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Think twice about Wayland. It breaks everything!
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Wayland.md

Think twice before abandoning Xorg. Wayland breaks everything!

Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to "just work" without the need for adjustments, then you may be better off avoiding Wayland.

Wayland solves no issues I have but breaks almost everything I need. Even the most basic, most simple things (like xkill) - in this case with no obvious replacement. And usually it stays broken, because the Wayland folks mostly seem to care about Automotive, Gnome, maybe KDE - and alienating everyone else (e.g., people using just an X11 window manager or something like GNUstep) in the process.

The Wayland project seems to operate like they were starting a greenfield project, whereas at the same time they try to position Wayland as "the X11 successor", which would clearly require a lot of thought about not breaking, or at least providing a smooth upgrade path for, existing software.

In fact, it is merely an incompatible alternative, and not even one that has (nor wants to have) feature parity (missing features). And unlike X11 (the X Window System), Wayland protocol designers actively avoid the concept of "windows" (making up incomprehensible words like "xdg_toplevel" instead).

DO NOT USE A WAYLAND SESSION! 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 seems to be made by people who do not care for existing software. They assume everyone is happy to either rewrite everything or to just use Gnome on Linux (rather than, say, twm with ROX Filer on NetBSD).

Edit: When I wrote the above, I didn't really realize what Wayland even was, I just noticed that some distributions (like Fedora) started pushing it onto me and things didn't work properly there. Today I realize that you can't "install Wayland", because unlike Xorg, there is not one "Wayland display server" but actually every desktop envrironment has its own. And maybe "the Wayland folks" don't "only care about Gnome", but then, any fix that is done in Gnome's Wayland implementation isn't automatically going to benefit all users of Wayland-based software, and possibly isn't even the implementation "the Wayland folks" would necessarily recommend.

Edit 12/2023: If something wants to replace X11 for desktop computers (such as professional Unix workstations), then it better support all needed features (and key concepts, like windows) for that use case. That people also have displays on their fridge doesn't matter the least bit in that context of discussion. Let's propose the missing Wayland protocols for full X11 feature parity.

Edit 08/2024: "Does Wayland becoming the defacto standard display server for Linux serve to marginalize BSD?" https://fossforce.com/2024/07/the-unintended-consequences-linuxs-wayland-adoption-will-have-on-bsd/

Wayland is broken by design

  • A crash in the window manager takes down all running applications
  • You cannot run applications as root
  • You cannot do a lot of things that you can do in Xorg by design
  • There is not one /usr/bin/wayland display server application that is desktop environment agnostic and is used by everyone (unlike with Xorg)
  • It offloads a lot of work to each and every window manager. As a result, the same basic features get implemented differently in different window managers, with different behaviors and bugs - so what works on desktop environment A does not necessarily work in desktop environment B (e.g., often you hear that something "works in Wayland", even though it only really works on Gnome and KDE, not in all Wayland implementations). This summarizes it very well: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/233

Apparently the Wayland project doesn't even want to be "X.org 2.0", and doesn't want to provide a commonly used implementation of a compositor that could be used by everyone: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/233. Yet this would imho be required if they want to make it into a worthwile "successor" that would have any chance of ever fixing the many Wayland issues at the core.

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)
  • phw/peek#1191 ❌ broken since 14 Jan 2023. Peek, a screen recording tool, has been abandoned by its developerdue to a number of technical challenges, mostly with Gtk and Wayland ("Many of these have to do with how Wayland changed the way applications are being handled")

As of February 2024, screen recording is still broken utterly on Wayland with the vast majority of tools. Proof

Workaround: Find a Wayland compositor that supports the wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 protocol and use wf-recorder -a. The default compositor in Raspberry Pi OS (Wayfire) does, but the default compositor in Ubuntu doesn't. (That's the worst part of Wayland: Unlike with Xorg, it always depends on the particular Wayand compositor what works and what is broken. Is there even one that supports everything?)

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.

NOTE: As of November 2023, screen sharing in Chromium using Jitsi Meet is still utterly broken, both in Raspberry Pi OS Desktop, and in a KDE Plasma installation, albeit with different behavior. Note that Pipewire, Portals and whatnot are installed, and even with them it does not work.

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)

Wayland broke global menus with KDE platformplugin

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

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

Update 2023: Some Wayland compositors (such as Wayfire) now support wlr_gamma_control_unstable_v1, see https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire/wiki/Tutorial#configuring-wayfire and jonls/redshift#663. Does it work in all Wayland compositors though?

Wayland breaks global hotkeys

Wayland does not work for Xfce?

See below.

Wayland does not work properly on NVidia hardware?

Apparently Wayland relies on nouveau drivers for NVidia hardware. The nouveau driver has been giving unsatisfactory performance since its inception. Even clicking on the application starter icon in Gnome results in a stuttery animation. Only the proprietary NVidia driver results in full performance.

See below.

Update 2024: The situation might slowly be improving. It remains to be seen whether this will work well also for all existing old Nvidia hardware (that works well in Xorg).

Wayland does not work properly on Intel hardware

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".)

Suggested solution

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.

Red Hat employee Matthias Clasen ("I work at the Red Hat Desktop team... I am actually a manager there... the people who do the actual work work for me") expicitly stated "Client-side everything" as a principle, even though the protocol doesn't enforce it: "Fonts, Rendering, Nested Windows, Decorations. "It also gives the design more freedom to use the titlebar space, which is something our designers appreciate" (sic). Source

Wayland breaks windows rasing/activating themselves

Wayland breaks RescueTime

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 requires JWM, TWM, XDM, IceWM,... to reimplement Xorg-like functionality

  • Screen recording and casting
  • Querying of the mouse position, keyboard LED state, active window position or name, moving windows (xdotool, wmctrl)
  • Global shortcuts
  • System tray
  • Input Method support/editor (IME)
  • Graphical settings management (i.e. tools like xranrd)
  • Fast user switching/multiple graphical sessions
  • Session configuration including but not limited to 1) input devices 2) monitors configuration including refresh rate / resolution / scaling / rotation and power saving 3) global shortcuts
  • HDR/deep color support
  • VRR (variable refresh rate)
  • Disabling input devices (xinput alternative)

As it currently stands minor WMs and DEs do not even intend to support Wayland given the sheer complexity of writing all the code required to support the above features. You do not expect JWM, TWM, XDM or even IceWM developers to implement all the featured outlined in ^1.

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

Wayland breaks NoMachine NX

Wayland breaks xclip

xclip is a command line utility that is designed to run on any system with an X11 implementation. It provides an interface to X selections ("the clipboard"). Apparently Wayland isn't compatible to the X11 clipboard either.

This is another example that the Wayland requires everyone to change components and take on additional work just because Wayland is incompatible to what we had working for all those years.

Wayland breaks SUDO_ASKPASS

Wayland breaks X11 atoms

X11 atoms can be used to store information on windows. For example, a file manager might store the path that the window represents in an X11 atom, so that it (and other applications) can know for which paths there are open file manager windows. Wayland is not compatible to X11 atoms, resulting in all software that relies on them to be broken until specifically ported to Wayland (which, in the case of legacy software, may well be never).

Possible workaround (to be verified): Use the (Qt proprietary?) Extended Surface Wayland protocol casually mentioned in https://blog.broulik.de/2016/10/global-menus-returning/ "which allows you to set (and read?) arbitrary properties on a window". Is it the set_generic_property from https://github.com/qt/qtwayland/blob/dev/src/extensions/surface-extension.xml?

Wayland breaks games

Games are developed for X11. And if you run a game on Wayland, performance is subpar due to things like forced vsync. Only recently, some Wayland implementations (like KDE KWin) let you disable that.

Wayland breaks xdotool

(Details to be added; apparently no 1:1 drop-in replacement available?)

Wayland breaks xkill

xkill (which I use on a regular basis) does not work with Wayland applications.

What is the equivalent for Wayland applications?

Wayland breaks screensavers

Is it true that Wayland also breaks screensavers? https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/wayland-and-screen-savers/

Wayland breaks setting the window position

Other platforms (Windows, Mac, other destop environments) can set the window position on the screen, so all cross-platform toolkits and applications expect to do the same on Wayland, but Wayland can't (doesn't want to) do it.

  • PCSX2/pcsx2#10179 PCX2 (Playstation 2 Emulator) ❌ broken since 2023-10-25 ("Disables Wayland, it's super broken/buggy in basically every scenario. KDE isn't too buggy, GNOME is a complete disaster.")

Wayland breaks color mangement

Apparently color management as of 2023 (well over a decade of Wayland development) is still in the early "thinking" stage, all the while Wayland is already being pushed on people as if it was a "X11 successor".

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pq/color-and-hdr/-/blob/main/doc/color-management-model.md

Wayland breaks DRM leasing

According to Valve, "DRM leasing is the process which allows SteamVR to take control of your VR headset's display in order to present low-latency VR content".

Wayland breaks In-home Streaming

Wayland breaks NetWM

Extended Window Manager Hints, a.k.a. NetWM, is an X Window System standard for the communication between window managers and applications

Wayland breaks window icons

Update 6/2024: Looks like this will get unbroken thanks to xdg_toplevel_icon_manager_v1, so that QWindow::setIcon will work again. If, and that's a big if, all compositors will support it. At least KDE is on it.

Wayland breaks drag and drop

Wayland breaks ./windowmanager --replace

  • Many window managers have a --replace argument, but Wayland compositors break this convention.

Wayland breaks Xpra

Xpra is an open-source multi-platform persistent remote display server and client for forwarding applications and desktop screens.

  • Under Xpra a context menu cannot be used: it opens and closes automatically before you can even move the mouse on it. "It's not just GDK, it's the Wayland itself. They decided to break existing applications and expect them to change how they work." (Xpra-org/xpra#4246) ❌ broken since 2024-06-01

Xwayland breaks window resizing

Workarounds

  • Users: Refuse to use Wayland sessions. Uninstall desktop environments/Linux distributions that only ship Wayland sessions. Avoid Wayland-only applications (such as PreSonus Studio One) (potential workaround: run in https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage)
  • Application developers: Enforce running applications on X11/XWayland (like LibrePCB does as of 11/2023)

Examples of Wayland being forced on users

This is exactly the kind of behavior this gist seeks to prevent.

History

  • 2008: Wayland was started by krh (while at Red Hat)
  • End of 2012: Wayland 1.0
  • Early 2013: GNOME begins Wayland porting

Source: "Where's Wayland?" by Matthias Clasen - Flock 2014

A decade later... Red Hat wants to force Wayland upon everyone, removing support for Xorg

References

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented May 9, 2022 •
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Much of this is outdated, or is lacking some context, or is plain misleading. Here's a few things:

  • vokoscreenNG has support now: "For Windows and Linux(X11, Experimental Wayland support since 3.1.0 pre alpha)" (https://github.com/vkohaupt/vokoscreenNG)
  • OBS now supports wayland by default (obsproject/obs-studio#2484)
  • Jitsi Meet is broken on browsers that don't support Wayland ("Closing since there is nothing we can do from the Jitsi Meet side. The browser must have support for this.")--different from what was implied above
  • Zoom now has a solution that will be released soon (https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Wayland-screen-sharing-broken-with-GNOME-41-on-Fedora-35/m-p/53991/highlight/true#M27430)
  • Applications breaking without the Qt Wayland plugin is a feature. You can't run X11 apps on Wayland without XWayland, and the Wayland plugin is there to allow you to run it as a native Wayland app. Simple.
  • A fork of Redshift exists to support Wayland--but there's also gammastep for wlroots.
  • As mentioned in albertlauncher/albert#309, "Wayland does not allow clients to register global hotkeys atm. Use your desktop evironment to bind a hotkey to albert toggle or albert show."
    • Sounds like global hotkeys to me.
  • You can run apps as root, with sudo --preserve-env=XDG_RUNTIME_DIR,WAYLAND_DISPLAY
  • As others have mentioned, global menus seem to work all around.

I'm disappointed at how outdated this is.
Wayland was not intended to be a 1:1 replacement. Guess what? X11 wasn't a 1:1 with X10 either. If developers aren't willing to put in the effort to add Wayland support, don't blame it on Wayland.

Also, what arguments are there against Portals and PipeWire outside of the fact they're related to GNOME? I don't have any other GNOME software installed and it works perfectly for me.

Which is irrelevant because X10 existed like ~40 years ago. Do you realize how many applications rely on X11? You can't just throw X11 out the window. X11 will be revisited one day, but certainly not by Wayland-monkeys. [...] You know what? We don't care about Wayland. Wayland is going to die and be and be abandoned. Forever. Everyone's happy. Especially me. [...] In X, screen capturing is done with extensions. You can capture the entire screen or a single window. In Wayland, you need a crutch to do this. I don't want to use PipeWire, even though it is better written than the nasty PulseAudio. Any other sound subsystem over ALSA is a software crutch. We'll have to admit it. Wayland's lack of features and its anarchic ideology makes it necessary to use crutches. Only companies like Microsoft do that. And all sorts of software like Systemd, PulseAudio, pushes GNU/Linux down this path. A path of Redhat/GNOME supremacy.

This post was really instructive, because in response to a precise technical list of corrections to the OP (complete with links - I copied the original back in for clarity) we got a rant with zero technical merit and nothing but:

  • Expletives ("Wayland-monkeys")
  • Saying "we" while really meaning "I and maybe N other people" with N being small
  • Conspiracy framing, endless references to Microsoft, Red Hat and the supposed GNOME supremacy.
  • Lack of historical and/or technical knowledge (case in point: mentioning ALSA as the end-all of sound subsystems - when it came out, it was seen by many as an unnecessary crutch over OSS and as a way to enforce the Linux supremacy over other Unix flavours that use OSS until today - exactly the thing you're now blaming on Pipewire).

@bodqhrohro
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bodqhrohro commented May 9, 2022 •
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with N being small

Do you imply discriminating minorities is okay?

and the supposed GNOME supremacy

It's the reality: look what is a default DE in major distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian).

and as a way to enforce the Linux supremacy over other Unix flavours

As it still remains. The major difference though is that emulating OSS over ALSA works pretty well, which is not applicable to emulating X over Wayland due to the limited and primitive nature of Wayland (while OSS was more primitive than ALSA).

@Monsterovich
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Monsterovich commented May 9, 2022 •
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Expletives ("Wayland-monkeys")

Say "thank you" for that. I could have found less censorious words. Especially after forcing CSD in the majority of GTK applications. I also found out that in the new Intel GPU driver (modesetting) there is no "Tearfree" option, because, well, "use vsync in the compositor" which obviously doesn't cover all use-cases. The suspicion immediately falls on Wayland.

Saying "we" while really meaning "I and maybe N other people" with N being small

Most GNU/Linux users use Xorg, that's a fact. I don't care about a couple of "Mom, I'm a hacker!" students playing Wayland in their Arch Linux distro or whatever. I don't see how you can use it for everything else at this point. What matters to me is whether it works or not, and most importantly, how it works. Because people like me use Linux for work. Wayland is another attempt by corporations to impose their will on users, which is unacceptable in the Linux community. Many people have said it before me, so I have every right to say "we".

Conspiracy framing, endless references to Microsoft, Red Hat

Prove now that corporations want to do good for the Linux community. What good have they ever done for the Linux community?

when it came out, it was seen by many as an unnecessary crutch over OSS and as a way to enforce the Linux supremacy over other Unix flavours

I thought it was about the license, wasn't it? I remember that OSS was once proprietary, so they replaced it with ALSA.

@Monsterovich
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It's the reality: look what is a default DE in major distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian).

And now the developers of these distributions will make our life much harder for anyone who disagrees with their policy and simply cut off all non-GNOME alternatives with an Wayland-axe. What a beautiful plan.

I wouldn't be surprised if soon we have to divide into "corpo-distros" and "everyone else".

@Monsterovich
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while OSS was more primitive than ALSA

Hey, I heard that OSS has a separate volume control for each application. Does that make it more primitive or superior to ALSA, at least in some ways? :P

@sognokdev
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Most GNU/Linux users use Xorg, that's a fact.

That's true, but it's becoming less and less true as time goes by.

GNOME is now using Wayland by default, and according to you, we are heading towards the GNOME supremacy. In the meantime, Xorg is being abandoned by its own developers.

So, I don't see how you can come to the conclusion that Wayland is going to die. It seems to be wishful thinking.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented May 9, 2022 •
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and the supposed GNOME supremacy

It's the reality: look what is a default DE in major distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian).

It used to be KDE until they botched their 4.x release, and things are now more diverse again than they were 3-4 years ago - Mint defaults to Cinnamon, OpenSUSE to KDE, there's the Steam Deck, some distros default to X, others to Wayland and so on.

The major difference though is that emulating OSS over ALSA works pretty well, which is not applicable to emulating X over Wayland

If you say so. In the meantime lots of people are using their legacy applications with XWayland just fine.

with N being small

Do you imply discriminating minorities is okay?

No. But I imply that calling out pretentious bullshit is OK. As it is when you equate pointing out small numbers with the discrimination of minorities. Next thing you're going to claim you're a discrimination victim. Or a victim of corporate conspiracies. Or whatever victim.

@Monsterovich
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So, I don't see how you can come to the conclusion that Wayland is going to die. It seems to be wishful thinking.

Wayland is a bit more complicated than writing an extra layer over something else like PulseAudio did. In addition, PulseAudio made some sense, perhaps in terms of sound transmission over the network and software mixing, although many things could simply be implemented in ALSA. Wayland is different, you have to start from scratch. And you could do compatibility if Wayland wasn't such a GNOME-oriented prison.
They can't rewrite the entire software framework. Especially when you don't have enough knowledge to do it, which is obvious to Wayland developers. Eventually they will just get bored with this futile task. Wayland will become just another abandoned software. Don't be surprised, corporations often abandon their developments. Look at Google, for example.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented May 9, 2022

I don't care about a couple of "Mom, I'm a hacker!" students playing Wayland in their Arch Linux distro or whatever.

That's fine, you do whatever, but don't forget the kind of arguments brought forth in favour of X11 around here are My Little Pony apps and obscure window managers.

@bodqhrohro
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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.

@bodqhrohro
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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).

@sognokdev
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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.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented May 9, 2022

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.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented May 9, 2022

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.

@Monsterovich
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Monsterovich commented May 9, 2022 •
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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.

@sognokdev
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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.

@Monsterovich
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Monsterovich commented May 9, 2022 •
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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.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented May 9, 2022 •
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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."

@sognokdev
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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).

@bodqhrohro
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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?

@kindsoldier
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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.

@bodqhrohro
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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".

@sognokdev
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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).

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented May 9, 2022

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).

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented May 9, 2022

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.

@sognokdev
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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.

@bodqhrohro
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@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.
kravchuk_nuclear_weapon_en
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

@bodqhrohro
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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.

@sognokdev
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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.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented May 9, 2022

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.

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