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

[Artim]

wasn't this literally just added a couple weeks ago, and completely irrelevant to any wayland protocol? if we are satisfied with hacking something together, adding X support wont be too hard

Sure, that must be the reason why for the last decade or so it was only possible to accomplish HDR when circumventing the X Server. Because obviously Red Hat and others had no interest in their customers having the best experience possible. You are ridiculous.

[Artim]

I am familiar with the work being done, but so far what mostly constitutes the HDR color work being done is setting gamut (which we can already do) and setting transfer function to a PQ transfer, which isn't super hard to do. but none of this is *x11* support or *wayland* support. this is the compositor sending HDR data to the display, what we need is *wayland* support and *x11* support (the latter which may or may not actually happen). but until wayland the protocol supports HDR. it's more of a hack then anything else.

This is not to diminish the colormanagement work kwin devs are putting in, they seem to have support for at least some kind of inverse tonemapping which is quite important. They have been for sure making great strides, but this is not "wayland HDR support"

Wayland doesn't need to support HDR, as there is nothing in it that could prevent HDR. What actually is still worked on is a color management protocol, so clients can tell the compositor the color space their output has, so the compositor can map all color spaces to the color space of the output device. A merge request has been made to Weston in late september: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayland-CM-Weston. For all I can tell that's also what Plasma 6.0 will be implementing (and I think Gamescope from Valve does too). So there will soon be 3 compositors to gather real world experience, but since Valve just released an OLED version of the Steam Deck capable of displaying HDR content, support will be moving ahead quite rapidly now. Sure, it was a long path to HDR support, but that's because on Linux people wanted to make a better job than Windows did, having good color management with mixed content from the get-go. It's always more complicated and time-consuming to do things right rather than doing a half-assed job.

[Artim]

You still don't seem to understand the meaning of the word "unified".

I understand that it means, I just refuse to acknowledge the relevance of it. Wayland as a protocol does take care of limiting fragmentation. Eventually all compositors will probably support all of Wayland, so it's irrelevant how they implement things. Also, if everybody would need to work on one implementation, progress would be crippled to a halt due to heavy discussions and in the end everybody not agreeing with the compromises made will just create a fork and do it their way. That's Open Source for you. There's no enforced conformity, no cooptation. That's what brings Linux forward. Otherwise, you'd end up with a bad compromise. And that's already existing, and it's called Windows.

[Citan]

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.

Either you have a very selective memory, or you got abducted by aliens for a good ten years until recently.
Because systemd has been born in a brazen fire worthy of the comparison with Mountain of Fate's volcano, and even still today some ashes are hot enough to generate some fumes...

[Citan]

All this arguing over these protocols is stupid. Wayland is here to stay until the next big thing comes along. This is how development always was, and always will be. The beauty of Linux is that you don't have to use what you don't want to use. If you don't like Wayland, cool, don't use it. We haven't gotten anywhere near the point where you're forced to do so. Just stop arguing over it and crying about how much you disagree with it.

Beautifully said, and the vocal whiners around it seem to completely forget about that.
By the way, avis, how did you live the WIndows 8 phase? You know the phase where Microsoft IMPOSED an ENTIRELY NEW, HALF-BAKED, TWO-THIRD BROKEN INTERFACE on hundred millions of people who didn't ask for anything, with absolutely no way for 99% of them to avoid it (because mostly nobody among "standard users" know how to install an OS, and Intel was hand-in-hand with MS to force W8 on all new computers)?
Because it's Microsoft, this time it was fine I guess?

Instead of arguing and crying about things, how about try contributing something useful? If you can't code, it can as simple as filing bug reports so they can get things ironed out and make it run better for everyone.

Well said, although to be fair, devs are not always the most patient or comprehensive people when confronted with bug reports, especially ones filled by people who just discover the development world and consequently have no clue how to properly report something in an efficient way. xd

[mdedetrich]

Either you have a very selective memory, or you got abducted by aliens for a good ten years until recently.
Because systemd has been born in a brazen fire worthy of the comparison with Mountain of Fate's volcano, and even still today some ashes are hot enough to generate some fumes...

While definitely true, I would argue the reasons behind the systemd hate were different. People seemed to hate that systemd was a "monolith" and "against Unix philosophy" even though those people couldn't differentiate between a monorepo and a monolith.

That and the typical political Lennart Poettering hate.

[Citan]

I miss a few small things from X11, like being able to hide the mouse cursor, which on Wayland needs to be implemented by the WM/DE, but KDE devs refuse to because they told me the feature is “too niche”. Even though unclutter is pretty well used by X11 users. I would love to have it in KDE Wayland and some others have vouched for it too in the bug report, but their mind is already set.

But other than that, I do agree that Wayland is pretty unnoticeable in my daily usage (even though I'm not the biggest fan of Wayland).

Hey, I'm curious, would you mind expressing what your use-case is for hiding the mouse cursor? Except possibly for recording guides/hows-to on manipulating software, I must say I cannot find use-cases.

[pabloski]

And? That's when Xorg got massively better! Before that, it was even worse

It was designed to serve the needs of a past era. And it suffers massively from the "hacker" free software mentality, in the sense that free software folks ( more often than not ) have this "agile" mentality and they just start hacking code instead of planning the architecture beforehand. What do I mean? The print server was inside X11!! Why the hell was a display server built to handle printint on paper?? Maybe they thought that showing pixels is just printint on screen, so they added the bonus of printint on paper too!

Nate is right when he says that X11 was a dev platform and not just a display server. The problem is that today's computing world is much different: more things to do, very different things to do, need to decouple components for manageability and bug squashing. So maintaining X11 as a "display server" would need a massive rewrite and refactoring of the architecture. This is why the Xorg folks ditched it and started building Wayland. And this is why Wayland, after 15 years, isn't fully ready. There were discussions inside the Xorg community, they really tried to just revise Xorg, but it was unfeasible. So they chose to start stripping parts out of it and transferring them into the kernel. Modesetting was an Xorg thing, not it is a kernel thing. Same with input handling. And other little and not so little things.

Also I note that many people lamenting the Wayland way, really hate the new concept of sandboxed computing. Their problems all stem from Wayland not giving full access to the framebuffer, to other windows pixels and they go all the way to how Flatpak sandboxes applications, how Portals open holes, etc... They want total access to the system. I don't blame them, after all, sometimes, even I have the desire to return to the old days of DOS and get access to hardware registries.

[Artim]

So does android or chrome os both are using linux kernel, so what? That proves my point about fragmentation in linux world getting worse thanks to wayland.

Do not all of you get me wrong. I am dwm user on arch. I tried switching to wayland long time ago. I have installed dwl. But i have far too many problems with it. Too many things are broken/do not work well. When/If wayland will be ready i'll make a switch. I did switch to pipewire from pulseaudio recently. Before that i simply could not use pipewire. Wayland seems to take much more time to be adopted. Until then i'll just continue using X.

I do not care about X or Wayland i just need video output on my laptop to use it for work and hobby. It just needs to work. Today X just works, wayland does not.

EDIT: i checked and wayland does not have HDR not even on kwin! There is no HDR yet on X or on Wayland.

There's HDR in Plasma 6 Wayland. Also there is in Gamescope.

Android and ChromeOS are irrelevant in this discussion as they only use the Linux Kernel and no other parts of it. GNU/Linux will certainly not adopt Surface Flinger as that's unusable on anything else than a Smartphone. And it will certainly not adopt what ChromeOS is using, as Google themselves are admitting that all their proprietary crap they threw on top of Gentoo is just a waste of time and effort. They are currently switching to a much more GNU/Linux version of ChromeOS, including Wayland. So no, not Wayland is the problem, but side projects like Mir and whatever ChromeOS uses that are doomed to failure.

Funny enough, ChromeOS is also the only OS using the failed Upstart system, which is most likely to be replaced by systemd going forward. So citing ChromeOS for anything else than bad technical decisions just shows ignorance, since Google themselves admits that their decisions were bad.

[Artim]

Simple explanation would be that it simply is not what you think it is You have said yourself what would happen if it was that cool/modern/forward looking/cruft free.

Wayland opponent does not need to insult anyone It is a fact that wayland does not work for average linux user as good as X does. Heck i am on linux since 2008 and it does not work for me too.

Then you are still in the minority. Or why do you think the majority of distributions is running Wayland - mostly for a few years now - without any problems?