SDL Developers Weigh Reverting Wayland Over X11 For SDL 3.0

[Old Grouch]

Do you know when X11 will get HDR support? I mean, its out for 40 years now.

I didn't realise HDR was that old. Can you point me at the (dated) release documentation?

[muncrief]

I'm not anti-Wayland, just pro-Reality.

And the reality is that Wayland is not ready to replace X11, and even with the most aggressive and intense effort will not be ready for at least 5 years.

Does X11 need to be replaced with a more modern system? Yes. Is Wayland the best candidate to replace it? No.

However Red Hat was dead set on pretending it was so now the entire Linux community is stuck with a fragmented mess of various implementations, none of which are fully functional.

And the worst part is that many Linux applications developed over the decades will never work with it, even if it is finally completed and one of the plethora of implementations is chosen as primary, because the resources to rewrite many older Linux applications will simply never be available.

So don't be a fanboy for either X11 or Wayland, be a fanboy for Linux and be realistic about it. Yes, Wayland is eventually going to "win", but it's going to be hell getting there because it was forced upon the Linux community long before it was ready.

"I'm not interested in arguing, as reality does the arguing for us."
SearingTruth

[anda_skoa]

whether it's legitimate to want your non-MDI multi-window application to be able to request that its subwindows be positioned relative to each other

As far as I understand the relative positioning not in question, but absolute positioning is

[Developer12]

My gripe with Wayland replacing X11 is that Wayland wasn't , or isn't, a complete solution even theoretically. We're getting there, but it has taken a long, long time. Had "someone" actually planned a complete ecosystem instead of having small islands of software, we would have had a much easier transition.

According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System the X11 protocol was finalised 1987, three years after initial release.
Wayland had its initial release 15 years ago, and its ecosystem is still not feature complete, comparatively.

The X11 protocol, as finalized in 1987, was completely fucking useless.

It took many, many, many, many rounds of additions and extensions all through the 90's and into the early 2000's before it was even remotely usable. And yes, several of those core extensions broke network transparency beyond repair. (reliance on DBus is one of the most notable and recent-ish additions to the list) Network transparency on X11 has been both horribly broken and full of ugly hacks for literal decades.

For all the gory details on just how many extensions it took to get X11 even remotely usable (and the damage they did to network transparency), see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQoQE_HDG8g
For some basic examples regarding network transparency see the latter part of https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/...parencyFailure

[Monsterovich]

I'm not anti-Wayland, just pro-Reality.
So don't be a fanboy for either X11 or Wayland, be a fanboy for Linux and be realistic about it. Yes, Wayland is eventually going to "win", but it's going to be hell getting there because it was forced upon the Linux community long before it was ready.

It won't. Its concept was flawed from the very start. Every attempt to switch to Wayland ends with regressions because the architecture is flawed too.

Only X11/Xorg equivalent with all implemented features will be able to replace X11, not some set of protocols with a minimalistic library without proper desktop features.

In addition, Wayland developers have the mindset of GNOME developers (they're the same people in general).

Economically Wayland is a black hole, it will never be ready.

[anda_skoa]

And the reality is that Wayland is not ready to replace X11

It is also a matter of use case.

Here on Phoronix we are often just looking at desktop but other use cases have often transitioned years ago.

Especially the easy of writing a custom compositor has made the job of developers on special purpose systems much easier.
Appliances, industrial embedded systems, kiosks, etc.

A bit like Linux has also moved into some areas first and then expanded to others, with desktop being the most challenging.

it was forced upon the Linux community long before it was ready

That is still years away.
Even Fedora is not considering removal of X11 session support for several more releases and last I checked there were other distributions than Fedora

[Quackdoc]

HDR is not needed on a desktop. If it was, it would have been done by now.

A decent HDR monitor now costs from about $1000 on the market. Not everyone even has a monitor that supports VRR (I do and it works fine in Xorg).

nah, decent HDR monitors start at like 400 now. also HDR for desktops has been progressing, it's a feature a lot of people want, sadly windows is just complete dogshit and osx is a very minimal amount of people, Android and IOS now handle HDR + SDR fine so its starting to see more adoption

[muncrief]

It won't. Its concept was flawed from the very start. Every attempt to switch to Wayland ends with regressions because the architecture is flawed too.

Only X11/Xorg equivalent with all implemented features will be able to replace X11, not some set of protocols with a minimalistic library without proper desktop features.

In addition, Wayland developers have the mindset of GNOME developers (they're the same people in general).

Economically Wayland is a black hole, it will never be ready.

I agree that the concept is deeply flawed Monsterovich, and will never work as originally envisioned. However I believe that over the years Red Hat and other pro-Wayland developers will eventually change it to what it should have been in the first place and still call it Wayland. That's why I said it's going to take many years, and will be hell getting there. The truth is that as reality exposes its insurmountable flaws it will simply have to be changed, but there are too many egos involved to ever name it anything else. Whatever it actually finally becomes it will be called Wayland, and the pro-Wayland fanboys will say "See, we were right all along."

And that's fine, I just want to get this mess over with as soon as possible as it's an incredible strain on time and resources that Linux desperately needs elsewhere.

[davidbepo]

Xorg trolls, do not celebrate yet.... Issues like this are GOOD, because they lead to the implementation of new protocols to solve them.... Eventually Wayland will be a rock solid default for SDL 3.0 . No matter how much you spread FUD and troll against Wayland, Xorg is dead. Deal with it.

i find it funny how you think this is good, also how you call the fact that basically every non red hat project trying to use it has very real issues FUD denotes an amount of fanboyism that broke my meter

btw i dont really love Xorg, but i sure as hell hate being shoved a broken by design clusterfuck as replacement

[hf_139]

Valve has the user in mind. They are a hardware and software vendor that wants to sell a functional product.

Meanwhile RedHat wants to sell software support.

It's just logical for a project to only switch to Wayland if it is at least on a par with xorg. Allowing a regression, just to be on THE CURRENT THING, isn't logical