Prolific Red Hat Developer Starts Up "Wayland Itches" Project

[Duve]

My "Wayland itch" is Wayland itself, and the solution to it would be to get rid of the whole thing entirely. X is the killer app of proper u*ix systems, and without it, operating systems such as macOS might start looking competitive, especially considering how Poettering has a boner for their design and tries to change the userspace to become a clone of macOS.

I think a better solution than Wayland would be to remove unnecessary features from X (like networking among other things) and make it more maintainable. Enforcing hardware acceleration isn't that great of an idea, while X allows to change compositors on the fly. I like my display with low input latency, VSYNC is better enabled on a per-application basis. I remember wasting like an hour to get compton to work the way i wanted it to just to see that it provides me no benefit and worse performance. Not everyone drags windows on top of each other all the time.

The biggest problem with that is that with X11 anything done to improve it at this point would basically break spec. Which also means that some of the problems that you have in x11 are actually baked into the protocol, and to be frank if you seen the X11 protocol that's a lot of stuff to check and rewrite. A good example of this is actually a lot of the security concerns that x11 has, most of the issues are actually with protocol and to fix them would mean to break the protocol.

At this point it's simply better to come up with a clean solution to a lot of issues that we have with X11 then to simply keep repairing it, because refactoring all of the code would take a lot of time and you would be forced to break a lot of stuff. Which in many ways Wayland is.

[Vasant1234]

As much as I love X, networking should not be a part of your windowing system, and solutions like VNC are the right way to go.

The only reason it was part of the original design was that the prominent computer vendors 30 years ago wanted to sell thin client solution. You will like this solution https://volkspc.org/MicroXwin/.
There is not network, no protocol but it still provides Xlib compatibility.

[mroche]

You can, because Nvidia ignores Linux. It's not the job of compositor developers to clean up the mess that Nvidia created. I have no respect for Nvidia and their practices, but if you are buying their hardware with broken drivers - do it at your own risk. That's my point. Developers should not support that in Wayland case.

Outside of the Wayland fiasco (EGL vs GBM) can you define NVIDIA’s broken drivers? I haven’t had a problem in several years using their driver for multiple cards on my workstation for computer graphics work (an industry where AMD GPU’s will not be making a surge in any time soon). If you’re referring to their choices of ending support for “older” hardware or refusing to open source the driver, that’s one thing. But it’s also their prerogative as a company to choose what they support and for how long. Doesn’t mean I like it, but I accept that’s the way things are for the time being. As it is on X, the stuff works great.

Cheers,
Mike

[shmerl]

Outside of the Wayland fiasco (EGL vs GBM) can you define NVIDIA’s broken drivers?

Not having their code in upstream kernel which results in not properly supporting DRM/KMS (which results in a long list of problems starting with lack of proper PRIME support) and etc. All that comes from the same primary problem - Nvidia don't care about doing proper Linux driver development. And such royally broken driver situation is something Linux users should simply avoid.

[fernie]

something similar to xinput to modify input device parameters and disable/enable

[starshipeleven]

Read the history of wayland, it was never planned to replace X.

Yes it was.

As we see after 10 years, it is lacking features that X solutions have.

As we also see, it lacks those by design.

[MrCooper]

1. Wayland is not limited to Gnome. There should be more coordinated cooperation between compositor developers (kwin, wlroots, mutter etc.).

My impression is that there's quite a lot of this already on GitLab / mailing lists / IRC. More is probably always possible, but it doesn't seem like a big issue.

3. First class Vulkan/WSI support instead of usage of EGL and Co.

Eh? Vulkan WSI had first class Wayland support from day 0. No EGL involved with Vulkan.

network tunneling over ssh, so that i can use GVIM or firefox from my server.

In the worst case, X forwarding works with Xwayland as well as it ever did.

I'm using Sway over Wayland, and what I miss the most is proper multi monitor support. Mirroring is not supported, and screen placement does not always work reliably. But I'm not sure to what extent these problems are because of Wayland or because of Sway.

It's all Sway.

[DanL]

You can, because Nvidia ignores Linux. It's not the job of compositor developers to clean up the mess that Nvidia created.

Quit exaggerating to the point of ridicule. Nvidia doesn't ignore Linux. They don't do things the way you want, but that's not equivalent to ignoring. Oh, and Nvidia is not alone in creating the whole GBM mess, and they at least contribute to one major compositor: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...rged-KWin-5.16

You may hate Nvidia (and there are some valid reasons to do so), but don't make BS claims about them.

[SupposedlyFunny]

Quit exaggerating to the point of ridicule. Nvidia doesn't ignore Linux. They don't do things the way you want, but that's not equivalent to ignoring.

I haven't followed the development, but did something improved from Torvalds' public "fuckyou Nvidia"?

[Britoid]

I haven't followed the development, but did something improved from Torvalds' public "fuckyou Nvidia"?

Their driver is no longer terrible?