This post is in part a response to an aspect of Nate’s post “Does Wayland really break everything?“, but also my reflection on discussing Wayland protocol additions, a unique pleasure that I have been involved with for the past months.
Before I start I want to make a few things clear: The Linux desktop will be moving to Wayland – this is a fact at this point (and has been for a while), sticking to X11 makes no sense for future projects.
By switching to Wayland compositors, we are already forcing a lot of porting work onto toolkit developers and application developers. This is annoying, but just work that has to be done. It becomes frustrating though if Wayland provides toolkits with absolutely no way to reach their goal in any reasonable way.
Many missing bits or altered behavior are just papercuts, but those add up. And if users will have a worse experience, this will translate to more support work, or people not wanting to use the software on the respective platform.
What’s missing?
- Window positioning
- Window position restoration
- Window icons
- Limited window abilities requiring specialized protocols
- Automated GUI testing / accessibility / automation
I spent probably way too much time looking into how to get applications cross-platform and running on Linux, often talking to vendors (FLOSS and proprietary) as well. Wayland limitations aren’t the biggest issue by far, but they do start to come come up now, especially in the scientific space with Ubuntu having switched to Wayland by default. For application authors there is often no way to address these issues.
We built a new standard giving zero backwards compatibility, no path to migrate and removed existing functionality. You can’t blame us when things don’t work!
I see your point, but at the same time, Wayland isn’t brand new. Devs have had well over a decade to get their stuff Wayland-ready.
At some point, the likes of Nvidia really do need to be told to hurry up and get their stuff ready. We can’t stick to X11 forever.
It’s a massive change! Wayland hasn’t been ready either. They’re still debating support for features.
It’s been ready for general use for years, most distros have had it enabled for a long time.
But yeah it’s not ready for every use case. Then again, neither is X11, I suppose.
It’s not ready for existing use cases that X11 has. And won’t have some of the features.
The Wayland team, from what I can tell, seems to be comprised of “architectural purists”. They’re so concerned with the right way to do things they’re ignoring pragmatic impact to downstream apps. And so they debate over trivial things like whether to allow “windows to position themselves” and “whose job is that?” which is silly and has been solved by practically every other OS.
So yes - application teams haven’t caught up. But because Wayland is a huge lift from X11. You can’t just change everything and then bitch about how the rest of the world simply hasn’t “seen the light” yet. It’s a lot of work for an application team that provides zero new functionality for users. And it’s ridiculous that the Wayland team is trying to push blame on to others at this point.
Again, they’ve had well over a decade to move to Wayland. It hasn’t been suddenly sprung upon them.
If they don’t want to move, they don’t have to. But that does basically entail giving up on Linux.
And it doesn’t provide zero new functionality… I do things on my PCs that I can’t do with X11. Multiple monitors with different scaling and refresh rates, tear-free, 1-to-1 gestures, actual security, better performance, fewer bugs, soon there will be HDR. All stuff that’s either not possible with X11 or require hacky workarounds.
You talk of the “Wayland team”, but you need to understand… the “Wayland team” is the X11 team. They are the same people. They left X11 and have moved to Wayland.
Tbh, all of this bickering is futile. We know Wayland is the present (of most distros anyway), and the future. App developers can either accept that or they can abandon Linux. There’s not really a viable medium-long term alternative, even the slower-moving projects are moving to it. X11 is on life support.
This is like when everyone was complaining about the move away from DOS. At some point, people have to accept that the platform has been updated.
Are you under the impression that I’m arguing against moving to Wayland? I’m not. I’m saying the team has done a shit job of managing the migration. And yes - that’s the X11 team.
@TheGrandNagus @atzanteol I agree with you about purists and poor attitude towards reality but at the same time I’ve been using Wayland for a few years now without personally having issues
When I try it I get a blank screen and nothing happens. So. 🤷
@atzanteol guy at sh.itjust.works can’t get shit to work :)
jk
at the same time, besides maybe rendering my screen 0.0000001ms faster than X, i can’t tell you anything it does in any way better or different than X
puts pictures + words on screen, yay
Hah!
Why should devs pay any attention to wayland when after a decade the project still suffers from severe deficiencies of functionality over X11.
@TheGrandNagus @atzanteol
Wayland is not supposed to be a drop-in replacement for X11. It will always have feature differences. There are things that X11 does that should not be handled by the display protocol.
And they should pay attention to it because X11 is dead. It’s in life support mode. It’s basically impossible to maintain. The devs have abandoned it for Wayland.
It can’t cope with modern desktop usage like multiple displays with different refresh rates (not without weird hacks and workarounds anyway), different displays with different scaling, touch support is awful, HDR support won’t be a thing, performance is worse, and security is terrible.
Wayland is the future of the Linux desktop. Pretty much all DEs and distros are on board.
Sure devs of random programs can say “I refuse to support Wayland!”, that is their right. But in doing so they are effectively deciding to abandon Linux development, because X11 is going the way of the dinosaurs, and if you think otherwise then I don’t know what to tell you. You’re living in a fantasy world.