- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
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Force people to move to Wayland. Everyone that complains about Wayland breaking their setup knows how to install Xorg anyways. But most Wayland problems are software vendors not giving a shit. Make them give a shit by breaking their shit by default on most setups. 10 years was enough time to make your software work on Wayland. If your software doesn’t work on Wayland by now, then your risk management is shit.
It’s not only software vendors but Wayland itself lacks some crucial features. For me it’s auto-type and screen magnification - both are showstoppers for me.
Autotype is already solved - ydotool, wtype and dotool exists (and possibly others as well).
Screen magnification is already present in KDE (
Meta++,Meta+-to zoom in/out). There’s also a magnifier tool (KMag). There may be similar functionalities in other DEs.My issue is the lack of an overall GUI automation tool, ie, like AutoHotkey. X11 had PyAutoGUI, but there’s no such AIO equivalent for Wayland yet, and the PyAutoGUI devs don’t seem to be interested in Wayland support - it’s neither on their road map, nor have they even answered any Wayland questions on their Github page, which is disappointing. But this isn’t Wayland’s fault, when other tools have shown that automating the GUI is possible, we just need someone to put together a complete package like PyAutoGUI / AHK.
Autotype is already solved - ydotool, wtype and dotool exists (and possibly others as well).
These tools work by creating a virtual keyboard so they don’t let you send input to a specific window. The input goes to whatever happens to be focused at the moment. This makes them less reliable than the X11 equivalents and unusable for tasks where you need to guarantee that the right window gets the input.
feel free to check out map2, I’m currently working on version 2 which will do lots of the stuff you need when it’s ready, but currently the API might still change and docs are active WIP
still, it can already do most stuff I need it for :)
KMag doesn’t work on Wayland.
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If that’s the case, then stick to Xorg for now. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s in your best interest for distros to ship with Wayland out of the box.
Do you want software you use to be compatible with Wayland now or later? If your answer is later, then you have to wait for vendors to catch up, even though Wayland got
auto type(already exists) and screen magnification by then. This is why I never understood this push against Wayland. People, your only alternative to Wayland is dead and unmaintained. If you push against Wayland as the default option, you only make your transition in the future more painful than it needs to be.Also, I think it’s still a software vendor problem. If your software can’t work with the only desktop protocol with a future, then you must contribute to the protocol to create a way to make it work. If you don’t do that, then shit happens, your software breaks, and you had 10 years to contribute to the protocol to fix it. Your risk management was once again exceptional at avoiding doing the necessary work to eliminate a long known risk.
People, your only alternative to Wayland is dead and unmaintained. If you push against Wayland as the default option, you only make your transition in the future more painful than it needs to be.
Nobody’s pushing “against Wayland”. I don’t give a shit about Wayland or Xorg. What I care about is having a full-featured, easy to use desktop stack readily available. The “dead” Xorg works perfectly with everything. That’s the bar.
When I get a checkbox on the login screen saying “use Wayland” (or when the distro does it by default) I need everything to work. If everything does not work, I do not use it.
The Wayland choice of pushing complexity onto individual software projects by making them all reinvent a hundred wheels, and onto users by making them hunt down a hundred pieces of software to build a wobbly desktop stack sucks. I have no incentive to take part in this particular rat race.
Nobody’s pushing “against Wayland”. I don’t give a shit about Wayland or Xorg. What I care about is having a full-featured, easy to use desktop stack readily available.
Install Xorg yourself. Don’t make it easily accessible to new Linux users. Software vendors will take note and postpone doing any work for as long as possible.
And you obviously care a lot about Wayland and Xorg.
The “dead” Xorg works perfectly with everything. That’s the bar.
No, it doesn’t. And if it does, then it’s still insecure by design. When I hear statements like these, I get the urge to publish PoC Linux malware code on GitHub that uses X11 specific features to show just how not fine it is.
The Wayland choice of pushing complexity onto individual software projects by making them all reinvent a hundred wheels, and onto users by making them hunt down a hundred pieces of software to build a wobbly desktop stack sucks.
Substitute Wayland for X11 here. Both Wayland and X11 are protocols. X11 is such a lackluster protocol that all implementations died, except that Xorg still has users.
Install Xorg yourself. Don’t make it easily accessible to new Linux users.
New users will drop any distro whose default desktop doesn’t work perfectly and with all the features they want. Linux already has a high enough bar competing with Windows, creating additional artificial hurdles is dumb in the extreme.
And if it does, then it’s still insecure by design.
Security vs convenience has always been a give and take. There’s a cutoff point that users will not cross if the software becomes too inconvenient to use, even if it means greater security. The Wayland stack is currently on the bad side of that line and needs to step over if it wants to see mass adoption.
Substitute Wayland for X11 here. Both Wayland and X11 are protocols. X11 is such a lackluster protocol that all implementations died, except that Xorg still has users.
Nobody cares, all they see is the stack, with Wayland leading the point on the bad decisions.
And you obviously care a lot about Wayland and Xorg.
You are projecting. If this were any other piece of software, say, a text editor that works and does everything you need, and someone came and told you “you must use this new one, it’s the way forward, but oh it doesn’t have all the features you need from a text editor” you would say “thanks but I’ll wait until it’s ready”. But you see no problem in pushing Wayland on people who can’t use it?
Please understand that nobody will ever successfuly push through incomplete software. Not on Linux. There’s nothing you or anybody can do to convince people that incomplete software is complete and usable when it’s not.
New users will drop any distro whose default desktop doesn’t work perfectly and with all the features they want. Linux already has a high enough bar competing with Windows, creating additional artificial hurdles is dumb in the extreme.
Both Wayland and X11 are an artificial hurdle to someone, so at least pick the sane choice with a future.
Security vs convenience has always been a give and take. There’s a cutoff point that users will not cross if the software becomes too inconvenient to use, even if it means greater security. The Wayland stack is currently on the bad side of that line and needs to step over if it wants to see mass adoption.
No, Wayland is doing fine.
Nobody cares, all they see is the stack, with Wayland leading the point on the bad decisions.
Oh no, Wayland isn’t X11. It’s almost as if Wayland isn’t supposed to be 1:1 bug compatible with Xorg.
You are projecting. If this were any other piece of software, say, a text editor that works and does everything you need, and someone came and told you “you must use this new one, it’s the way forward, but oh it doesn’t have all the features you need from a text editor” you would say “thanks but I’ll wait until it’s ready”. But you see no problem in pushing Wayland on people who can’t use it?
I don’t know about what text editors you use, but my text editor doesn’t allow malware to log all keystrokes, tamper with windows of other apps, steal clipboard contents without consent, inject keystrokes into other windows, escalate privileges, and install rootkits that persist OS re-installs using the escalated privileges.
People work on Wayland. Nobody works on Xorg. Alternatives don’t exist.
Please understand that nobody will ever successfuly push through incomplete software. Not on Linux. There’s nothing you or anybody can do to convince people that incomplete software is complete and usable when it’s not.
Do you need a refresher about systemd, pulseaudio, etc.? I’m not in the systemd haters camp, but pulseaudio broke regularly for me. Yet every distro included pulseaudio.
I really wanted Wayland to work for me. I just bought a new ASUS laptop (and ASUS has a great Linux compatibility track record, mind you!), 7th Gen Ryzen+Radeon, all AMD. I figured, let’s use Wayland on this one.
I installed KDE Neon, updated the kernel (some stuff is broken on the LTS kernel, no big deal, easy fix), switched to the Wayland session, everything was fine…until I opened any chromium-based app. Crashed kwin, killed the session completely, it recovered, but in a new session. Switched to X11, everything works. Maybe if I grabbed a newer mesa from a PPA it would work, but:
- Crashing the window manager killing the session is awful and doesn’t happen in X11
- Chromium shouldn’t crash the compositor at all
- Even if it’s AMD’s new graphics drivers being buggy, that still shouldn’t kill the session!
And I know, technically KDE could (and afaik, is) implement session management so that doesn’t happen. But to my knowledge, literally 0 WMs/DEs can recover the session after a compositor crash currently, and that’s a big deal.
If you still want to give Wayland a try, take a look at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/wayland#Electron. Electron still defaults to X11, even though Electron supports Wayland. It’s a bit annoying to set the command line parameters for apps that bundle Electron, but maybe it works for you.
auto type
ydotool?
Increase your scaling/decrease resolution.
Not the same as “on demand zooming”, which let’s one stick with a high, native resolution, but zoom in when required (e.g. websites with small text that can’t be zoomed via browser’s font size increase; e.g. referencing some UI stuff during UI design, without having to take a screenshot and pasting + zooming it in e.g. GIMP).
What? Strg + Mousewheel, you can even set the option to only zoom text. At least on firefox. No clue what kind of browser you are using which is not capable of that.
Yeah, that browser zoom. And I too used / use Firefox. I’m not saying these kind of sites are common, but nevertheless I’ve encountered them occasionally. Back then, the most pragmatic workaround was to use desktop zooming of Xfce.
My intention on the previous comment was simply to give some examples of desktop zooming that go beyond the typical accessibility viewpoint (e.g. vision impairment).
10 years was enough time to make your software work on Wayland.
By that logic, one could answer that 15 years was enough time to make Wayland work better than it does… but that would be petty and disingenous.
Desktop stacks are very complex. X.org took 30 years to beat that complexity into a usable shape. Wayland pushed most complexity up the stack and still took 15 years to finally put together a protocol of beta quality.
It will take the rest of the stack however long it will take to build on that protocol. Most of the Linux community are volunteers, and Wayland was and still is work in progress. Nobody in their right mind rushes to write software on top of an unstable protocol.
If Wayland is truly ready I think we will see meaningful stack adoption within the next 5 years. But I don’t think trying to force developers into it will achieve anything.
As for forcing users that’s completely unreasonable. If you’re using XFCE on Nvidia you’ll have to wait for XFCE to get Wayland support and for Wayland to get Nvidia support. Very few people are willing to change their whole desktop stack or able to buy a new graphics card for the sake of… of what? Bringing about the Year of the Linux Desktop?
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You know what’s super ironic? I went through this exact thing with X, 25 years ago, when you had to put together a Linux desktop with spit and duct tape.
Wayland promises to be much nicer than X but the way it asks you to put together a working desktop stack yourself is straight out of the '90s.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
Step 1: Install a Wayland compositor of your choice Step 2:
Read again
You should have used a - instead of a .
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This is a terrible recommendation and I hope as few people follow it as possible.
People like you are why Linux has a reputation for always being broken; as soon as we get something that works and is stable, we gotta move to the next broken thing.
The same thing will be said about Wayland in 20 years, if it ever reaches feature-parity with X.
Oh yeah?
That must explain why Xorg always crashes and burns when I don’t use the correct combination of desktop environment, compositor and driver version.
Let’s not ignore that Xorg doesn’t and never has been working for everyone. At least default to the sane option with a future.
User error. If X is too difficult for you to use, maybe you should try Windows.
Moving to an even more broken option isn’t a good solution.
The sense of entitlement in some of the replies on that post are absolutely awful
As for me personally, I want to love Wayland. It has great performance on ALL my devices, (except one with a nvidia GPU) and is super smooth compared to X11!
However… the secure aspect of Wayland makes it very difficult, if not impossible to easily get a remote desktop going. Wayvnc doesn’t support the most popular desktop environments depending on how Wayland was compiled, and the built-in desktop sharing on distros that have switched over to Wayland often require very specific Linux-only VNC and RDP clients, otherwise you run into odd errors.
I really hope the desktop sharing situation improves because it’s a pretty big showstopper for me. On X11 you just install & run x11vnc from a remote SSH session and you have immediate session access with VNC from Linux, Android, and Windows. If you want lockscreen access too then you run as root and provide the greeter’s Xauth credentials. But Wayland’s not so simple sadly AFAICT…
Waypipe is something I’ve found out about recently though, so need to check that out and see how well it works at the moment. If anyone has any helpful info or pointers please share, I’m completely new to Wayland and would appreciate it!
For me its especially services like RustDesk or even RealVNC that are essential, because I have no DynDNS
I know this is not useful for most use cases, but if you login to the desktop on the ‘remote Wayland’, locally first then RD will work as expected. So if you can change the behaviour of the remote desktop to stay unlocked (IE its in a secure place where others cannot just access the device), then and RD will work with Wayland.
I use NoMachine (since I manage all sorts of devices, and its nice that there is a client and server for everything including phones/arm) and it works for me because many of the machines are actually VM’s and I can keep the desktops unlocked and logged in. NoMachines solution for Wayland - is to disable it and use X11 !!
But I wish many of the RD developers would just embrace Wayland and add/rewrite code to support it (If it is in their scope, I don’t know) It might not be, since I am aware of Waypipe and Pipewire, but I’d assume that RD devs would still need to include support for that.
I use freerdp for Linux and rd connect on Android, Windows to connect to my Ubuntu laptop as a second monitor on gnome Wayland and it works great
Also wayland is just slower for gaming
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Looked at it. It seems GNOME are doing dirty hacks, since AFAIK they don’t have tearing control in their compositor.
And game fps is not directly translated to perceived performance on wayland. For example in Xonotic 90-95 fps on wayland feel laggy, but if enable glFinish, I’ll get 80 fps in same area, but game will feel much better. But it causes game to run in 20-30 fps in places and cause more lag there, where it would run 30-60. For context runnung game in X11 without glFinish gets me 110 fps in same area, which feel like 110 fps. Running game in kmsdrm gets me 120 fps in same area.
The more it’s on its way out, the harder it will be to find people that even want to maintain it.
I honestly don’t get these posts, there’s a couple of things that is super weird.
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Why does every discussion about Wayland include trashing xorg?
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Isn’t the solution pretty obvious, stop mainting xorg if you don’t like to maintain xorg, who is forcing you to maintain xorg?
I really don’t care if I’m using xorg or wayland, I just want something that works, and I have tried wayland and that isn’t the case as of the moment. And I don’t care about the why, because I can’t be like yeah I use Wayland that’s why I can’t be on this video conference.
Just stop mainting it if you don’t want to maintain it, problem solved, move on.
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Seems like a redhat problem, so why is he complaining. It wasn’t the developer who signed an agreement to maintain xorg, so I don’t get the argument. Either you do it for the money you get paid, and if you don’t feel like it’s enough, then don’t do it. The developer can just quit and do something else, ask for another project. The only one who is making him work on xorg is redhat.
But why even mention m it in the same context as Wayland, make Wayland work for the end user and 90% of people would not care if thier Linux machine was using Wayland or xorg.
Yes I’ve had multiple issues with video conferencing on Wayland, but my experience is 1 - 2 years old. I just use what works, I don’t have any technical problems with xorg and that is why I use it.
Just let xorg die.
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Why does every discussion about Wayland include trashing xorg?
I don’t know, really, but it’s something I feel I’ve seen before.I thought about it and it’s just fanboyism.Some people get legitimately angry when they see someone using something they don’t like, and I think Wayland fanboys fit in this category to a tee.
I see the exact same kind of backlash whenever someone brings up Nvidia or Manjaro. The fanboys come out and all take it as an opportunity to recommend what they like because they believe their tastes are superior to everyone else’s.
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I guess Wayland isn’t as feature-rich as X because people from RHEL don’t want to put in the work to maintain it.
Not surprising, really. It just follows the modern trend of removing features so incompetent programmers have an easier job.
You are the boss! 💪
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I don’t get the issue with “maintaining Xorg”. Like, I get that it has a “cost”, I just don’t understand why that cost would be an issue since it’s basically fixed, marginal cost (and has been since like 2015): the software is already mature, so it’s unlikely to see relevant changes, or even minor changes (if that’s what we want to mean with “dead”). That means, it can be affixed to a specific toolkit and environment to build (if this isn’t being done already - which any mature project like RedHat should be!) basically guaranteeing it’ll build forever. You can just set a virtual button or a yearly crontab to do it. Fixed, marginal cost.
Contrasted to that, what Wayland is doing is kinda a representation of the worst ways of capitalism: centralize the profits, socialize the costs and the externalities (redesign, recode, rebuild), and blame society (the Linux communities) for it, all for a variable cost that is unbounded in time and space because you never know what’s gonna cost a small project like a text editor to reimplement the entire desktop stack “just” for Wayland.
I don’t get the issue with “maintaining Xorg”.
I think he explains it pretty well, he even gives some examples and mentions there are many others. For a company to support such a large component for its commercial customers has a lot of work and verification we wouldn’t consider as end users. His comment also explains why you can’t just maintain a status quo with it and make an automatic build and forget…
The issue with maintaining X is solely RH not wanting to pay developers to maintain it.
Wayland only exists because RH wanted to remove features of X so they can offload implementation and maintenance of those features to other parties.
It’s all about money. Don’t fool yourselves into thinking it’s not.
As a third party, my understanding is that both the implementation and the protocol are really hard, if not next to impossible to iterate on. Modern hardware doesn’t work like how it did when X did, and X assumes a lot of things that made sense in the 90s that don’t now. Despite that, we cram a square peg into the round hole and it mostly works - and as the peg becomes a worse shape we just cram it harder. At this point no one wants to keep working on X.
And I know your point is that it works and we don’t need too, but we do need too. New hardware needs to support X - at least the asahi guys found bugs in the X implementation that only exists on their hardware and no one who wants to fix them. Wayland and X are vastly different, because X doesn’t make sense in the modern day. It breaks things, and a lot of old assumptions aren’t true. That sucks, especially for app devs that rely on those assumptions. But keeping around X isn’t the solution - iterating on Wayland is. Adding protocols to different parts of the stack with proper permission models, moving different pieces of X to different parts of the stack, etc. are a long term viable strategy. Even if it is painful.
But keeping around X isn’t the solution - iterating on Wayland is. Adding protocols to different parts of the stack with proper permission models, moving different pieces of X to different parts of the stack, etc. are a long term viable strategy. Even if it is painful.
The problem is, that’s always used as an excuse to force people to be gratis beta testers. I’ve been around for the wrecks that were (and still are) Pulseaudio and Systemd. Wayland is even worse: it doesn’t even fully start a session in my machine. If as devs you want to “iterate”, sure, go ahead; but leave it in the dev branch; as a user, don’t try to sell me Wayland again until it’s actually over.
The problem is, that’s always used as an excuse to force people to be gratis beta testers
If as devs you want to “iterate”, sure, go ahead; but leave it in the dev branch; as a user, don’t try to sell me Wayland again until it’s actually over.
it’s opensource software, don’t like it? go ahead, don’t use it. They don’t owe anyone shit
Sadly, message does not list a dollar amount. Replies are great though. Lots of pointing out the listed items are small compared to corporation size.
Also I see “Red Hat” thrown around a lot. There’s no Red Hat anymore, it’s IBM, and IBM’s target user is a RHEL customer.
I’m willing to bet most people commenting on Mastodon (and here for that matter) have very little in common with a RHEL customer. IBM, like Valve with the Deck, have very specific use cases in mind and can afford to support a Wayland-based desktop for those particular circumstances.
But does IBM care about the desktop needs of the average Linux user? I doubt it.
Great point. IBM has a long history of squeezing every penny from their customers. At one corner job, IBM had to come onsite a few times a year to perform system updates. We were not allowed by IBM to upgrade the OS ourselves.
Yeah, I never take people seriously when they say something is ‘too expensive’ but willfully obscure what that price actually is.
I’m less of a useful idiot because of it.
