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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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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?

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Nov 7, 2023 •
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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?

You solve the IPC problem by the same mechanism you already do your IPC, outside of the display server. You're not going to like this answer.

For background, X11 Atoms are a mechanism to attach extra payloads to a window. They are an artifact of the architecture of the X11 stack, concretely the way X11 was expected to work in networks and achieve network transparency - apps were meant to draw their UIs by asking the server to do basic drawing operations, without having an idea of the machine, X server, WM etc. they were being run on. So Atoms were introduced as an extra interprocess communication channel within the client-server protocol to make this more efficient. Remember that this was the 1980s when the much less powerful networks and computers of the time dictated different ways to do networking, and IPC was still a research topic. Inevitably, with this 1980s IPC mechanism in place, over time some people got used to using them for storing all kinds of things.

In Wayland the architecture of the stack is different; remember that it was never meant as a drop-in replacement, so there is no 1:1 mapping of every X11 structure to an analogous Wayland structure. The rationale why they aren't there was that we don't really do 1980-s style client-server networking anymore, so apps run on the same machine where they draw their UIs, and they already have available IPC mechanisms to talk to each other about things like process IDs, application binary paths, the directory being displayed in a file manager and so on. So the general answer is: if you want to do IPC, you do it through the IPC mechanisms you already have.

This does mean that app developers who have got used to using Atoms for all sort of IPC in their apps face a bit of a porting effort. You're probably not asking because you want to port your desktop environment, as you have made it very clear that you have no intention to do so, so you probably don't need help and are not interested in it. If someone else wants a more specific answer to solve a specific use case in porting a specific application, they should ask it in a place that is not a Wayland hater gist and better suited to get or give support. There they should expect that people who want to help them ask “what are you trying to do”, the question that some people here hate.

On a more general level, a transition to a different stack architecture will inevitably have places where porting generates this kind of friction. Could Wayland have made this a little bit easier by introducing its own Wayland Atoms local IPC mechanism? Maybe. But then the counterargument is that it's not the 1980s anymore and IPC is a solved problem in the way that it wasn't back then. So the tradeoff for making porting a bit easier is that you now have an extra IPC mechanism in place that works only in Wayland and needs to be supported forever.

The situation is a bit like the porting challenges generated by file metadata storage in MacOS during the Classic → OS X transition. In early MacOS filesystems every file had a data fork (what we'd today call the contents of the file) and a resource fork (that contained all sorts of system metadata like icons, what app to open a file with and so on). In 1984 that made sense and the Mac was the first kid on the block anyway. You needed crutches like MacBinary or BinHex to do things like download files over a network, but back then not many people did that. As people started to interact with other filesystems and network services more, that approach began to create problems, such as Macs littering other systems with ._ and resource.frk files. So Apple used the OS X transition to largely get rid of them, and the Mac build tools started stripping resource forks from applications starting in 2002 with OS X 10.2. Inevitably some developers had gotten used to using them for all sorts of other things — in spite of Apple discouraging that already in 1986 — so this decision created a bit of developer outrage at the time, like the Classic → OS X transition did in quite a few places.

@ctrlcctrlv
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ctrlcctrlv commented Nov 7, 2023 •
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apps run on the same machine where they draw their UIs

nonsense

@ssokolow
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ssokolow commented Nov 7, 2023 •
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The situation is a bit like the porting challenges generated by file metadata storage in MacOS during the Classic → OS X transition. In early MacOS filesystems every file had a data fork (what we'd today call the contents of the file) and a resource fork (that contained all sorts of system metadata like icons, what app to open a file with and so on). In 1984 that made sense and the Mac was the first kid on the block anyway. You needed crutches like MacBinary or BinHex to do things like download files over a network, but back then not many people did that. As people started to interact with other filesystems and network services more, that approach began to create problems, such as Macs littering other systems with ._ and resource.frk files. So Apple used the OS X transition to largely get rid of them, and the Mac build tools started stripping resource forks from applications starting in 2002 with OS X 10.2. Inevitably some developers had gotten used to using them for all sorts of other things — in spite of Apple discouraging that already in 1986 — so this decision created a bit of developer outrage at the time, like the Classic → OS X transition did in quite a few places.

  1. That document is equivalent to "Just because we have an API that allows you to read/write the raw representation of the JSON payload doesn't mean you can store non-JSON stuff in there". (i.e. It's not saying "resource fork bad", it's saying "the resource fork must contain a valid key=value datastore format as interpreted by Finder".)
  2. The resource fork being used heavily for resources was a GIANT boon for game modders and hugely empowering for users without the skill to read disassembler output as way to implement stuff like GIMPshop (a modded version of early GIMP to make its UI more Photoshop-like) without needing access to the source code, since so much of your application's UI was defined in resources (menus, dialogs, pretty much all pixmap assets, etc.

I honestly think it's a tragedy that Apple lacked the vision to get ahead of the curve and provide APIs and default Finder behaviours to normalize "when dealing with a filesystem without resource forks, or a network connection, files are automatically represented in a packed AppleSingle-esque format".

It's like how OSX killed off "To make a bootable backup of your hard drive, just drag-and-drop. Dragging and dropping the System folder to a new drive is all that's required to make it bootable."

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Nov 7, 2023

apps run on the same machine where they draw their UIs

nonsense

Sure. That was an add-on, tacked on later after criticism from within the community that Wayland did not have the same client-server network transparency model that X11 had.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Nov 7, 2023 •
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  1. That document is equivalent to "Just because we have an API that allows you to read/write the raw representation of the JSON payload doesn't mean you can store non-JSON stuff in there". (i.e. It's not saying "resource fork bad", it's saying "the resource fork must contain a valid key=value datastore format as interpreted by Finder".)

Resource forks were always in a key=value format, with four-letter key. What the document is saying is “data is what the data fork is for, don't use the resource fork for storing data.” (“Do not use it to open ‘another data fork.‘”) As always, when a manufacturer issues a warning against doing something, it's because people are doing it :) It probably didn't help that Apple weren't 100% consistent with this themselves for things like fonts, which would contain data in the resource fork.

  1. The resource fork being used heavily for resources was a GIANT boon for game modders and hugely empowering for users without the skill to read disassembler output as way to implement stuff like GIMPshop (a modded version of early GIMP to make its UI more Photoshop-like) without needing access to the source code, since so much of your application's UI was defined in resources (menus, dialogs, pretty much all pixmap assets, etc.

Oh totally, resource forks were a great idea at the time. I translated a few applications by hacking in the resource fork with ResEdit. They were easily 10-15 years ahead of the curve, in the 1990s everybody was experimenting with putting metadata at the filesystem level.

I honestly think it's a tragedy that Apple lacked the vision to get ahead of the curve and provide APIs and default Finder behaviours to normalize "when dealing with a filesystem without resource forks, or a network connection, files are automatically represented in a packed AppleSingle-esque format".

I guess Apple decided not to go that way because if you serialize your resource and data forks into a packed file format by default every time you put a file on a server or a non-Apple filesystem, other people lose access to the unserialized data content of your files, at least if they don't use a Mac. In 1984 that was not a problem, because few people were sharing files between Macs and other systems, but eventually maintaining interoperability arguably became more important.

@ssokolow
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ssokolow commented Nov 7, 2023 •
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Resource forks were always in a key=value format, with four-letter key. What the document is saying is “data is what the data fork is for, don't use the resource fork for storing data.” (“Do not use it to open ‘another data fork.‘”) As always, when a manufacturer issues a warning against doing something, it's because people are doing it :) It probably didn't help that Apple weren't 100% consistent with this themselves for things like fonts, which would contain data in the resource fork.

That's not what I'm getting from it.

"Don't use the resource fork of a file for non-resource data. Parts of the system (including the File Manager and the Finder) assume that if this fork exists, it will contain valid Resource Manager information." sounds like it's saying "You have means to shove stuff that isn't valid Resource Manager format into the resource fork. Don't."

"PBOpenRF was provided to allow copying of the resource fork of a file in its entirety, without Resource Manager interpretation. Do not use it to open "another data fork."" reinforces that by saying "PBOpenRF is the thing that allows the resource fork to be read/written as a blob without well-formedness enforcement."

I guess Apple decided not to go that way because if you serialize your resource and data forks into a packed file format by default every time you put a file on a server or a non-Apple filesystem, other people lose access to the unserialized data content of your files, at least if they don't use a Mac. In 1984 that was not a problem, because few people were sharing files between Macs and other systems, but eventually maintaining interoperability arguably became more important.

I still think that's solvable. For example, any file with no resource fork could be serialized to resource-fork-less channels as a bare data fork (what they were already doing regardless of resouce fork presence/absence), and they could have a database of file type codes that should always be a bare data fork, pre-populate it with the most common formats that are also meaningful to open on non-macs (eg. GIF), and then encourage application developers, to use the new APIs to add formats they support to it where appropriate.

Heck, if they published a free AppleSingle library for non-mac applications to interchange with mac files, they could wind up in an SQLite-esque situation where AppleSingle it is de facto standard format for structured files on all platforms and wouldn't Apple like having that leverage over the industry.

@HappyGoFishing
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I just hate gnome devs. not wayland. nuff said.

@Thaodan
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Thaodan commented Nov 7, 2023 via email

@fgclue
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fgclue commented Nov 8, 2023

X11 sucks guys wayland better5 2874.

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