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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.

As 2024 is winding down:

For the record, even in the latest Raspberry Pi OS you still can't drag a file from inside a zip file onto the desktop for it to be extracted. So drag-and-drop is still broken for me.

And Qt move() on a window still doesn't work like it does on all other desktop platforms (and the Wayland folks think that is good).

And global menus still don't work (outside of not universally implemented things like qt_extended_surface set_generic_property).

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://git.521000.bestelectron/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 Nov 5, 2023 •
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Applications can set their icons, there is no problem for an app to register as many different icons as it wants, with NoDisplay set appropriately so that in the menu users see the one you want.
You just disagree with the way it's done. Here we go again. First it was portals and Pipewire, now it's .desktop files and the XDG spec.

If you've been paying attention, you'll know that I've been a consistent voice in favour of cautious optimism about Wayland, but I disagree with this one.

The motivation for that decision came from WM/DE developers who got tired of bug reports to the end of "why does the icon in the window decoration not match the theme" or "the one I specify in the menu editor" and "why is the icon blurry". In KDE that discussion goes back all the way to the 2000s. It predates Wayland.

Generating .desktop files on the fly in ~/.local/share/applications or wherever is what Wine does, too.

I guess the alternative in Unix-like OS would be to have some kind of daemon that Qt et al. can talk to via a standard API, where the app can register its desired DE behavior, specify an icon via QWindow::setIcon() and so on and the daemon passes it on to the window manager (or does whatever the user wants with it - e.g. overlay a website's favicon or a Telegram chat icon on the theme app icon in a defined way). That would also make it easier to get DEs to play nicely with self-contained apps.

@probonopd
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Generating .desktop files on the fly in ~/.local/share/applications or wherever is what Wine does, too.

That's a shitty way to litter the system with such files, especially for portable applications (e.g., running from a USB stick that can come and go) and are not "installed" in any particular location in the filesystem.

@ssokolow
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ssokolow commented Nov 5, 2023 •
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The motivation for that decision came from WM/DE developers who got tired of bug reports to the end of "why does the icon in the window decoration not match the theme" or "the one I specify in the menu editor" and "why is the icon blurry". In KDE that discussion goes back all the way to the 2000s. It predates Wayland.

And I do value the ability to override icons using the system theme highly, which comes from the same mechanism. I'm just not willing to give up the APIs Qt offers to fall back to a bundled icon if the lookup fails.

Generating .desktop files on the fly in ~/.local/share/applications or wherever is what Wine does, too.

I exported WINEDLLOVERRIDES='winemenubuilder.exe=d' years ago to keep Windows applications from finger-painting in my launcher menu. If I want a launcher, I use PlayOnLinux's list of installed wineprefixes.

I guess the alternative in Linux would be to have some kind of daemon that Qt et al. can talk to, where the app can register an icon via QWindow::setIcon() and the daemon passes it on to the window manager (or does whatever the user wants with it).

Except that appimaged is 100% optional by design... though I suppose that would be the route I'd have to take. Some kind of application-specific code where, when I run my application, it detects if it's running from a git checkout or tarball or what have you and then re-runs itself inside a wrapper which will invokes necessary commands like xdg-desktop-menu to add the icon and then clean it up whether or not its child exits cleanly.

@Monsterovich
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Monsterovich commented Nov 5, 2023 •
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@phrxmd

Generating .desktop files on the fly in ~/.local/share/applications or wherever is what Wine does, too.

Not just .desktop files, but icons. I have to clean it up by hand every time, because wine doesn't do it.

@ssokolow

I exported WINEDLLOVERRIDES='winemenubuilder.exe=d' years ago to keep Windows applications from finger-painting in my launcher menu.

Oh great, at least that behaviour can be turned off.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Nov 5, 2023

Generating .desktop files on the fly in ~/.local/share/applications or wherever is what Wine does, too.

That's a shitty way to litter the system with such files, especially for portable applications (e.g., running from a USB stick that can come and go) and are not "installed" in any particular location in the filesystem.

I agree, that's why there is the next paragraph.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Nov 5, 2023

Except that appimaged is 100% optional by design... though I suppose that would be the route I'd have to take. Some kind of application-specific code where, when I run my application, it detects if it's running from a git checkout or tarball or what have you and then re-runs itself inside a wrapper which will invokes necessary commands like xdg-desktop-menu to add the icon and then clean it up whether or not its child exits cleanly.

I think it being optional is no big problem, the worst that could happen (in the "downloaded tarball" case) is that the daemon is not available AND there are no (packaged, user-configured) .desktop files, in which case all you lose is that your visual user experience degrades a bit. But that should not be critical, because if your user interaction critically depends on being able to draw stuff in your X11 WM's window decorations the way you want, you have a bigger problem.

With self-contained apps there's even less of a problem, an AppImage knows it's an AppImage and can do whatever it needs to do to check daemon availability, register things with it or the DE and initiate any necessary cleanup.

@ssokolow
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ssokolow commented Nov 5, 2023

I still don't like that it's necessary to to reinvent work that really should be done once, in a common, guaranteed-to-be-available place, for all portable or "being run from a git checkout for development purposes and fast iteration" applications.

It's CSD vs. SSD all over again and you're arguing that, once again, SDL2 should bite the bullet and fix the mess that Windows and macOS developers don't have to deal with.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Nov 5, 2023 •
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I still don't like that it's necessary to to reinvent work that really should be done once, in a common, guaranteed-to-be-available place, for all portable or "being run from a git checkout for development purposes and fast iteration" applications.

It's CSD vs. SSD all over again and you're arguing that, once again, SDL2 should bite the bullet and fix the mess that Windows and macOS developers don't have to deal with.

It's even worse, we've just reinvented a portal :) But I digress.

If we're just talking about icons, the question would be what is the alternative proposal to spare WM devs to deal with bug reports about wrong or ugly icons, while maintaining user icon theming. In the meantime we're going in circles. Just telling them to suck it up is not going to do it, not least because they call the shots regarding the design decisions in DEs.

That said, talking about what goes into a .desktop file, the world is not all rosy on the other side either. MacOS is better, but Windows developers have to deal with installers all the time already for basic things such as getting their app to show up in the launcher.

@ssokolow
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ssokolow commented Nov 5, 2023 •
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It's even worse, we've just reinvented a portal :) But I digress.

Here's hoping the developers on GitLab realize that same thing. I've been repeating this train of thought over there and I honestly would invent a redneck-engineered "temporary .desktop file" portal if that was the only option.

the question would be what is the alternative proposal to spare WM devs to deal with bug reports about wrong or ugly icons

How does requiring a .desktop file be installed magically force developers to drop higher-resolution icons into /usr/share/icons/hicolor?

QWidget::setWindowIcon already takes a QIcon (contains multiple variants like a Windows .ico), not a QPixmap and a simple xprop test on something like Yakuake will demonstrate that X11 already has support for loading multiple resolutions of icons into the _NET_WM_ICON property, with Yakuake itself already setting sizes all the way up to 128x128.

I'm having trouble finding anything but GtkWindow.set_icon_name for GTK, so this appears, once again, to be a GNOME-ism being forced upon the rest of the ecosystem and then rationalized, same as they claim that having the compositor add the server-side window decorations is inherently inefficient and a performance drain when what they really mean is "we can't implement SSDs efficiently because of technical debt and bad architecture inside Mutter".

That said, talking about what goes into a .desktop file, the world is not all rosy on the other side either. MacOS is better, but Windows developers have to deal with installers all the time already for basic things such as getting their app to show up in the launcher.

Naturally. Each desktop has stuff that it does well and does badly... I just think this particular case is something XDG-based platforms shouldn't regress on.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Nov 5, 2023 •
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the question would be what is the alternative proposal to spare WM devs to deal with bug reports about wrong or ugly icons

How does requiring a .desktop file be installed magically force developers to drop higher-resolution icons into /usr/share/icons/hicolor?

First of all that only covers the "ugly" case, but not the "doesn't match my icon theme" or "I have different launchers with different icons for the same app and want to see that icon in the title bar so I can tell them apart" case.

And then there are apps like Zoom that come with nice icons, but then proceed to drop an ugly lo-res one into the title bar. Of course that's a bug (in line with its overall questionable coding standards), but still.

so this appears, once again, to be a GNOME-isms being forced upon the rest of the ecosystem and then rationalized, same as they claim that having the compositor add the server-side window decorations is inherently inefficient and a performance drain when what they really mean is "we can't implement SSDs efficiently because of technical debt and bad architecture inside Mutter".

Not sure if that's really a GNOMEism. I couldn't find the original discussions on the KDE mailing lists quickly, but here you have KDE maintainer Eike Hein referring to the discussion as something that happened many times in the past, in a 2016 bug report on icons in the Task Manager. Plasma changed to using icons from the .desktop file during the KDE 4→Plasma 5 transition, before KWin began to support Wayland:

It's been discussed many times in the past, but here's the lowdown:

  • If we don't give precedence to the system icon for an app, it means the icon can change during a transition from launcher to window, which breaks the lifecycle visually and is upsetting to users (-> bug reports)
  • Ditto not respecting the user's choice in custom icon theme (app code may load icon assets differently from Plasma, so no consistency is guaranteed) or custom configured icon (menu editor)
  • Legacy apps often load icon assets in ways that doesn't give us a hi-res icon we need for hi-dpi systems, causing the icons to look blurry or pixelated
  • Wayland (this reflects the state of seven years ago — my addition) doesn't support window icons much less ones that change at runtime, so if this were optional we wouldn't be able to offer this option across windowing systems, further sacrificing consistency
  • The Task Manager is not a window list, the buttons it displays are an abstraction over several data sources (launchers, startup notifications, windows (some of which are logically treated as a single entity, e.g. in case of hidden utility windows, or grouping)) and the integrity of this abstraction outweighs providing detailed window metadata

Bottom line: (a) Far more users expect/rely on apps in the Task Manager having a stable, recognizable icon (potentially one they explicitly chose) than on window-specific icons, (b) the quality of the window metadata is low and it's not consistently available across supported windowing systems.

@ssokolow
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ssokolow commented Nov 5, 2023 •
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Plasma changed to using icons from the .desktop file during the KDE 4→Plasma 5 transition, before KWin began to support Wayland:

My issue is with the lack of a fallback, as expressed by what I could find of the GTK API vs. the Qt API.

As a PyQt-using developer who runs Plasma 5 on X11, I can say that I don't remember getting frustrated that the relevant API was non-functional when iterating on my applications from ~/src with no .desktop file installed.

@probonopd
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probonopd commented Nov 5, 2023 •
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Interesting conversations over at
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/52#note_2155722

One of the maintainers contributors there says:

This protocol won't be something you can expect to see everywhere. I'd suspect gnome would not implement this, unsure about kwin, wlroots would depend on the specific downstream and same with Smithay (whether these two provide helpers in library is a different question).

Isn't this a clear step backward from X11, where setting the icon worked everywhere? Isn't this point in case that the whole philosophy of Wayland is backwards if it leads to basic functionality being broken depending on which desktop environment you happen to be running?

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ghost commented Nov 5, 2023 •
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I just want to thank you guys, i looked at the wayland proposal
and i'm really happy that it got opened, you found some real reasons for it to exist (i didnt have many, but i just now realized how important it really is, just thought it was another stupid desicion that might have problems)

I wish wayland were to just be really nice upgrade, instead of it beeing, flawed, but differetnly than X
(with that i mean it has a lot of downsides, i dont know about many in X, but those arent big/important enoguh that i noticed them, im right now on i3 which doesnt even have a backbuffer, but i still prefer it to wayland, since wayland has much bigger issues for me)

and XWayland was made so lazy, its buggy and uses X as backend instead of a translation layer that works without running X, so you're not just running walyand but also X, which is just stupid (and lazy).

Isn't this a clear step backward from X11, where setting the icon worked everywhere? Isn't this point in case that the whole philosophy of Wayland is backwards if it leads to basic functionality being broken depending on which desktop environment you happen to be running?

Yes, that is really stupid, it's not "oh it works on wayland". No. It's: "oh it works on KDE, but not on GNOME, but kinda on everything that uses wlroots"

I want wayland to do well, but it's already too late for that, the whole infastructure is crap, it's too late now, the next protocol should be designed by the whole linux community, done with a great attention to everything, or we'll get wayland2, better some ways, but worse others.

@ssokolow
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ssokolow commented Nov 5, 2023

with that i mean it has a lot of downsides, i dont know about many in X, but those arent big/important enoguh that i noticed them

The two main flaws I personally experience in X which Wayland set out to solve are:

  1. Any damn game has access to the same XRandR APIs that are used to permanently change display resolutions, so any game which changes the resolution when it fullscreens is likely to confuse the WM and crush all my windows onto my center monitor.
  2. X represents keycodes as 8-bit values so I have to find something without a predefined behaviour and with proper X keysym mappings to remap things on my ATi Remote Wonder II to at the kernel level or those keypresses will just be invisible to X applications.

While they haven't done anything about it in Wayland yet, another problem with X.org is that gamepad input is invisible to the screensaver idle timer.

@zocker-160
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Any damn game has access to the same XRandR APIs that are used to permanently change display resolutions, so any game which changes the resolution when it fullscreens is likely to confuse the WM and crush all my windows onto my center monitor

You can run games in gamescope, prevents all of the resolution nonsense caused by games. Wayland inside gamescope seems to be actually not bad, so there you go.

@ssokolow
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ssokolow commented Nov 6, 2023

I solved the problem by cobbling together a dedicated gaming PC from spare and hand-me-down parts and buying a DVI/USB KVM switch.

@i509VCB
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i509VCB commented Nov 6, 2023

Interesting conversations over at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/52#note_2155722

One of the maintainers there says:

This protocol won't be something you can expect to see everywhere. I'd suspect gnome would not implement this, unsure about kwin, wlroots would depend on the specific downstream and same with Smithay (whether these two provide helpers in library is a different question).

Isn't this a clear step backward from X11, where setting the icon worked everywhere? Isn't this point in case that the whole philosophy of Wayland is backwards if it leads to basic functionality being broken depending on which desktop environment you happen to be running?

Just to make it clear I'm not a maintainer at wayland-protocols, but I am involved in Smithay as a project.

@i509VCB
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i509VCB commented Nov 6, 2023 •
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I want wayland to do well, but it's already too late for that, the whole infastructure is crap, it's too late now, the next protocol should be designed by the whole linux community, done with a great attention to everything, or we'll get wayland2, better some ways, but worse others.

As much as I'm not fan of the current situation with some things in Wayland, a wayland2 or x12/x13 is probably going to be dead on arrival due to network effects.

Sure you can build the perfect display server protocol, but if no one uses it then it's a waste. The same kind of thing applies to social media as well.

@ssokolow
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ssokolow commented Nov 6, 2023 •
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As much as I'm not fan of the current situation with some things in Wayland, a wayland2 or x12/x13 is probably going to be dead on arrival due to network effects.

Sure you can build the perfect display server protocol, but if no one uses it then it's a waste. The same kind of thing applies to social media as well.

However, I could see something like Arcan slowly growing into the role X.org currently serves by completing its Wayland support, allowing roles like wmctrl to be served via its support for launching clients with access to privileged-only APIs, and sufficiently resolving people's complaints about wayland's suitability for non-utility applications by guaranteeing a superset of what desktops like GNOME will NACK the xdg namespace down to.

If it pulls off something like that, Arcan would wind up in a network-effect dynamic comparable to how their licenses allowe LibreOffice to merge patches from Apache OpenOffice but not vice versa.

As long as "Wayland++" is a true superset of "Wayland", network effects against it taking the lead are greatly reduced and you don't need "Wayland++" to have a compositor that's capable of things like a "Run As Administrator..." option which launches X11 applications sandboxed but with exclusive access to an X11 socket that can manipulate Wayland windows as if they're X11 apps.

Really, when you think about it, Wayland the protocol is the least of your worries on that front. It's like claiming that, because the Win32 API exists, it's impossible to run DOS apps in DOSBox on Windows and Linux apps in WSL.

@OGrigorios
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Nice shitpost, but this is github not 4chan

@kissingboys
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kissingboys commented Nov 6, 2023 •
edited by probonopd
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this is anti-wayland propaganda. EVERY POINT STATED IN THIS GIST IS PROVEN FALSE. DO NOT BELIEVE EVERYTHING IN THE INTERNET ⚠️

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ghost commented Nov 6, 2023

>"this post is incorrect"
>refuses to elaborate
>leaves

image

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Nov 6, 2023

I want wayland to do well, but it's already too late for that, the whole infastructure is crap, it's too late now, the next protocol should be designed by the whole linux community, done with a great attention to everything, or we'll get wayland2, better some ways, but worse others.

As much as I'm not fan of the current situation with some things in Wayland, a wayland2 or x12/x13 is probably going to be dead on arrival due to network effects.

Wayland protocols are versioned, there is no technical problem in doing a wayland2 that does everything the way you want. You can replace every part with something that you think works better and retain backwards compatibility. If the whole Linux community were to get together, it can form a Community Display Server Committee tomorrow.

But then you'd have to deal with the politics. Some people will feel left out (like it often happens with the BSDs). Others will inevitably disagree with the way the governance is run. Others will see this as a way to force everyone else to produce the kind of product they want, without contributing to it themselves — we've seen plenty of that here: “I'm a volunteer, I am not interested in helping to maintain a display server or to organize people, but I want the display server to be the way I want”. Others will argue about who is part of community and should be part of the governance and who should not — e.g. corporations. Find a way to solve all that in a better way than failed whole-community projects such as the LSB and you might get somewhere, but community politics are a steep hill to climb, much steeper than the technical side.

@Monsterovich
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this is anti-wayland propaganda. EVERY POINT STATED IN THIS GIST IS PROVEN FALSE. DO NOT BELIEVE EVERYTHING IN THE INTERNET

Nice shitpost, but this is github not 4chan

That's a lot of Redhat bots, though.

@Monsterovich
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@phrxmd

Wayland protocols are versioned, there is no technical problem in doing a wayland2 that does everything the way you want.

Ahahaha. Wayland not only has fragmentation across desktop environments, but also across versions of the same protocols. That's "awesome".

But then you'd have to deal with the politics.

I've never had to deal with politics in Xorg/X11, that's why Xorg is good unlike GNOME/SJWayland.

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ghost commented Nov 7, 2023

I've never had to deal with politics in Xorg/X11

I've seen plenty of political arguments regarding X11 on old mailing lists.

@OGrigorios
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this is anti-wayland propaganda. EVERY POINT STATED IN THIS GIST IS PROVEN FALSE. DO NOT BELIEVE EVERYTHING IN THE INTERNET

Nice shitpost, but this is github not 4chan

That's a lot of Redhat bots, though.

Take your shizo meds

@probonopd
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@kissingboys care to provide links to the solutions/workarounds and I am happy to link them. Note: The solutions must work in all, not just some desktop environments, and must not pull in additional software such as Pipewire or Portals. Like on X11.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Nov 7, 2023

@phrxmd
I've never had to deal with politics in Xorg/X11, that's why Xorg is good unlike GNOME/SJWayland.

Ah, the classic "I never had a problem, so problems do not exist."

That's because at least one of the following is true:

  • You never engaged in Xorg/X11 development.
  • You don't remember the time when there were different people with different ideas in the community who had to agree with each other how the graphical server X server should work.
  • You're just trolling anyway.

@probonopd
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To the Wayland experts/proponents in this channel:

My desktop environment makes excessive use of X11 Atoms (e.g., the process ID that a window belongs to, the path of the binary an application belongs to, etc. are stored in X11 atoms on the windows). How do I do this in Wayland?

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