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Wayland is not killing smaller distributions. Who even came up with that batshit crazy idea?
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Killing is overly dramatic, but it's putting a burden on certain projects if they want to convert to it and not all have the resources to tank it. I don't see Window Maker porting their toolkit to Wayland, for instance.
But XWayland exists so I don't see what's the fuss.
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My comment was about distributions specifically and those package Wayland since ages.
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Flatpak is good for diversity. Users don't need to worry about whether the obscure distro they want to use has the software they want in its repos. If a distro supports flatpak it will work with most popular software out of the box.
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Having run PostmarketOS on an old Samsung Galaxy tablet and now Arch on PineTab 2, Flatpak often works better than the native package manager. Especially with Wayland, many packages just work including touchscreen.
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I may be misunderstanding flatpack, though I do understand the draw of all dependencies in one package.
One of the big things that drew me to linux some years ago was "oh, you don't have to reinstall every dependency 101 times in a packaged exe so the system stays much smaller?" As well as in-place updates without a restart. It resulted in things being much much less bloated, or maybe that was just placebo.
Linux seems to be going in the flatpack direction which seems to just be turning it into a windows-like system. That and nix-like systems where everything is containerized and restarting is the only thing that applies updates seems to be negating those two big benefits.
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X11 is already dead, and it will not become more or less usable it will always stay the way it's and wayland will get better. that's the difference and flatpak is just an option it doesn't try to replace what's already availible. spreading distrust and misinformation about these softwares doesn't help
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X11 is already dead
How do you mean that? I've been using X11 for like 17 years. i3 uses X11, and I will most likely not use another WM if I can help it. It's perfect for me. X11 is available in the core repositories of all the big distros.
Curious to know what you mean by "dead".
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Wayland reduces bugs and standardizes the desktop, and flatpak makes it easier for distros to include apps without going through the process of packaging them.
This post is FUD bullshit, Wayland and Flatpak are making it easier to run an indie distro.
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I've been using Wayland for a while, and I've seen more bugs with my WMs than in my ~1000 hours of Deep Rock Galactic playtime
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Reduces bugs 🤣
Adding 10 bugs to your apps for every bug removed from the display manager
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Wayland reduces bugs
As I have to give a few lectures, I can't say I'm pleased with how screen-sharing or using a projector in the classroom fails almost half of the time and always embarrasses me in front of everyone. I ended up purging the Wayland stuff and going back to good ol' i3 and I haven't had a display-related issue ever since.
X11 works, it may not be as sexy or modern as Wayland but it's battle-tested and just works and for the vast majority of people, excluding Wayland's bugs, the differences are not even noticeable.
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This post isn't bullshit. The title indicates that we should discuss in the comments. 🙂 I'm not OP btw.
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There are pros and cons.
Total centralization of the Linux Eco system isn't good for anyone. But total fragmentation where there's a million different distros that can all do basically the same thing isn't good either.
Wayland and Flatpak are great projects though. Love seeing them get more adoption.
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Great projects, but far from a finished product.
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People complaining about something opensource not doing what they want it to do: dudes/dudettes, if you want to maintain X11, go right ahead. Or if you want it maintained, pay somebody to do it. But stop this incessant whining about opensource devs choosing a direction you don't like and pretending it's the end of the world. This isn't some faceless, megacorp with closed-source shit you have no control over.
If all the people complaining about wayland either put their energy to positive stuff like making wayland better or making X11 better, this wouldn't be a problem.
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Good thing the world is that simple, you're completely correct. Nobody who could theoretically prevent something they don't like is not entitled to their dislike, duh!
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That's exactly what I was I saying! Wow, your reading comprehension gets five stars and a kiss on the check. Papa Wouter must be impressed!
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My pet peeve is when people complain someone else's free labor isn't being done in the way they'd prefer. First of all, it's entitled. Secondly, complaining on social media rarely if ever accomplishes anything in FOSS land.
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Counterpoint, if all of the people advocating for wayland actually worked on improving wayland to a usable state instead maybe people would actually want to use it.
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No one's forcing you to use it. If you don't want to, stick to X11. I've been testing wayland for a few months now and it's fine. It does most of I want it to. I don't need fancy fractional scaling, adaptive refresh rates, or whatever other fancy stuff people complain about that isn't there. It shows my windows, allows screen-share, and... that's it. Only thing missing for me is scriptability.
I'm not advocating for Wayland nor X11, just saying to stop shitting on devs who give a lot of free time to write opensource code that none of us have to pay for. All we have to do is be nice - maybe report bugs, maybe maybe donate if we have the means.
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Distros should be free to evolve and fill any amd every niche. Let the rivers of life flow.
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It is by the juice of distro that thoughts acquire speed, the fingers acquire stains. The stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my rig in motion.
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Wayland is so much better than X. You don't have to use it but its simplicity means most of the Linux community is going to.
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What’s so much better about Wayland than X? I mean, I’m not really a fan of X and the security nightmare that it is, but as a user it’s all pretty plug and play these days. What does a normal user get out of Wayland? Would they even know they’re using it?
I’d love to try it, but it currently won’t work with some software I use, so I haven’t bothered… And honestly I’m kind of confused about how everybody is talking about how amazing Wayland is (and how it seems to suddenly be the one true path for a bunch of distros) when my only experience with Wayland is people talking about how great it is and then not being able to screenshare or whatever… Which doesn’t make it seem great from the outside? That maybe sounds a bit flippant, but I genuinely don’t understand why “normal” people are so excited? I mean, I can see people caring about features like HDR and maybe that’s easier to build into Wayland than ancient X11, but I’d be more excited about the specific feature than Wayland itself which may make implementing these things easier?
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Here's the sad truth that Wayland haters hate: Wayland is way more performant and streamlined. X11 is an overly patched mess.
Everytime I had to install a distro, EVERYTIME I had to do some textfile hacking to avoid screen tearing with X11. Turns out in Wayland that is a virtually impossible bug.
Forget about making touchscreens work properly in X11, specially with a secondary screen.
I also remember all the weird bugs that appear in X11 when you have 2 screens with different scaling. No issue at all with Wayland.
Pretty basic stuff in any modern setup.
Wayland performs perfectly on platforms like KDE Plasma or Gnome. I miss no feature. It just requires that some propietary apps realise its potential. And that is what is already happening and will happen throughout 2024.
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First of all, X is not a security nightmare. There were 0 cases of someone getting hacked because of X exploit. It's a FUD.
Now Wayland is a fad (haha). It's not that much better than X and when it was drafted 10 years ago everyone just ignored it. Over the decade it became clear that X is stuck and at some point it will become obsolete so people started looking at alternatives and Wayland started getting some traction. Over time different tools started getting Wayland support, some people started getting exited about it and a kind of new meme developed where using Wayland meant that you're ahead of everyone else (just like using Arch BTW). In the end it's just a nice PR stunt. Ask people what specifically is so great about Wayland and they will mention some obscure features most people don't need and features that it will have 'soon'. In the long term the move will hopefully be a good thing but as of now if you don't specifically need the few features it has you can keep ignoring it.
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Sure, if you call "simplicity" to literally not doing anything so that every coder has to implement the graphics stack on every program on their own.
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Well no, its handled by the desktop and libraries.
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Flatpak doesn't conform to the XDG home directory, and that upsets me. Also we have an ongoing dispute between SI and IEC units on their GitHub. But I like it otherwise.
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Not doing that is the whole point of flatpak. XDG_HOME is a bad design because it leads to a giant and hard to sift through swamp of mixed files, with no separation in terms of tidyness and security whatsoever.
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The several distros is a thing of sheer beauty. It's like the meritocratic free market -- everyone can participate and the only way to win is to make something better than anyone else.
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Flatpak packages still suck at integration without breaking something in the core app. They're really great for bleeding edge and cross distro support tho.
Wayland still can't do all the cool tricks X11 can, so it's not like it's really being forced upon anyone beyond X11 losing on potential major updates which is unlikely.
DEs are willing to switch to Wayland given that it is either equal or superior to X11 which is still not the case for several scenarios and applications.
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Exactly my POV. Do all the things X11 can, and I have no problem switching whatsoever.
Why did no one had any issues switching from PulseAudio to PipeWire? Because it was simply better. It could do everything PulseAudio could, plus a lot more. It was backwards compatible (with plugins of course) and there were practically very little issues with it at the point at which distros and users decided to switch. It was a finished product.
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I suddenly have the urge to daily drive Hannah Montana Linux
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To devils advocate a little in general with this topic: For wider spread adoption, Linux kinda needs to adopt around more standards. If you put yourself in the shoes of the average windows or Mac (even iOS/Android) user; it's an overall standardized experience.
Linux now, is mostly a choice of DE and package manager. I still absolutely want distros like arch and Gentoo to still exists as they are.
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Windows and Mac don't have standards; they're single solitary stand alone monoliths. The user experience is the same in their walled gardens because they are the same, not because those systems embrace standards. In particular Microsoft's lack of standards has been a point of pain for Linux and FOSS users for decades. Linux has actual standards and that is exactly why there is so much diversity. That diversity would have crumbled into chaos long ago if the Linux community did not embrace standards.
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If Windows users had to deal with the dependency issues, it likely would've never taken off. That's kind of the problem I've seen around various Linux distros, though I wager it's gotten a lot better in recent years. For the record, I've been out of the Linux game for a good 6 years, and I barely ever boot up my computer much. I'm able to run my business completely off my phone (except tax season), and I haven't made the earnest effort to get back into it due to time constraints.
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Man...we've been saying that since '99...
I mean it has gotten a lot better. Dependency hell is mostly a thing of the past. If you were around back then using it then you should know the suffering we all went through to get ANY sort of usability out of it. Half the time it wouldn't even fucking work at all due to some weird hardware you had, or you were limited to terminal only because XFree86 didn't know what to make of your video card (it was a time of cheap shitbox Pentium MMX/Pentium II/Celeron machines, some of which came in cow print boxes). It sure has come a long way from my perspective.
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Ok, but nobody explained what the equivalent of "ssh -X" was supposed to be with wayland.
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It doesn't exist as far as I know.
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Waypipe
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It's such a niche feature that I bet most people under 30yrs never heard or used that it's become too cringey that everyone keeps mentioning it.
But there's the solution already mentioned.
I'd just like that some people would look a bit at themselves and realize that almost nobody wants or cares about that single weird feature. There are many remote desktop solutions more known to end users that need that kind of interaction.
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I don't mind Wayland but I sure hope flatpack will not become the default way to distribute packages. Most packages I tried so far didn't work. I just avoid it now.
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That's strange? I've never come across a single broken Flatpak across multiple computers with Linux installed. Do you have examples of broken Flatpaks?
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Nope, I don't remember and after it happened couple of times I just started avoiding it.
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I don't have examples but can confirm that mamy flatpaks don't work out of the box. chromium and brave browser for me crash after a few seconds
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I don't use it at all, I just repackage stuff that I need for my distro's package manager... if they're not in the repos.
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More like "Wayland is getting killed by my Nvidia card"
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Honestly if you care about Linux don't buy Nvidia at this point.
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I was just in a position to buy a top of the line video card. Even thought Nvidia still outperforms AMD at the top end I never even considered them an option.
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I agree but it's very unfortunate considering graphics cards are so expensive to replace nowadays so if you already have an Nvidia card then you're kinda screwed.
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Honestly anything that doesn't get ported to wayland is probably old enough that it doesn't really make sense to use as your primary desktop anyway. The most niche DE I regularly use is NsCDE, but it's entirely FVWM scripts and FVWM is planning on adding wayland support. It'll be a little sad to lose things like Trinity, WindowMaker, and Afterstep, but they were never amazing anyway and either way I doubt X will actually be unusable for a long time still.
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I miss bspwm, none of the Wayland compositors work quite the same. Hyprland is close, but it's just not quite as good. I moved to Wayland for the security benefits, but I miss X11/bspwm.
The worst part is there's no standardization around screenshots/screen sharing/etc. so every DE/WM in Wayland has to be supported separately, or implement wlroots; which restricts how the software can be written.
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The second statement is not true, the standardization is flatpak portals and they by now cover almost every aspect of the system. The screenshot api is this: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/portal-api-reference.html#gdbus-org.freedesktop.portal.Screenshot
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Yes -flatpak. I'm not a big fan. It's nice though
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My problem with it is honestly just a personal thing...
My current laptop uses an Nvidia GPU.... i don't think i need to say more
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"reduces fragmentation" wtf lol. If it wasn't for flatpak making it easy to run proprietary / obscure apps on my weirdo little distro (Void Linux, one of the few remaining non-systemd distros) I would have switched to something mainstream like Debian long ago. People are gonna go with the distro that supports (i.e. has non-broken packages for) the apps they use. Having a cross-platform package manager makes it easier for small independent distros to exist and be useful, not harder.
EDIT: And while it's true that Wayland adoption kills obscure X11 window managers, Wayland adoption also spawns a wide range of obscure Wayland compositors. Think hyprland, wayfire... It's by far not all Gnome and KDE! If anything, we can expect more people making Wayland compositors as hobby projects, if Waylands claims about a simpler codebase are to be believed.
In conclusion: this is a stupid argument lmao
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I use Void too, but not Flatpak. You can use xbps-src to repackage those obscure pieces of software, you do know that, right?
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I use flatpak because I enjoy the sandbox as well. Nice to know that a zeroday in some obscure internet-enabled program won't automatically grant the hacker access to my entire home directory. And as for xbps-src, I might as well submit my package to the official repos while I'm at it. Don't get me wrong, I do want to eventually contribute to Void's repos in some way, but when I have time for that. And right now, I don't have time to essentially become a package maintainer just to be able to use the apps that I need to use.
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If anything, we can expect more people making Wayland compositors as hobby projects, if Waylands claims about a simpler codebase are to be believed.
They are not. Wayland compositors have to do a lot more of the same thing in every compositor than window managers ever had to. So many in fact that their whole central design idea has to be corrected for by everyone using wlroots to implement those common parts to get anywhere anyway which means wayland compositors in other languages without wlroots bindings are less likely.
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have to do a lot more of the same thing in every compositor than window managers ever had to
Yes, but is that not entirely expected? As far as I understand, compositors are complete implementations of Wayland's display server specification, whereas window managers are just a helper program that, well, manages windows, while Xorg does the heavy lifting required to fully implement the X Window System protocol. So the only real difference that I see is that, in the X world, the "common parts" are managed by a separate process (Xorg), whereas in the Wayland world, they are managed by a separate library (wlroots). So a hobbyist developer trying to make a window manager in some obscure language would need to figure out how to communicate with Xorg in that language, whereas a developer trying to make a compositor in some obscure language would need to write wlroots bindings for that language. Maybe I am just ignorant, but those seem like comparable efforts to me.
And lastly, in the X world, the only (widespread) implementation of the X Window System protocol is Xorg, but, in the Wayland world, there are compositors that use wlroots, and those that don't. So wouldn't that alone indicate more fragmentation / diversity? Sure, there are more X window managers than Wayland compositors out there, but X11 has also existed for longer. In short, I don't see how the Wayland system is more adverse to diversity of implementations than X
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I don't like flatpak any more because it makes restoring snapshots take forever.
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I like the way standardisation is going, everything is going to be on the bee standard and that that isnt being updated too well too bad. What seperates us from the windows users is we can evolve if ya look at the distro tree it looks a lot like natrual selection to me
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Lol I'll care if I'm ever not able to build from source, which would mean I probably won't use that software, so I don't care.
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Why not?
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It's killing what effectively is the backbone of what makes up Linux and the open source world - diversity.
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There's an increasing amount of wayland compositors, so I don't think diversity goes away.
Additionally, hyprland supports plugins which can do most things an X.org window manager could do. E.g. there's a plugin to support river's window layout protocol, which allows for creating custom window layout generator.
Diversity doesn't just vanish, it's replaced by new possibilities, created by solid protocol specifications with multiple implementations.
Similarily, nixpkgs and other repos continue to grow, just like flathub does too. These projects aren't killing diversity, they're enabling it.
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Linux'es diversity has never been found in the large fundamental pieces of software. Instead it's typically been found in the nooks and crannies between them. We've typically had one or several of those and most have used those. It's the kind of diversity you find between evolutionary differences between the same species, not revolutionary differences.
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the only reason this bothers me is... ew... flatpak.
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Oh god, how bad flatpak is. I say this as someone who used to head up a security group for an OS.
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do you have anything to back this up other than a fuzzy claim of authority? so far when I see people say things like this they're always talking about a handful of since fixed vulnerabilities early on in the project
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Niche X11 projects die, niche wayland projects emerge... Nothing's really gonna change here. And packages SHOULD be unified. There is no response reason to package chromium in 15 different ways for every distro.
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Why not? Maybe I'm using a niche architecture which doesn't gets built by default. Or maybe I don't use glibc.
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Wayland is still too immature. I couldn't get it to work on my Kubuntu distro.
And then there's this list of problems with Wayland.
https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277
BEGIN RANT
"Move fast and break things" may be fine for software gurus who love to experiment and have no problem hitting their head against the wall every few days while believing in the promise of a free-to-fix future, but this isn't true for poor or busy people who are NOT middle class folks living in their own house in a suburb with a garage full of computer parts. There are single parents, caregivers with disabled and/or elderly, folks who need a reliable computer for their studies, and in general people who simply need something that JUST WORKS.
I'm a caregiver, and unfortunate I'm poor enough that I don't have money to buy a commercial OS. Heck, I wish Windows just worked instead of making old versions obsolete. I was perfectly fine with Windows 7 ten years ago until Microsoft started doing planned obsolescence bullshit with their forced updates. I had to switch to Linux because Windows became very unreliable and I needed a stable platform that wouldn't ruin my work.
(So if you're one of the persons who reply to "Help my Linux is having problems" with "well you should know Linux is like that, you should have thought it twice before switching", then you're part of the problem because that's a very, very shitty answer to give to a non technical end user with limited time and resources)
The year of the Linux desktop will never arrive if developers keep pushing incomplete and buggy software to the end users instead of actually fixing bugs and delivering their stuff ONLY when they're ready.
Wayland is NOT ready for the end user.
END RANT.
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if developers keep pushing incomplete and buggy software to the end users instead of actually fixing bugs
My understanding is, the issue is that fixing bugs in X has become too much of an issue due to bloat and bad historical architecture, so the developers working on it - and providing the software for free, if not working for free - instead worked together to develop a new standard aiming to fix the issues inherent to X's code and design.
The "list of problems" is absolute bullshit right from the start. The first two sections are "It didn't used to work like this in X, Wayland is trash!" and "I had some screen recording software using X APIs and they don't work when not running in X!". In fact, a lot of them follow this pattern, blaming Wayland because it doesn't have 100% backwards compatibility. It's not an X rewrite, it's meant to be a new, better piece of software.
I will not deny that Wayland has problems, of course - but those mostly come down to NVidia refusing to support open protocols, missing features that are yet to be implemented, and missing software support for Wayland.
I will also say that on Arch, which doesn't assume I'm using X, Wayland does work completely fine for me when following instructions. It might be an issue with the distro you're using not having good support, or one of those edge cases like problematic hardware. I definitely agree that you should stick with X for now if you have problems, but I'll also say that you're getting it for free, and if you don't report problems, they might also not know about them, for example because it only occurs on specific hardware.
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You're not wrong but also misinterpreting this. Yes, it's bad to push incomplete software on end users, and it's even apart of the entire development ideals of Linux: never break userspace. There's even small bits of code (see: egrep and fgrep) in the core commands that has been on the chopping block for removal for 2 decades but hasn't because removing them would break apps.
The choice of PUSHING Wayland on end users is not up to the developers making wayland, it's up to the distro maintainers, and this image honestly doesn't even make sense. Most distros right now are either so nothing, and the ones that do are disabling Wayland until it's more feature complete. The only big distro I remember that's specifically is pushing for it is Fedora, and Fedora is specifically known for pushing for new initiatives.
X11 works just fine, and will work just fine for a long time, and if there's ever a point where a majority of apps start dropping X11 support for Wayland, it's going to be because Wayland just works by that point and has for long enough for devs to care.
That article itself against has been a pain point for years because it over-dramaticises a lot of the pain points about Wayland and a lot of the issues it touts don't... exist anymore. I've used lots of software like OBS on Wayland just fine a long time ago even though the article says it's been broken for years. Nvidia on Wayland has also just gotten to a good state on proprietary drivers while the article implies you need the crappy open source drivers to use Wayland at all, which hasn't been true for a very long time. I could go on about this article, but Brodie Robertson has already talked it to death on YouTube.
Wayland does "just work" (no bugs, no configuration, just switch to it and nothing breaks) for a lot of users at this point, and I'm tired of this article ignoring that and trying to make it seem like Wayland is this buggy slop everyone's being forcefed when it's not.
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There are single parents, caregivers with disabled and/or elderly, folks who need a reliable computer for their studies, and in general people who simply need something that JUST WORKS.
This is also one of the many reasons why Linux as an OS fails to establish a bigger user base. Of course, this is one of the smallest problems, but it still is.
Like Linus said, every tool every dev made was usually because they wanted to fix problems in their workflow, not because users needed something that they can provide. Sure, I'd also look at things from this perspective. After all, god made his beard first, not everyone else's, but the trouble is, things don't really move fast enough in that direction. Don't get me wrong, there has been progress in GUI tools, but not enough IMO. Most tools are terminal based, and while that is not a problem for most UNIX type OS enjoyers, that is a problem for your averige Joe. That might not be the crowd we're trying to get off of MS and Apple products, but they still play an important role IMO, more of a guide as how a UI should look and feel to the average user. Linux and other UNIX based OSes kinda messed up with this one. Things are getting better though, have to say. I don't use some of the UIs for stuff people usually do, but I have tried a few and I have to say that things are moving in the right direction the past few years. Just not fast enough...
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Wayland has been great for several years now. Things change, especially technology.
I always found it so strange when the biggest tech nerds get upset about change.
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appimage and flatpack ftw
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Yeah, appimage and flatpack for the waste dump. I agree.
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i am going to steal your pan's and sell them on ebay
edit: and for the waste dump would be ftwd
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Funny how that move is the reason im thinking about moving back to windows...
My Manjaro xfce cant start qt applications because Wayland was not found in "" and I can't find the reason.
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And instead of switching to a better supported distro you're gonna go back to Windows? Alright.
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probably cause your running Manjaro tbh
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Fuck flatpack.
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but why? It makes software installation easy. You constantly angry nerds are a huge part of the reason Linux doesn't have more popularity. There's literally nothing wrong with flatpaks for the average user
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Yes, there is:
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Security updates can't be provided by the distro for all apps at once
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Waste of storage space, network traffic, and RAM
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It's flatpak, but yeah, I do agree 😂.
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Systemd is a mess though. And the Linux kernel. Its a bloated single binary in mostly unsafe languages, which is such an insanity!
I am so happy that Cosmic has such a good Rust compositor and even Desktop using Smithy.
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Ok people dont like the truth? Pipewire, Wayland, Flatpak, bubblewrap, podman, etc.
But having single binaries run, being completely unchangeable and written in unsafe code... damn
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