KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future

As we roll into 2024, Wayland sadly is still proving to be a divisive topic with some frustrated with it either from past experiences or not all software yet being fully adapted to make use of Wayland directly with all available features. There's also some still hoping for an X11 renaissance that will never materialize. Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of "Wayland breaking everything" isn't really accurate...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Graham-X11-Bad-Platform

[loganj]

what a stupid analogy with photosho and wayland.

i thought that wayland was suppose to replace X11. strange....did thay change their tune when the realize they screw it or it really was not meant to replace X11? cause its strange how all DE jump on it and hit their heads on the wayland wall

[avis]

You know something is inherently and deeply wrong about Wayland if someone high up in the Linux hierarchy has to defend it.

I don't remember Linux developers defending systemd, pulseaudio/pipewire or devtmpfs. They got the transition right. They extended and improved a lot on what was before them.

Wayland initially did not extend, it was designed with a lot less stuff which is required for the average desktop user. And to this date it doesn't have a killer feature which is required by lots of users. HDR is still not there. Per monitor scaling? Yeah, but at what cost? DPI scaling in X11 is miles better and versatile than fractional scaling in Wayland.

Maybe just maybe someone has to admit they royally fucked up with what was necessary to fully replace X.org and make the replacement enticing for the user.

And it doesn't help that each Wayland compositor is basically a whole X.org server. That's just pure insanity and probably the reason the progress in Wayland adoption has been so slow.

I'd say scrap this crap. Sorry. Look at how Microsoft did it with Windows Vista where they completely replaced the entire graphics stack. Maybe X11 did not have to be fully replaced but it needed to be rethought and readjusted, not killed off.

[avis]

Love this comment in the blog post:

guiodic December 27, 2023 at 1:41 am
Sorry, I wrote in Italian, this is the version in English:
I respect your opinion, but it remains an opinion, which you present as fact. Wayland has basically no practical advantages over X11 other than some marginal improvements introduced very recently that would have been implemented in Xorg anyway had it not been decided to abandon it. On the other hand, it has innumerable disadvantages, including fragmentation and the need for applications and toolkits to implement functions that should logically be in a display server and not in its clients, with the result that some do it, some do not, some do but partially, or do it badly. For decades, the open source world has had to live with the problems of fragmentation (including that of X11 many years ago) and now a further fragmentation is being introduced without any real benefit.
As for the comparison you make between X11 vs Wayland like Linux vs Windows… let’s take what you write seriously. Suppose tomorrow the developers of glibc decide that because they no longer understand C then C is obsolete and glibc will be replaced by libR, a system library that only supports APIs in Rust. Immediately all the things that worked before would stop working, developers would have to learn a new language, rewrite everything from scratch, etc. Not only that, the new libR, by design, would stop implementing two thirds of the old functionality, which would have to be re-implemented by individual applications or third-party libraries. That would be a disaster. Here, Wayland is only a slightly less dramatic disaster. But perhaps that is not true either. In the case of libR, at the very least, one would have the advantage of using a language that has real advantages over C and that, in the long run, would perhaps make system development easier and faster. In the case of replacing Xorg with Wayland, basically the only effect is to lose functionality and complicate things, not simplify them.

[slagiewka]

what a stupid analogy with photosho and wayland.

i thought that wayland was suppose to replace X11. strange....did thay change their tune when the realize they screw it or it really was not meant to replace X11? cause its strange how all DE jump on it and hit their heads on the wayland wall

Replacing doesn't mean being a drop-in replacement.

[avis]

Replacing doesn't mean being a drop-in replacement.

That's a great counter argument. /s

[jacob]

what a stupid analogy with photosho and wayland.

i thought that wayland was suppose to replace X11. strange....did thay change their tune when the realize they screw it or it really was not meant to replace X11? cause its strange how all DE jump on it and hit their heads on the wayland wall

Yes. Replace it, not be a drop-in replacement and not support everything that used to work on X11.

[DrYak]

And as usual, most of the thread will consist on people who missed that:

• most of the modern GUI software doesn't actually use core X11 protocol (e
  g.: nobody uses drawing primitives), instead it uses a few after-the-fact haphazardly bolted on hackish extensions (compositing, etc.). Wayland is mery a from scratch reimplementation of the features from those X11 extensions that modern GUI actually use
• wayland is developed by the actual Xorg devs, i.e. the people best situated to know that most of classic X11 doesn't make sens anymore nowadays.

But I am looking forward to the systemd-wayland jokes.

[Volta]

avis

X11 is broken by design just like your Windows. It's enough to abandon it. When comes to analogy to glibc he's totally missing the point: glibc is not broken by design and has active developers unlike X11. The one you quoted cannot be taken seriously.

[cl333r]

Wayland _is_ the future and it's awesome (especially compared to X11), it's just that the devs did a shitty job because they had a shitty/lazy attitude.
Their initial goal was - no we're not replacing all of X11, only the (image-swapping) part we care about, if you want a paste clipboard, menu location control and many other things X11 does - it's not our (Wayland's) job.
And many people (including myself) didn't agree with it because those other parts won't write themselves, not to mention the hardest part - figuring out a standard for each such "non-wayland" (like clipboard) solution that all main parties would agree with. And it's fine for them not to write the code themselves, the part that actually pissed me off is the attitude that "it's not Wayland's business - you the community figure out all the rest, we did the core stuff". It was clear to me things don't work like that, the open source community who actually write the code and contribute - is like >95% paid corporate devs.

Then the Wayland devs started (very slowly) creating said new standards to actually fully replace X11 because like 10 years later they FINALLY realized things don't decided and write themselves and without these bits Wayland is sitting like a dead duck where it "kinda" works but has too many bugs and shortcomings to actually replace X11.

This attitude is/was Wayland's biggest problem. That's why it took 15 years and we're still not there. If you remember there were even attempts by random people to fork it because back then the Wayland devs even refused to negotiate adding said features (because again, "it's not Wayland's job to do this" was the answer back then).