This has Systemd vs Runit vibes. No matter how many anti-systemd folks scream to me about how horrible it is for XYZ technical reasons, every Linux distro I’ve ever used for years, desktop and server, has used systemd and I’ve never experienced single problem that those users claim I will.
Same here with Wayland. All the major desktop environments and distros have or are implementing Wayland support and are phasing out X. The only reason I’m not on Wayland on my main computer already is because of a few minor bugs that should be ironed out in the next 6-12 months with the newest release of plasma.
It’s not because Wayland is unusable. I try switching to Wayland about every 6-9 months, and every time there have been fewer bugs and the bugs that exist are less and less intrusive.
Any time you get hardcore enthusiasts and technical people together in large community, this will happen. The mechanical keyboard community is the same way, people arguing about what specific formula of dielectric grease is optimal to lube your switches with and what specific method of applying it is best.
At a certain point, it becomes fundamentalism, like comic book enthusiasts arguing about timeline forks between series or theology majors fighting about some minutia in a 4th century manuscript fragment. Neither person is going to change their views, they are just practicing their arguments back and forth in ever-narrowing scopes of pros and cons, technical jargon, and the like.
Meanwhile the vast majority of users couldn’t care less, and just want to play games, browse the web, and chat with friends, all of which is completely functional in Wayland and has been for a while.
All of the technically-minded posts I’ve read about systemd have been positive. The only detractors seem to be the ones with less technical knowledge, complaining about “the Unix philosophy” and parroting half-understood ideas, or worse, claiming that it’s bad because they have to learn it.
I know xorg has problems, but it was good to get some insight into why Wayland is falling short. Every argument I’ve seen in favor of Wayland has been “xorg bad”.
X code is convoluted, so much so that the maintainers didn’t want to continue. AFAIK, no commercial entity has put any significant money behind Xorg and friends. Potentially unmaintained code with known bugs, unknown CVEs and demands for permission system for privacy made continuing with Xorg a near impossibility.
If you don’t want new features and don’t care about CVEs that will be discovered in future as well as the bugs (present and future), then you can continue using Xorg, and ignore all this. If not, then you need to find an alternative, which doesn’t need to be Wayland
Oh, and you might need to manage Xorg while other people and software including your distro move onto something else.
So yeah, “xorg bad” is literally the short summary for creating Mir and Wayland
I get it.
But as far as I can tell, there are just two xorgs now, one of them is just spelled “Wayland”.yeah that’s that’s the impression I got so far as well.
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Meanwhile the vast majority of users couldn’t care less, and just want to play games, browse the web, and chat with friends, all of which is completely functional in Wayland and has been for a while.
The last couple of times I tried Wayland, it broke my desktop so badly that I couldn’t even use it.
Granted, that was “a while” ago, so my experience might be better now, but it’s made me very wary of it.
I think the vast majority of users won’t change their display server without doing a fresh install, so I’m not sure if that’s a fair comparison to the average use case. That being said, you experiencing that issue is a fair reason for staying wary.
Why would I ever do a fresh install?
To avoid issues like misconfiguring your display server.
What does “broke my desktop so badly that i coudlnt even use it” even mean? Such an over the top statement lol, makes it seem as if wayland is malware or smt.
This has Systemd vs Runit vibes. No matter how many anti-systemd folks scream to me about how horrible it is for XYZ technical reasons, every Linux distro I’ve ever used for years, desktop and server, has used systemd
You’ll one day learn the difference between Popular and Correct.
Trump is popular, for instance.
and I’ve never experienced single problem that those users claim I will.
This is a “everyone tells me to get smoke detectors and I’ve never had a fire in all my 23 years of life” comment.
There’s a reason we have building codes, seat belts, traffic lights, emergency brakes, FDIC, and pilots’ licenses.
every Linux distro I’ve ever used for years, desktop and server, has used systemd and I’ve never experienced single problem that those users claim I will.
That means simply that you have never used systemd. You have only used a linux distro.
When you use a car only from the backseat and have some driver driving it for you, then you aren’t going to have any complaint about the engine.
Systemd becomes the more horrible, the closer you get to it.
ha, you beautifully illustrated their point.
i’m not saying you’re wrong, it’s just funny how on-the-nose you got it.
I run a bunch of Linux servers, multiple desktop instances, manage multiple IT clients, and took my first Linux certs working with Systemd management, all for years now.
But I’ll be sure to switch away from systemd when it becomes an issue…
Most of the post is an “argument from authority”: Trust me, I have a PhD and maintain my own X server, and I assure you that Wayland is a pile of shit!
OP claims that “actually nothing will actually run” because the stable Wayland protocols lack so much important functionality. In reality, many people use Wayland every day, and multiple large distributions use it as the default display server. This doesn’t inspire confidence in OP’s knowledge.
Admittedly, the first bug they linked is a real issue and it should be fixed, but it’s not a Wayland design flaw. It’s an (arguably important) feature that hasn’t been implemented by all compositors yet. With the second bug OP laments that Wayland compositors are implemented in C, an unsafe language. This is true about X.org too, so I don’t really see the point. Arguably Wayland improves on X11 here, because someone could develop a new Wayland compositor in Rust, while in X11 this is a core part of the display server.
It does give anti-SystemD “why make new when what we got now is good vibes”.
Their Java bashing was more a criticism of design patterns than Java, but fell into the meme bashing of tech based on one example. Find an old bug and say tech is dreadful as a result.
With the second bug OP laments that Wayland compositors are implemented in C, an unsafe language.
That’s not what they’re saying. They’re saying wlroots is full of race conditions, which will be very hard to fix because they’re part of a fundamental design problem.
That is a serious problem, but advocating X11 will not solve anything. Wayland is being improved every day, while X.org is in deep maintenance mode.
And let’s not pretend that X.org is perfect. Race conditions at least can be fixed, even if it takes a lot of time and effort. Worst case, someone will rewrite wlroots in Rust. But in X11 any application can kill other applications, install a key logger, pin itself to the foreground, etcetera. This is by design: it’s what makes window managers,
xkillandxeyeswork. It’s also a huge security flaw that can never be fixed.No one is advocating X11. It’s hard to have a constructive conversation about the shortcomings of Wayland when every apologist seems to immediately go off topic.
“I don’t want to listen because you don’t know the technical challenges. Oh, you have a long list of credentials? I don’t want to listen to an argument from authority. X11 bad, therefore Wayland good.”
OP even brings up Mir, but you never see Wayland proponents talk about why they think Wayland is better.
That security argument is like advocating wearing a motorcycle helmet when walking down the street. It sounds like a great idea and super safe, but it’s also super impractical and the things it’s supposed to protect against are extremely unlikely.
But ok, more security isn’t a bad thing. But why not make it an option, like SELinux for example? That way users can choose a degree on a scale between security and convenience that suits their use case and circumstances. Why make it all or nothing?
It’s a valid concern IMO. Any application on X11 can install a key logger, record your screen, and influence other applications in a myriad of ways. With open source software from a trusted repository, this is not an issue, but an increasing number of people run random binary blobs from Steam, the Snap Store and Flathub. I am 100% certain that some less-conscientious publishers are already using X11 features to build ad profiles of their users; it’s a matter of time before the first ransomware will appear. The only sensible way to prevent this, is to confine applications to their own space.
But ok, more security isn’t a bad thing. But why not make it an option, like SELinux for example? That way users can choose a degree on a scale between security and convenience that suits their use case and circumstances. Why make it all or nothing?
Wayland simply doesn’t have protocols for most of this stuff. (Applications are supposed to use D-Bus and portals.) Developing new protocols that offer X11-like functionality is a large investment and will also need changes in the toolkits and apps to make it work.
Race conditions in wlroots is fixable, and not a reason to choose x11 over Wayland.
At this point I have to ask if you know what a race condition is.
Because they said they are fixable…? Or because you think a minor, temporary wlroots bug is severe enough to merit binning the entire Wayland project?
Out of curiosity, how much mail do you tend to store at your provider?
And if it’s a non trivial amount, what do you plan to do when they announce it?
Yeah, those arguments don’t hold up at all. Those bugs linked are not design related and could be fixed in a few months. KDE is already working on adding reconnect capabilities to plasma.
OP claims that “actually nothing will actually run” because the stable Wayland protocols lack so much important functionality. In reality, many people use Wayland every day
Are the Wayland compositors people are using every day exclusively using “stable” Wayland interfaces? Honest question, because I have absolutely no idea.
Neither do I. I’ve had a sensor net watching for Wayland news (because sooner or later I’m going to have to migrate to it, just want to know when) but so far there hasn’t been any executive summary.
My main thought is “this is a screenshot of a wall of text that’s hard to read”.
You should switch to Wayland
Sounds like a heap of crap. X.Org developers moved to Wayland, they were the ones who made it happen. Now, I wonder where this dude with his XOrg Forks and PhD and shit was during all that 15 years it took to conceptualize wayland.
You all need a lesson in taking everything people say, including and most importantly their qualifications with a huge grain of salt.
Wayland has been working perfectly for years now. Many of the supposedly “impossible to implement” functions of the old hunk of junk Xorg were either found to be bogus anyways or have been made available on Wayland.
Sincerely– Someone who’s been using wayland since 2016
Wayland has been working perfectly for years now.
Not for every one. For example, I still get random black screens with only mouse trails, windows disappearing, and videos not playing properly. Why yes, I do have an Nvidia card, thank you for asking.
After finally realizing nobody is interested in EGLstreams, Nvidia seems to be on track to make their drivers less of a disaster for Wayland support, so thankfully it is bound to become better
I just want you to know, this isn’t a failure on anything other than Nvidia trying to force their own crap on everyone and failing
I’m on AMD and had so many issues with Wayland. A lot of games were straight up unplayable due to the amount of issues and some other applications straight up not compatible while scaling is also still a freaking mess. Saying Wayland has been working perfectly for years just feels like clownery and is kinda insulting to everyone who experiences those problems.
Interesting, what model is your GPU? I’ve been using Wayland for months on an RX 6650 XT and for about a year before that on an RX 570 and I’ve had so many less problems than I used to on X. Maybe I’m just lucky with my GPU choices?
This also depends on the desktop you use. GNOME is by far the most stable [In My Experience], and KDE spent the whole 5.x series getting their Wayland support into shape. What you’re describing could be XWayland failures (games don’t run on Wayland lol) and desktop environment bugs.
Depending on how long ago you’re talking about, your hardware, and your desktop of choice, things might’ve been improved a lot since the last time you used a Wayland session.
I have nvidia and its been working for me
Very good point. Mr x11 expert maybe seems pissed he’s gotta learn a new tech and refuses to, so will bash it and hope it goes away. But if they were an expert, they’d probably know the things you mentioned.
only thing keeping me back to switch to Wayland is Barrier. I need that for my work machine 🤷🏻♂️
Legit, used Wayland for a whole two hours before realizing barrier wouldn’t work and had to drop back to x. Workflow gotta workflow.
Maybe try Input Leap. It’s an actively maintained fork of Barrier (Barrier isn’t maintained), and it has Wayland support.
Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll check it out.
Maybe try Input Leap. It’s an actively maintained fork of Barrier (Barrier isn’t maintained), and it has Wayland support.
Apparently their devs are aware of Wayland. Maybe someone even makes a Wayland-aware alternative like some apps had.
Actually, the primary dev is no longer active. The other developers have moved to a fork called Input Leap that has Wayland support.
Interesting, I saw they mentioned Wayland in their repo.
X.Org developers moved to Wayland, they were the ones who made it happen.
But did they bring the same mistakes with them?
They made Wayland the way it is precisely to NOT make the same mistake.
Most of the xorg “mistakes” are design choices in the x11 protocol and have been there since some MIT undergrad smoked too much ganja over Christmas break 1986 and wrote the implementation that became the de facto standard.
(Probable) Source for those who prefer actual text: https://lobste.rs/s/acepul/wayland_is_pretty_good_actually#c_bzr8nr
I am of two minds:
- He’s not wrong
- It doesn’t matter at this point
It’s a mess, but honestly so are a lot of critical FOSS projects (e.g.: OpenSSH, GNUPG, sudo). Curmudgeons gonna curmudgeon. There was a point of no return and that was years ago – now that Wayland’s finally becoming useable despite itself it’s probably time to come to terms with the fact that better alternatives would have arisen had anyone thought they could truly manage it.
it’s probably time to come to terms with the fact that better alternatives would have arisen had anyone thought they could truly manage it.
This is the most important takeaway. There’s a lot of people whining about Wayland, but Wayland devs are currently the only people actually willing to put in the work. Nobody wants to work on X and nobody wants to make an alternative to Wayland, so why do we keep wasting time on this topic?
TL;DR: the author needs to do a better job of citing sources and building an argument.
The author’s argument from self-appointed authority tone aside, I dug into the only two verifiable pieces of evidence cited. These are almost impenetrable to the outsider, and even with plenty of coding experience behind me, I’m having to go deep to make sense of any of it. After all, sometimes, bugs and design decisions are the result of a best effort in the situation at hand and not necessarily evidence of negligence, incompetence, or bad architecture. There’s also something to be said for organizing labor, focusing effort on what matters, and triaging the backlog.
The original author really needs to pony up a deeper digest of the project, with many more verifiable links to back up the various quality claims. If anyone is going to take this seriously, a proper postmortem is a better way to go. Cite the version reviewed, link to every flaw you can find, suggest ways to improve things, and keep it blameless. Instead, this reads like cherry picking two whole things on the public bug tracker and then making unsubstantiated claims that’s a part of a bigger pattern.
My personal take on what was cited:
- I’m grossly unqualified to assess this codebase as a Wayland or GUI programmer, but work plenty in the Linux space as a cloud practitioner and shell coder.
- The first article smells like inadequate QA for cases like placing Wayland programs in the background, which is not typically done for GUI apps under normal usage (IMO).
- The second article is a two-line change that I suppose highlights how ill-suited C is for this kind of software. Developer chatter on the MR suggests that the internal API could use some safeguards and sanity checks.
- 162 open issues, 259 closed, oldest still open is five years old. Not great, but not terrible.
- None of this is particularly egregious, considering the age of the project and the use it enjoys today.
Links:
You aired my frustrations really well. He spent a lot more time making claims and discussing his own background than demonstrating Wayland’s issues and showing that they’re egregious. It’s an entertaining rant at best, but that doesn’t make his points valid nor does it make anything actionable.
I remember reading through that thread when it came out and those are extremely worrying points. Wayland has extremely deep core issues. #2 there alone is horrible.
There are and were alarm bells ringing all around btw with Wayland. From a software developing perspective the approach is terrible. You cannot solve super complex problems by throwing away 30 years worth of code and redoing everything from scratch. You’ll just run into the exact same issues again. Which no, haven’t gone away as the technology advanced as many people would like to believe, we’re still using displays and networking and keyboards and mice.
There is a lot of legacy in X but there’s also a lot of accumulated experience and battle-hardened code. The obvious path would have been to keep the good and remove the bad.
Wayland will eventually since those issues but it will take just as long as it took X, because that’s what happens when you start everything from scratch again.
This is filling me with deja vu because it’s exactly what some of us went through with X, trying to piece together a working desktop out of dozens of pieces. But when you point that out you get “ha ha grandpa that’s old stuff, this new stuff won’t have that problem because [insert magic here]!”
Keep in mind that when Wayland started it was supposed to be a mini-server, to be used for the login screen only. Then the idea came to make it usable for stable, controlled and simple devices where there isn’t a lot of user configuration or hardware variation.
How it got from there to “let’s use it for everything on the Linux desktop and ditch X” I’ll never understand.
How it got from there to “let’s use it for everything on the Linux desktop and ditch X” I’ll never understand.
Just because they wanted it so badly… They had 2 fundamental problems with X:
1 - Everybody except the super nerdy nerds confused the ‘X client’ and the ‘X server’ all the time, and thought the naming were wrong.
2 - The networking was hard to set up / troubleshoot.
Which no, haven’t gone away as the technology advanced as many people would like to believe, we’re still using displays and networking and keyboards and mice.
Which X.Org was not designed to support.
Do you mean not initially designed to support? Because at least for displays and networking (in the sense of being able to send X events over the network) that seems wrong, a network capable display server is basically X’s entire purpose? And for keyboards and mice there are extensions now, so x.org as a standard now very much supports those by design. Actually to my knowledge Wayland basically just forked their keyboard standard, the X Keyboard Extension.
XOrg is designed so a central server (mainframe) sends and receives data from smaller terminals, and that not only includes a heap of devices that haven’t been in use since the 90s it also has a ton of features that nobody uses. (See: X native fonts, X native widgets, X driver model…)
X’s way of handling events and sending draws to clients as such is somewhat convoluted. Once you start to really dig into it, it’s amazing how much people managed to stack on top of it until today.
Besides, modern day X over Network is a somewhat niche and possibly broken function
I mean xwayland is the best supported X implementation today, and will only get better. You’re not ditching everything when you maintain backwards compatibility.
Op has an Nvidia GPU.
I know you are joking but I’ve been running Wayland (Hyprland) on an Nvidia card for about a year now with in the beginning very few and currently zero issues. Even stuff like screensharing works.
Oh I know. People that actually have an idea of what they’re doing have far less struggles with Nvidia stuff on Wayland. I just poke at it because I know that so many Wayland haters use Nvidia on some DE that isn’t 100% supported like it’s Wayland’s fault.
Huh
I think they mean whoever wrote that text, not you
No not really. Wayland shills constantly use template arguments such as nvidia, dinosaurs, boomers, luddites, etc regardless of context.
lmao you really are out to argue today, aren’t you.
why would they mean you? you posted the image with a title. the comment is a response to that. do you really think the commenter claims you have an nvidia GPU because of the title, asking for thoughts? it is not clear what side you’re on, or whether you even picked a side in the first place from the title and image alone.
edit: just now seeing those other comments from you in this thread. yeah, maybe it was aimed at you.
It was aimed at him. Kids on the struggle bus to Jensen Huang’s leather jacket factory.
that’s a savage insult hahahaha
Just reading the way you type things out proves you’re like 12. No cap fr fr nvidia is bussin’. Jesus Christ… Just admit you struggle with a piece of tech that others have no issues with and move on.
Wayland is here. For a kid bitching about dinosaurs, boomers and other “old” things you sure do have a real fucking problem letting go of old tech.
My thoughts on this? I think people should care less about what software other people use.
Man, display servers look hard to develop and I’m glad we have two amazing/successful projects to choose between! I think the devs who work on X are doing an amazing job and it’s amazing to see how passionate the devs/users are for Wayland.
If bobby tables likes to use x because they know how it works and are comfortable with it, let them work with x! If you think it’s okay to judge/pester/shame people because some software they choose to use, shame on you! In the end, does it really matter what you use.
The Devs who work on X are doing an amazing job
There aren’t any Devs working on X. That’s the whole problem. Xorg is the most modern and most popular implementation of X, was started in 2004, it no longer has any permanent maintainers, and it hasn’t been updated since 2018. Nobody alive fully understands the whole codebase, it is an unholy mess of multiple forks and multiple versions of many different projects all smushed together. There is no more room for innovation on Xorg because any time anybody fixes a bug or adds a feature, it breaks something totally unrelated. All of the big players who used to pay developers to maintain it, no longer do. Partly because they can’t find anyone willing to do it.
I’m not saying Wayland is the answer to the problem. Building a new display server protocol does not fix the problems with Xorg, and it has its own slew of problems. It really is a “rock and a hard place” situation. You’re a future-hating troglodyte who shuns innovation if you continue to use Xorg, and you’re a risk-taking early-adopter who forfeits functionality for shiny new toys, if you use Wayland.
aren’t any devs working on X.
Didn’t know about that! Good for them. I would still argue it’s a very popular and successful software despite it’s unholy codebase.
It really is a “rock and a hard place” …
Yeah. I hope it’s just a vocal minority but it’s depressing when you see people act like this in the wild.
Most recent Stable release was December 13, fixing a CVE. Someone is working on it (Red Hat still pays a few to do so, at the very least).
try and squeeze in a Java-90ies-OO style of factoryinstancemanagerfactoryfactory
This one made me laugh out loud :-)
It just turned legitimate points into meme bashing. Makes me doubt it. Comes across more like the anti-SystemD folk.
I’ve been using Wayland for 5 years. There were a few bugs in the beggining, but now it works great. These threads are such a waste of time.
I have over 100 confirms X11 developments
That’s great dude. Why don’t you go maintain it then, apparently nobody else wants to: https://www.phoronix.com/news/RHEL10-Removing-X.Org
Wayland took too long
Look up how long btrfs has been in development, or at audio subsystem churn. These things take time, because it’s mostly volunteers working on them.
Systemic complexity has doubled in the last two years
What does this even mean?
Mir was better
It turns out the Canonical dumping random stuff over the wall is not the same as creating a legitimate open source community around a project.
Unfixable amount of race conditions
As if there’s never been a synchronization bug in X… But also System76 and others are writing Wayland compositors on Rust anyway.
Systemic complexity has doubled in the last two years
“If wayland is so great why can’t I run
/usr/bin/wayland???” 😎
Most people don’t give a shit and just want a system that works. As a lot of distros switch to / have switched to Wayland I have never noticed any issues in daily usage of any of my devices, in fact my surface laptop 4 can’t do external displays if I’m running x11 but that feels like a surface issue not a display manager issue. Point being that the switch is happening and a majority of users do not care as long as their systems keep running, and in my experience there’s no reason to believe they won’t.
As an enduser my only noticeable issue with Wayland is that Auto-Type with KeepassXC doesn’t work.
Auto-Type will be disabled when run with a Wayland compositor on Linux. To use Auto-Type in this environment, you must set QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb or start KeePassXC with the -platform xcb command-line flag.
https://keepassxc.org/docs/KeePassXC_UserGuide#_auto_type
This works for me.
Yeah, that one is annoying.
Yeah, that one is annoying.
What one?
Posting pictures of text is annoying. The letters are too tiny, i can’t read it comfortably. That is my first thought.
