY problem" stance and lordy ... is that frustrating.
There's a lot of people out there who are happy to tell you that you have an XY problem, but when you explain why it is not, ... crickets.
regularfry
There's all the difference in the world between asking "why do you want to do that?" and "why would you want to do that?"
js2
Often asking "why" is to tease out XY problems. It's not that the experts can't see past the end of their own nose, but rather that they have the experience to recognize questions that indicate the questioner has wandered off into the weeds.
roel_v
The people replying like that are in the barely-not-novice-anymore category themselves, and their mental model of the world is that everybody is just fumbling around doing everything wrong like they were doing themselves a short time ago. It's true that when you are just past the point where you're not totally useless any more, there is a point where you think you're God's gift to the world (not judging - I have felt like this many times over, it goes away after the next big hurdle you run into...), and it's impossible at that stage to imagine the type of abstract thinking you get after many more years of experience.
But yeah - the 'XY problem!' crowd (along with the 'But The Rules!' crowd) has also totally destroyed Stack Overflow.
scoutt
I can deal with a "Why would you want to do that?". What I cannot deal with is "It's not standard practice" kind-of answers.
oldmanhorton
But, it's also a reasonable response to prevent bloat. Not asking that question is how anything with backwards compatibility guarantees, especially languages, get too complex over time. Asking the question doesn't mean you've hit a wall; the maintainers may just be going through a mental checklist to try to keep this from being a major pain for them in 10 years.
brnt
Change causes stress, it's a scientific fact. It is thus not surprising that many don't like change for any reason, nor is it a reason not to change if the reasons are sound.
While we can all agree X is a pile of something, I am in the camp that remains unconvinced by Wayland. It does not work on my hardware, it does not solve problems I have. OK, no more screen tearing, which is nice.
Wayland have to understand that if they want to replace X, they'll have to replace X.
PaulHoule
The fact that has gone on more than seven years and Wayland is not mainstream is exactly what the problem is.
It seems impossible that it will be ready for use before it is hopelessly obsolete (e.g. Windows and MacOS will be beaming images straight into your brain or something.)
kaba0
Or you know, development on Linux is not cathedral but bazaar based, and they can’t just say “this is the new display protocol”. And until a critical mass is achieved noone will even start porting apps over, and all that.
Wayland is (fortunately) coming, but changing a whole ecosystem is not a small feat (even with the great backward compatibility with XWayland, because unmaintained apps will never port)
cycloptic
>In my admittedly somewhat distanced opinion, Wayland's biggest mistakes were not launching with a coherent strategy for replicating functionality like screen sharing, screenshots, and to a lesser extent remote desktop/applications. They just punted and said "that's a compositor problem!" as though that was supposed to make it ok.
I am not sure what you mean here. Weston, the original implementation, includes support for screenshots, screensharing and RDP. Other implementations decided to implement those in a different way, for various reasons. The way to not "punt" this would be to use libweston but that has its own set of issues, and it seems strange to blame the Weston hackers for not upstreaming every single other thing that some implementer is working on.
olejorgenb
> screensharing and RDP. Other implementations decided to implement those in a different way
I'm not fully up to date on the state of these things, but if the different implementations doesn't have a common interface it's goodbye to ever having screensharing work for everyone. I think that's what the parent means.
If we're lucky Discord/Zoom/etc. will implement it for the most popular compositor(s).
Similarly with screenshots - even though it's a much simpler problem it's annoying if the program taking the screenshot is fundamentally bound to a specific compositor.
If I'm not mistaken there are standardization efforts underway today though?
cycloptic
>if the different implementations doesn't have a common interface it's goodbye to ever having screensharing work for everyone.
No, not really. In practice what happens is Discord/Zoom/etc do implement it for the most popular compositors and then the other compositors follow suit if they want to support those applications. You would be complaining even more if they only supported weston because their screencast mechanism is pretty limited, and it would suck if the other ones just copied that.
The current "standard" is to just use pipewire and have the display server talk to the pipewire server, most commonly using xdg-desktop-portal. This is obviously outside the scope of Wayland, because any application can talk to pipewire and share/receive a video stream. I don't know about Zoom, but Chromium has support for this in the works, so Discord should get that eventually from updating their Electron: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/26022
BoysenberryPi
I have no beef with Wayland specifically and I agree that if you are harassing maintainers of any project you're probably an asshole. However,
>Maybe Wayland doesn’t work for your precious use-case. More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago.
I'm a game developer. None of the software I use works reliably or at all on Wayland. None of it. And I'm completely fine with that, I'll keep using Xorg and you can give me a call when my "precious use-case" is handled.
znpy
that's imho the core problem with wayland advocates:
- if you rely on something that doesn't currently work on wayland and you write about it on (for example) hacker news then you're the asshole and you should be dropping that something and switch to wayland (which of course, most of us cannot do)
- if your current setup works and you'd rater spend your time doing your stuff instead of rebuilding on wayland, you're an asshole
rinse and repeat.
Most wayland advocates can't seem to understand the philosopy of "I don't really care about xorg vs wayland, my current xorg-based setup works well enough for me, i'll switch when I can be equally productive on wayland".
vetinari
> ost wayland advocates can't seem to understand the philosopy of "I don't really care about xorg vs wayland, my current xorg-based setup works well enough for me, i'll switch when I can be equally productive on wayland".
Because usually the part "my current xorg-based setup works well enough for me" is not true. It will be said, when it comes to wayland, and they don't want to switch... but once hidpi or mixed-dpi displays or reliable screen-lock or something other comes on topic, then suddenly "linux" (not xorg, but linux) is behind the times, doesn't work out of the box as other systems do and requires hours and hours of configuring.
That's the "my current xorg-based setup works well enough for me" in the full glory.
znpy
>>> most wayland advocates can't seem to understand the philosopy of "I don't really care about xorg vs wayland, my current xorg-based setup works well enough for me, i'll switch when I can be equally productive on wayland".
> Because usually the part "my current xorg-based setup works well enough for me" is not true.
case in point. What do you know about my current setup for example? it works remarkably well for me.
Stop making the whole wayland thing look like a bunch of annoying people.
TheCapeGreek
> Most wayland advocates can't seem to understand the philosopy of "I don't really care about xorg vs wayland, my current xorg-based setup works well enough for me, i'll switch when I can be equally productive on wayland".
Same rehash the same arguments of Linux vs Windows that people have been having for years. It's turtles all the way down :)
It's only less common nowadays around these parts since tux has become far more usable day-to-day in the last decade.
kaba0
Noone is bothered by the people that simply don’t care about or can’t switch. People are bothered about “why rediscover the wheel when x11 works fine, and also this whole protocol is shit because no screenshot blahblah“.
znpy
I'm sad to prove you wrong.
Look at the sibling of your comment (link for brevity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26004250).
ohgodplsno
Let's be honest, most wayland advocates do not give a single shit about people sticking on xorg.
They might care a little bit more when their only interactions are with snarky people going "sO yOu StILl CaN'T tAKe ScReEnShOts oN wAyLaNd haHaHa sHiTtY sOftWare", or legitimate assholes.
adkadskhj
Yea i'm confused by this line. I'm a Linux-desktop-noob, but i was going to use i3-Wayland, aka Sway, and because i have an Nvidia i was told don't bother. Nvidia Drivers + Wayland sound broken?
Now that may not be true.. but it seemed clear cut. I wanted to try Wayland really bad because i have a multi-DPI monitor setup, and Xorg is awful at that. Yet, it seemed too early.
Nvidia isn't exactly some niche product. Not exactly a "Precious use-case".
__s
It'll work with Nouveau. Nvidia refuses to implement an interface in their driver every other graphics driver implements
Drew wrote a blog entirely devoted to the Nvidia issue: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
Miraste
On the one hand, trying to work with a company as intractable and anti-OSS as Nvidia must be incredibly frustrating and I sympathize. Nouveau is too slow and broken to be usable, and that's also NV's fault. On the other, I'm never going to choose Wayland over Nvidia (i.e. throw out all my GPUs and buy slower ones), and it obviously can't be a default in any major distros while this is still the case. So long as it's not a default, it won't have the support or pressure needed to fix its many smaller problems.
Unfortunately, Wayland is dead in the water until it can run on Nvidia machines, and no amount of blog posts will change that.
dkarl
> Nvidia users are shitty consumers and I don’t even want them in my userbase.
Can't say he isn't straightforward. If you bought your computer without thinking about running Linux on it, or if you're looking to install Linux on an employer-supplied Windows laptop, there's an excellent chance you're a shitty consumer that he doesn't want using his software.
6gvONxR4sf7o
Wow, so he writes an article about people being assholes about him not writing free extra stuff, and this other article saying literally “nvidia- fuck you” (and its “shitty consumers”) for not writing this other free extra stuff. He says that’s treating Linux users like shit, when a massive part of nvidia’s business is supporting Linux (GPGPU stuff), which works fantastically.
Reading OP, I figured it was righteously angry. Reading your article, I’m now figuring he’s just angry and abrasive. The OP article reads hypocritical after reading yours.
adkadskhj
Appreciate the info! I'll have to look into that. As someone who runs Computer Graphics software GPU perf is important to me. I'll be curious to look into how Nouveau behaves there
adkadskhj
As an aside, i hate GPUs on Linux. I'm running Blender and am in the market for a new PC build. The GPU is a huge source of confusion, due to Linux.
I see so many conflicting stories about how well AMD GPUs behave and perform on Linux. Some new, many old. Some even as extreme as "I bought a new AMD GPU and there are no drivers for it yet". Furthermore for Blender specifically AMD seems to get the short stick in performance.
Really leaves me confused as to what to buy. Just venting.
Too
How well does Nouveau work on Wayland? On X11 it's a complete disaster compared to the proprietary drivers. Framerate drops when just moving windows around or scrolling in my editor, screen tearing, fans blasting when playing videos or just randomly.
Basically I would say it doesn't work.
robert_foss
NVidia is broken, not Wayland. They refuse to implement the same APIs as everyone other driver does.
Wayland is 10 years old, and extremely stable. If it isn't working properly it's either your driver vendor or your desktop environment that is to blame.
adkadskhj
Sure, i'm willing to accept that - but is your solution for me to buy a new graphics card?
How much of the market share is Nvidia? A stupid quick search's top result says 80%. So 80% of PCs can't run Wayland?
To be clear, i know nothing of compositors/etc, I've had nothing but problems with Xorg, and i want to use Wayland. _and yet_ - it seems like there is not a single PC in my house, or any of my family, that can run Wayland.
I'm happy to accept your statement of where the blame lies. But if you're telling me Nvidia can't run Wayland currently.. does it matter to the end user? When "Most PCs" can't run Wayland his statement of "precious use-case" seems off base.
danShumway
> NVidia is broken, not Wayland. They refuse to implement the same APIs as everyone other driver does.
I'm extremely sympathetic to this argument, and I actually agree with ddevault's decision not to support NVidia in Sway. I think as an Open Source maintainer you don't have an obligation to burn yourself out solving a problem that is NVidia's fault, and we need real pressure on NVidia to stop being completely awful.
However.
Linux is at the point where I am able to start recommending it to ordinary people, and even technical people who are used to Windows. One the selling points I use is that a lot of hardware "just works" in Linux. NVidia is not ddevault's problem to solve, but people buy NVidia cards, and regardless of who's fault it is, if someone walks up to me and asks about switching to Linux or using a tiling window manager, I am not going to have a conversation with them about graphics cards. I'm going to point them towards X-compatible software that gets good performance regardless of their graphics card.
Doesn't mean it's anyone's fault that I can't recommend Wayland to everyone, but I can't recommend Wayland to everyone.
And I am on the Wayland hype train. I don't like X11, I want to run Wayland. In most cases, I would be defending Wayland right now. But if one of the conditions of switching over is "buy a new graphics card", if it's "redo all of your linux-wacom setup"[0], if it's running an entire embedded X session just to get Emacs working[1], if it's that common applications just don't work right now, then that's not ready for prime time. Those aren't problems that the Wayland devs can fix, but until they get fixed, I just can't in good conscience tell people that the Wayland ecosystem is mature and ready for regular usage.
The moment I have to talk to someone about throwing out hardware, I'm recommending them to stay on X. I don't care who's to blame, people want software that just works, and I don't feel confident that Wayland just works. I'm not going to recommend every i3 NVidia user throw away their graphics card, that's not a real solution. I sympathize with the devs who are being hounded to solve problems that aren't their responsibility[2], but I also sympathize with the users who are just as much not to blame for any of this. It is also not their problem to solve when they can instead just use an existing stack that works today. They have zero obligation to play Where's Waldo with the maintainers of a dozen projects just to build a working system.
----
[0]: Do equivalently powerful tools to linux-wacom even exist for Wayland right now? I can't find out. There's basically zero documentation that exists on this that I can find, compared to an extensive Arch guide about rebinding keys under X11, multiple helpful utilities like xsetwacom that are pretty well documented, and dozens of blog posts and forums that are troubleshooting even obscure issues. That's not a narrow use case, my computer is an art station. I need to know before I switch that my Cintiq will work perfectly, and DuckDuckGo doesn't know the answer to that question.
[1]: Emacs is finally working to get rid of its X dependencies, but it's still not part of the main release, I'd still need to switch to compiling Emacs myself, which... no.
[2]: And I'm also sympathetic to arguments that this just takes time, and as people start to switch more utilities will be written and driver support will get better. But it's taking a really long time. And I don't know where NVidia fits on that spectrum, because I'm not confident that they're going to magically stop being awful any time soon. Maybe someone else will write a compatibility layer around the driver or something? Eventually? Waiting for NVidia to go out of business and their hardware to vanish isn't feasible.
pmlnr
...
...
Really? "Us, open source devs demans nvidia to alter their ways". And you wonder why people are disappointed in wayland?
kaba0
If we are being pedantic, linux doesn’t support nvidia (more correctly the reverse), sway only tries to build upon the user space provided by the linux kernel.
arghwhat
And there is nothing wrong with that in the slightest.
No hate, just a practical problem being solved. No one is forcing you to shift prematurely, although assistance is always welcome to fix your usecase.
creata
If it's not too much trouble, can you list the software you use which doesn't work on Wayland?
BoysenberryPi
No problem, the biggest ones I tried were Godot, Krita, and Steam. Godot does not run on Wayland although support seems to be planned somewhere down the pipeline. Krita "runs" on Wayland but a lot of the features do not work nor does pen support last time I checked. Steam just doesn't work.
Edit: A commenter on this thread mentioned Emacs. I have not tried that as I have recently switched to Emacs but if that is true then that would also be a big one for me.
fullstop
I have a Linux PC that my kids mostly use, running Wayland sessions. It definitely works with Steam and Krita, although I admit that I do not know if all of Krita's features work. They have played Portal 2, Minecraft, and a few "windows-only" games with Proton.
My biggest gripe is that if you have more than one window of Chrome open it gets VERY slow. Multiple tabs are good, multiple windows are not.
mondoshawan
On my ASUS PN50 APU, Steam works fine in wayland, even in big picture mode. Input, however, is another (sad) story.
rvolosatovs
Godot and Steam work perfectly fine on Wayland.
ywei3410
Emacs and Steam seem to work for me - I've been using it with XWayland for around a year now.
vetinari
> Steam just doesn't work.
Steam works fine. What exactly doesn't work for you?
bionade24
swaywm (Wayland) runs Krita and Steam just fine. Don't use Godot, so can't tell anything about it.
dleslie
Basically all GTK2 apps won't work.
pmoriarty
It's a couple of years old, but this post on "Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet."[1] summarizes some of the concerns I have about switching to Wayland:
"at the moment there are several types of applications that not only don't work in wayland, but would be very difficult, or impossible to work natively in all major wayland compositors.
Examples (in order of importance to me):
* Programmatic output configuration (xrandr, arandr, etc.)
* CLI clipboard access (xsel, xclip)
* Third party app launcher/window switcher (rofi, dmenu, albert, docky).
* Clipboard managers (parcellite, klipper, Gpaste, clipman, etc.)
* Third party screen shot/capture/share (shutter, OBS, ffmpeg, import, peek, scrot, VNC, etc.)
* Color picker (gpick, gcolor3, kcolorchooser)
* xdotool
PS: ydotool has been touted as an equivalent of xdotool, but ydotool has only a tiny fraction of the features of xdotool.
And it's unlikely that it'll get much better any time soon, as its README says:
"Since Jun, 2019, I have little time to maintain this project"
wtype is supposed to be another equivalent to xdotool, but it has even less features than ydotool.
If the rest of Wayland's X equivalents as feature poor as these, I don't hold out much hope for Wayland in the near future.
[1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_...
undefined
popcornarsonist
* It's not exactly the same, but I use Kanshi for dynamic output configuration. https://github.com/emersion/kanshi
* https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard
* https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wofi
* https://github.com/yory8/clipman
* There's wlrobs for OBS. There's grim/slurp/wl-recorder for use outside of OBS.
* You can use grim to grab a particular color on the screen, but the UI wouldn't be as good, of course.dleslie
Emacs
ahendriksen
Emacs works perfectly fine under xwayland. The recent pgtk feature branch does not use X anymore under wayland. What is not working for you?
striking
Someone is working on that: https://github.com/masm11/emacs
undefined
dleslie
Hell, Emacs doesn't work in Wayland.
tyingq
Ah, but that is so niche that it's precious :)
tsujp
That's not strictly correct. Give the `feature/pgtk` branch from upstream a try, `make` it yourself unless your distro has a binary for it -- that (`make`'d myself) worked for me on Void Linux.
There are also a few forks on GitHub with native wayland patches out there too if `feature/pgtk` doesn't.
zests
I'm already on 28.x/native comp. Is this branch really tested and working well enough without any performance regressions? I read the LWN article about this branch and it did not increase my confidence.
undefined
ubercow13
Have you tried the Wayland port? (https://github.com/masm11/emacs :)
skratlo
Hell does, and way better than on Xorg, less latency. Why do your spread lies? There's a pgtk and native-comp branch.
undefined
tubularhells
Fellow game dev here. What breaks do you have? Just wondering.
kuschku
I’m using a Dell UP2718Q (3840x2160, 144dpi, 60Hz) and a Fujitsu Siemens P17-2 (1024x1280, 96dpi, 75Hz) side by side, and without Wayland this setup isn’t even possible to get working properly. Sadly, KDE still doesn’t support it nicely under Wayland (so I moved to Ubuntu Budgie), but under X11 it’s entirely impossible to run it properly, as except for Qt nothing supports mixed DPI, or mixed refresh rates properly.
Once proper wide color gamut and bitdepth support is added, it’ll be even better, as the monitors are 10-bit Rec.2020 and 8-bit sRGB. Which under X11 isn’t even possible to support, as again, Xorg only sees one single screen it’s drawing on, and it’s up to the lower levels of the stack to split that.
EDIT: Answering the most common question which is asked all the time as my comment is getting some visibility here:
Now why does wayland break screenshot and keyboard tools? Because "every program is a keylogger by default and can see any event, look at the contents of any window" is a major security issue, especially as it means the entire security model of screen lockers or containerized applications is useless.
Under X11, basically every application you run can trivially escalate itself to root. As even your Zoom client can just listen to your key events when you unlock your screen or use sudo in your terminal, save your password, and tada it can elevate itself. Under X11, there is no security whatsoever, and no separation of privileges.
EDIT2: Why is sandboxing applications important? (a) more and more proprietary software is also released for linux, which you probably shouldn’t trust. And (b) if e.g. your XMPP client is compromised, you don’t want the attacker to gain root.
EDIT3: Yes, screenshot tools and screensharing still works. I can use KDE Spectacle under Budgie or Chrome, and Slack, Teams, Discord, Jitsi all work just fine. OBS requires a patch, but also works nicely. It’s not impossible, it just requires software using it to be updated.
spijdar
Professional pentester here - Wayland alone doesn't really do much for you, security wise. It is still very possible for an application simply running under a wayland compositor to do lots of nasty things.
The Wayland protocol provides the building blocks for someone to create an Android-like sandboxed environment, but doing so would break every application. Snaps and Flatpak come closer, but still generally miss the mark, since many applications require your entire home directory to be bind mounted in their container.
Running wayland alone gets you very little in terms of sandboxing. It locks the front door, but leaves the backdoor and all your windows open, because that's what every application under the sun expects.
> Under X11, you are basically running every application with root, always.
This is ... not true, either broadly or generally. You're saying this because Xorg runs as root, which means that any security flaw in Xorg yields root access. I think saying that "you are running every application with root" is stretching it a bit, but I'll accept it.
But Xorg doesn't have to run as root. OpenBSD started it years ago with Xenocara, but AFAIK Fedora also does not run Xorg as root. I'm not sure what other OSes are doing, but it's at least not a flaw of X11 in general, just a flaw of Xorg.
kuschku
> This is ... not true, either broadly or generally
I’m saying that because if you ever type in your password, e.g. into a screenlocker, into a terminal with sudo, or an apt-get gui, every application can listen to those input events. Every application has the ability to be a keylogger by default. And with that captured password, it then can either inject input events into your terminal, or run sudo itself.
> The Wayland protocol provides the building blocks for someone to create an Android-like sandboxed environment, but doing so would break every application. Snaps and Flatpak come closer, but still generally miss the mark, since many applications require your entire home directory to be bind mounted in their container.
That’s true, but also not. With X11, even a flatpak without any special permissions or bind mounts can still basically control your system. Just listen for input events until you see the keys "s u d o", then listen until you see something that looks like a password, then wait until the user is not paying attention, and inject virtual input events to start a terminal and inject input events to run "sudo rm -rf /*" with the password you captured earlier.
By making the ability to intercept, record, or inject input events a special API, wayland at least allows flatpaks to be sandboxed at all.
spijdar
Ah, that's fair.
Still, assuming a lack of other sandboxing, running a keylogger is pretty trivial. It's not by default, as you put it, but an un-sandboxed application has enough access to your filesystem to perform tomfoolery and get your credentials. At that point, there's no need to start a terminal, you just load some shellcode in whatever process you control, and say goodbye to your data.
As for sandboxing, well, you're right, although one could sandbox X11 if they wanted to. "X-on-X" is actually a thing, rarely used outside developing X, but I could see it being used for seamless sandboxing with some work. Work that, inevitably, no-one will actually do, so there's that ;)
R0b0t1
> I’m saying that because if you ever type in your password, e.g. into a screenlocker, into a terminal with sudo, or an apt-get gui, every application can listen to those input events.
And any program can (on a relatively default box) trace arbitrary programs under your gid and scan memory for passwords. The real issue here is that there are very weak process boundaries within a gid (because it is historically most convenient), not necessarily a lot wrong with X11.
enriquto
> With X11, even a flatpak without any special permissions or bind mounts can still basically control your system. Just listen for input events until you see the keys "s u d o", then listen until you see something that looks like a password, then wait until the user is not paying attention, and inject virtual input events to start a terminal and inject input events to run "sudo rm -rf /*" with the password you captured earlier.
Why such complication? An hostile application can simply add an "evil" line to your .bashrc and you are fucked anyway. No need to keylog anything, nor the fancy stuff that you describe. It doesn't need to be a graphical application, even. The "ls" command can do it!
pmoriarty
"But Xorg doesn't have to run as root"
All the hand wringing over root privilege escalation on Linux is almost irrelevant for most single-user systems, as since there's really only one non-root account which usually has all the data the user cares about, getting access to just that non-root account would be disaster enough for the user.[1]
So if Wayland's design is standing in the way of doing useful things because they're concerned about root privilege escalation, they've got their priorities mixed up.
[1] - not to mention that once a non-root account is exploited then getting root in some other way, even if Wayland itself can't be exploited, is usually not difficult.
kuschku
The goal isn’t to prevent escalation to root, but to prevent escalation out of a sandbox.
If you sandbox an application today, while it can’t access the filesystem at all, and nothing under your user account, as long as it can show you a window under X11, it can log, manipulate, and inject any input events or window contents of any other windows as well.
That’s the one single big hole in todays sandboxes under linux, and there’s only two options to solve it: put a whole separate X server into the sandbox of every single application with X-on-X, or replace X. Which is one of the things wayland fixes.
Majestic121
I think the point about root is not so much about whether Xorg is run as root, but rather that any application can then elevate itself as root by listening to the key events to catch your password (for example when unlocking your screen) and then sudo with it.
ben-schaaf
> You're saying this because Xorg runs as root, which means that any security flaw in Xorg yields root access.
They're saying that because every app under Xorg can do keylogging they're effectively running as root, as any of them can keylog your root password next time you type it in.
ebiester
I get the frustration, but fundamentally, screen sharing and screenshots are so integral to my daily use that I couldn't even consider wayland. For nearly any remote worker at this point, at least the ones I work with, this is fundamentally true.
In 2021, screen sharing and screenshots are table stakes.
PurpleFoxy
Screen sharing and screenshots do work on wayland as long as the application is updated to support it. Electron only recently gained this capability so not all electron apps have updated yet.
No one will fault you for using X because zoom hasn’t supported wayland yet. The problem is people sharing blatant falsehoods like “wayland doesn’t support screen sharing” when there are plenty of programs that can do just that on wayland.
kuschku
I use KDE spectacle under Gnome/Budgie for screenshots (works fine) and screen sharing works fine with Slack, Teams, Discord and Jitsi.
lmm
> Sadly, KDE still doesn’t support it nicely under Wayland (so I moved to Ubuntu Budgie), but under X11 it’s entirely impossible to run it properly, as except for Qt nothing supports mixed DPI, or mixed refresh rates properly.
Sounds like a roughly equivalent situation either way? Personally I'd sooner use only Qt applications than have to use Gnome.
kuschku
I’m using (except for firefox) 100% Qt applications under Ubuntu Budgie (which is a bit like elementary but with Wayland support).
The result is good enough for my use case, I don’t have to deal with toy applications and I can use the full crisp resolution.
And thanks to standard protocols, I can use KDE software like KDE Spectacle as screenshot tool or screensharing with Slack, Teams, Jitsi under Budgie just fine.
lmm
> I’m using (except for firefox) 100% Qt applications under Ubuntu Budgie (which is a bit like elementary but with Wayland support).
If your only non-Qt application was Firefox, what was your problem under X11? Certainly for me having to switch to Gnome's WM/panels/etc. much would be more disruptive than switching browsers. (You might find Firefox valuable enough to be worth switching your whole DE for, in which case fair enough, but I don't think it's an objective advantage for Wayland).
(IMO Konqueror is a much better browser, but I'm sure everyone has their own preferences)
mindcrime
Now why does wayland break screenshot and keyboard tools? Because "every program is a keylogger by default and can see any event, look at the contents of any window" is a major security issue, especially as it means the entire security model of screen lockers or containerized applications is useless.
OK, so what's the solution here? Give up on screen-shotting tools forever? Or is there a plan to fix this somehow?
kuschku
There’s an API for that. e.g. KDE Spectacle uses it, which is why it can be used as screenshot tool under wayland no matter your DE.
But by making it an explicit API, you can also apply an include/exclude list to the programs allowed to call this API, and e.g. exclude sandboxed applications from taking screenshots. Or e.g. add a permissions prompt (as on android or iOS) for an application to request to be on that include list.
PurpleFoxy
The solution is to make it a permission. On macOS you can’t just record the screen, you can open the OS settings page and tell the user to allow screen recording and now your program gains access to this feature.
mzi
I use grim[0] under Wayland, and it can grab things off my screen.
sushisource
This is definitely not entirely true of x11. I have mixed DPI (which, admittedly, does work for shit, but can be hacked around by using a wrapper script to launch things with different DPIs) and mixed refresh rates. The mixed refresh rates work perfectly, zero issues (as configured via nvidia drivers, admittedly annoying for other reasons).
That said I would use wayland if nvidia wasn't busy fucking everything up.
kuschku
> but can be hacked around by using a wrapper script to launch things with different DPIs
I have firefox windows on both monitors, and like to drag tabs over from one to the other.
Under X11, doing so is either impossible, or requires restarting firefox, which really isn’t something I’d wanna do.
There was an old XUL extension for firefox to parse QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS and apply it instead, but that’s long gone. And normal Gtk apps never worked properly.
renewiltord
It's probably the mixed dpi because I've been using a Qnix overclocked to 96 Hz and a Vizio at 144 Hz, both 27" 1440p for a while and I get different refresh rates and everything works normally.
tleb_
The question is then: is this isolation even useful? There are a lot of attacks that still exist when a program runs in userspace and that are not inherent to GUI programs. Example: creating an executable named sudo somewhere in a directory that is in your ~ and PATH.
kuschku
Sure, but if you’re under X11, then a flatpak or any other jailed application can still trivially elevate itself to root.
Jailing applications only has a meaningful benefit whatsoever under wayland, as a flatpak without bind-home under wayland is actually properly sandboxed. Still a rare case, but at least it’s possible and getting even somewhat common.
PurpleFoxy
Wayland is only one piece in the security puzzle. Flatpak and SELinux are the other pieces. Under X there is no point sandboxing a GUI app since X provides an escape.
roel_v
And yet on every other OS, users can take screenshots and use virtual keyboards... It's not because X's security model is broken that the solution is 'we'll just remove that functionality'.
kuschku
And yet instead of looking at sibling comments you asked the same question again, so I’ll have to answer it for at least the fifth time in this thread.
Wayland allows the same as well. It’s just an include/exclude list for such APIs, so you can actually limit which programs can access what.
Under X11, jailing GUI apps is entirely useless as there is no actual security boundary. Under wayland, you as user are in control and can define whether spectacle should be able to take screenshots (sure) and whether myflashlight-flatpak should be able to access all input events and take screenshots (probably not).
SEJeff
The author is kind of a jerk. He complains that users don't like wayland when he entirely and wholesale rejects anyone who wants to use an nvidia graphics card.
Maintainers with attitudes like this are why we can't have nice things:
https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
Sadly, the OSS driver doesn't support the 4k monitors I use for work well enough to actually use day to day. So my option is to use an "evil" but very stable driver and no wayland to do my job and get paid, or not.
_ktx2
Drew Devault is an interesting character. I find some of the ways he chooses to express himself to be pretty poor most of the time. That said, Drew does come from a place of genuine caring, erratic, divisive, and brusque opinions aside. You just have to learn to filter out most of the useless anger and frustration he tends to speak with.
All that to say, nvidia doesn't really do the work to play ball in Linux with Wayland. There is no way to improve these drivers, you can only hope Nouveau can solve your woes.
caaqil
> You just have to learn to filter out most of the useless anger and frustration he tends to speak with.
Or, here is a wild idea, we stop looking for some "wisdom" in what people who often express themselves this poorly write. Most of what this "thought leader" writes that I happened to read have the same punchline, and it got old pretty fast.
Sometimes, stuff is just garbage. You don't have to look through 99% of the garbage to find some 1% that is supposedly not as garbage.
kodah
I definitely understand that it's difficult to listen to people like this. If you feel that way, my recommendation is don't engage with his content. I certainly don't recommend Drew Devault's writing or projects to anyone precisely because of this. That said, I do still listen to him because that vitriol and frustration does seem to come from a good place and genuine frustration.
6gvONxR4sf7o
A lot of OP seems to be him complaining about that same behavior in users, which is straight up hypocrisy. It’s bad for his mental health when people do it to him, but he’s not part of the problem or anything.
kuschku
Or you start buying a GPU that actually supports linux? If you buy a proprietary product with no actual linux support, then why are you complaining to the unpaid volunteer to fix it, and not the multi-billion dollar company you just made several hundred dollars richer?
gpm
It does support Linux, just fine, on x11... It's also the only option for a significant portion of machine learning software.
Meanwhile we (or at least I) aren't asking any unpaid volunteers to fix anything. We're asking them to stop claiming their new software works for practically every use case when it doesn't, nothing more.
SEJeff
Bingo! I’m also asking him to maybe be less of a jerk about it.
He complains about users not using his software while also (literally) saying “fuck you nvidia”.
Hypocrite much? I’m a former GNOME software foundation member and was on the GNOME sysadmin team. I literally used to have root on gnome.org. I’m not the enemy here, but I’m being made out to be one because I use hardware that OSS stuff does not reliably support.
bartvk
> We're asking them to stop claiming their new software works for practically every use case
Who is 'them' here? Is that Drew DeVault, or can you point to someone else specifically?
SEJeff
CUDA is primarily developed for Linux. You’re showing me that you totally misunderstand the problem by assuming Nvidia doesn’t build these GPUs for Linux. There is a reason that Nvidia gpus + Linux servers top the top 500 supercomputer list. It is because they’re built to work together:
kuschku
Nvidia supports exactly one use case on Linux: running their GPUs in servers or workstations purely with their proprietary drivers purely for ML and CAD work.
Everything else is completely unsupported, and if you’ve got an issue with that, you’ve got to complain to Nvidia, not open source projects.
You expect a single unpaid volunteer maintaining a wayland compositor alone to somehow be able to add support for nvidias badly documented custom format?
slabity
Not defending the author, but aren't you totally misunderstanding the fact that Nvidia providing excellent CUDA support is irrelevant to this conversation? The fact is Nvidia has a long history of providing the bare minimum to Linux desktop users, even on X11.
Hell, I can't even fix the screen-tearing or get Optimus to work with Nvidia's proprietary drivers with X11 on my GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q laptop. It may be 'usable' in a sense that it doesn't crash, but the number of graphical glitches that I run into every single day (literally opening my laptop requires me to refresh every window) that I never run into with Intel or AMD kind of proves to me how much Nvidia cares about desktop usage.
Drew Devault might be a jerk (not my words) and have a lot of fallacies in his arguments, but that doesn't mean you should be doing the same thing.
erk__
Also worth noticing, there are other operating systems that does not use the Linux kernel. FreeBSD does have an official Nvidia driver (although a pretty limited in term of framework suppot) and Nouveau is not ported anymore. The AMD drivers are a port of the Linux drivers and are usually some versions behind because it is work to port them. So it means that I cannot try out sway on my laptop, and as I am not planning to buy a new laptop in the next few years, it is not something I can try soon. Sure I can just run Linux and I do on another drive, but I just end up with X so I can share configurations.
floatboth
I don't think Nouveau ever was ported before. I actually tried it myself (unsuccessfully). Kind of a painful codebase.
> usually some versions behind
Currently on 5.4-5.5, only Big Navi is not supported yet. With the state of the GPU market right now, we'll probably catch up before the prices on those become sane :D
Funnily enough, it's Intel that's slowing the updates down more than anything. amdgpu is rarely an early adopter of new Linux kernel API surface. i915 is very much one, all the time.
h_anna_h
In their defence until a few years ago it was nvidia that had the good linux drivers while AMD was stuck with bad ones. The tables turned after AMDGPU as far as I know.
kuschku
That’s true, but that’d mean running a 900 series Nvidia card or even earlier, which wouldn’t be able to handle multiple 4K monitors natively at 60Hz with or without the proprietary driver.
Which means that the author bought an nvidia GPU at a point in time when it was already obvious that nvidia would treat linux as a second class citizen.
And even if not, you should first complain to the company you paid hundreds of dollars to, not the unpaid volunteers.
africanboy
> Or you start buying a GPU that actually supports linux?
People usually don't get to chose what HW the company buys for them and, anecdotally, "the component X doesn't work with Wayland" rarely makes a difference.
I've tried Wayland many times a year over the past 5 years.
I still only get a black screen.
X11 just works.
zamadatix
Or just use KDE Wayland, they support it fine.
LeoPanthera
Does it? I run KDE on my desktop PC with has a GTX 1080 inside it, and whenever I experimentally turn on Wayland, I get a black screen. Been like that forever.
nailer
Re: NVIDIA, announced on Jan 7:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-G...
> This work will hopefully land in time for the start of standalone XWayland releases separate from the xorg-server. Those should begin this spring in time for the Fedora 34 release as likely the first distribution shipping standalone XWayland packages.
> With this and other NVIDIA proprietary driver work pending to improve the Wayland support, hopefully by Ubuntu 21.10 we see GNOME on Wayland by the default so that for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is also that shift away from X.Org.
Out_of_Characte
"rejects anyone who wants to use an nvidia graphics card." Yes this part is true. "my option is to use an "evil" but very stable driver and no wayland to do my job and get paid, or not." So what is the problem? That you can't have nice things for free?
6gvONxR4sf7o
As someone with an nvidia card, it rubs me the wrong way that he says “Nvidia users are shitty consumers and I don’t even want them in my userbase.”
If he wants someone like me to use wayland, that’s the problem. If he doesn’t want me to use it, then there’s no problem. But I think this guy isn’t just maintaining it. He’s evangelizing it too, right? Get rid of the old broken X11 and come to the promised land of wayland where we fixed x11’s woes. And if it doesn’t work for you:
> Maybe Wayland doesn’t work for your precious use-case. More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago.
He seems to be saying it works and you’re dumb if you think it doesn’t. And at the same time saying he won’t support maybe the most common cards out there.
_coveredInBees
So many comments here are missing the point of the rant. If it doesn't work for you, fine, move on. But it takes a special type of asshole to go around harassing maintainers and continuously putting down their hard work and in many cases just making overly broad and incorrect generalizations or propagating outright lies. There is a big difference between constructive criticism and what drove the author to write that rant in the first place.
It boggles my mind how people can be complete assholes to people writing FOSS because the sense of entitlement that users have when it comes to FOSS is staggering, and the more technical someone believes themselves to be, oftentimes, the more caustic they tend to be in how they interact with FOSS developers. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone, but having been a silent observer on Github issues for many FOSS projects as well as reading the rants on reddit and HN against FOSS technology <X>, it really pisses me off even though I have no skin in the game.
These are real humans and people devoting their own free time to build something they are passionate about and believe in. It may not work for you, you may even think what they are doing is a terrible idea. Then provide constructive criticism if you wish and move along. That's all too rare though. In reality, what people really want is they want Wayland (or insert Technology <X> here), but they want it the way they would wish it to be, and so they will essentially engage in negging developers and their decisions trying to beat them into submission. It's despicable behavior and no one should be defending this.
Measured criticism is fine, but then move the fuck on. Let people passionate about FOSS they care about, continue working on it. But don't be an asshole and keep trying to tear them down just because you selfishly want what they are building, but you want them to really build it the way you want it and to meet your specific use cases.
R0b0t1
He's saying, literally,
> So my new approach is “fuck you”. None of the Wayland detractors have a clue.
Lumping everyone who may not have a rosy view of Wayland together.
There's a good comment by an (alleged) pentester mentioning how Wayland doesn't really buy you that much. He's right. The bigger issue is lack of isolation within a gid. I can still debug your terminal and try to get your root password.
oconnor663
> Blanket lumping everyone who may not have a rosy view of Wayland together.
I think it's a lot closer to the author's intent to read the post as "here's what I'm experiencing" rather than "here's a category view of the world that I want you to endorse". Obviously a statement like "no one in [group] understands [thing]" is never going to be 100% true. When people say things like that, they're venting.
kaba0
But in the same comment thread by the pentester, it turns out that what wayland does is a necessary step for security that X without embedded X sessions simply lacks. It is not sufficient but noone said so and it would be stupid to even assume that eg. a kernel bug can’t be used for escalation just because someone runs Wayland.
R0b0t1
> It is not sufficient but noone said so and it would be stupid to even assume that
Err, no, a bunch of people who bother talking about Wayland propose it as a solution to everything. Now that they are being called out on it they are walking back their positions.
oconnor663
Weird social effects of being online:
If we were in a room of 100 people, and two folks got into a shouting match, everyone would start listening. And then a group decision would get implicitly made. Is it a personal argument, best to stay out of it? Or is someone getting attacked unfairly, and it makes sense to intervene? Everyone in the room starts watching, and everyone starts thinking about what the group is going to do.
Online is nothing like that. If someone behaves like a complete asshole on one thread, most people don't see it. Especially if the asshole is "some random guy" with no standing in the community. Since there's no real drama, the incident doesn't come to the community's attention. The person on the receiving end of the abuse never gets to have that moment that you'd have in a room of 100 people, where you know everyone sees you and supports you, and maybe you get some "points" for keeping your cool. There's no points for that online, just silence. I think it can feel very isolating and frustrating, and I'm not sure how to address it.
NoodleIncident
> “Wayland sucks!” is a conspiracy theory with no basis in truth, and its supporters have spent years harassing Wayland maintainers, contributors, and users.
See that "and"? Your comment here only addresses the second half of that sentence, which is probably true, and people shouldn't do that. Most of this thread is discussing the first half, which doesn't seem like it's actually correct. You can't say "people are missing the point" when he's making two points in the same rant.
There are pro-wayland people in this thread arguing the former point ("Wayland works for almost everyone"), and mostly they aren't putting up convincing arguments. So far I've seen: "it's really someone else's fault" (ok, in the meantime wayland doesn't work for me") -- "actually no operating system should support this" (ok, back to windows or apple or non-wayland linux it is).
> More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago.
> [Wayland] invented some new, fixable problems in the process — most of which have been fucking fixed already, and years ago!
> Most of the lies you’ve heard about ways that it’s broken are just that: lies.
The author didn't support these statements at all (which is the whole point of the rant, he's tired of doing that. that's fine). Someone else has to do that for this rant to make sense. So people are saying, "here is my common use case. how does it work on wayland now?" If they only thought it was broken due to lies and propaganda, it would be easy to explain how it's since been fixed. But people aren't.
t0astbread
This hits the spot. People are acting like Wayland developers are taking X and everything they liked about it away from them when in reality you can just continue running X if you don't like any particular Wayland compositor.
The Wayland world will continue improving and chances are your problems will be sorted out one way or another in the future. But attacking people working to improve the status quo without any obligations on your side is fucked up beyond reason.
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roel_v
At first they came for x, and I didn't speak out, etc...
FartyMcFarter
> So my new approach is “fuck you”. None of the Wayland detractors have a clue.
Mmmmkay. That's a pretty broad statement, good luck with that attitude!
> I’ve tried appealing to reason and rationally debunking each lie that some Wayland detractor flavor-of-the-week is touting to tow the party line, but it didn’t work.
I guess he's referring to this post? https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-de...
turminal
> I guess he's referring to this post? https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-de...
And to numerous comments on HN and elsewhere.
The 'wayland sucks' movement is sooo annoying, even to me and I'm just a happy wayland user and haven't spent any of my free time writing those thousands of lines of code.
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Aardwolf
That post doesn't tackle the issue of being unable to do keyboard and mouse automation
Y_Y
I wonder where they're "towing" the party line to? Maybe it was parked in front of a hospital.
Deestan
Quite a few of these are of the form:
"Wayland doesn't X!"
"Actually, it's on purpose or X that is not working on Wayland because [reason]."
Sure but that doesn't make it work.
undefined
gspr
> That's a pretty broad statement, good luck with that attitude!
Luckily, DeVault is an insanely prolific writer of actual code, so there's no need to evaluate his attitude. His code speaks for itself.
zzz143
[flagged]
dang
Please don't use HN for personal attack, no matter how strongly you disagree with someone. We're trying for something else in this community.
tarruda
> Spending your life hacking on Wayland when the world has pretty conclusively assigned capital to headless Linux use cases does speak for itself, yes.
He has worked on projects other than wayland.
Sourcehut is a notable example: A free github alternative that has great e-mail integration. One of the amazing features is that the UI uses no javascript (pure server side python) and is super fast.
medicineman
>I’m not sure comparing detractors of software to people who believe thousands of people died in a false flag operation is defensible commentary in any light nor that this community should be giving it an audience.
Instant turn off and automatically made me close the window. It is hard to imagine he has his position because all I see is someone on top of a mountain of salt. Good thing he didn't mention the USS Liberty.
gspr
Why do you care so much about what someone else decides to spend their time coding on? Man, people criticize the weirdest things sometimes.
I for one greatly appreciate a lot of DeVault's work. Do I think he has the softest way of expressing his opinions? No. Do I need him to in order to appreciate the technical merits of his work? No. I'm not looking for a life partner – I'm looking for excellent software.
ChrisRR
Acting like an arse is not the way to get your point across. Wayland definitely does not work under every use case, but claiming that anyone who does have issues with it is a conspiracy theorist is wrong
Guess what, you're using linux, and these things take time to develop and be adopted. That's the way linux always has been, you trade off less than perfect software for the benefit of endless configuration.
Wayland will be widely adopted one day, but insulting anyone who has issues with it does not help your case.
captainmuon
One thing I rarely see discussed - and one of the reasons I don't like Wayland personally - is the second order effect of putting everything in the compositor: It is now really hard to write a "window manager" or window tools. And this leads to a certain uniformity of desktop environments (the big ones, GNOME + Plasma, and then a bunch of keyboard driven minimal environments "for hackers")
What I mean is, back in the day with X11, all clients were equal and there were nice little tools that let you switch between virtual desktops graphically (desktop pagers). I myself wrote a little taskbar (with the kind of glow animation that moves with the cursor that Windows 7 made popular), but never published it unfortunately. A lot of people wrote or hacked on window managers. It was never really easy, but at least it was possible.
Now with wayland, you have to write not only the code that draws the titlebars, but the code that puts the pixels on the screen, input handling, clipboard handling and all kinds of stuff.
Of course you can fork an existing window manager, or use something like wlroots, but they are all opinionated. If you just want "GNOME with different titlebars" someone else wants "KDE with different titlebars" - you're out of luck. So this makes the barrier to entry really high.
On the other hand, if somebody would write a "window decorator" interface, you could write a small window decorator process (like we had with Compiz). I don't believe this will happen, because it would have to be adopted by multiple compositors to make sense. If it did, I would have a bunch of ideas I'd like to try out one day.
dashboardmess
“Putting everything in the compositor” isn’t mandated by Wayland at all, and I think only gnome does it. If you implement the protocols defined by Kwin, you can reuse everything in KDE without using it. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but properly implementing it on X11 also is more work than you would expect. The only problem here is politics, as KDE hasn’t stabilized the interface as far as I know.
Wlroots isn’t opinionated at all. In theory, it’s perfectly possible to write a gnome shell alternative using wlroots. Writing a taskbar for nearly all wlroots based compositors is also possible.
You could even write a plugin for wayfire to implement the Kwin protocols, and write another plugin to implement a simple window manager.
As for changing the titlebars, as long as you enable CSD, you could just write a theme.
noobermin
Dear god, Drew has spicy takes but this takes the cake, comparing anti-wayland sentiment to 9/11-truthers is quite the comparison. Not sure I can stomach reading past the first sentence.
zests
Beware writing things on the internet when you are angry.
bionade24
I only developed on smaller FOSS projects but can tell you this blogpost ist just an abyssnormally small piece of the hate you'll get for changing things.
mjw1007
I think Wayland has come too close to the following pattern, which I've seen in other cases of free software which have become controversial:
- decide it's time to make a New Thing which will supersede the Old Thing rather than living beside it
- decide that some features of Old Thing will not be directly supported by New Thing; instead New Thing will be flexible enough that people could implement those features on top of it
- declare that the work done to support those features will have to be done by the people who want to use them
- declare that the time has come for New Thing to supersede Old Thing, before said work has been done
[Edit: this wasn't intended to be a list of things that are individually bad ideas. It's only the last, in combination with the others, that I think is ill-advised.]
Out_of_Characte
This is exactly the kind of post that the author was talking about.
"decide it's time to make a New Thing which will supersede the Old Thing rather than living beside it"
A non-substantial argument. Whats the difference between a wayland 'superceding' X and a wayland 'living besides' X? Does implementing Xwayland not constitute trying to 'live beside' it? your argument is vague and you can respond with more ambiguity. Install X and wayland. Nothing stops you.
"decide that some features of Old Thing will not be directly supported by New Thing; instead New Thing will be flexible enough that people could implement those features on top of it"
WHICH features? the 'old thing' can never equal the 'new thing' otherwise they would be the same. Wayland is purposefully LESS flexible (again, how is wayland more flexible? Or is that another vague statement?) in its input handling and screen handling which is why screen recorders needed to be reimplemented in the name of security.
"declare that the work done to support those features will have to be done by the people who want to use them" How is this controversial? You seem to ascribe some kind of motivated reasoning for the statement that certain features aren't being maintained/developed by wayland developers. Dev says 'no' to a feature request, why is this controversial? EGLstreams is the closest thing to a controversy but nothing prevents anyone from forking and implementing support. Open source, no excuses.
"declare that the time has come for New Thing to supersede Old Thing, before said work has been done"
no such declaration has been made.
gspr
> - decide it's time to make a New Thing which will supersede the Old Thing rather than living beside it
That doesn't really describe the situation very well, seeing as XWayland works seamlessly. Wayland compositors very much support living beside X programs.
beshrkayali
Equating between flatearthers/antivaxers and criticism of Wayland has got to be a prime example of False equivalence [1].
This style of argumentation is as bad (if not worse) than baseless rejection of Wayland because of "vague" criticism.
If I try to read between the lines, the author is worried that if more people don't jump ship and switch to Wayland, suffering through whatever trouble they might face, Wayland won't get better faster. Which although true, is a very selfish argument that does not see beyond the author's own use case.
I'd like to try Wayland sometime, so far I haven't. I don't think there will be a lot of issues that I'll have to get around, but honestly I'm not looking to find out right now. I use Xorg and I'm happy. At some point, I'll try Wayland.
mkl95
I don't hate Wayland. But every time I use it random things stop working, so I'm sticking with x11 for the time being. I'm a firm believer in "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
johnisgood
I have been attacked for daring to say that software can be finished. Maybe it is my fault for not having said explicitly that it does not mean that they do not get 1) security patches, 2) compatibility patches, 3) bug fixes. That said, I have been attacked for using X11, too, which pretty much works for me and has worked without an issue under Arch Linux for years. It just works, and Wayland would not because my window manager does not support it. I do not blame Wayland for it, of course, but I think many software that I use have no Wayland support.
I have been attacked for using irssi, too, instead of weechat. They still hold the view that it is not maintained despite showing them the commit history. Crazy. Make no mistake, I am not complaining, it is the Internet after all.
talhah
It depends what level of broken is okay with you. X11 by design allows any application to see what you type which I would consider broken and a security risk.
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> In the case of Wayland, the “vague authority” are a bunch of volunteers who have devoted tens of thousands of hours of their free time towards making free shit for you.
That does not mean anyone is under an obligation to like it.
> Maybe Wayland doesn’t work for your precious use-case. More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago.
If you insist on disregarding people's use cases, don't be surprised they don't like your software. I've been down this road a lot with FOSS software: "I don't use it because it doesn't do what I need", "sure it does!", "no, it really doesn't", "well you don't need that anyway!"...
On the whole however, I can certainly understand the frustration at having to deal with a community that gets annoyed at anything that changes simply because they're already so used to the garbage pile they have that they now hold the delusion that it's actually not garbage.
In my admittedly somewhat distanced opinion, Wayland's biggest mistakes were not launching with a coherent strategy for replicating functionality like screen sharing, screenshots, and to a lesser extent remote desktop/applications. They just punted and said "that's a compositor problem!" as though that was supposed to make it ok. People have thus harbored some inherent resentment ever since.