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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

@Monsterovich
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Monsterovich commented Nov 13, 2023 •
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@AndreiSva

This thread is such a fucking joke. Think X.org is good software? Great, go ahead and maintain it yourself. The rest of the world will move on. Deal with it.

I don't want to give the wrong impression, but the average Wayland user is this. ^^^^^

Typical bigot behavior, don't be surprised that Wayland is being boycotted.

@IverCoder
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IverCoder commented Nov 13, 2023 •
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@Monsterovich

@AndreiSva

This thread is such a fucking joke. Think X.org is good software? Great, go ahead and maintain it yourself. The rest of the world will move on. Deal with it.

I don't want to give the wrong impression, but the average Wayland user is this. ^^^^^

Typical bigot behavior, don't be surprised that Wayland is being boycotted.

Of course. Wayland is evil! Wayland will destroy the Linux desktop! We will all be forced back to Windows! AAAAAHHHH! Everybody who contributes to Wyaland and is dropping unnecessary X11 baggage is the antichrist! RAAAAAAGGGGGHHH!

@bodqhrohro
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We will all be forced back to Windows!

Back to Android.

@Monsterovich
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Monsterovich commented Nov 13, 2023 •
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@binex-dsk

The fact that you used the word bigot unironically is reason enough for me to use Wayland.

"I'll be using Wayland, not because it's "better", but to spite Xorg supporters!" 😄 😄 😄

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ghost commented Nov 13, 2023

Yes.

@bodqhrohro
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Poof, now @binex-dsk is shadowbanned.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Nov 13, 2023

@IverCoder

Germans here are so riled up about a small FOSS development grant lol.

I'm German and I'm not riled up, even though I would have preferred the grant to go to KDE e.V. instead :)

Nonprofit management is not the same as IT management and professional fundraising requires a skillset that techies usually don't have. You can see that from the bickering about her life choices. I also find professional shamanism weird, but what kind of spiritual practices this person engages in is besides the point; she has a job and if the GNOME foundation decides that they need a professional nonprofit manager, and then they get millions in grants, it seems to work out for them.

Thunderbird went from a couple of thousand to several million USD in donations by hiring a professional fundraiser. For the same reason KDE is currently running a fundraising drive to hire personnel for the KDE foundation.

What a lot of techies don't understand is that having a legitimate concern is not enough. You need to be able to motivate people, network well and organize community efforts. Coming across as a toxic primadonna is a big no-no. If all you do is maintain your own software in isolation while writing angry posts, nobody will join your effort except maybe a few other angry people. Of course the available resources that are up for grabs then go to the likes of GNOME instead.

@Kommynct
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Kommynct commented Nov 14, 2023 •
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This really needs updated, almost all of the things listed are completely incorrect by now, it's kind of insane. Some of the things rely on fundamentally flawed assumptions, i'm going to go down the list

There is not one /usr/bin/wayland display server application that is desktop environment agnostic and is used by everyone (unlike with Xorg)

This is called wlroots, and the same problem existed on x.org until things settled down, the only reason there's any duplication of effort now is that gnome and kde started working on wayland before wlroots existed, kde even shares most protocols with wlroots, at this point it's basically just wlroots/kde and gnome, there used to be many x.org implementations too. This isn't really a fundamental problem or anything, it doesn't affect functionality and effort is very minimally duplicated on gnomes end.

Wayland breaks screen recording applications

...no, it doesn't, it just used a different protocol for screen recording, just use OBS or any of the million different screen recorders for wayland

Wayland breaks screen sharing applications

No... it doesn't, it just uses a different more secure protocol, all of the browsers have already implemented this, none of the issues linked are relevant to wayland. If you actually click the linked issues you see they've all been solved, except for some issues on zoom's end, not waylands end.

Wayland breaks automation software

Use ydotool...

Wayland breaks global menus with non-KDE Qt platformplugins

Also solved... did you read the linked article?

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

Why is it okay that they need a special x.org plugin, but not okay that they need a wayland plugin?

Wayland breaks Redshift

gammastep, this is solved.

Wayland breaks global hotkeys

Also solved in hyprland, although not yet solved in sway, it's just a matter of time.

Wayland does not work for Xfce?

XFCE isn't a wayland compositor... they haven't implemented wayland support, it's not that wayland is somehow broken, they even have a roadmap https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

Wayland does not work properly on NVidia hardware?

This is almost completely resolved

Wayland does not work properly on Intel hardware

This isn't even true and is based on one article that faced some screen tearing issues. So many more people have screen tearing on x.org but you don't say x.org is broken?

Wayland complicates server-side window decorations

That was just an ongoing debate... it didn't impact functionality at all, and SSD is fully supported in the modern era.

Wayland breaks windows rasing/activating themselves

This has been fixed for ages now, there's a protocol for urgency.

Wayland breaks NoMachine NX

This issue is marked as solved

Wayland breaks xclip

Yeah because xclip is made for x.org... use wl-clipboard, it's the exact same thing.

Wayland breaks games

Wlroots is about to implement the fix for that, soon all wayland compositors will have this issue fixed, i've never noticed a problem.

Wayland breaks xdotool

use ydotool

Wayland breaks xkill

There are a billion other ways to kill things, i use pkill, I don't know why you expect a tool designed exclusively for x.org to work on wayland, use the many wayland alternatives.

Wayland breaks screensavers

It's not true, nobody has bothered to make a screensaver for wayland though, all the functionality needed for creating a screensaver is there.

And this is all from a cursory glance, this post is really bad. You should delete it or completely rework it from scratch.

@VIPLightning
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VIPLightning commented Nov 14, 2023 •
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Since your post marks 3 years since November, all you did on here was bitch, complain, expect free handouts with fixes, and put zero effort in contributing to Wayland ever. Therefore your post contains zero valid criticism making it a waste of mine and everybody else's time to read. How's the boycotting working out for you btw?

@bodqhrohro
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@phrxmd

What a lot of techies don't understand is that having a legitimate concern is not enough. You need to be able to motivate people, network well and organize community efforts

That's a societal problem. In a totalitarian society, you don't need to "motivate" anyone, you just mobilize people to develop free software because the party says so, and there's no place for commercial software.

@Kommynct

the only reason there's any duplication of effort now is that gnome and kde started working on wayland before wlroots existed

GNOME Shell and KWin are not the only still existing non-wlroots-based compositors.

kde even shares most protocols with wlroots

No, that's a myth. They had a short glimpse of collaboration on layer-shell when working on Wayland support in Latte Dock, but then diverged and made a bunch of incompatible Wayland extensions for the same tasks.

Use ydotool...

It's not par on features with xdotool.

i use pkill

How would you quickly determine the PID by the window?

@VIPLightning

and put zero effort in contributing to Wayland ever

How does they boycott imply contributing anything for the enemy?

@Kommynct
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Kommynct commented Nov 14, 2023 •
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the only reason there's any duplication of effort now is that gnome and kde started working on wayland before wlroots existed

GNOME Shell and KWin are not the only still existing non-wlroots-based compositors.

So..? other people decided to make things for fun/whatever, they're the only relevant ones, further duplication of effort is a matter of choice, not a fundamental issue with wayland. The only reason the same doesn't happen to X11 is because making an X11 clone is both pointless and annoying.

kde even shares most protocols with wlroots

No, that's a myth. They had a short glimpse of collaboration on layer-shell when working on Wayland support in Latte Dock, but then diverged and made a bunch of incompatible Wayland extensions for the same tasks.

[citation needed]

Use ydotool...

It's not par on features with xdotool.

What's missing?

i use pkill

How would you quickly determine the PID by the window?

swaymsg -t get_tree | jq '.. | select(.type?) | select(.focused==true).pid'

@ssokolow
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ssokolow commented Nov 14, 2023 •
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So..? other people decided to make things for fun/whatever, they're the only relevant ones, further duplication of effort is a matter of choice, not a fundamental issue with wayland. The only reason the same doesn't happen to X11 is because making an X11 clone is both pointless and annoying.

*nod* Everything anyone actually uses these days is based on the XFree86 lineage for the same reason that Intel switched ICC to being LLVM-based and Microsoft Edge and Opera are now Blink-based.

Give it time and we'll see all Wayland implementations converging on one implementation which is almost certainly going to be wlroots... well, unless the GNOME developers egos' are so huge that they stick to their own approach even as everyone else outpaces them by sharing effort. I wouldn't put it past them.

@bodqhrohro
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@Kommynct

The only reason the same doesn't happen to X11 is because making an X11 clone is both pointless and annoying.

I've seen an in-browser X server to demonstrate its APIs recently. A basic one is not hard to implement really.

[citation needed]

Ahem?

https://wayland-bites.github.io/

https://wayland.app/

plasma-window-management vs. wlr-foreign-toplevel-management, output-management vs. wlr-gamma-control, fake input vs. virtual-keyboard/wlr-virtual-pointer, outputdevice/DPMS vs. wlr-output-management. Hilariously, KWin's extensions tend to blindly mimic APIs from X11 world, while wlroots ones are rethought from scratch.

What's missing?

You tell me, lol.

root@localhost:~# xdotool --help                                        
Available commands:
  getactivewindow
  getwindowfocus
  getwindowname
  getwindowpid
  getwindowgeometry
  getdisplaygeometry
  search    
  selectwindow
  help          
  version   
  behave     
  behave_screen_edge
  click           
  getmouselocation
  key        
  keydown               
  keyup                 
  mousedown           
  mousemove           
  mousemove_relative
  mouseup
  set_window                    
  type                     
  windowactivate   
  windowfocus
  windowkill
  windowclose
  windowmap
  windowminimize
  windowmove
  windowraise
  windowreparent
  windowsize
  windowunmap
  set_num_desktops
  get_num_desktops
  set_desktop
  get_desktop
  set_desktop_for_window
  get_desktop_for_window
  get_desktop_viewport
  set_desktop_viewport
  exec
  sleep
root@localhost:~# ydotool --help
Usage: ydotool <cmd> <args>
Available commands:
  type
  recorder
  mousemove
  key
  click
root@localhost:~#

swaymsg -t get_tree | jq '.. | select(.type?) | select(.focused==true).pid'

Too compositor-dependent. xkill works with any WM, and even if there's no WM running at all.

@ssokolow
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plasma-window-management vs. wlr-foreign-toplevel-management, output-management vs. wlr-gamma-control, fake input vs. virtual-keyboard/wlr-virtual-pointer, outputdevice/DPMS vs. wlr-output-management. Hilariously, KWin's extensions tend to blindly mimic APIs from X11 world, while wlroots ones are rethought from scratch.

Because KDE is pragmatic about getting a desktop that does what users want now and they know that, since distros update all KDE stuff together, it's reasonable to treat KDE-specific APIs like kernel-internal APIs and deprecate and remove them as better solutions get agreed upon... similar to how the the XDG extension for server-side decorations grew out of KDE's extension for it... like the components of new OpenGL versions beginning as vendor-prefixed extensions or Vulkan growing out of AMD's Mantle API.

@bodqhrohro
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@ssokolow

unless the GNOME developers egos' are so huge that they stick to their own approach even as everyone else outpaces them by sharing effort

It's clear now they have enough resources for that.

And there definitely are parties who are dissatisfied with the fragmentation in the GNU/Linux ecosystem, and would like to "fix" that, by creating uneven competition conditions in particular. Ein Linux, ein systemd, ein GNOME.

@HappyGoFishing
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@AndreiSva

This thread is such a fucking joke. Think X.org is good software? Great, go ahead and maintain it yourself. The rest of the world will move on. Deal with it.

I don't want to give the wrong impression, but the average Wayland user is this. ^^^^^

Typical bigot behavior, don't be surprised that Wayland is being boycotted.

"Bigot" is such an establishment NGO-tier phrase.

@Kommynct
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Kommynct commented Nov 14, 2023 •
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@Kommynct

The only reason the same doesn't happen to X11 is because making an X11 clone is both pointless and annoying.

I've seen an in-browser X server to demonstrate its APIs recently. A basic one is not hard to implement really.

I highly doubt this is a reimplementation of the X protocol and not just a hack to run x11 in a browser

plasma-window-management vs. wlr-foreign-toplevel-management, output-management vs. wlr-gamma-control, fake input vs. virtual-keyboard/wlr-virtual-pointer, outputdevice/DPMS vs. wlr-output-management. Hilariously, KWin's extensions tend to blindly mimic APIs from X11 world, while wlroots ones are rethought from scratch.

That's hardly anything, really, and they seem like they're the result of kde starting their wayland implementation before wlroots was around. For example, why would kde bother implementing the gamma-control protocol when they already have a built-in nightlight feature? That'd be a waste of time and effort. Wlroots made a compositor agnostic version of the protocol that's better for everyone going forward, but implementing it into kde is a waste of time, because they already made one, even if it's worse, it's fully functional. Somebody might bother fixing that later, but I can't imagine why this would be a high priority issue when the code is already written and works fine. They've not always been sharing protocols.

swaymsg -t get_tree | jq '.. | select(.type?) | select(.focused==true).pid'

Too compositor-dependent. xkill works with any WM, and even if there's no WM running at all.

There's ways to do it on KDE and gnome as well, such a simple tool doesn't need to be compositor independent, so nobody is working on a problem that ultimately affects nobody and has an easy workaround. I can't even begin to bring myself to care when there's a solution for everyone.

@bodqhrohro
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bodqhrohro commented Nov 14, 2023 •
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@Kommynct

I highly doubt this is a reimplementation of the X protocol and not just a hack to run x11 in a browser

https://magcius.github.io/xplain/src/server/server.js

they seem like they're the result of kde starting their wayland implementation before wlroots was around

True, outputmanagement was created in 2015 indeed. plasma-window-management, Fake Input, outputdevice and DPMS too. I was disoriented because they were added to wayland.app too recently.

so nobody is working on a problem that ultimately affects very few people

The minority who ever switches the compositors, huh?

I intentionally made my environment as WM-agnostic as possible, in times when Wayland was already around, and I'm not willing to degrade it back to being dependent on some certain compositor, even such powerful as Hyprland or so.

@Kommynct
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Kommynct commented Nov 14, 2023 •
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@Kommynct

I highly doubt this is a reimplementation of the X protocol and not just a hack to run x11 in a browser

https://magcius.github.io/xplain/src/server/server.js

"Some of the more tricky code in there has been ported from the Xorg X server itself along with its helper library, pixman."

Seems like a hack rather than a full reimplementation, not going to bother reading the code to check, but it definitely seems that way.

so nobody is working on a problem that ultimately affects very few people

The minority who ever switches the compositors, huh?

I intentionally made my environment as WM-agnostic as possible, in times when Wayland was already around, and I'm not willing to degrade it back to being dependent on some certain compositor, even such powerful as Hyprland or so.

There's so little that's compositor dependent, what's left hardly matters and is easy to replace, and if you're switching to a different WM, you'll face much harder things to switch around than your xkill command, plus it's almost definitely going to be wlroots based and have a similar solution. This is really nitpicking at this point, yeah, it'd be nicer if it was more agnostic, but, meh, it's not hard to switch xkill for whatever the local compositor uses. One day everything will be wlroots.

And yes, very few people switch compositors regularly and there are SO FEW things left that you have to really change out. Furthermore the people who are technically savvy enough to switch to various WM's won't have any problem googling why xkill doesn't work and what to use instead. Why devote effort to fixing an issue that only occurs when people switch compositors, and they can easily fix for themselves by just switching out a single line in their config file?

@bodqhrohro
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bodqhrohro commented Nov 14, 2023 •
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Y'know what, the way I designed my environment may be because of my Windows background, where I made a custom environment involving lots of independent software for small tasks, often proprietary ones, like ObjectBar, ObjectDock, YzShadow, TopDesk, VAnim, etc. Despite being proprietary, they tended to be highly configurable and extendable. The culture around Rainmeter might be even richer than around conky (even though I didn't use it).

I brought this attitude to GNU/Linux too, and went on with composing the environment from small independent components and fitting them together exclusively with configuration and scripting, which do not involve any editing of the source code of those components themselves. In particular, because my former laptop, which I used for 10 years, was too weak to compile anything (compiling the kernel in 2015 took 2 hours there, for example), and had a timeless lack of disk space for the sources. So I went the binary-only way as much as possible.

And it certainly went to a mad level when I started overcoming the problems of the software with dirty hacks, even when it would be more rational to fix the source code, just for the sake of not touching it. Especially when I rewrote my resource monitor from Bash spaghetti to Rust, and specifically included there hacks to overcome layout problems of xfce4-genmon-plugin, instead of fixing the plugin itself finally, at least, or even making the monitor itself a plugin: just to avoid keeping the monitor dependent on some certain panel at all.

Time to end the madness maybe?..

@bodqhrohro
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@Kommynct

Seems like a hack rather than a full reimplementation

A hack would be something like running a stripped-down X server via emscripten. This is definitely a reimplementation. Not a full one, of course, I explicitly mentioned that.

and if you're switching to a different WM, you'll face much harder things to switch around

Not really, thanks to the X server providing lots of things in a WM-agnostic way itself, and where it lacks something, the EWMH standardization still makes the switch inconspicuous.

plus it's almost definitely going to be wlroots based

Why?

One day everything will be wlroots.

Keep dreaming about that, lol. Even the attempt to replace KWin with KWinFT failed already.

Why devote effort to fixing an issue that only occurs when people switch compositors

Because compositors can break and should then be switched for a while until being fixed.

@Kommynct
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Kommynct commented Nov 14, 2023 •
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and if you're switching to a different WM, you'll face much harder things to switch around

Not really, thanks to the X server providing lots of things in a WM-agnostic way itself, and where it lacks something, the EWMH standardization still makes the switch inconspicuous.

You say this as though you don't have to completely rewrite your config when you say, switch from i3 to spectrwm, compared to that, switching wayland compositors is already no big deal.

plus it's almost definitely going to be wlroots based

Why?

Why would it not? Nearly every new compositor is wlroots-based, the only other game in town is... smithay? maybe? No need to duplicate effort.

One day everything will be wlroots.

Keep dreaming about that, lol. Even the attempt to replace KWin with KWinFT failed already.

There's no need for kde/gnome to switch, they're going to end up using most of the same protocols anyway and the code is already written, but if they ever decide to rewrite their wayland implementation from scratch for any reason, you know it's going to be wlroots based.

Why devote effort to fixing an issue that only occurs when people switch compositors

Because compositors can break and should then be switched for a while until being fixed.

You say this like xkill is integral, almost everything works when you switch compositors, there's a few tiny things here and there, but there isn't much, and xkill is NOT integral. Especially considering if you switch compositors, you'll inevitably have to rewrite your config. This is a minor issue at best.

@bodqhrohro
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bodqhrohro commented Nov 14, 2023 •
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You say this as though you don't have to completely rewrite your config when you say, switch from i3 to spectrwm

Yes, I avoid WM-specific things whenever possible. Like, binding global hotkeys via the means of WM (I use xbindkeys for that), laying out the windows with the means of WM (I use devilspie2 for that), using the builtin panel of WM (I use standalone panels only), etc. The only major exception though is the compositor, as I find all the standalone X11 compositors primitive. Though there existed the zComp project, which basically was a fork of Compiz with the WM part stripped away so it can work with any other WM, and I was going to revive it.

the only other game in town is... smithay?

Mir also. And things like Orbment/WayCooler, even though they're virtually dead.

they're going to end up using most of the same protocols anyway

Why? KDE maybe (even though they don't need to), but GNOME is insisting on growing the ecosystem of portals instead of Wayland extensions, because portals play well with containerized apps.

but if they ever decide to rewrite their wayland implementation from scratch for any reason, you know it's going to be wlroots based

Really? GNOME/KDE are way too into their own design visions, and use Wayland as a political tool to instill them and not give a shit about others, as I highlight through all the thread. It was evident even on X.Org already, when they came up with GNOME 3 and KDE 4, breaking compatibility with other environments significantly. And some users did even find this breakage beneficial, for example, because they overcame the XKB's limitation for 4 simultaneously switchable layouts only.

You say this like xkill is integral

Almost as integral as the Magic SysRq key: systems where it doesn't work bite.

@HappyGoFishing
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This has opened my eyes on the whole X/Wayland debacle

@Sivecano
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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?

the official documentation seems quite good with a bunch of examples.
https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtwaylandcompositor-index.html

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Nov 14, 2023 •
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One day everything will be wlroots.

Keep dreaming about that, lol. Even the attempt to replace KWin with KWinFT failed already.

I wouldn't say it has failed. It's certainly lost pace as Roman Gilg moved to working on it part-time only, and the way he forked it generated some bad blood in the KDE community. But it's still around and has some contributors, and it's generated a lot of learning experiences that will probably influence the future direction of KWin.

KDE also has a bit of experience with such situations, there was a kwin-lowlatency fork that was maintained for several years until KWin got low latency patches itself.

You say this like xkill is integral

It does have has a distinct use case, but it's limited to where you want to try to kill some app window from the GUI, but in a way (intended or not) that you cannot be sure that the app will actually be terminated, as xkill doesn't send SIGTERM or SIGKILL. Wayland compositors can kill a window's Wayland connection, too, and yes, that's not compositor-agnostic (if I want to do this from the command line on KWin, the only compositor I use regularly, I would issue qdbus org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/kwin org.kde.kglobalaccel.Component.invokeShortcut "Kill Window") — but if people had an actual need to do this in a compositor-agnostic way with a command line program, it would be no problem to write a 10-line wrapper script.

In this particular case taking that as a point of criticism is making a point just for the sake of making a point, not for the sake of an actual usability problem that people are having. People mostly don't change from wlroots to KWin to Mutter every five minutes and those who do are likely technical enough that they've already figured it out.

@bodqhrohro
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to kill some app window from the GUI in a way that doesn't send SIGTERM or SIGKILL

As long as the PID corresponding to the window is known, it's possible to send any signal.

I probably already mentioned above in thread someone made buttons for FVWM sending SIGSTOP/SIGCONT. I didn't come up with anything like that, and had to do that manually all the time. Wayland compositors won't even tolerate that due to rapidly accumulating IPC messages (and this issue has no good solution, which was deeply discussed somewhere too).

but if people had an actual need to do this in a compositor-agnostic way with a command line program, it would be no problem to write a 10-line wrapper script

Yeah, if people know programming at all. Compare that to just installing x11-utils from a repository.

People mostly don't change from wlroots to KWin to Mutter every five minutes and those who do are likely technical enough that they've already figured it out.

Changing a WM does not need deep technical skills as well. In times of GNOME 2 that was done pretty massively.

@phrxmd
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phrxmd commented Nov 14, 2023 •
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to kill some app window from the GUI in a way that doesn't send SIGTERM or SIGKILL

As long as the PID corresponding to the window is known, it's possible to send any signal.

Sure, but the point was about xkill and that's not what xkill does.

but if people had an actual need to do this in a compositor-agnostic way with a command line program, it would be no problem to write a 10-line wrapper script

Yeah, if people know programming at all. Compare that to just installing x11-utils from a repository.

The set A of people who don't know programming at all has little to no intersection with the set B of people who kill application windows from the command line. If you are in set A and don't know programming at all, you open your window or task list and kill it from there.

Then there is the set C of people who switch compositors and kill application windows so often that they need a compositor-agnostic way to do them from the command line without doing kill -9 and kill -15. That set is a subset of set B and is so small that nobody seems to have bothered writing a simple script for it. This leads me to the probably safe assumption that the cardinality of set C is zero, or very close to zero, probably smaller than the number of words you and me have now written talking about it.

People mostly don't change from wlroots to KWin to Mutter every five minutes and those who do are likely technical enough that they've already figured it out.

Changing a WM does not need deep technical skills as well.

Changing WMs on a regular basis is something only technical people do. Maybe that was different in times of GNOME 2, except it actually wasn't, and even then that was 12+ years ago.

@bodqhrohro
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The set A of people who don't know programming at all has little to no intersection with the set B of people who kill application windows from the command line

There is a major exception which fits into the intersection: system administrators. Who also tend to use GNU/Linux on desktops (yet many of them indeed see UNIX-like systems only through the window of Putty.EXE ;)) And have virtually zero programming skills (otherwise they would work at some more prestigious job (at least DevOps).

Changing WMs on a regular basis is something only technical people do

Do you need to be a "technical" person to edit a path in .LNK properties? Power user level is enough. It's as simple as that. And power users are totally NOT developers. But on GNU/Linux, this class just cannot survive in general. Power users need GUI configuration tools, which are a powerful thing only in KDE perhaps.

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ghost commented Nov 14, 2023

This thread is such a fucking joke. Think X.org is good software? Great, go ahead and maintain it yourself. The rest of the world will move on. Deal with it.

and again someone who thinks problems shouldnt be talked about just because people arent improving the alternate, ok, go ahead, think wayland is this perfect protocol with 0 issues. And anyone who points them out thinks X.org is the best, that my guy is projection, and its not good for you.

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