This has Systemd vs Runit vibes. No matter how many anti-systemd folks scream to me about how horrible it is for XYZ technical reasons, every Linux distro I've ever used for years, desktop and server, has used systemd and I've never experienced single problem that those users claim I will.
Same here with Wayland. All the major desktop environments and distros have or are implementing Wayland support and are phasing out X. The only reason I'm not on Wayland on my main computer already is because of a few minor bugs that should be ironed out in the next 6-12 months with the newest release of plasma.
It's not because Wayland is unusable. I try switching to Wayland about every 6-9 months, and every time there have been fewer bugs and the bugs that exist are less and less intrusive.
Any time you get hardcore enthusiasts and technical people together in large community, this will happen. The mechanical keyboard community is the same way, people arguing about what specific formula of dielectric grease is optimal to lube your switches with and what specific method of applying it is best.
At a certain point, it becomes fundamentalism, like comic book enthusiasts arguing about timeline forks between series or theology majors fighting about some minutia in a 4th century manuscript fragment. Neither person is going to change their views, they are just practicing their arguments back and forth in ever-narrowing scopes of pros and cons, technical jargon, and the like.
Meanwhile the vast majority of users couldn't care less, and just want to play games, browse the web, and chat with friends, all of which is completely functional in Wayland and has been for a while.
I am of two minds:
- He's not wrong
- It doesn't matter at this point
It's a mess, but honestly so are a lot of critical FOSS projects (e.g.: OpenSSH, GNUPG, sudo). Curmudgeons gonna curmudgeon. There was a point of no return and that was years ago -- now that Wayland's finally becoming useable despite itself it's probably time to come to terms with the fact that better alternatives would have arisen had anyone thought they could truly manage it.
Sounds like a heap of crap. X.Org developers moved to Wayland, they were the ones who made it happen. Now, I wonder where this dude with his XOrg Forks and PhD and shit was during all that 15 years it took to conceptualize wayland.
You all need a lesson in taking everything people say, including and most importantly their qualifications with a huge grain of salt.
Wayland has been working perfectly for years now. Many of the supposedly "impossible to implement" functions of the old hunk of junk Xorg were either found to be bogus anyways or have been made available on Wayland.
Sincerely-- Someone who's been using wayland since 2016
Wayland has been working perfectly for years now.
Not for every one. For example, I still get random black screens with only mouse trails, windows disappearing, and videos not playing properly. Why yes, I do have an Nvidia card, thank you for asking.
After finally realizing nobody is interested in EGLstreams, Nvidia seems to be on track to make their drivers less of a disaster for Wayland support, so thankfully it is bound to become better
I just want you to know, this isn't a failure on anything other than Nvidia trying to force their own crap on everyone and failing
I recently found out it was Nvidia's fault for not following the standard every one else agreed on.
Very good point. Mr x11 expert maybe seems pissed he's gotta learn a new tech and refuses to, so will bash it and hope it goes away. But if they were an expert, they'd probably know the things you mentioned.
I remember reading through that thread when it came out and those are extremely worrying points. Wayland has extremely deep core issues. #2 there alone is horrible.
There are and were alarm bells ringing all around btw with Wayland. From a software developing perspective the approach is terrible. You cannot solve super complex problems by throwing away 30 years worth of code and redoing everything from scratch. You'll just run into the exact same issues again. Which no, haven't gone away as the technology advanced as many people would like to believe, we're still using displays and networking and keyboards and mice.
There is a lot of legacy in X but there's also a lot of accumulated experience and battle-hardened code. The obvious path would have been to keep the good and remove the bad.
Wayland will eventually since those issues but it will take just as long as it took X, because that's what happens when you start everything from scratch again.
This is filling me with deja vu because it's exactly what some of us went through with X, trying to piece together a working desktop out of dozens of pieces. But when you point that out you get "ha ha grandpa that's old stuff, this new stuff won't have that problem because [insert magic here]!"
Keep in mind that when Wayland started it was supposed to be a mini-server, to be used for the login screen only. Then the idea came to make it usable for stable, controlled and simple devices where there isn't a lot of user configuration or hardware variation.
How it got from there to "let's use it for everything on the Linux desktop and ditch X" I'll never understand.
I mean xwayland is the best supported X implementation today, and will only get better. You're not ditching everything when you maintain backwards compatibility.
Which no, haven’t gone away as the technology advanced as many people would like to believe, we’re still using displays and networking and keyboards and mice.
Which X.Org was not designed to support.
Do you mean not initially designed to support? Because at least for displays and networking (in the sense of being able to send X events over the network) that seems wrong, a network capable display server is basically X's entire purpose? And for keyboards and mice there are extensions now, so x.org as a standard now very much supports those by design. Actually to my knowledge Wayland basically just forked their keyboard standard, the X Keyboard Extension.
XOrg is designed so a central server (mainframe) sends and receives data from smaller terminals, and that not only includes a heap of devices that haven't been in use since the 90s it also has a ton of features that nobody uses. (See: X native fonts, X native widgets, X driver model...)
X's way of handling events and sending draws to clients as such is somewhat convoluted. Once you start to really dig into it, it's amazing how much people managed to stack on top of it until today.
Besides, modern day X over Network is a somewhat niche and possibly broken function
I've been using Wayland for 5 years. There were a few bugs in the beggining, but now it works great. These threads are such a waste of time.
I have over 100 confirms X11 developments
That's great dude. Why don't you go maintain it then, apparently nobody else wants to: https://www.phoronix.com/news/RHEL10-Removing-X.Org
Wayland took too long
Look up how long btrfs has been in development, or at audio subsystem churn. These things take time, because it's mostly volunteers working on them.
Systemic complexity has doubled in the last two years
What does this even mean?
Mir was better
It turns out the Canonical dumping random stuff over the wall is not the same as creating a legitimate open source community around a project.
Unfixable amount of race conditions
As if there's never been a synchronization bug in X... But also System76 and others are writing Wayland compositors on Rust anyway.
Systemic complexity has doubled in the last two years
"If wayland is so great why can't I run
/usr/bin/wayland???" 😎
Some old people just do not want to learn new things and will try to justify it however they can. Happens with Rust, happens with Wayland.
This is not a case of old people. Wayland genuinely lacks features. People of all ages find it trash.
It is designed to lack features. It has a purposefully limited scope. Bashing it for it's goal is weird.
Replacing something featurful with something minimal is silly. The replacement needs to solve the users problems at least as well as the previous solution did.
Decomposing the solution into smaller simpler parts is fine, but you can't just solve part of the problem and expect the users to be happy about it.
Wayland's biggest issue is that it was born out of developer frustration, rather than solving a user problem. As such, users have little reason to adopt it.
It doesn't and other software should and will fulfil those purposes. It has for many users and with a few years, will have for most. How do you think some distros run only on Wayland? What are they missing?
It was actually created because of design issues in x11 that prevented certain solutions to modern problems. I think there was also certain security concerns. I did read a blog about this previously.
No one spends their free time writing software for years out of frustration only. I gather you don't make open source software...
Happens everywhere really, sometimes it's justifiable sometimes its not. Its really weird when it happens on free software lol.
Please dont just post screenshots of text. Post a link to the content.
As an enduser my only noticeable issue with Wayland is that Auto-Type with KeepassXC doesn't work.
Most people don't give a shit and just want a system that works. As a lot of distros switch to / have switched to Wayland I have never noticed any issues in daily usage of any of my devices, in fact my surface laptop 4 can't do external displays if I'm running x11 but that feels like a surface issue not a display manager issue. Point being that the switch is happening and a majority of users do not care as long as their systems keep running, and in my experience there's no reason to believe they won't.
I took wayland a decade to become usable. It tells me all I need to know about it simplicity and usefulness.
I have been using Wayland on void for a while and have no particular issue with it. There is screen sharing on stuff like zoom that isn't working at the moment (unless you use gnome) which is a bit annoying but not really serious enough to force a change to xorg. Also Wayland has more clean code then xorg and I do like the potential it has, specially when it comes to security.
Nothing against xorg, if you can use Wayland its better imo but otherwise xorg is fine as well.
