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

[Artim]

Here's what actual programmers think about Wayland design:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38780031

Not a lot of support TBO unlike people here most of whom have not written a single line of code and have very limited needs.

Sure, that's why most software already works great on Wayland. And if course the people commenting on a page called "Hacker News" must be developers. You are such a moron. Go, stick with X the few years left that you still can. You'll see that you too won't have any other option than using Wayland in the very near future.

Wayland is the future, there's no way around it and there's no competition. Learn to live with it or stick with your broken by design Windows. But stop writing so much ridiculous bullshit.

[Artim]

And I thought people on this forum are delusional, but Nate has to top the cake at this point.

Anyway probonopd if you read this, you are a true hero. Keep doing God's work! If even just to show these ignorant clowns facts about their stupid Wayland.

Well said moron. Now go play with your toys. Adults should discuss such important things. Probonopd is just yet another moron too thick to understand, what wayland is. Just like you, Quackdoc and Avis.

[Artim]

Wayland doesn't break everything, but it breaks a lot of things, and always will.

And the reason is that it is an ill conceived design that will always fragment and destabilize the Linux application ecosystem because it places critical system functionality within each application itself. So no matter how many years or decades go by many applications will never work with it, and the stability of those that do will wax and wane dependent upon the application developers ability to maintain not only its own functions, but system functions as well.

And the fact that Wayland has a plethora of incompatible implementations will further assure that the hot mess that is Wayland will never cool down, and Linux will continue to fragment into smaller and smaller pieces. Ultimately threatening its very existence.

In fact there are few things that could make Microsoft happier than Wayland. After all its decades trying to eliminate and/or absorb Linux, it now finds Linux destroying itself from within. With the active and knowing assistance of its partner Red Hat.

False. It will always break things, but that's its very purpose. The maintainers of X saw themselves incapable maintaining and modernizing it without constantly having to break stuff. So they created Wayland so they break whatever they wanted, since both could exist in parallel. No need to stall updating one thing until everyone had caught up. Everybody can just transition when they are ready.

But if you think wayland would hurt Linux in the slightest, think again. All distros that ship Gnome are defaulting to Wayland for years now. Neither do they experience any larger problems with it, nor are users abandoning these distros en mass, because in contrast to the lies you want to spread, it just works.

[Artim]

I legitimately don't understand why people hate Wayland to the extent they do to provoke posts like Nate's. If X11 is so perfect, surely, it won't need anything more than security updates, which it will likely continue to have for another 15 years. There are enough diehard fans to maintain it whenever the day comes where Xorg won't. As far as I understand (and perhaps I'm mistaken), an application developed with Wayland in mind will still work on X11. So I sincerely want to know - what are you all worried about? If Wayland is destined to fail then just sit back and watch it burn. If it succeeds, you can still use X11 all you want. What's the crusade for?

You X11 supporters literally have NOTHING to lose in the foreseeable future, yet, you resist the mere notion of Wayland as if the devs were inspired by Hitler.
This rabid hate reminds me a lot of people who push their religious (any religion; doesn't matter which) agenda to their government when their government already isn't preventing them from worshipping or spreading "enlightenment" as they see fit. Not everyone needs to share your beliefs. My difference in faith is not incompatible with you retaining/practicing yours.
Not everyone needs to use X11. A distro or DE supporting Wayland doesn't prevent you from using X11 yourself. There's no reason X11 can't coexist with Wayland.

It's simple: they are dumb as shit, they never even spent a second thinking about the topic. Those are the same morons hating on systemd and everything else that makes bigger changes, just by the fact things don't stay exactly the same as they did for the last 40 years. Because progress is the devil's work.

[Artim]

That is to say, never, because Wayland doesn't have a unified library or a unified server like Xorg. For each DE you have to make a different implementation of the graphics server, which multiples fragmentation by 100 if not more.

Good luck maintaining your own server, we'd rather use Xorg instead.

Nobody stops you from using wlroot or even Weston. And wlroot is/will be the base for pretty much every distro that's not gnome or KDE.

[Artim]

https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9f...omment-4804260

Just stop spreading this morons stupid world views. He is incapable of understanding what Wayland is.

[Artim]

There is an excellent article on Wayland vs. X by Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(protocol).

Pay special attention to the "Rendering model" section which explains the responsibilities of a Wayland client, and the multitude of ways those demands can be met. Here is the first paragraph:

"The Wayland protocol does not include a rendering API. Instead, Wayland follows a direct rendering model, in which the client must render the window contents to a buffer shareable with the compositor. For that purpose, the client can choose to do all the rendering by itself, use a rendering library like Cairo or OpenGL, or rely on the rendering engine of high-level widget libraries with Wayland support, such as Qt or GTK. The client can also optionally use other specialized libraries to perform specific tasks, such as Freetype for font rendering."

Of course this would be bad enough, but now add to that the fact that Wayland has a plethora of incompatible implementations that require different client implementations, and a clear picture of the hot mess that is Wayland emerges.

Yes, what the Wikipedia says is all true and it's a good thing. What you make of it, is just a big lie. Yes, while the majority of DEs will use wlroot, Plasma and Gnome don't. And of course you can't just swap out Compositors. But why would you always? But that doesn't create any incompatibility on the client side. There everything is compatible as long as it sticks to the Wayland protocol. And as the Wikipedia article that you quote says, you can just use toolkits like GTK or Qt for everything, so you don't have to take care of any of those more complicated things. Sure you always need the libraries of the toolkit to run such any application, but that's not Wayland specific but has always been that way since they buried the axe and created compatibility between the two.

[Damnshock]

I don't remember Linux developers defending systemd, pulseaudio/pipewire or devtmpfs.

There were literally *YEARS* of fights/arguments against systemd and pulseaudio. *YEARS!!!*

And as much as I love pipewire, there are still quite a few things from Pulseaudio that are not supported. Oh... wait! It's exactly the same situation as we have with Wayland! (it just happens to be "smaller")

Please, do yourself and everybody else a favor and grow up.

[Quackdoc]

I have been using exclusively wayland via sway for 4 years now and I have zero issues and nothing that doesn't work.

been using sway for a long time too now, sadly I have had lots of issues since then, but hey, at least I have touch now

[Artim]

If wayland is so much modern and so much better then x11, then where is HDR support for wayland? From ordinary linux users perspective x11 is miles ahead of wayland. For such user wayland is unusable and that's after 15 years of development. It's simply waste of developers times and resources. It's like reactos (open source windows). No one is gonna use it for anything other then running it so that some tech guy/gal said "yeah cool"
Same thing is going on for linux on apple silicon. By the time it's usable on that hardware we will already have great arm chipsets in PC world too. Also there is literally 0 chance of linux being optimized on apple silicon like mac os is. It's too locked down and hardware is specifically designed to run mac os, not linux.

Then where is the HDR support in X? There is none and there never will, while KDE IS implementing it right now, as is Valve? Well, what a bad example.

But the biggest benefits of Wayland aren't user facing. Those are usually the biggest differences. It is impossible to maintain X. That's why its maintainers created Wayland, to have a basis one can work with and that is future proof.

And no, Wayland isn't in development for 15 years. The protocol has been started 15 years ago. But the first tries to implement it was about 10 years ago in Gnome. And compared with other OS' major displaying overhauls - Windows never had a real one, it all needed to stay compatible, so the only thing they actually changed more was the graphics driver standard which also broke everything - Linux isn't really any slower than every other OS. With the difference, you can use it on Linux while it's in development and daily drive it as soon as you want. You don't need to wait for work to be finished - which will never happen, as there will always be a next big thing to implement as use cases change over the decades. With the difference, with Wayland it won't be turning into an unmaintainable mess nobody wants to touch anymore.