X Window System Turns 38 Years Old

[cynic]

Volta cynic Linux fix your system first... hardware does not need to support software, its always the other way around... heck in this case Nvidia supports Linux... and very well I might add, on Xorg. I dont blame them one bit for not bending over backwards to support wayland, there is literally no business case for them to do so, especially given the animosity towards Nvidia expressed by many of the wayland devs.

what? my systems are all intel based and perfectly working with Wayland! I don't have to fix them

I honestly dont actually care, I have a system that works very well in Xorg, and I know that I am actually in the majority of the market, this means that inertia will continue relegate wayland to the corner until they get their situation figured out. Screaming about how terrible Nvidia is has no affect, wanting something doesn't make it real.

hmm... what about you screaming how horrible Wayland is? Will it have some effects?

[cynic]

At no point in my statement did I say that wayland was a bad idea! Its actually a great "idea"! The point was that many great ideas fail in implementation, usually quite a few times, before they are successful. I would not say that wayland is a bad idea, its a bad implementation of a good idea.

good! Implementation can be fixed.

specifications are harder to change instead and the major problem with Xorg resides in the X11 protocol that cannot be fixed.

[otoomet]

I tried wayland early this year (on ubuntu 20). The show stopper for me was lack of zoom screen share--a critical application for my work. Besides it, I had issues with menus and trays (on sway). I'll give it another try some time.

I am also afraid that it will take quite a bit of time to configure it properly as there seem to be no obvious equivalents to small X utilites, such as xrdb, xrandr, xset, and some utilities that only work on X, e.g. pasystray failed to work. Would be great if there were mostly compatible similar utilities (e.g. wrdb, wrandr, etc) but it may not make sense as wayland does things differently.

So even if the protocol is superior and ready, it is not trivial to switch.

[zexelon]

good! Implementation can be fixed.

specifications are harder to change instead and the major problem with Xorg resides in the X11 protocol that cannot be fixed.

100% agree on this!

[Old Grouch]

Asking from a position of ignorance here:

Using the X Window System, I can do the following:

$ xhost +local:<account_name>
$ sudo -u <account_name> -H firefox

and up pops a Mozilla Firefox window on my display running in the context of the <account_name>. It is quite convenient.

How do I do similar in Wayland?

[Vistaus]

what? my systems are all intel based and perfectly working with Wayland! I don't have to fix them

Intel is a hit or miss too. I now have Wayland working on my current AMD PC, but on my previous one with Intel-only hardware from 2017, I couldn't get it to work at all.

[cjcox]

Quite an achievement. Back in the 90's I actually used the make makefile stuff to make things easier for a development team. But noted that X11's use was horrible. Anyway, just thought I'd mention "great stuff" I used, but was horrible the way X11 used it.

[bachchain]

How long do you suspect until the Linux desktop is effectively Wayland-only

Not until cinnamon is

[birdie]

Asking from a position of ignorance here:

Using the X Window System, I can do the following:

$ xhost +local:<account_name>
$ sudo -u <account_name> -H firefox

and up pops a Mozilla Firefox window on my display running in the context of the <account_name>. It is quite convenient.

How do I do similar in Wayland?

You can pray your Wayland compositor implements it and then you can use a VNC/RDP client to connect. That will leave you with Gnome/Mutter and not much else. I've not heard of KWin implementing it but then I've not used anything outside of Wayfire yet and Wayfire left me with a bitter taste: it's nearly completely unusable for me.

Issue 233 continues to rear its ugly head. I wonder how many years it will take before someone realizes we don't need more than a dozen of Xorg-like servers for Wayland, most of which are barely functional, and instead we need just one for the desktop.

I'm sure by year 2035 someone will create a Wayland server and that won't be Redhat which basically dictates the development of Wayland and Gnome and which couldn't care less about any other use cases.

[sinepgib]

Thats wrong and there are many examples. Going on you mentioned Windows. When windows totally changed it's UI when going from Win 3.11 to Win 95 that had a huge impact on it's success. When doing away the DOS platform going to a NT driven technology, that was a huge impact and made it even more successful. It's also not true that windows kept totally compatible to each and every legacy standard, there is lots of old software you won't get running on a current gen windows platform.

The UI may change how you work in some aspects, but your programs still worked. Windows only ever broke DOS programs around the Vista ages. For a long time, Raymond Chen made sure even buggy software would keep running. And all that transparently to the user, not hacky "oh build Qt3 for this" or "let's use snap so we can ship an older distro inside your current one" solutions.

Wayland is a portrayal of how developers care only for their jobs and resumes and how they care very little for users. It also portrays how the Linux desktop community is willing to shoot itself in the foot and crawl around pretending that this is not really the case and that this is all for their own good.
Sure we have xwayland now but the trend is downgrading x11 to lower priority and that is very irresponsible. You should never ever be changing or breaking userspace behavior. The only reason the mobile world gets away with change or app breakage is that people keep breaking their phones. Even Windows still supports a substantial amount of 25 year old applications.

While I share the sentiment, it's a little late for that. Wayland or not, the Linux desktop has been breaking user space for ages. Of course, the kernel doesn't, but then all libs do so willy nilly so it makes no difference. It's actually less harmful to migrate to Wayland (as most applications use toolkits you can port) than what the toolkits and libraries themselves do all the time.

This is just embarrassing, and just does not work in a present where not every application can be fully trusted.

FTFY.

Wayland is more like electric cars and X is gas cars. Wayland has a few models but it still doesn't offer things like trucks & motorcycles as well as it is so new that your town (distro) might not even have charging stations. While we'd be better off with electric cars, there aren't enough charging stations, green power plants, or varieties of models available to make it viable for everyone. Plus, affordable electric cars are more of a pipe dream than Wayland with HDR and VRR, the Year of the Linux Desktop, or GNOME adopting server side decorations.

I am not entirely convinced we'd be better off with electric cars. Sure, the carbon footprint may in theory be lower, but then again the change will be tiny if our replacement is fossil fuels electricity (there is probably some gain in burning in a bigger turbine, but not much more than that) and mining lithium is far from environmentally clean. I don't have a strong position, I just find it non-obvious whether it'll be better environmentally speaking.