Wayland is growing up. and now we don't have a choice
fireborn.mataroa.blog> GNOME’s Wayland session is now stable and usable with Orca.
They did that via an out-of-band D-Bus protocol, rather than going full Wayland. I'm all for keeping D-Bus around for backwards-compatibility (lots of things use AT-SPI2, and I certainly don't want a repeat of the CORBA -> D-Bus migration), but Wayland's AT support should be first-class, not relegated to proprietary GNOME extensions.
Per Matt Campbell's article https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the..., this decision has something to with security:
> Assistive technologies or other accessibility clients currently connect to the compositor through a D-Bus protocol, defined in the Mutter repository linked above. By exposing this interface via D-Bus rather than Wayland, we make it easy to withhold this communication channel from sandboxed applications, which shouldn’t have this level of access.
Excellent excellent call out. This feels very wrong direction, this using a side-band for accessibility!!! I had no idea.
It's surprising to me that security would prompt the push to D-Bus. Wayland's design with the compsitor as the message bus center was built to center security in the architecture, to make the compositor the arbiter of data flows. I'm struggling to picture what the issue was here with sandboxed applications.
Compositors are incompatible with one another and have totally different levels of functionality. Most compositors don't do any proper kind of security and permissions and just limit data flows in the most primitive and restrictive way possible. Using something with existing security but the possibility of cross-communication like DBUS is just easier here. Although I expect a lot of confused deputy type of exploits there...
> Compositors are incompatible with one another and have totally different levels of functionality.
I see far more similar about compositors than different. They have freedom of implementation & do different things, but they offer to apps a very common set of protocols, and some of the newer edgier protocols have more varied adoption. But I see standards & growth & development forward as 'what Wayland is', not "incompatibility" (that's why Wayland proper is purely 100% protocols & not a bespoke impl) and "totally different" (???).
Finding formal concensus to make special stable has been hard. But there is a pleasantly large amount of overlap and interop, even if compositors end up implementing more than one flavor of say gamma control.
> Most compositors don't do any proper kind of security and permissions and just limit data flows in the most primitive and restrictive way possible.
When starting a composite yeah, you figure out who has input and send it there. You render the surface the apps give you. Dataflow is inherently quite unidirectional for a long time when beginning a desktop compositor.
But that doesn't feel true at all today. Most compositors support advanced screen sharing, virtual pointers, and other fairly advanced data-flow protocols, almost all built security in mind, requiring more advanced routing & permissioning, as is very visible with the screen share flows of most apps.
> Using something with existing security but the possibility of cross-communication like DBUS is just easier here.
Agreed, but you yourself in your very negative comment on Wayland in this topic seem quite opposed to second systems in broad basis (and pretty radically down on Wayland in general). I'd like to see the display system protocols able to better tackle talking about and managing what's on the screen, rather than building a second parallel system for saying and working with what's on the screen.
I also think there's a decently strong basis already there in the current protocols. There's a security context to start. https://wayland.app/protocols/security-context-v1 We see more advanced flows like XDG Foreign for apps to expose surfaces and mix them onto our own apps.
At-spi d-bus was already right there & done, and it felt easy to keep using it. It was mostly convenience I feel like, and the justification of security feels like a blunt hammer to deny exploration. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/at-spi2-core/
Maybe it is actually better to do these accessibility operations over D-bus than over a Wayland protocol. Just because something existed in Xorg does not make it the best solution.
CORBA (or D-Bus) was needed in the X11 days, precisely because X11 didn't really provide a better solution. Wayland does. See https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch04.html#sect-Pro...:
> The Wayland protocol is an asynchronous object oriented protocol. All requests are method invocations on some object.
Anything D-Bus can do, Wayland can do. (Except systemd integration, but that says more about systemd than about Wayland.)
I like that this article isn't just a bunch of GNOME hate. But I freely admit to being frustrated that this switch is being forced when they're still developing basic accessibility functionality for GNOME. Once I switch to Wayland, I have to find new ways of:
- Adding hotkeys
- Replacing all my utilities that involve screenshot + OCR
- Making sure Orca works to some extent (low expectations here, but I need some of it to work)
- Reversing the gamma ramp
- Screen magnification
I have mapped out some approaches to most of these, but I full anticipate one or more to be show-stoppers or items I have to attempt to implement from scratch. I'm looking at 100 hours of work, minimum, to make this switch, and am basically just left out in the cold to figure all these workflows out under more hostile circumstances. It's also a chicken and egg, since I need to bootstrap into the new environment without any of my old tools working.
It's great that GNOME is taking some of this seriously, but they're forcing a very difficult transition, and it's frustrating that they think accessibility is in a usable state, or that we're low prioritiy enough to not matter. I'vbe heard the word "edge case" used a lot, it really stinks to be in a category where your entire computer use and professional career are considered an edge case.
> Making sure Orca works to some extent (low expectations here, but I need some of it to work)
It sounds like this actually is supposed to work? At least on GNOME?
I am still perfectly happy running X11. I am not going to switch any time soon.
Never change a running system.
The fact that only Gnome kind-off supports basic accessibility on wayland already shows what a giant failure wayland is.
it only takes popular distributions making it default, then all sorts of things will start depending on it, and it will be difficult to not switch eventually. As somebody that has written a lot of xlib/xt/motif code years back, and that still has the full O'Reilly X series set on my bookshelves, I would prefer X11 to continue; but just like sysv->systemd it seems things are moving against that being the case.
To me, the only thing that'd be troublesome to replace would be a browser, but worst case I'll run a Wayland compositor on my X11 server for that.
(And yes, I'd rather do that than go all in on Wayland)
> but worst case I'll run a Wayland compositor on my X11 server for that
This is actually surprisingly easy, too. My first experiments ran a wayland app in cage ( https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage ), but in order to better handle multiple windows I switched to sway with a lightly tweaked config, and other than some input weirdness (I think it struggles with modifiers held while switching focus) it works pretty well.
I like how Wayland provides some isolation between applications, so I switched
I understand that Wayland doesn't support Xlib function calls. What are the options for those of us who rely on C code which which uses Xlib for 2d graphics and event handling? If I have to switch to e.g. GTK, I'd not only have to rewrite all the Xlib calls, but all the code which depends on this, as Xlib and GTK do graphics ad events quite differently.
XWayland is still supported, and afaik will be for some time. It's only standalone Xorg which isn't.
Thanks, this might be what I'm looking for. It's covered here: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html and https://www.mankier.com/1/Xwayland
Ariadne Conill is turning Xwayland into a full X11 replacement: https://github.com/kaniini/wayback. She doesn't want to maintain it long-term, so if you're interested in contributing, please do: the more people understand the codebase, the better.
Isn't libwayland-client the replacement?
E.g. you now use the wayland calls instead of x11 calls
Specifically, I mean functions such as XCreateSimpleWindow, XDrawRectangle, XDrawArc, XmbDrawString, XNextEvent, etc.
There is a missing piece in Wayland tha I’m worried about—or rather, a key functionality that will need to be sorted out: Remote Desktop, but not in the sense of access to an existing display — rather, fully in-memory accelerated compositing for multi-user, concurrent desktop sessions to the same machine. FreeRDP has been doing some work on that, but we need a mature Xrdp replacement and I don’t think that is around just yet.
TLDR (non-AI): The author raises very valid points about accessibility under Wayland. The "And Now We Don’t Have a Choice" subtitle seems to address that only Gnome seems to have usable accessibility under Wayland right now but can easily be misunderstood as "we have no alternative to Wayland". The author also mentions X11 sucked in many ways and that this transition also is a moment to rethink what proper accessibility should fulfill.
Wayland is a perfect example of the second system effect and the sunk cost fallacy. X11 had problems, but instead of fixing them, developers threw the baby out with the bathwater, designed something completely byzantine and weird. Time was invested, so no stopping now or ever. The design of wayland introduces more problems than it solves, only by plastering over with yet another extra protocol that you have to implement in addition to wayland you might regain some lost functionality. Or paper over a design bug that will never be fixed.
Wayland is a dead horse. Made edible by sufficient fermentation and mobile towards the finish line by declaring the rot spreading over the line to be a victory. That Gnome just now gains parts of the functionality it had in X11, years later, while still being actually behind X11, while being an incompatible mess that leaves behind all other desktop environments to the detriment of the Linux ecosystem as a whole isn't actually a victory. Its the victory of the slightly-less-ruined after a devastating war.
> X11 had problems, but instead of fixing them
You can't fix a protocol that simply isn't designed for how modern graphics hardware works. Both macOS and Windows have upgraded their display stacks over the decades, but it was seamless because unlike Linux, nearly all applications dynamically link the system library which they can upgrade. Linux is late to the party here because everyone wants to make their own toolkit.
X was designed for multiple remote terminals receiving drawing commands over a network, not locally hardware accelerated graphical interfaces and functions that rely on close coordination between the hardware and display server (e.g. hardware planes, vrr, hdr).
Fixing X would require a new protocol to the point that it isn't X anymore, aka Wayland. There are arguments that not having a reference display server has led to problems though.
Wayland also doesn't even remotely resemble anything that would be fit to talk to modern graphics hardware. DMA buffers and DRM (direct rendering manager, not the digital restrictions management) are an afterthought, a separate protocol that is not even all in stable yet. Vulkan usually doesn't work. Latency with Wayland got worse and won't get better because "frames have to be perfect". Tons of unnecessary blitting and latency be damned. All while actually tearing in Wayland is as bad as in X11 here.
Fixing X would require a protocol that is mostly X, but of course incompatible because you have to rip out some protocol bugs. But Wayland isn't X minus the bugs. Wayland started as a little bit of broken bitmap-pushing and a whole lot of hot air. And even with tons of extension and auxilliary protocol development, multiplied by tons of unnecessary reimplementations in tons of compositors, it isn't even where X11 was when Wayland started. Wayland fixed nothing yet, broke a lot, fragmented the community, brought pain and misery.
> Wayland also doesn't even remotely resemble anything that would be fit to talk to modern graphics hardware. DMA buffers and DRM (direct rendering manager, not the digital restrictions management) are an afterthought
You don't use Wayland to talk to graphics hardware, you use Wayland to communicate with the display server.
The Wayland protocol lets apps negotiate an area to write it output to and how it gets written there is completely up to the application, whether it involves the GPU or not, OpenGL, Vulkan etc.
This is in contrast to X where the app use X APIs to draw textures, which are then pulled by the compositor (copy, rip latency/performance), and then sent back to the X server to display.
That is complete BS. The application doesn't talk to the graphics hardware alone and then just copy a bitmap into a Wayland buffer. You don't just magically talk to the GPU. There is this little problem called 'security', 'multiprocessing' and 'multiuser' in between.
> That is complete BS. The application doesn't talk to the graphics hardware alone and then just copy a bitmap into a Wayland buffer. You don't just magically talk to the GPU. There is this little problem called 'security', 'multiprocessing' and 'multiuser' in between.
This is literally what DRM/DRI is for... which is not Wayland.
If you think the display server should handle applications using the GPU, then even Xorg dropped this approach.
DRM is literally the 3D acceleration driver framework for Linux. It has been around for decades and is same set of drivers that are used for any sort of accelerated graphics in X.
If you want to get rid of DRM you have to start over and rewrite all graphical drivers for Linux from scratch.
DMA is part of the basic architecture of modern computers. It is how you can do things like have fast USB devices or network devices because it allows device hardware to by-pass the CPU and write things directly to memory.
> DRM is literally the 3D acceleration driver framework for Linux. It has been around for decades and is same set of drivers that are used for any sort of accelerated graphics in X.
Yes, exactly. And Wayland ignored it for years, from the start, and only later slowly adopted it as an extension.
> DMA is part of the basic architecture of modern computers.
Yes, I know.
DMA is even older and not limited to Linux or Graphics. Back in the old VESA, SGI and Windows 3.0 times, DMA was a cool new feature (but actually old even then). When Wayland was conceived, it was boring and old. Yet Wayland didn't originally include DMA buffers, just later added it as an extension when it became obvious that they had just gotten rid of a 40 year old feature that was really really necessary for modern graphics...
> Yes, exactly. And Wayland ignored it for years, from the start, and only later slowly adopted it as an extension.
DRM is not part of Wayland, and Wayland does not use DRM. Wayland is the protocol between the display server and application, DRM is a functionality provided by the kernel to allow user space applications to use and share graphics hardware.
The display server can use DRM, as will applications wanting to use OpenGL/Vulkan, but these are not "wayland".
Did you even read the use case for this? or just Googled 'Wayland DRM' and post the first link?
When VR headsets are exposed to user space, they appear as displays and subsequently the display server will control them (which isn't useful), this is just a protocol that allows clients (like games, SteamVR) to have control transferred so they can drive the VR headset instead. This is because multiple applications are not allowed to control the same display on the Linux kernel at the same time.
It does not make DRM/DRI part of Wayland. Again, it goes back to my original comment of "you use Wayland to communicate with the display server"
IIRC GNOME originally wanted to do this over Dbus, but there was opposition.
The protocol is trivially extensible, and have had plenty of extensions that has significant altered how it behaves. Fixing X in a step wise manner wod have been perfectly doable. The problem is that the Wayland proponents didn't just want to fix the things there was agreement was broken, but also wanted to actively break things that would cause an uproar.
But we did do exactly that with X for literal decades. Then the developers of Xorg said "fuck this". I mean, where does the bus stop?
For literal decades they proved how malleable the protocol is, yes. Then they decided to ignore how malleable the protocol is instead of even trying to e.g. start by deprecating obsolete functionality and disabling it in future versions.
When XRender was introduced, for example, was the perfect time to deprecate server-side font-rendering. It's trivial to shim on the client side if anyone cared about the legacy functionality, and it takes a trivial amount of code to switch to using XRender instead for it instead (been there, done that, written a font renderer).
There's been plenty of opportunities to gut the legacy parts of the protocol that way, and reduce the complexity.
Grouping the main set of extensions and declaring that if the server reports a certain version number or above they
This didn't happen because redhat/ibm/microsoft took control of the project and decided they wanted to kill it. They have said this directly on social media that this is their explicit goal so it's not as if this is a conspiracy of some sort, it's just their publicly stated goal. They then deliberately stopped merging changes and left it to rot until the contributors got frustrated enough to fork it.
Now a massive gamergate-esque coordinated character assassination campaign against the creator of xlibre is ongoing even from publications that have many previous articles praising the same contributor at length. Corporate control of open source is very dangerous to the ecosystem as they also fund the "journalists" writing these articles who are willing to defend every decision they make.
Why would Microsoft want to kill X? It kept back the Linux desktop.
> Now a massive gamergate-esque coordinated character assassination campaign against the creator of xlibre is ongoing even from publications that have many previous articles praising the same contributor at length
Half the drama is the Xlibre guy involving politics
> Why would Microsoft want to kill X? It kept back the Linux desktop.
Well, we'll see what "progress" Wayland will bring. Maybe in another 15 years, when it might be halfway "done"...
the xlibre guy said "no dei" in a fork that is separating from a company embroiled in racist discrimination lawsuits for using DEI to hurt real people.
Is that really involving politics? In a way it is, sure, but again, unlike red hat, IBM and friends, he has pledged not to discriminate against contributors on the basis of politics. Red hat and IBM openly continue to discriminate against contributors and employees on not only the basis of politics but skin color as well. They wield their CoC like a cudgel to get rid of anyone they don't like with no semblance of fair enforcement. It's a series of struggle sessions, man.
So, if you're accusing him of being political, but you're not accusing red hat of being political, you're probably not really accusing him of being political, you're probably just either woefully misinformed or outright racist.
Can you explain why you think someone who pledges not to discriminate against people for politics (while forking from a corp that does, it's not just a random comment, it's part of the reason a fork is needed) is more political than a company that actively discriminates against people for politics and also their skin color?
> if you're accusing him of being political, but you're not accusing red hat of being political
I equally think being political the other way is also begging for toxicity and division.
e.g. See Godot.
He invoked controversial right-wing populist slogans in the project README. Yes, that is involving politics, and doing so in a way that is guaranteed to put a lot of people off.
He can be political even in ways people finds offensive, and still have people prepared to still engage with his projects, but he can't do that within the project and expect people to ignore it. It's his choice. He appears to have chosen to double down on being controversial and driving people away from the project.
> why you think someone who pledges not to discriminate against people for politics
The "no DEI" bit is a common "slogan" from people who by many are seen to want to ignore discrimination and pretend it isn't a problem, often because they are seen as quite happy for discrimination to continue. As such, to a lot of people when someone makes a claim like that adjacent to claiming not to want to discriminate, it rings hollow, and in fact often signals to them that the person using that language is likely to either be a racist or is fine with racists.
You don't need to agree with those views. You're free to find that interpretation ridiculous or offensive. But when you try to defend this project, you ought to at least understand that this is how it gets interpreted by a lot of people, and this is why the project is mired in controversy, and will remain mired in controversy as long as the project presents itself in this way.
If his intent seriously is to genuinely not discriminate, then his choice of working is exceedingly poor and shows a lack of understanding of the politics involved.
He has now had plenty of opportunity to read reactions to it, and has still chosen to leave that language in place. To me, that is strongly negative signal - either he doesn't care about the reaction, or is being stubborn and willing to push people away, or he's fine with people seeing him that way. Either way, it's not going to do anything good for this project.
> The "no DEI" bit is a common "slogan" from people who by many are seen to want to ignore discrimination and pretend it isn't a problem, often because they are seen as quite happy for discrimination to continue. As such, to a lot of people when someone makes a claim like that adjacent to claiming not to want to discriminate, it rings hollow, and in fact often signals to them that the person using that language is likely to either be a racist or is fine with racists.
This very accurately describes the pro-dei faction, i'm not sure why you'd associate that with the anti-dei faction. You know, active lawsuits and real individual examples of people being harmed by ongoing discrimination are pretty solid evidence. In the end there's only people who are for prejudiced discrimination and people against prejudiced discrimination. I don't care which flavor you have but right now the truth is Xlibre is against it and red hat is for it. Anything else simply isn't aligned with reality.
I guess it just comes down to there being a lot of insane racist people in tech right now who view any opposition to their provable-in-the-courts racism as working against their broader ideological goals and therefore a valid target for attacks on every front. Very odd and unhealthy for open source. Hopefully these people get some of their own medicine.
It's irrelevant whether we agree on which faction the characteristics applies to. All that is relevant is that bringing this up in the README and elsewhere the way that he has is seen that way and seen as highly political and offensive by a lot of people.
He has chosen to make this into a political project that pushes away a lot of people who see his language as indicative of a dicriminatory attitudes rather than one focused on the technical merits.
That's his choice. I for one won't get involved with a project like that, and clearly that is the case for a lot of other people too.
> Now a massive gamergate-esque coordinated character assassination campaign against the creator of xlibre
Sigh. People repeating absolutely batshit things people say right back to them is not character assassination.
If you want to talk about anti-woke this Make X11 Great Again that then go for it. But you sound crazy. Okay? You sound like there's something wrong with you. So when people are off-put by this super weird and unnecessary politicization that's your problem.
It is not cancel culture. If you don't want to be accountable for the things you've said then I don't know what to tell you. That's not compatible with our current reality, so until inter-dimensional travel is invented, you're gonna be in for a rough ride.
It absolutely is character assassination in the context of what's been happening. News sites that have praised the xlibre author for countless articles are suddenly doing a 180 because the people who pay their bills are the same people running wayland and embroiled in anti discrimination lawsuits for abusing DEI to hurt people.
That you care more about "make x11 great again" more than red hat and IBM perpetrating actual cases of racist discrimination tells me a lot about you. You're either in an echo chamber and do not have all the information or are deliberately choosing to ignore it. Either way you aren't in the morally just position you think you are.
It's not about being morally just, it's about taking accountability for the things you say.
Everyone is allowed to say off-putting things. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to deduce that making politically-charged statements might make people a bit weary of your project. That's his prerogative - but, it's not character assassination to repeat words back to people. I'm very tired of pretending it is. I find it incredibly immature when people want to play victim for being portrayed how they themselves seemingly want to be portrayed. You want to be politically charged? Bon apetite.
"repeat words back to people" isn't the problem here though anyways, it's dishonest to pretend that's what matters here. not the mass bans, censorship, one sided articles, misinformational misinterpretations, zero acknowledgement about faces, and the insane double standards where on one side you have a guy who is "political" by saying he's anti dei and welcomes everyone of various politics and identities, and on the other hand you have the DEI corporation currently embroiled in multiple lawsuits for discriminating against real people not just based on politics but their skin color. It's an insane double standard.
> one side you have a guy who is "political" by saying he's anti dei and welcomes everyone of various politics and identities
Yes, being anti-woke and pro-Trump is political. I'm sorry, it just very obviously is. It's not a double standard because it's the same standard.
Just like DEI might piss some people off, being a Trumpie might piss some people off. If you think that making anti-woke claims or MAGA references is apolitical I don't know what to tell you. Because it is, and I was under the impression everyone on Earth should be in a agreement on that.
DEI doesn't just "piss some people off", it's outright illegal discrimination and red hat's concequences are currently working their way through the court systems. This strange equivocation from things that are clearly on completely different levels is tiresome.
If you personally are one of these people who think hurting people with racial discrimination is on the same level as typing "Together we'll make X great again!" then you are likely very deep in ideological capture. Everyone regardless of political alignment who is a decent person should be able to see that one of these matters and the other does not.
You're applying a deeply partisan interpretation of DEI to imply a very specific set of policies that are not anywhere close to universally supported by proponents of DEI. That is the problem.
If you can't see why this gets interpreted as an extremist stance by a lot of people, then that is part of the problem.
As long as those statements are in the README, it's like a giant flashing red light that the project is toxic and extremely political and pushing an agenda seen as extreme right by a lot of people.
People are free to run their projects whichever way they want, but words have consequences, and we can see in this very threat how that wording is derailing this projects chances of being considered on its technical merits.
That specific set of policies is being specifically implemented by IBM/Red hat. It's not exactly a small niche company, and it is very obviously directly related to the situation and the need to fork. It's also not a partisan interpretation, it's the only objective legal interpretation. Objective truth exists despite your efforts to pretend otherwise. Yes, there are stupid ignorant people who will see the words "DEI bad" interpret it wrongly. But it doesn't make them correct.
> News sites that have praised the xlibre author for countless articles are suddenly doing a 180
Which news sites praised the xlibre author for posting anti-vaxx stuff the the linux kernel mailing list and now shun him for posting other conspiracy theories in xlibre's README?
> Now a massive gamergate-esque coordinated character assassination campaign against the creator of xlibre is ongoing even from publications
The ranting anti-vaxer racist did it to themselves.
the racist DEI loving IBM/red hat employees and leadership did it to themselves
https://x.com/America1stLegal/status/1937994904132551029
I hope every last one of these people responsible lose their jobs.
Oh, please. As someone who wants a project like Xlibre, even just the project README alone is sufficient to taint the project.
Do you mean dbus as the other protocol? Because that's an intentional choice to separate out the protocol for drawing windows and responding to events and "desktop stuff" that's not related to being a window on the screen. They're not plastering over anything, that stuff is intentionally out of scope for Wayland.
The advantage is that anything can use the desktop stuff (cli tools) just by talking to dbus instead of having to be a wayland client despite having no windows.
Tons of stuff aren't in wayland that are actually graphics and window related. Wayland just forgot about it, then later on people realized that their design was far too primitive and simplistic.
DMA buffers, color management and pixel formats, scaling and DPI, image and video capture, tons of keyboard and mouse related things, all initially forgotten, now incompatible extras that are inconsistently implemented, frequently broken and forever in beta/staging/unsupported hell...
If you mean what Wayland literally calls "staging" it means that compositors should adopt it now, it doesn't mean pre-release. Once multiple compositors implement the protocol it can become stable.
Staging still means it is untested because not widely implemented. And still unsupported by the majority of compositors. So basically still unusable.
Also, "can become stable" is a very rare thing. Only a single-digit percentage of staging ever became stable.
I'm sorely tempted to take the backend of a Wayland compositor and write a new X server on top of it, with a focus on deprecating everything not actually used by modern X apps that don't have alternatives, which would be a lot.
I bet you could benefit from quite a bit of the Wayland compositor work on modernising the lower levels, and end up with something much simpler than current Xorg without ditching much compatibility.
I think XWayland is basically an X server that supports Wayland. It is based on Xorg though. But if you really think it has a bunch of features nobody uses, you could try to delete those simplify that way.
Or am I misunderstanding what you want to do?
I don't want an X server that supports Wayland. I want a leaner, simpler X server without Wayland.
EDIT: To clarify, the reason I mentioned Wayland compositors is that it'd be an opportunity to pick a low-level rendering backend that has been written from scratch without the baggage of Xorg.
The "good parts" of X that modern apps actually use are comparatively simple compared to the low level bits - the protocol is trivial-ish, and you can get 90% there by implementing a small-ish subset of the protocol.
XWayland can be run in 'rootless' and 'rootful' modes.
Rootless is what it is typically ran as and allows you to integrate X11 apps into your Wayland desktop environment.
Rootful would allow you to run X11 desktop with X11 Window manager and the whole ten yards.
I don't know how well rootful mode is working because it is rarely used. I imagine it would take some work to make it fully functional. But it something that exists and I would expect that the Xorg/Wayland devs would like to see it fully fleshed out.
But that essentially gets you most of the way there.
But then I'd get the baggage of both a whole Wayland compositor and much of Xorg. I want neither.
> designed something completely byzantine and weird. Time was invested, so no stopping now or ever. [...] is a dead horse. Made edible by sufficient fermentation and mobile towards the finish line by declaring the rot spreading over the line to be a victory.
This applies perfectly well as a criticism of X11, you know.
Yes, but X11 has the excuse of being very old. Wayland was supposed to be a clean redesign, learning from the mistakes of the past. They learned from some mistakes, but they also completely ignored all of the good ideas, functionality and necessary additions that X11 and other systems like MacOS and Windows had.
They designed a system that was as simple as they could make it, trying to push the complexity that wasn't just bitmap-blitting onto others. And they isolated Wayland from all possibilities of making proper, compatible, common extensions. They tried to be the opposite of X11, because they recognized "push absolutely everything into the X11 server" as a mistake. Nobody ever used the XPrint extension. But they went too far, cut away all the useful stuff, all the necessary extensions, even cut away the "server" and just went with a library plus protocol. Now everyone has to reimplement their own server (compositor in wayland lingo), producing tons of busywork, splitting the community, ensuring incompatibility and pain. And everyone has to keep up to date on all the tons of necessary extra protocols that all the compositors have to implement all over again.
Yes, the same words do apply. But for different reasons.
If you want to fix X11, you can. You can do all the work that the Wayland devs did.
People downvoting my TLDR and all that nonsense about XLibre on top is making me sad.
More and more people are using GPT for editing. I admit to sometimes using AI to help me too. To be fair, I'm not sure what to think of this particular slick style quite yet.
What in particular drove you to leave this comment? I am just curious. This doesn't strike me as Gen AI slop like other posts I see sometimes.
It's got an —, and apparently these are called "ChatGPT hyphens" now – even though they're on my keyboard.
Bad news for all my programming guides that use em dashes properly... ;D Luckily I have a Git history on them that predates LLMs, for whatever that's worth.
In Vim, the digraph is ^K-M.
Ah, a lot of people do use LLMs for editing. And when I read this I can just hear GPT-4.x's style and tone of voice in my head.
None of the following are smoking guns, but together... well, either it's GPT or it's https://xkcd.com/810/ .
* Bullet point lists
* emdash
* extensive use of bold
* sentence fragments
* "Here's the good news:"
* juxtaposition over emdash: "This transition is happening — but we’re not being ignored anymore."
* Bullet points that simply MUST have a conclusion " The entire workflow? Gone." , " not just for me, but for every user who deserves to choose how they compute.", "And they shouldn’t have to." , "But we have to start over."
* "I hope it’s done right — not half-baked, not bolted on."
* "We lost an ecosystem."
* "That has to change. / And it starts with every compositor agreeing on what “accessible” actually means. "
etc....
Maybe it's
A) A human who is a very skilled writer with a particular style
B) GPT4.x
but my best guess is
C) Both: Human did the rough draft, then had GPT4 edit it into shape.
OFF but I liked most of these points ~3 years ago. Bullet points for "what you will learn" and "what you've learnt" for example.
Now articles structured this way make me sad. I am not sure if it is acquired distaste, just tiring, or recent articles are indeed worse; either way I am not very happy about them.
People see an em dash and dismiss it as slop.
Maybe they don't know but some of us love them and have keyboards which have an em-dash/en-dash key or use an OS where they are easy to type.
XLibre talk is banned here, we DO have a choice.
It'd be odd indeed if we'd banned something we hadn't heard of.
After looking into it, I think what happened is that a few submissions were flagged by users, for the cromulent reason that the articles weren't very substantive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44332956
Edit: There also seems to be an aura of flamedrama around it. I didn't look closely, so I may be wrong, but if that's true, it's another reason why HN users would (cromulently) flag it.
Can you elaborate more on discussions about XLibre being banned on here? Are accounts that mention it getting banned? Is there just mass downvoting by partisans with some kind of agenda?
I get that X11 has security issues, but NVIDIA drivers and Wayland still seem to have no support now and no support planned for the future, so Wayland is a non-negotiable non-option for many (most?) Linux desktop users, including myself.
That said, with the custodian of X11 refusing to merge 1000+ patches including various bug fixes and security fixes, I'm excited for the prospect of XLibre - this is exactly what Open Source, as an idea, was invented to facilitate - user choice.
Wayland supports nvidia cards, that they are not supported is FUD at this point in time.
I have an RTX 4060 Ti with latest drivers installed, KDE on Debian. On the login screen, I can select X11 or Wayland. Selecting X11 lets me log in fine, selecting Wayland and logging in results in a black screen and the only thing I can do to get any video out at all is switching to another TTY.
I have an RTX 4060 with latest drivers, KDE, and Arch. Wayland works perfectly for me. Maybe Debian has some outdated packages that haven't caught up yet?
"Works on my machine, just use my OS" isn't a solution to my problem, whereas X11 is a solution to my problem.
Wasn't suggesting at all that you use my distro or that you can't use X11 as your solution. Debian is great and I use it for all of my servers. I'm just responding to the assertion that Wayland doesn't work with NVIDIA today, which is really only true if you are using older packages for a more stable distro. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not accurate to represent the current state of Wayland based on a distro known for using older packages.
You're literally running Debian. It's Debian. It's old, it's outdated, yes that's your problem!
Listen, I run Debian too. But I'm not going to get online and complain out X Y Z not working when I'm running a package from 3 years ago. Please, be for real.
>It's old, it's outdated, yes that's your problem!
No, it's stable, it's reliable, it's the solution to all of the problems I had on Arch, Fedora, and other rolling releases.
And again, Nvidia drivers work perfectly right out of the box on X11.
Wayland? That's a new problem.
You don't have to preach Debian to the choir man - I run Debian.
We're talking about very new developments here. You're running years old packages. Okay? That's not going to work.
When you're running Debian, it's expected you're going to be 3-5 years behind the Linux userspace status quo. So it's absolutely fine you're on X11. I have a desktop on Bookworm running X11 on Nvidia - works great, I love it. I also have a very, very new laptop running Tumbleweed on Wayland and kernel 6.15. X really struggles with new hardware in a way Wayland does not. For me on that computer, Wayland is better in a plethora of ways. I am a bit forced to run a very new kernel and Mesa and all that due to running bleeding edge hardware.
Same exact experience here. Nearly borked my entire installation trying to get that to work.
And I am running a 4060 Ti 16Gb perfectly on my Fedora setup with wayland and KDE.
I have an Nvidia card with the default Fedora install and it works on Wayland without having to do anything.
Really? As of a couple months ago I nearly totally hosed my Debian installation trying to get Wayland GDM working under Nvidia.
I've been totally breaking Linux installs trying to get Nvidia to work for 15 years now, and that's on X11. On the other hand I recently did the first OS upgrade that I've ever done successfully without breaking Nvidia and that was running Wayland.
Nvidia is just really really bad on Linux in general, so it's always a coin toss if you'll be able to boot your system after messing with their drivers, regardless of display server.
Nvidia under Linux has had a long and hard history.
For most purposes, including gaming, it is best to avoid Nvidia hardware. Using Intel for laptops and AMD for dedicated GPUs is kinda the best general approach if you are planning on using Linux.
Of course if you have a need for CUDA then Nvidia is the only game in town, but that is a different issue then Wayland support.
For a while Nvidia was fighting the Xorg/Wayland devs over GBM vs EGLStreams which has delayed Wayland support. This has to do with the API extensions that allowed Wayland to manage application output buffers.
Gnome was the only Wayland environment to try to support EGLStreams for Nvidia, but it really didn't do them any good.
A while ago Nvidia eventually switched over to GBM and EGLStreams is dead, which helped out a lot of people running non-Gnome Wayland desktops. But there are lots of problems with Nvidia drivers besides that right now.
The reality is that Nvidia doesn't care about consumer Linux desktop. Their primary focus is on Enterprise users in terms of people needing graphically accelerated desktops.
So right now if you are running Linux on your personal workstations/desktops/laptops you are essentially beta testers for whenever Enterprise Linux distros make the switch to Wayland.
> The reality is that Nvidia doesn't care about consumer Linux desktop. Their primary focus is on Enterprise users in terms of people needing graphically accelerated desktops.
What does this actually mean in terms of technology? What is Nvidia providing that works for RHEL but doesn't work for Fedora, or whatever?
I haven't tried Debian but the latest releases of Ubuntu, Fedora as well as any rolling release distro work fine.
> Can you elaborate more on discussions about XLibre being banned on here? Are accounts that mention it getting banned? Is there just mass downvoting by partisans with some kind of agenda?
YC moderators are hiding the articles from the front page.
x11libre got 2 active discussions here according to
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
and both got removed from the front page
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44302650 -- 2 days ago | 80 points | 197 comments -- Long live Xorg, I mean Xlibre
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44199502 -- 14 days ago | 116 points | 180 comments -- The X.Org Server just got forked (announcing XLibre)
Those articles were flagged by users, not moderators, and I'm not sure moderators even saw them (I didn't).
The topic isn't banned. More substantive articles would stand a better chance of not getting flagged, though.
A highly controversial guy making controversial patches to a somewhat heated topic around these parts is going to get flagged by users too, how are you so certain it's the admins doing the hiding? Even when not flagged the score to comment ratios will drag those off the front page quickly.
Both threads devolved into politics, and that's likely the reasons why they got flagged. There's no evidence these were hidden by moderators, as opposed to because regular users flagged threads.
Having seen some of your comments on one of those threads, there's a decent chance your comments contributed to getting those posts flagged.
The [flagged] indicator on a submission usually indicates user flagging. Moderators and algorithms just quietly downweight submissions without any visible indicator. So this isn't an HN moderator position, the question to resolve is why users would flag it.
In this case, I'd have flagged them too if I saw them. The "long live" post is an aggressive tirade that reflects poorly on the author and led to a poor-quality discussion. The second is a link to a git commit history, which is weird in its own right and provides no explanation, and the context provided in the comments shows that a generally dislikable figure with extreme political views is now leading a fork of X11 that has yet to prove itself viable. So I'd probably have flagged that one too as pointless drama until proven otherwise.
What's XLibre? Are they taking Linux desktop accessibility more seriously?
It's a fork of x.org that's trying to keep actively developing it more than the x.org developers are interested in doing (because they are working on wayland and see x.org as basically obsolete). That in itself is a reasonable goal but given the person responsible for it I would not be too optimistic about it.
XLibre is a fork of Xorg X11's codebase started by a developer who got kicked out of the Xorg project because he was making lots of changes that broke everything and had a hard time getting along with the other devs.
Another dev blindly applied his MRs assuming he had tested stuff before submitting the request and they had to go back and revert a bunch of stuff.
Broke nvidia compatibility, broke xrandr extension, and a bunch of other stuff.
Googler, NSA'er, or Red Hatter?
This is false, he we the sole person submitting large amounts of code for about a year and was widely praised, until he forked and red hat went nuclear on his account for opposing their corporate goals, he was not kicked out for bad changes or anything of the sort. Trying to revise history on this is malicious.
The people like OA are spreading misinformation because the developer stated everyone was welcome to contribute and would oppose excessive politics. Keep in mind red hat is currently getting sued 3x over for blatantly racist policies which they used to ban other contributors and forced on their managers, they are evil people.
> What's XLibre?
a fork of X allegedly maintained by an arsehole
> Are they taking Linux desktop accessibility more seriously?
no
From their readme:
> Together we'll make X great again!
This explains the project in a nutshell.