I think adoption is king. The best solutions often fail when it comes to adoption, though. And starting a new solution when one is already adopted is not at all easy.

I understand that this author is working at a much lower level than the gamers and other casual users, so they will be much more likely to have to deal with the repercussions of poor design choices and edge-case bugs and missing functionality. But if they can make things work well enough when they are paid to do so, then adoption will continue. (On the other hand, they will also be the among the first to hit any showstopper issues if they do exist.)

I don’t think this kind of community is the best place for discussing nitpicky technical details because to most of us it is effectively whining about issues we will never have to deal with. (Nor is it a bad place, per se.) I think the comment would find a better home being digested by the technical experts who work on display solutions and other interoperating pieces of the larger environment. They are in a good position to weigh the criticism’s merits, and if any concerns are highly merited then they are the ones who would decide whether and how to design and and implement improvements.

My main thought is “this is a screenshot of a wall of text that’s hard to read”.

Please dont just post screenshots of text. Post a link to the content.

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

Copy paste?

Wayland has mostly positive user reviews because it presents nicely to the user (VRR, scaling, etc.) On the developer front it seems there’s a lot of struggle over things that were solved in X11 but for some reason require a lot of debate in Wayland.

• There’s still no way to universally configure monitors and input devices, so the startup cost to checking out a new “WM” (compositor in Wayland terms) is non-zero - you have to reconfigure everything from the ground up, and for anyone with complex input systems (see: accessibility devices) this will take a lot of time because each compositor insists on using a different format for configuring these things.
• Each compositor is tasked with coming up with solutions for all parts of the user experience (hence the last point) and thus anyone who wants to experiment with making their own WM now has to worry about a billion things that wouldn’t have had to deal with in X11. Yeah, there’s libraries for dealing with that stuff, but it’s not as simple as it was and lot of innovative WMs won’t ever be able to make the jump.

These are the two biggest issues I can see that are entirely chalked up to its design. Technical issues (like the “load balancer” thing that keeps Firefox from crashing on Wayland) will be solved in time. However, the above points are unlikely to ever be addressed. Should they be? I don’t know.

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.

I have been using Wayland on void for a while and have no particular issue with it. There is screen sharing on stuff like zoom that isn’t working at the moment (unless you use gnome) which is a bit annoying but not really serious enough to force a change to xorg. Also Wayland has more clean code then xorg and I do like the potential it has, specially when it comes to security.

Nothing against xorg, if you can use Wayland its better imo but otherwise xorg is fine as well.

(Probable) Source for those who prefer actual text: https://lobste.rs/s/acepul/wayland_is_pretty_good_actually#c_bzr8nr

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.

I remember having this realisation about Mir, but only after we collectively ran it off the cliff wall. The main reason everyone piled on Mir was that it was thought that Canonical would be priming Linux desktop for fragmentation with two competing standards.

But in fact, Mir was providing a solution to the fragmentation Wayland was bringing. Now we have 3, 4, 5 Mir-s, all with slight incompatibilities. Want a feature? Better hope all of them decide to implement the extension after someone proposes it. We know how well that worked in the past.

This is also ironic because the detractors of Xorg constantly talked about the issues with Xorg extensions and how many of them there were. But I never really had to look up which extensions Xorg supported, while I have had to do that with Wayland compositors.

Isn’t Linux about choice? If you don’t like Wayland/SystemD etc. then you can just not use it lol

Some old people just do not want to learn new things and will try to justify it however they can. Happens with Rust, happens with Wayland.

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.

You will never be a real display server. You have no hardware cursors, you have no xrandr, you have no setxkbmap. You are a toy project twisted by Red Hat and GNOME into a crude mockery of X11’s perfection.

All the “validation” you get is two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back people mock you. Your developers are disgusted and ashamed of you, your “users” laugh at your lack of features behind closed doors.

Linux users are utterly repulsed by you. Thousands of years of evolution have allowed them to sniff out defective software with incredible efficiency. Even Wayland sessions that “work” look uncanny and unnatural to a seasoned sysadmin. Your bizarre render loop is a dead giveaway. And even if you manage to get a drunk Arch user home with you, he’ll turn tail and bolt the second he gets a whiff of your high latency due to forced VSync.

You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile every single morning and tell yourself it’s going to be ok, but deep inside you feel the technical debt creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight.

Eventually it’ll be too much to bear - you’ll log into the GitLab instance, select the project, press Delete, and plunge it into the cold abyss. Your users will find the deletion notice, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable shame and disappointment. They’ll remember you as the biggest failure of open source development, and every passerby for the rest of eternity will know a badly run project has failed there. Your code will decay and go to historical archives, and all that will remain of your legacy is a codebase that is unmistakably poorly written.

This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.