Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development

[Artim]

You probably mean SSD (server side decorations?). And yes, SSD should be made mandatory for any compositor and Gnome should shut up and implement it.

Why should anybody be that stupid and implement inferior technology?

[Artim]

I thought the point of wayland was to move everything out of the display server and into client side libraries, toolkits, etc. so now we have this fragmented mess with no hope of one single standard implementation like we had with X.org. What a joke. Imagine if 16 years of development effort was spent renovating X, instead it was wasted chasing this Wayland bullshit.

Like it or not, but that's what 99% of Wayland is. It's just taking the latest stuff that was tried with X - as in not doing everything the most complicated way, but build libraries and toolkits that take care of all the complicated mess - and put it on a base of sanity instead of a base of decades of technical debt making any progress without breaking changes impossible.

Wayland still has no real accessibility stack nor input method support. 16 years!!

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/

Let me guess, you haven't done anything either to change that, no? Well, lucky you there's e.g. the germand Sovereign Tech Fund that indirectly pays for the primary issue by paying Gnome devs to implement better accessibility and thus also build the necessary foundation for such tools. That's how you do it, pay devs to do it or do it yourself, not by whining like an ungrateful brat in a forum.

[hf_139]

Why should anybody be that stupid and implement inferior technology?

CSD is a security vulnerability. An application moving crucial window elements around, potentially blocking or removing close buttons or making its own to try to get users to click on something they don't want.... we already have that in those malicious browser popups, why would we want that in desktop applications as well?

[Artim]

Difficult to justify calling them developers at this point

Because you are a developer and have done much more for the benefit of Wayland that you are able to judge? Right...

[Artim]

Why is it that everybody wants to maintain Wayland, but nobody wants to maintain X?

Sanity. It's not that people didn't try that for decades, but everyone who did maintain X dropped that pile of garbage long ago and instead wrote up the first building blocks from Wayland. Some of them are now retired, the rest is involved because that's the only sane way forward.

[hf_139]

Why not just replace Wayland completely?
Implementing things on top of Wayland to patch Wayland issues is just the same we did with xorg.
Wayland barely became usable over the past year, so there is still time to simply.... replace it and do it better.

[Artim]

So you dind't even read the article you're commenting under. Even this proposal for speedier protocol development process mentions that protocols can stil be declined on the basis of "being against the spirit of Wayland", i.e. ideological reasons. At no point has the idea been to allow any stupid idea to become a supported protocol.

What did you expect? That the typical idiots that can only whine without ever haven done anything to improve things will suddenly activate their pea brains and think before they write? You should know better...

[deusexmachina]

Like it or not, but that's what 99% of Wayland is.

Years of writing and argumentation and refinement yet no two people describe what "Wayland is" the same way. No one person seems to even summarize it the same way every time they talk about it. Seem the diversity of descriptions here: https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9f...5e3a9f2d1f2277
And don't confuse my critique for thinking that I don't want Valve to work on it, which inevitably happens. I don't think I have any place to tell Valve what to do.

[Artim]

Because X is an overbloated technology that can't support things like HDR. Linux desktop is today alive because HDR was a commercial failure, but the technology is becoming more popular slowly.

only one of a myriad of reasons.

[Artim]

Because with Wayland, secure boot and some secret sauce we can achieve a sort of locked down walled garden so these cis cowboy root users can become more like us civilized iOS/Windows/Mac/Android users! For their own safety (and our own safety, of course) they need to be restricted from having so much access! How else are we gonna enforce digital rights management? How are we gonna coerce everyone onto the "next technology" if some bigoted cowboys are running free enticing and distracting the rest of the slave-*uhmm*-users!

Tell me you got no fucking clue without telling me you got no fucking clue...

Wayland doesn't lock anything down except the ability of programs whatever the hell they want to do without the user knowing or even consenting. That's basic security design, even Microsoft isn't that incompetent to understand. They merely refuse to implement such things because it costs money and that would decrease their profit and in turn decrease their share holders profits. And as long as users are dumb enough to buy it, why bother?