Boycott Wayland. It breaks everything!

Wayland.md

Think twice before abandoning Xorg. Wayland breaks everything!

tl;dr: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet, and maybe never will. Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to "just work" without the need for adjustments, then you may be better of not using Wayland at this point.

Wayland solves no issues I have but breaks almost everything I need. And usually it stays broken, because the Wayland folks only seem to care about Gnome, and alienating everyone else in the process. DO NOT INSTALL WAYLAND! Let Wayland not destroy everything and then have other people fix the damage it caused. Or force more Red Hat/Gnome components (glib, Portals, Pipewire) on everyone!

Please add more examples to the list.

Wayland breaks screen recording applications

• MaartenBaert/ssr#431 ❌ broken since 24 Jan 2016, no resolution ("I guess they use a non-standard GNOME interface for this")
• https://github.com/mhsabbagh/green-recorder ❌ ("I am no longer interested in working with things like ffmpeg/wayland/GNOME's screencaster or solving the issues related to them or why they don't work")
• vkohaupt/vokoscreenNG#51 ❌ broken since at least 7 Mar 2020. ("I have now decided that there will be no Wayland support for the time being. Reason, there is no budget for it. Let's see how it looks in a year or two.") - This is the key problem. Wayland breaks everything and then expects others to fix the wreckage it caused on their own expense.
• obsproject/obs-studio#2471 ❌ broken since at least 7 Mar 2020. ("Wayland is unsupported at this time", "There isn't really something that can just be easily changed. Wayland provides no capture APIs")
• There is a workaround for OBS Studio that requires a obs-xdg-portal plugin (which is known to be Red Hat/Flatpak-centric, GNOME-centric, "perhaps" works with other desktops)

Wayland breaks screen sharing applications

• jitsi/jitsi-meet#2350 ❌ broken since 3 Jan 2018
• jitsi/jitsi-meet#6389 ❌ broken since 24 Jan 2016 ("Closing since there is nothing we can do from the Jitsi Meet side.") See? Wayland breaks stuff and leaves application developers helpless and unable to fix the breakage, even if they wanted.
• flathub/us.zoom.Zoom#22 Zoom ❌ broken since at least 4 Jan 2019. ("Can not start share, we only support wayland on GNOME with Ubuntu (17, 18), Fedora (25 to 29), Debian 9, openSUSE Leap 15, Arch Linux"). No word about non-GNOME!

Wayland breaks automation software

sudo pkg install py37-autokey

This is an X11 application, and as such will not function 100% on 
distributions that default to using Wayland instead of Xorg.

Wayland breaks Gnome-Global-AppMenu (global menus for Gnome)

• https://gitlab.com/lestcape/Gnome-Global-AppMenu/-/issues/116 ❌ broken since 24 Aug 2018 ("because the lack of the Gtk+ Wayland support for the Global Menu")

Wayland broke global menus with KDE platformplugin

• https://blog.broulik.de/2016/10/global-menus-returning/ ("it uses global window IDs, which don’t exist in a Wayland world... no global menu on Wayland, I thought, not without significant re-engineering effort"). KDE had to do additional work to work around it. And it still did not work:

• https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=385880 ("When using the Plasma-Wayland session, the global menu does not work.")

Good news: According to this report global menus now work with KDE platformplugin as of 4/2022

Wayland breaks global menus with non-KDE Qt platformplugins

• https://blog.broulik.de/2016/10/global-menus-returning/ ❌ broke non-KDE platformplugins. As a result, global menus now need _KDE_NET_WM_APPMENU_OBJECT_PATH which only the KDE platformplugin sets, leaving everyone else in the dark

Wayland breaks AppImages that don't ship a special Wayland Qt plugin

• https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2018/03/unsetting-qt_qpa_platform-environment-variable-by-default/ ❌ broke AppImages that don't ship a special Wayland Qt plugin. "This affects proprietary applications, FLOSS applications bundled as appimages, FLOSS applications bundled as flatpaks and not distributed by KDE and even the Qt installer itself. In my opinion this is a showstopper for running a Wayland session." However, there is a workaround: "AppImages which ship just the XCB plugin will automatically fallback to running in xwayland mode" (see below).

Wayland breaks Redshift

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/redshift ❌ broken ("Redshift does not support Wayland since it offers no way to adjust the color temperature")

Wayland breaks global hotkeys

• albertlauncher/albert#309 ❌ broken since 7 Jan 2017 ("This is a security measure, but has the side effect of preventing applications from registering their own global hotkeys") YouTube video by René Rebe

Wayland does not work for Xfce?

See below.

Wayland does not work properly on NVidia hardware?

See below.

Wayland does not work properly on Intel hardware

• https://cfenollosa.com/blog/fed-up-with-the-mac-i-spent-six-months-with-a-linux-laptop-the-grass-is-not-greener-on-the-other-side.html ❌ broken since at least 02 Apr 2021 ("Screen tearing with the intel driver. Come on. This was solved on xorg and now with Wayland it's back.")

Wayland prevents GUI applications from running as root

• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1274451 ❌ broken since 22 Oct 2015 ("No this will only fix sudo for X11 applications. Running GUI code as root is still a bad idea." I absolutely detest it when software tries to prevent me from doing what some developer thinks is "a bad idea" but did not consider my use case, e.g., running truss for debugging on FreeBSD needs to run the application as root. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1323302 suggests it is not possible: "These sorts of security considerations are very much the way that "the Linux desktop" is going these days".)

Wayland is biased toward Linux and breaks BSD

• https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/wayland_on_netbsd_trials_and ❌ broken since 28 Sep 2020 ("Wayland is written with the assumption of Linux to the extent that every client application tends to #include <linux/input.h> because Wayland's designers didn't see the need to define a OS-neutral way to get mouse button IDs. (...) In general, Wayland is moving away from the modularity, portability, and standardization of the X server. (...) I've decided to take a break from this, since it's a fairly huge undertaking and uphill battle. Right now, X11 combined with a compositor like picom or xcompmgr is the more mature option."

Wayland complicates server-side window decorations

• https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2018/01/server-side-decorations-and-wayland/ ❌ FUD since at least 27 January 2018 ("I heard that GNOME is currently trying to lobby for all applications implementing client-side decorations. One of the arguments seems to be that CSD is a must on Wayland. " ... "I’m burnt from it and are not interested in it any more.") Server-side window decorations are what make the title bar and buttons of all windows on a system consistent. They are a must have_ for a consistent system, so that applications written e.g., Gtk will not look entirely alien on e.g., a Qt based desktop, and to enforce that developers cannot place random controls into window titles where they do not belong. Client-side decorations, on the other hand, are destroying uniformity and consistency, put additional burden on application and toolkit developers, and allow e.g., GNOME developers to put random controls (that do not belong there) into window titles (like buttons), hence making it more difficult to achieve a uniform look and feel for all applications regardless of the toolkit being used.

Wayland breaks windows rasing/activating themselves

• https://phabricator.kde.org/D16648#470609 ("Wayland clients can't raise or activate themselves"), ❌ broken since May 27 2019

Wayland breaks RescueTime

• https://help.rescuetime.com/article/117-common-linux-issues ("One of the features of Wayland is that it prevents apps from doing precisely what RescueTime is trying to do—track activity in other windows.") ❌ broken since June 3, 2021

Wayland breaks window managers

Apparently Wayland (at least as implemented in KWin) does not respect EWMH protocols, and breaks other command line tools like wmctrl, xrandr, xprop, etc. Please see the discussion below for details.

Wayland breaks _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR protocol

• https://github.comelectron/electron#33226 ("skipTaskbar has no effect on Wayland. Currently Electron uses _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR to tell the WM to hide an app from the taskbar, and this works fine on X11 but there's no equivalent mechanism in Wayland." Workarounds are only available for some desktops including GNOME and KDE Plasma.) ❌ broken since March 10, 2022

References

• Chris Titus Tech: Wayland vs Xorg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_MBJcD3SFI
• tildearrow: did somebody say "anti-Wayland horseshit"?

The trend Wayland is causing resembles what Google has done to browser engines. Just compare:

• Canonical ditched Unity in favour of GNOME with a few extensions;
• XFCE uses Mutter for Wayland support instead of porting xfwm4;
• LWQt uses a Mutter fork with a KWin D-Bus API support (being Qt-based otherwise);
  with
• Opera ditching Presto (except of Opera Mini transcoders) in favour of WebKit and later Blink;
• M$ ditching Trident/Edge in favour of Blink;
• Electron ousting XULRunner and MSHTA;
• WebKit-based Android Browser being phased out and replaced by Chrome;
• QtWebKit being replaced with QtWebEngine;
• several other replacements of WebKit with Blink in embedded solutions (Tizen, Samsung Internet, don't remember the complete list already).

So now, instead of a diverse world of competing browser engines, there is omnipresent Blink, being an unusable and barely customizable (yup, still, despite all the efforts put in particular by Opera and Electron developers) bloatware, with Apple/Mozilla still resisting (and turning their engines into bloatware too), the furry Goanna developer pretending to resist, and a bunch of primitive projects like NetSurf, KHTML and elinks which barely handle the modern, intentionally over-engineered, Web. Oh, and proprietary Flow (was it even released already?)

I find all of this unusable and lost a notion of a favourite browser, suffering all the time I have to use the Web in general, and got disenchanted by the idea of Web-is-the-future, despite I highly leaned on it in early 10s. For average slatephone users, actually, it realized much earlier, as for some reason they prefer to download native apps from app stores (even if they are just wrappers for a browser engine, but such kind of apps is dying out too), instead of opening web apps in a browser.

Ironically, GNOME developers act as a good faction there, as they keep maintaining a port of WebKit for GNU/Linux, thus keeping the diversity in the GNU/Linux world instead of being devoured by the Blink/Quantum oligopoly. Still lots of users I've encountered don't recognize this and keep thinking by old memory that Chrome is WebKit-based too, and thus other WebKit-based browsers are as much bloated and thus not worth trying, despite this was true for an already shorter term (2008–2013) than Blink exists.

In the meantime lots of people are using their legacy applications with XWayland just fine

Because you take only things that work, ignore those which don't work, and conclude from it that it works well enough, huh?

Anything beyond a direct client-to-server talk, and to some extent beyond talking between X clients in one Xwayland session, is broken. And this is probably the only thing the topic starter managed to highlight and list correctly. Besides of the PipeWire scope, okay.

you're a discrimination victim

Yes I am, how can I get a shelter? ;DDD

obscure window managers

So you imply that obscure window managers are not being used for work, huh? Especially when people write window managers themselves for their specific workflow (like this one).

Eventually they will just get bored with this futile task. Wayland will become just another abandoned software.

Xorg is becoming another abandoned software. Its developers got tired with it. It's not a forecast, it's not hypothetical. It's happening right now for real.

Wayland has been created 14 years ago, and is becoming more and more popular. Major distros and desktop environnements are switching to Wayland.

In the meantime lots of people are using their legacy applications with XWayland just fine

Because you take only things that work, ignore those which don't work, and conclude from it that it works well enough, huh?

Because if only you think up obscure edge cases hard enough, things that work just fine for other people suddenly stop doing so, huh?

Anything beyond a direct client-to-server talk,

...which is like 99% of what GUIs are doing... and the intersection of legacy software that needs the remaining 1%, has no developers working on Wayland support and has no Wayland-compatible equivalent is quite small and getting smaller, see the list posted a few posts earlier. And for the rest, just continue to use X11, as the intersection of that set with the set of users forced at gunpoint to use Wayland is zero.

My Little Pony apps and obscure window managers

So you imply that obscure window managers are not being used for work, huh? Especially when people write window managers themselves for their specific workflow (like this one).

Next you're going to say that people also write My Little Pony apps for work.

Xorg is becoming another abandoned software. Its developers got tired with it. It's not a forecast, it's not hypothetical. It's happening right now for real.

Curiously, the people who project the immediate demise of Wayland in the future often tend to be the same who have done nothing to contribute to X11 in the past.

Xorg is becoming another abandoned software. Its developers got tired with it.

Ah, I get it now. So since Xorg works, we have to break everything and then fix it, because we're bored and need somewhere to spend the money?

Wayland has been created 14 years ago, and is becoming more and more popular.

That in itself sounds funny. It's like taking a dusty old tape recorder out of the closet. Look guys, it's mainstream now!

Major distros and desktop environnements are switching to Wayland.

Yeah. I heard that a lot. Good luck.

That in itself sounds funny. It's like taking a dusty old tape recorder out of the closet. Look guys, it's mainstream now!

Except the old thing here is X, not Wayland.

Except the old thing here is X, not Wayland.

I think it's impressive that such a thing as X has survived so long and is still working good and relevant. The desktop has hardly changed in 20 years, perhaps that's why. And Wayland never managed to become relevant for 14 years. And the only way to move everyone to Wayland is to forcibly break compatibility. What else? Oh yeah, NVidia bad.

Wayland has been created 14 years ago, and is becoming more and more popular.

That in itself sounds funny. It's like taking a dusty old tape recorder out of the closet. Look guys, it's mainstream now!

It would have sounded just as funny if you had said it about X11 in 1998, when X11 was 14 years old. Look guys, sure it comes from the early 1980s when people were watching Laserdiscs and the USSR was shooting down Korean passenger jets, but now KDE 1.0 is out, Netscape is open source, it's mainstream now!

Xorg is becoming another abandoned software. Its developers got tired with it.

Ah, I get it now. So since Xorg works, we have to break everything and then fix it, because we're bored and need somewhere to spend the money?

Actually it's more like "I'm not going to get up from my couch to maintain X11, but I'm going to tell the X developers from my couch what they should and should not be doing."

And Wayland never managed to become relevant for 14 years.

It is relevant. See this and this.

Even Xorg developers think it's relevant (don't forget who created Wayland).

Because if only you think up obscure edge cases hard enough, things that work just fine for other people suddenly stop doing so, huh?

Obscure edge cases is what distinguishes mature software from a student's pet project. Remember about the Pareto principle.

the intersection of legacy software that needs the remaining 1%, has no developers working on Wayland support and has no Wayland-compatible equivalent is quite small and getting smaller,

It's not about legacy primarily, it's about intentional limitations of Wayland.

forced at gunpoint

So you suspect every user should be savvy enough to be able to switch to the X11 session? Would you claim the same if some distribution, or even the GNOME upstream, drop supporting the X11 backend? The need to trade it for some more real-cases-oriented environment is much closer to a "gunpoint" already. What if those users loved GNOME Shell and are used to it, but would have to re-learn ibecause GNOME Shell is an intentionally limited shit directed by security-paranoid freaks willing to turn a full-fledged desktop system into something Android-like?

Next you're going to say that people also write My Little Pony apps for work.

I couldn't recall any better example of an app spawning zillions of windows :P There were lots of serious™ apps made like this, before SDI came out of fashion, like GIMP or Cinelerra.

when people were watching Laserdiscs and the USSR was shooting down Korean passenger jets

Hey, my vacuum cleaner was made in USSR and is still working, and the washer is only a bit younger. The Soviet mixer is probably working too, didn't try it for many years.

Oh, and BTW, I watched a LaserDisc rip on archive.org recently, it has some sort of DMCA exemption. Nice analog noise, I'd say (analog TV had it too, but VHS sadly doesn't preserve it due to the low bandwidth).

I'm not going to get up from my couch to maintain X11

Why maintain what's working? Oh, and yeah, the vacuum cleaner and the washer needed some maintenance once in a few decades too; the motor in the former had to be replaced (and the new one sucks even better!), and the timer in the latter has broken, so now the power passes through to the motor directly and I have to plug and unplug it from the socket in time myself xD Lots of maintenance, right?

It would have sounded just as funny if you had said it about X11 in 1998, when X11 was 14 years old. Look guys, sure it comes from the early 1980s when people were watching Laserdiscs and the USSR was shooting down Korean passenger jets, but now KDE 1.0 is out, Netscape is open source, it's mainstream now!

X11 need revision. But has a very smart and fundamentally clever design. Wayland has no design at all.

See this and this.

Not quite true. Part of the planned debunking, BTW (yup, I still remember about it :P)

or libraries (cairo, pixman, freetype, fontconfig, pango, etc)

Suckless software still exploits Xft a lot. Freetype and Pango are bloatware.

XLFDs (seriously, XLFDs!)

Yeah, what's wrong with XLFDs? It's just a machine-readable string, after all. Modelines are much more dangerous, they could kill a CRT, after all (does anyone still have such a CRT? xD)

Some people still prefer bitmap fonts, because, well, there's no ideal approach for anti-aliasing vector fonts on LoDPI at all. All of them look ugly or blurry.

the entire core rendering API that lets you draw stippled lines, polygons, wide arcs and many more state-of-the-1980s style graphics primitives

Such a light graphics is crucial for sending efficiently over the network. I just remind that Windows RDP still uses such kind of graphical primitives, and thus provides a level of latency and picture quality which no any compressed-bitmap solution can achieve!

GLX is a decent replacement, of course, but hey, shitty Wayland-oriented toolkits barely exploit even that!

But we can't ever get rid of the core rendering API and much other complexity that is rarely used in a modern desktop

Where only GNOME Shell / Plasma are implied by a "modern desktop".

Such a light graphics is crucial for sending efficiently over the network. I just remind that Windows RDP still uses such kind of graphical primitives, and thus provides a level of latency and picture quality which no any compressed-bitmap solution can achieve!

If you want to draw a few lines and circles, yes. In practice, X11 is extremely slow over the network. If I run Firefox over a local 100 Mbit/s link, I have to wait like 20 seconds before I see the blank welcome page. With VNC, it's probably less than 1 second. And if the network connection is interrupted, the X clients crash.

Not quite true. Part of the planned debunking, BTW (yup, I still remember about it :P)

Make sure the Xorg developers read it. Because if they abandon Xorg, then it will stop working someday (unless you stop updating your OS forever).

Because if only you think up obscure edge cases hard enough, things that work just fine for other people suddenly stop doing so, huh?

Obscure edge cases is what distinguishes mature software from a student's pet project. Remember about the Pareto principle.

Still doesn't make things stop working that work for other people, just because you take your pride in thinking up obscure limitations that don't affect them.

Next you're going to say that people also write My Little Pony apps for work.

I couldn't recall any better example of an app spawning zillions of windows :P

Says something about the relevance of that use case.

I'm not going to get up from my couch to maintain X11

Why maintain what's working?

So no more complaints about Wayland binding developer resources (the system is maintenance-free, so they weren't needed anyway) and about forcing users into Wayland (they can use X, just like you are happy with your Soviet vacuum cleaner).

Not quite true. Part of the planned debunking, BTW (yup, I still remember about it :P)

Make sure the Xorg developers read it. Because if they abandon Xorg, then it will stop working someday (unless you stop updating your OS forever).

I think you missed the memo from the 1980s Washing Machine School of Software Maintenance that says that updating is not something users should need to do.

I think you missed the memo from the 1980s Washing Machine School of Software Maintenance that says that updating is not something users should need to do.

Oops. Too late, I upgraded to Debian 11 yesterday. I'll try downgrading to Debian 1.

@sognokdev

If I run Firefox

That's because you run bloated Firefox and not some X11-native browser like Links2. Firefox renders complete bitmaps, and changes them often, how is that even supposed to be efficient?

I highlight again: first the popular graphical software has went wrong way in late 90s and 00s by ignoring native X primitives and introducing the incompatible vinaigrette of GTK+/Qt/EFL/Swing/XUL/whatever, all rendering most of things themselves, while on competing desktop platforms they weren't that impertinent and used native WinAPI/Cocoa/libbe.so backends whenever possible. Then Wayland appeared, and instead of making something with this vinaigrette, it just recognized it as a status quo and intensified it by eliminating a notion of a native toolkit and allowing every app to be a walled garden which returns to the display server only a bitmap drawn in a whatever way. This happened in the era when raster graphics was already considered a bad taste, and in modern way it is replaced with vector graphics almost completely... but Wayland, unlike X, doesn't give a shit about vector graphics, it knows only bitmaps.

Now, of course, modern browser engines don't try to use native rendering in content viewports.on any platform.

With VNC, it's probably less than 1 second

On 100 MBit/s: probably yes, even with a decent quality. In some more real conditions, trade-offs are needed. And VNC isn't even good with dynamic and/or progressive compression quality, like in TeamViewer, for example.

Make sure the Xorg developers read it

What among them? Y'know, most of people that participated in the development don't do that anymore, and Wayland propagandists love to take the fact most of those remaining have chosen the Wayland way as a resignation of the whole team. And the fact it's open and thus anyone may become a developer instead of insane boomers ditching their creation.

I mentioned already that the existence at least of Xarcan shows that the "nobody can dive into X.Org codebase anymore" narrative is kinda a myth.

@phrxmd

Still doesn't make things stop working that work for other people

Fullscreen DRI may work for other people too, now what? How can it be considered a replacement for a windowing system?

Says something about the relevance of that use case.

It only says that I barely dealt with professional apps for Unix-like systems from that era.

no more complaints about Wayland binding developer resources

You seem to confuse the opponents again :P

1980s Washing Machine

Hey, it's a new upgraded version! The original one had a timer, the upgraded one doesn't need it anymore! Innovation! xDDDDD

unless you stop updating your OS forever

Oh, and I don't get what you mean by that really. I don't upgrade an "OS", just a few packets at time (as I don't have enough space on the system partition for all of them, and the automatic dependency resolution fails to handle this bunch in a sane way anyway). Some packages are even frozen, without interferring with upgrading other packages, some even were downgraded, for example, smbclient and related packages, because they have broken SMB1 support at some stage, which I need for Windows XP. Lots of software is installed from sources. And I don't quite get how some breaking change is supposed to sneak into here this way.

That's because you run bloated Firefox and not some X11-native browser like Links2. Firefox renders complete bitmaps, and changes them often, how is that even supposed to be efficient?

That's true. I just tried links2, it's really usable over a fast connection.

I highlight again: first the popular graphical software has went wrong way in late 90s and 00s by ignoring native X primitives and introducing the incompatible vinaigrette of GTK+/Qt/EFL/Swing/XUL/whatever, all rendering most of things themselves

Yes, but I guess there are reasons for that, like portability, and probably others.

I mentioned already that the existence at least of Xarcan shows that the "nobody can dive into X.Org codebase anymore" narrative is kinda a myth.

Oh, it's certainly possible to dive into the Xorg codebase. But I'm not sure there will be enough people willing to do that in the long run.

Oh, and I don't get what you mean by that really. I don't upgrade an "OS", just a few packets at time.

I meant that Xorg will probably need a lot of modifications in order to run on what will be your operating system 10 or 20 years from now.

I highlight again: first the popular graphical software has went wrong way in late 90s and 00s by ignoring native X primitives

I'm not really convinced about those, they were made with 1980s assumptions in mind - here is a 1994 take on those native X primitives (from the Unix Hater's Handbook, page 138):

Myth: X Is Device Independent

X is extremely device dependent because all X graphics are specified in pixel coordinates. Graphics drawn on different resolution screens come out at different sizes, so you have to scale all the coordinates yourself if you want to draw at a certain size. Not all screens even have square pixels: unless you don’t mind rectangular squares and oval circles, you also have to adjust all coordinates according to the pixel aspect ratio.

A task as simple as filling and stroking shapes is quite complicated because of X’s bizarre pixel-oriented imaging rules. When you fill a 10x10 square with XFillRectangle, it fills the 100 pixels you expect. But you get extra “bonus pixels” when you pass the same arguments to XDrawRectangle, because it actually draws an 11x11 square, hanging out one pixel below and to the right!!! If you find this hard to believe, look it up in the X manual yourself: Volume 1, Section 6.1.4. The manual patronizingly explains how easy it is to add 1 to the x and y position of the filled rectangle, while subtracting 1 from the width and height to compensate, so it fits neatly inside the outline. Then it points out that “in the case of arcs, however, this is a much more difficult proposition (probably impossible in a portable fashion).” This means that portably filling and stroking an arbitrarily scaled arc without overlapping or leaving gaps is an intractable problem when
using the X Window System. Think about that. You can’t even draw a proper rectangle with a thick outline, since the line width is specified in unscaled pixels units, so if your display has rectangular pixels, the vertical and horizontal lines will have different thicknesses even though you scaled the rectangle corner coordinates to compensate for the aspect ratio.

The color situation is a total flying circus. The X approach to device independence is to treat everything like a MicroVAX framebuffer on acid. A truly portable X application is required to act like the persistent customer in Monty Python’s “Cheese Shop” sketch, or a grail seeker in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” [...]

Check out the previous section "Myth: X Is “Portable”", or the following section "X Graphics: Square Peg in a Round Hole", which starts with a quote:

Programming X Windows is like trying to find the square root of pi using Roman numerals.

So at the risk of sounding like a boomer - the still-existing niche programs and toolkits utilizing native X primitives might be more of a testament to their developers' pain threshold than about their viability, no more than the fact that people still write impressive demos for the Amiga 500 says anything about its viability as a platform. Hats off to the developers who do that, there's some real skill there, but it seems more of an enthusiast thing.

With VNC, it's probably less than 1 second

On 100 MBit/s: probably yes, even with a decent quality. In some more real conditions, trade-offs are needed.

Note that the X client/server model has attracted quite a bit of criticism right from the beginning - here is the 1994 take from the same book, page 127:

Myth: X Demonstrates the Power of Client/Server Computing

At the mere mention of network window systems, certain propeller heads who confuse technology with economics will start foaming at the mouth about their client/server models and how in the future palmtops will just run the X server and let the other half of the program run on some Cray down the street. They’ve become unwitting pawns in the hardware manufacturers’ conspiracy to sell newer systems each year. After all, what better way is there to force users to upgrade their hardware than to give them X, where a single application can bog down the client, the server, and the network between them, simultaneously!

The database client/server model (the server machine stores all the data, and the clients beseech it for data) makes sense. The computation client/server model (where the server is a very expensive or experimental supercomputer, and the client is a desktop workstation or portable computer) makes sense. But a graphical client/server model that slices the interface down some arbitrary middle is like Solomon following through with his child-sharing strategy. The legs, heart, and left eye end up on the server, the arms and lungs go to the client, the head is left rolling around on the floor, and blood spurts everywhere.

The fundamental problem with X’s notion of client/server is that the proper division of labor between the client and the server can only be decided on an application-by-application basis. Some applications (like a flight simulator) require that all mouse movement be sent to the application. Others need only mouse clicks. Still others need a sophisticated combination of the two, depending on the program’s state or the region of the screen where the mouse happens to be. Some programs need to update meters or widgets on the screen every second. Other programs just want to display clocks; the server could just as well do the updating, provided that there was some way to tell it to do so.

The right graphical client/server model is to have an extensible server. Application programs on remote machines can download their own special extensions on demand and share libraries in the server. Downloaded code can draw windows, track input events, provide fast interactive feedback, and minimize network traffic by communicating with the application using a dynamic, high-level protocol.

As an example, imagine a CAD application built on top of such an extensible server. The application could download a program to draw an IC and associate it with a name. From then on, the client could draw the IC anywhere on the screen simply by sending the name and a pair of coordinates.

Better yet, the client can download programs and data structures to draw the whole schematic, which are called automatically to refresh and scroll the window, without bothering the server. The user can drag an IC around smoothly, without any network traffic or context switching, and the client sends a single message to the server when the interaction is complete. This makes it possible to run interactive clients over low-speed (that is, low-bandwidth) communication lines.

Sounds like science fiction? An extensible window server was precisely the strategy taken by the NeWS (Network extensible Window System) window system written by James Gosling at Sun. With such an extensible system, the user interface toolkit becomes an extensible server library of classes that clients download directly into the server (the approach taken by Sun’s TNT Toolkit). Toolkit objects in different applications share common objects in the server, saving both time and memory, and creating a look-and-feel that is both consistent across applications and customizable. With NeWS, the window manager itself was implemented inside the server, eliminating network overhead for window manipulation operations—and along with it the race conditions, context switching overhead, and interaction problems that plague X toolkits and window managers.

Ultimately, NeWS was not economically or politically viable because it solved the very problems that X was designed to create.

X is extremely device dependent because all X graphics are specified in pixel coordinates

CSS had the same problem, so what? The "pixel" measure was just re-defined as a virtual pixel bound to 96 DPI.

But yeah, GDI was engineered better, with printers in mind too, which is one of the reasons it's still viable.

Downloaded code can draw windows

Hey, this is the source of exploits and vulnerabilities, this is why radical free software lovers refuse to run non-free JS, actually. And that's why the idea of WMF/EMF files failed. And even PDFs can be dangerous.

and the client sends a single message to the server when the interaction is complete

Pretty resembles the difference between block-based terminals and character-based terminals. Guess what approach won, despite the drastic bandwidth difference.

And remember the everlasting problem of duplicating the data validation in the server and in the client if the client is rich (server-side validation is always needed).

Uh oh, should I only have recalled Kravchuk, as they dead.

Does this thread have some Woodoo magic inside, huh?

Sooooooo…

…please?

(I don't even care if I'm going to be banned from GitHub for that, it's worth it)

Uh oh, should I only have recalled Kravchuk, as they dead.

Does this thread have some Woodoo magic inside, huh?

Sooooooo…

…please?

(I don't even care if I'm going to be banned from GitHub for that, it's worth it)

What is woodoo magic

What is woodoo magic

It's voodoo, just the Wayland version.

I don't know what that is, is this supposed to break my wayland session or something

is this supposed to break my wayland session or something

I know only xoodoo magic then.

https://www.linux.org.ru/forum/desktop/10028921

NB for onlookers: it was the free radeon driver actually, that time I supposed I have fglrx because I remembered I had to install something proprietary to get the GPU working (which was just the firmware actually).

I have no problems with wayland. Most things "just work", and the things that don't require a little bit of tinkering.
Why don't you just install Windows?

Why don't you just install Windows?

Why do you find this solution acceptable at all?

Why don't you just install Windows?

Why do you find this solution acceptable at all?

It was meant sarcastically. Because that's the usual choice of users who abandon stuff because of even the slightest hickup.