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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

@ssokolow
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ssokolow commented Nov 12, 2023 •
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What!?? Are the Wayland people expecting Nvidia to make a driver (or specifically add support) for each DE? Makes it sound like Wayland is a secret plan to destroy Unix-like desktops.

Well check this out.

wlroots wlroots-eglstreams

gnome-display-server gnome-display-server-nvidia (????? does GNOME support NVidia though?)

For kde and any other DE similarly.

Those are backends for "GBM, the API everyone but nVidia had agreed upon before EGLStreams came on the scene" and "nVidia's proprietary buffer allocation API, which they wanted so badly that they wrote KDE's implementation for them and gave them a driver team liason to get them to accept it".

It's like how Vulkan is supposed to be supported everywhere but stuff on mac needs either a Metal backend or MoltenVK to translate.

As for GNOME supporting nVidia, they actually were the only ones willing to create an EGLStreams backend for a long time, which is part of the reason it feels like "Wayland is a GNOME project". While the entire rest of the ecosystem was taking a principled stance against proliferation of APIs and staying on X11 for the nVidia users, GNOME was working to polish their nVidia Wayland support and use that as a point of competition to attract users.

The sudden onset of "Wayland is the future" actually being an immediate concern coincides with nVidia finally starting to release drivers with beta-quality GBM support.

If wayland had a unified server, NVidia would write the driver for you. What's the problem with writing a layer based on eglstreams, btw?

Here's some discussion on the topic from 2019:

11:55 romangg: pq: Since the EGLStreams debate is heating up again, I remember you saying some time ago you are not in favor of EGLStreams at all after taking a look at it. What are your arguments for that?
11:55 aknautiy1: daniels, thanks got it :).
11:57 pq: romangg, I think daniels can word the arguments much better, he has repeated them so many times. :-) I'm just totally agreeing to that.
11:58 daniels: heh
11:58 pq: romangg, simply put, the EGLStreams design takes away the knowledge of individual frames, which means that a compositor or a client cannot synchronize any window state with actual rendering.
11:58 daniels: romangg: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2016-March/thread.html#27547 and following on into April carry a lot of it
11:59 daniels: the tl;dr is that EGLStreams really is a very fully-encapsulated stream, and this breaks some parts of the protocol (subsurfaces in particular) which rely on frame-by-frame visibility
11:59 romangg: pq: Ok, can I read a summary somewhere. We are currently discussing the EGLStreams patches to KWin and I'm not so happy about some details, in particular that stuff is hidden. I fear we can't do future improvements to our DRM backend afterwards in regards to multi gpu, framerate sync and so on.
11:59 daniels: fully tying everything into EGL also seems like a bad idea when we have Vulkan on the horizon, not to mention everything else, like how do you handle interop with PipeWire ... ?
11:59 romangg: Also I would like at one point overlay scanout.
11:59 daniels: hah
12:00 daniels: the answer in that thread is that it would require several as-yet-unwritten extensions
12:00 daniels: a couple to implement dynamic consumer switching (between GL texture and KMS overlay), since right now the producer -> consumer relationship is fixed for the lifetime of the stream
12:01 daniels: a couple more to support atomic
12:02 romangg: Erik said the Nvidia driver supports atomic mode setting internally. How we in KWin can then interact with it I don't know yet.
12:02 pq: romangg, I'd say your fears of a technical dead-end are well founded, IMO.
12:03 daniels: well, you'd need new extensions to allow EGL to build up a configuration, then apply it all at once - not sure what those would even look like tbh. plus the interop thing was a big one for me: how does that work with multiple GPUs? or media codecs which give you dmabuf? or PipeWire or any other kind of external streaming?
12:04 ascent12: Is the plan to implement every single other API in EGL?
12:04 daniels: essentially all the infrastructure we've built for years has been based around surfacing as much knowledge and visibility into the pipeline as possible, whereas Streams fully encapsulates that into a closed abstraction, which either perfectly supports your usecase or does not support your usecase at all, nothing in between
12:05 ascent12: (that was supposed to be facetious, it may not have come across in text form)
12:05 daniels: heh
12:05 romangg: daniels: Yea, when looking at the code I felt the same. While libdrm gives me ample control, EGLStreams interfaces hide central parts of the pipeline.
12:06 romangg: Since GNOME has support for EGLStreams afaik how do they cope with these limitations?
12:07 daniels: gnome doesn't do overlays since it's too hard to pull them out from their scene graph atm
12:07 emersion: do they use atomic?
12:07 daniels: no
12:07 daniels: (not yet)
12:07 emersion: they do direct scan-out though, right?
12:07 daniels: i'm not sure how it works with pipewire - either there's some kind of vdpau interop, or perhaps more likely, they just ReadPixels and then that will be fast enough
12:08 daniels: emersion: i'm not sure if they do these days or not, but last I looked no. (pq?)
12:08 emersion: (cc jadahl)
12:08 emersion: hrm, ReadPixels :S
12:08 pq: when I was poking the insides of Mutter's native renderer, I very much ignored anything related to EGLStreams, so I can't say anythin about them
12:08 ascent12: I vaguely remember hearing they did do atomic in the past, but I might have been thinking about multi-gpu scanout
12:08 emersion: pipewire said they were looking into dma-buf support
12:09 daniels: nv doesn't do dmabuf ...
12:09 emersion: err
12:10 daniels: maybe since I last looked, but at the time they just used the OPAQUE_FD extension for Vulkan, and used a magic side channel to encapsulate tiling data, probably compression status, etc

-- https://web.archive.org/web/20201130045107/https://dri.freedesktop.org/~cbrill/dri-log/?channel=wayland&highlight_names=&date=2019-02-21#t-1155

@Sivecano
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Sivecano commented Nov 12, 2023 •
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let's be real here. nvidia's driver support has been dogshit even before wayland. I used to run i3 with proprietary nvidia drivers before and I had a decent number of nvidia related issues. Though I have to say, that at least for me a lot of the wayland stuff is starting to run better and better. to the point where I have switched over to it not just on my hybrid graphics laptop but also on my nvidia only desktop.
make of this what you will but remember:
linus-torvalds-linus

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Nov 12, 2023 •
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If wayland had a unified server, NVidia would write the driver for you.

Their track record shows otherwise.

Another related piece of their track record with open source, community standards and unified servers - NVidia had TwinView for multiple monitors. But Xorg had RandR for managing displays since 2008 or so and NVidia didn't support it for years. If you wanted dual monitors on an NVidia card and have things like compositing, for a long time you HAD to use TwinView, even though it meant you still had to mess around by hand in your xorg.conf at a time when X had already been learning to be smarter about its configuration.

grafik

Unified server or not, it took NVidia ages (I think until 2015 or so, but I could be wrong) to actually support Xorg properly and put RandR support in their drivers.

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ghost commented Nov 12, 2023

Certified NVidia classic

@Monsterovich
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@phrxmd

Unified server or not, it took NVidia ages (I think until 2015 or so, but I could be wrong) to actually support Xorg properly and put RandR support in their drivers.

Exactly, we barely got a properly working NVidia driver implementation for Xorg (kind of), and you want NVidia to support a dozen incompatible graphical servers. That just doesn't seem possible from any perspective.

@probonopd
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This!

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Nov 12, 2023

@phrxmd

Unified server or not, it took NVidia ages (I think until 2015 or so, but I could be wrong) to actually support Xorg properly and put RandR support in their drivers.

Exactly, we barely got a properly working NVidia driver implementation for Xorg (kind of), and you want NVidia to support a dozen incompatible graphical servers.

Not at all, they just need to support community standards. That will give support to everyone. If they want to force their proprietary corporate shit on everyone, I don't feel sorry for them at all if they have to do it for different compositors separately.

@Monsterovich
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@phrxmd

Not at all, they just need to support community standards. That will give support to everyone. If they want to force their proprietary corporate shit on everyone, I don't feel sorry for them at all if they have to do it for different compositors separately.

I'm gonna be the devil's advocate for a while. But why should they comply with community standards when even Wayland doesn't? Wayland is designed for the benefit of the big players to dictate their terms to the disadvantage of the community: users and developers too. Otherwise Wayland would be a unified graphical server, or at least a framework (libraries) that implemented all the features in one centralized place that everyone would use. There is no third option. Either to act in the interests of the users/developers, or as it is now.

@probonopd
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probonopd commented Nov 12, 2023 •
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Wayland is designed for the benefit of the big players to dictate their terms to the disadvantage of the community: users and developers too.

So well said.
It works against users, essentially focing us to use Gnome (and maybe KDE) in order to have stuff halfway working.
And it works against developers, telling them what they can and cannot do (such as: set icons on windows at will).

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Nov 12, 2023

Not at all, they just need to support community standards. That will give support to everyone. If they want to force their proprietary corporate shit on everyone, I don't feel sorry for them at all if they have to do it for different compositors separately.

I'm gonna be the devil's advocate for a while. But why should they comply with community standards when even Wayland doesn't?

That's not being the devil's advocate, that's just trolling. We've just been discussing examples where they've been ignoring community standards at a time when Wayland wasn't even around yet. So Wayland or not, they're not open source friendly and will never be. Advocating for them is just corporate fanboyism.

@Monsterovich
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@phrxmd

We've just been discussing examples where they've been ignoring community standards at a time when Wayland wasn't even around yet.

Definitely Wayland is a worthy successor in ignoring community standards.

So Wayland or not, they're not open source friendly and will never be.

The attitude is the same. Open-source, but dictates its own terms to everyone. In essence, the varieties of the same, just different approaches.

изображение

@lranixonl
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@phrxmd

Not at all, they just need to support community standards. That will give support to everyone. If they want to force their proprietary corporate shit on everyone, I don't feel sorry for them at all if they have to do it for different compositors separately.

I'm gonna be the devil's advocate for a while. But why should they comply with community standards when even Wayland doesn't? Wayland is designed for the benefit of the big players to dictate their terms to the disadvantage of the community: users and developers too. Otherwise Wayland would be a unified graphical server, or at least a framework (libraries) that implemented all the features in one centralized place that everyone would use. There is no third option. Either to act in the interests of the users/developers, or as it is now.

Everybody decided to use GBM, AMD, Intel, all wayland compositor developers, all of them. But Nvidia wanted to use EGLStreams. This is only a Nvidia fault. Nobody agreed with Nvidia and continued using GBM. Only Gnome worked voluntarily in EGLStreams to make their DE working in Nvidia. If Nvidia used GBM, this problem would never have existed.

@Monsterovich
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@lranixonl

@phrxmd

Not at all, they just need to support community standards. That will give support to everyone. If they want to force their proprietary corporate shit on everyone, I don't feel sorry for them at all if they have to do it for different compositors separately.

I'm gonna be the devil's advocate for a while. But why should they comply with community standards when even Wayland doesn't? Wayland is designed for the benefit of the big players to dictate their terms to the disadvantage of the community: users and developers too. Otherwise Wayland would be a unified graphical server, or at least a framework (libraries) that implemented all the features in one centralized place that everyone would use. There is no third option. Either to act in the interests of the users/developers, or as it is now.

Everybody decided to use GBM, AMD, Intel, all wayland compositor developers, all of them. But Nvidia wanted to use EGLStreams. This is only a Nvidia fault. Nobody agreed with Nvidia and continued using GBM. Only Gnome worked voluntarily in EGLStreams to make their DE working in Nvidia. If Nvidia used GBM, this problem would never have existed.

Just like no one agreed that graphical server features should be done every time in every DE from scratch, just like no one agreed on mandatory use of Pipewire + DBus + portals, etc, etc... Except for the beneficiaries. See the difference? Neither do I.

@probonopd
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probonopd commented Nov 12, 2023 •
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If I wanted to make a minimalistic Qt and wlroots based Wayland compositor and window manager, which book/documentation would tell me how to do this?

@fredvs
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fredvs commented Nov 12, 2023

Wayland is designed for the benefit of the big players to dictate their terms to the disadvantage of the community: users and developers too.

So well said. It works against users, essentially focing us to use Gnome (and maybe KDE) in order to have stuff halfway working. And it works against developers, telling them what they can and cannot do (such as: set icons on windows at will).

And, of course, only providing obsolete and non-working documentation and code to be sure that no one, apart from their elected officials, will be able to use their code.

@fredvs
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fredvs commented Nov 12, 2023 •
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If I wanted to make a minimalistic Qt and wlroots based Wayland compositor and window manager, which book/documentation would tell me how to do this?

I too would be delighted to meet this book/documentation to only make a minimalistic wlroots without Qt.
Up-to-date and with working demo code.

@ssokolow
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ssokolow commented Nov 12, 2023 •
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And it works against developers, telling them what they can and cannot do (such as: set icons on windows at will).

Apparently, the rationale is that it it allows them to combat phishing by preventing compromised applications from faking the provenance of popups by forcing the icon defined in the Flatpak manifest.

...not sure how that works when any old application can fake the place the user is most likely to notice in a transient dialog like a fake "Please enter your password to update your packages" password prompt by telling the compositor "I'm a GTK application and I'm going to draw headerbars whether you like it or not. Don't draw server-side decorations." and then drawing the icon manually.

@probonopd
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probonopd commented Nov 12, 2023 •
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Apparently, the rationale is...

Thing is, application developers and end users should have all the power. Not some self-appointed middlemen that make "Linux" much harder than it needs to be with their misguided concepts of false "security". (Never run applications from authors you don't trust, simple. As soon as you deviate from that, things become cumbersome for everyone. iOS... shudder!)

@lranixonl
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@lranixonl

@phrxmd

Not at all, they just need to support community standards. That will give support to everyone. If they want to force their proprietary corporate shit on everyone, I don't feel sorry for them at all if they have to do it for different compositors separately.

I'm gonna be the devil's advocate for a while. But why should they comply with community standards when even Wayland doesn't? Wayland is designed for the benefit of the big players to dictate their terms to the disadvantage of the community: users and developers too. Otherwise Wayland would be a unified graphical server, or at least a framework (libraries) that implemented all the features in one centralized place that everyone would use. There is no third option. Either to act in the interests of the users/developers, or as it is now.

Everybody decided to use GBM, AMD, Intel, all wayland compositor developers, all of them. But Nvidia wanted to use EGLStreams. This is only a Nvidia fault. Nobody agreed with Nvidia and continued using GBM. Only Gnome worked voluntarily in EGLStreams to make their DE working in Nvidia. If Nvidia used GBM, this problem would never have existed.

Just like no one agreed that graphical server features should be done every time in every DE from scratch, just like no one agreed on mandatory use of Pipewire + DBus + portals, etc, etc... Except for the beneficiaries. See the difference? Neither do I.

I'm was talking about that particular case (GBM vs EGLStreams), I never said that Wayland was perfect or they always made the perfects decisions. I'm still critical of Wayland. What happened with Nvidia is what happens when you work outside of the consensus, they are alone and they have to do everything by themselves. Neither Intel nor AMD have to do anything special, outside implementing GBM in their drivers, to make GBM compositors work. There is no "special compositor for AMD", "special compositor for Intel", "special compositor for Raspberry Pi GPU", nobody needed to for their own compositors to support any GPU except for Nvidia.

Nvidia didn't need to " support a dozen incompatible graphical servers", they only had to support GBM. It's the same as Nvidia and DRI3 in Xorg. Or when everybody used RandR to manage multiple monitors, but with Nvidia you had to use TwinView.

Nvidia supports GBM since 495.44 driver.

If you don't want to use Wayland, you can use X11 and you will use what an xorg server and xorg WM/DE expect you to use. If you don't want to use the xorg implementation of X11, you will be in your own like OpenBSD with Xenocara. If you go to Wayland, you will have to use what Wayland expect you to use, like GBM, portals, etc. If you go outside of it, you are in your own.

In the same way that you can't force Nvidia to use GBM, Nvidia can't force every other to use EGLStreams.

@Monsterovich
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Monsterovich commented Nov 12, 2023 •
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@probonopd

Apparently, the rationale is...

Thing is, application developers and end users should have all the power. Not some self-appointed middlemen.

I guess a Wayland supporter would write something like this:

<wayland_cultism>
That's why Wayland was invented, so that DE developers could write features themselves and not depend on Xorg developers.
</wayland_cultism>

Which is false.

In fact, some kind of aggregation is necessary to prevent one-two player(s) from becoming a monopoly/oligopoly in the competition. That's the good thing about Xorg, it implements the basic mechanisms, plus protects users and developers from this situation that Wayland has created. The result is less work on DEs and applications, interchangeability and other benefits for both users and developers.

@bodqhrohro
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@phrxmd

Machine learning is a different topic as that's a pretty specific use case not many desktop users are engaged in

I wouldn't say so. There's definitely a growing interest for running image generating AIs at home. As well as for mining light cryptos, which lasts for many years already.

we'd be in a better world if the big ML libraries hadn't built their whole shit on top of proprietary code

Yeah, so ditch exclusive and expensive hardware as well as exclusive possibilities it brings just because it's not compatible with FOSS. That's where bigotry definitely comes to the scene.

so it can render its GUI on pretty much anything else you want

If it has an integrated or a second GPU, yay.

@probonopd

Why can't Wayland be binary-compatible enough to Xorg

For a similar reason why it's futile to simulate WebGL over bare HTML/CSS/JS. It technically may work, but in a totally inefficient way. Device drivers are totally not a place for thick compatibility layers.

If I wanted to make a minimalistic Qt and wlroots based Wayland compositor and window manager, which book/documentation would tell me how to do this?

Oh no, we're losing probo! Traitor! ×D

@probonopd
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probonopd commented Nov 12, 2023 •
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If I wanted to make

Just would like to know how well documented (in practical terms, a.k.a. "howto") this all really is.

@Monsterovich
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Monsterovich commented Nov 12, 2023 •
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@probonopd

I always knew what Wayland was when it first came out. I knew it wasn't going to work well because of the bad design. But the fact that it started to be promoted so heavily (like 2-3 years ago or so) was a big surprise. It's truly insane. 😂

Apparently in the modern world you can promote any garbage and there will be a lot of people who will prove that this is a brilliant idea.

@bodqhrohro

Oh no, we're losing probo! Traitor! ×D

"Know Your Enemy" (C)

Or maybe just wondering how this "sandboxing feature for Xorg" works . 😄

@bodqhrohro
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By the way, I've always seen i3 as something marginal and overly simplistic (up to being too simple to be usable) among tiling WMs, while the majority of the tiling world was represented by dwm, Awesome and Xmonad. And in fact, those were among the first to be ported to Wayland, in pre-wlroots era, but their clones quickly went to oblivion generally.

How did it happen that now there are so many i3 users who just migrated to Sway and are completely happy with it?

Could I get a false impression because dwm/Awesome/Xmonad users tend to polish their environments a lot, and brag with their custom configurations and screenshots, while i3 users make a silent majority who just use a default or nearly a default, and thus don't have anything to show? Same with default GNOME/KDE actually, which are just used as workhorses and not polished in any way.

@bodqhrohro
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Or that could be something specific for the Russian-speaking segment. Like with toons: in the rest of the world, a stereotypical Linux user is also an anime lover, but in ex-USSR, they're rather bronies, because anime was historically frowned upon there.

Same with the popularity of tiling WMs, regional abnormality.

No surprise then that so many Wayland haters now are Russian-speaking or in other way related to post-socialist and Marxist thinking.

@IverCoder
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This Gist reeks of laziness. Nobody seems to want to talk about maintaining X.org and the X11 ecosystem in general here. You all are relying on other people to maintain it and when they no longer want to do so, your privileged asses cry off thinking they're contractually obligated to maintain X.org for you.

@bodqhrohro
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Compiz is maintained by devoted users too, and? Have you seen it shipped in any modern distribution in a status more than something available for installation from repositories? Why do you suppose it would work for X.Org? I highlight again it's more an administrative problem, not a technical one. That's why this gist is a call in the plane of decisions, not of technical actions.

@Monsterovich
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@IverCoder

This Gist reeks of laziness. Nobody seems to want to talk about maintaining X.org and the X11 ecosystem in general here. You all are relying on other people to maintain it and when they no longer want to do so, your privileged asses cry off thinking they're contractually obligated to maintain X.org for you.

Wayland doesn't even need to be maintained, you just write specs and that's it. You can't do that with Xorg. It takes people and resources to develop. Even for Wayland compositor development. And guess what, infamous GNOME gets a 1 million Euro grant, and potential Xorg developers get absolutely nothing just like developers of other open-source projects. Do you rely the development to be purely enthusiastic (especially in difficult projects)? In that case, stop whining that Xorg is underdeveloped.

@fredvs
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fredvs commented Nov 12, 2023

This Gist reeks of laziness. Nobody seems to want to talk about maintaining X.org and the X11 ecosystem in general here. You all are relying on other people to maintain it and when they no longer want to do so, your privileged asses cry off thinking they're contractually obligated to maintain X.org for you.

X11 is still maintained: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg

And please compare all the test and docs provided by Wayland vs X11:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland

@IverCoder
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IverCoder commented Nov 12, 2023 •
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@Monsterovich

infamous GNOME gets a 1 million Euro grant

Because Germany (or EU or whatever, I'm an ASEAN guy idk how things in Europe works) decided that GNOME deserves the rewards best. After all, GNOME is FOSS and there's nobody preventing others from copying their improved code.

stop whining that Xorg is underdeveloped.

I'm not whining. X.org is underdeveloped in a way that most of our furnitures are finished, we can sit on it, and there's nothing to construct upon the furniture more. However it is rotting away and will soon "break" in a metamorphical sense if you guys don't create something like a WaylandX compatibility layer.

In fact, I'm happy that X.org is being underdeveloped. Those developers should rather devote their time to wlroots instead.

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