I’m curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I’m afraid that at some point, we’ll realize there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite.
Are there any instances of this happening? Where something is designed with a flaw that doesn’t get realized until much later, necessitating scrapping the whole thing and starting from scratch?
Wayland could already do with a replacement.
Wayland is incomplete and unfinished, not broken and obsolete and hopelessly bad design. PulseAudio was bad design. Wayland is very well designed, just, most things haven’t been ported for it yet and some design by committee hell, but even that one is kind of a necessary tradeoff so that Wayland actually lasts a long time.
What people see: lol Firefox can’t even restore its windows to the right monitors
What the Wayland devs see: so how can we make it so Firefox will also restore its windows correctly on a possible future VR headset environment where the windows maintain their XYZ and rotation placement correctly so the YouTube window you left above the stove goes back above the stove.
The Wayland migration is painful because they took the occasion to redo everything from scratch without the baggage of what traditional X11 apps could do, so there is less likely a need for a Wayland successor when new display tech arrives and also not a single display server that’s so big its quirks are now features developers relied on for 20 years and essentially part of the standard.
There’s nothing so far that can’t be done in Wayland for technical implementation reasons. It’s all because some of the protocols aren’t ready yet, or not implemented yet.
Agreed, Wayland has a monumental task to do: replacing a 30+ year old windowing system.
X11 is 40 years old. I’d say it’s been rather successful in the “won’t need to be replaced for some time” category. Some credit where due.
I mean … It doesn’t matter why it can’t be done. Just that it can’t be done.
40 years old is also what makes it so hard to replace or even reimplement. The bugs are all decade old features, everything is written specifically for Xorg, all of which needs to be emulated correctly. It sure did serve us well, it’s impressive how long we’ve managed to make it work with technology well beyond the imagination of the engineers in the 80s.
There’s this for the protocols: https://github.com/probonopd/wayland-x11-compat-protocols
It can be done, it’s just nobody wants to do it. It’s not really worth the effort, when you can work on making it work properly in Wayland instead. That way you don’t need XWayland in the first place, but also XWayland can then implement it using the same public API everyone else does so it works on every compositor.
Then make it fully X11 backwards compatible. Make Wayland X12. C’mon, they already admitted NVidia was right and are switching the sync and working to finally support the card they’ve been busting a hate boner over the driver simply because they’re bigots against the licensing. Time to admit breaking the world was a mistake, too.
It’s slowly happening. KDE can now do global Xwayland shortcuts, they also implemented XWaylandVideoBridge and compositor restart crash recovery for apps. We’re getting proper HDR, we have proper per-monitor refresh rates and VRR, I can even hotplug GPUs. Some of that stuff works better in XWayland because we can just run multiple instances with different settings. For the particularly stubborn cases, there’s rootful XWayland. X12 would have to break things too, and I doubt an Xorg rewrite would be all that much further than Wayland is. Canonical had a go at it too with Mir which was much less ambitious.
NVIDIA was right on that one indeed, but Wayland also predates Vulkan and was designed for GLES, pretty much at the tail end of big drivers and the beginning of explicit and low level APIs like Vulkan. They could very well have been right with EGLStream too, but graphics on Linux back then was, erm, bad. But in the end they’re all still better than the kludge that is 3D in Xorg.
It’s getting a lot of momentum and a lot of things are getting fixed lately. It went from unusable to “I can’t believe it’s not Xorg!” just this year for me. It’s very nice when it works well. We’ll get there.
At this point they could make it the best thing in the world. Won’t ever fix the resentment they earned against us NVidia users, might fix some of the resentment from x11 folks… but that it needs a separate XWayland will always be a pain point. That’s a kluge.
I can’t up-vote this enough. The “architectural purists” have made the migration a nightmare. Always blaming everyone else for simply not seeing their genius. I’m honestly surprised it’s gotten as far as it has.
Can’t even update Firefox in place. Have to download a new copy, run it from the downloads folder, make a desktop shortcut myself, which doesn’t have the Firefox icon.
Can’t remember if that was mint or Ubuntu I was fiddling with, but it’s not exactly user friendly.
Do not download Firefox of the internet. Use your package manager or flatpak
This has nothing to do with Wayland, it’s just AppImages kinda sucking. Use Flatpak or the one in your distro’s repos, not the AppImage. AppImages are the equivalent of portable apps on Windows, like the single exe ones you’d put on a flash drive to carry around.
Also the AppImage developer is very against Wayland and refuses to support it, which is why Wayland support is a shitshow on AppImages.
If you pick the Flatpak it’ll get updated in the background, have a proper launcher and everything.
Seriously, I’m not a heavy software developer that partakes in projects of that scale nor complexity but just seeing it from the outside makes me hurt. All these protocols left-right and center, surely just an actual program would be cleaner? Like they just rewrite X from scratch implementing and supporting all modern technology and using a monolithic model.
Then small projects could still survive since making a compositor would almost be trivial, no need to rewrite Wayland from scratch cause we got “Waykit” (fictional name I just thought of for this X rewrite), just import that into your project and use the API.
That would work if the only problem they wanted to solve was an outdated tech stack for X. But there are other problems that wayland addresses too, like: how to scale multiple monitors nicely, is it a good idea to give all other apps the keystrokes that you do in the one in focus (and probably a lot more)
Wayland and X are very very different. The X protocol is a protocol that was designed for computer terminals that connected into a mainframe. It was never designed for advanced graphics and the result is that we have just built up a entire system that balances on a shoe box.
Wayland is a protocol that allows your desktop to talk to the display without a heavy server. The result is better battery life, simplified inputs, lower latency, better performance and so on
I agree in the sense that Wayland adoption would have definitely gone quicker if that was the case, however in the long run this approach does make sense (otherwise you will eventually just run into the same sorts of issues X11 had).
Btw what you’re describing is not that far off from the normal way of using Wayland protocols in development - you use wayland-scanner to generate C source files from the protocols, and you include those to actually “use” the protocols in your programs. Admittedly all my Wayland development experience has been “client-side”, so I really don’t know how complex it is to build a compositor, but dwl (minimalist Wayland compositor) is only around 3k lines of code (only slightly more than dwm (minimalist X wm)).
It is complex to build a Wayland compositor. When none existed, you had to build your own. So it took quite a while for even big projects like GNOME and KDE to work through it.
At this stage, there are already options to build a compositor using a library where most of the hard stuff is done for you.
https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots
https://github.com/CuarzoSoftware/Louvre
There will be more. It will not be long before creating Wayland compositors is easy, even for small projects.
As more and more compositors appear, it will also become more common just to fork an existing compositor and innovate on top.
One of the longer term benefits of the Wayland approach is that the truly ambitious projects have the freedom to take on more of the stack and innovate more completely. There will almost certainly be more innovation under Wayland.
All of this ecosystem stuff takes time. We are getting there. Wayland will be the daily desktop for pretty much all Linux users ( by percentage ) by the end of this year. In terms of new and exciting stuff, things should be getting pretty interesting in the next two years.
It’s what happens when you put theory over practicality.
What we wanted: Wayland.
What we needed: X12, X13…
The X standard is a really big mess
That’s kind of what I was trying to imply.
We needed a new X with some of the archaic crap removed. I.e. no one needs X primitives anymore, everything is its own raster now (or whatever it’s called).
Evolving X would have given us incremental improvements over time… Eventually resulting in something like Wayland.
You can’t evolve something that old.
What was stopping X just undergoing some gutting? I get it’s old and covered in dust and cobwebs but look, those can be cleaned off.
“Scoop out the tumors, and put some science stuff in ya”, the company that produced that quote went on to develop the most advanced AGI in the world and macro-scale portable on-demand indestructible teleportation.
I would rather X didn’t get access to deadly neurotoxin, thanks
I dunno, sounds kinda cool.
X12 it’s got 15% less X11!
Because we no longer have mainframes in computer labs. Each person now has there own machine.
And yet I play modern games on modern hardware with X just fine. It’s been extended a little bit since the 80s.
Yes it works but it everything is glued together with duct tape
So what? Clean that up then.
No body wanted Wayland except the mad scientists and anti nvidia bigots that made it.
Imagine calling developers who have a cold relationship with Nvidia due to Nvidia doing the bare minimum for Linux development “bigots” lol
I think you must be a fanboy. “Bigotry” towards a multi trillion dollar company lmao. What an absurd thought.
I’m no fanboy of any video card. I just have ton of laptops with NVidia in them, and the bigots making Wayland never gave a darn about our plight… and then they started pushing distros to switch before they did anything to fix it. Their callous attitude toward the largest desktop linux userbase is insulting and pushing the distros before they fix the problem should be criminal. Every one of them should be put away for trying to ruin Linux by abandoning it’s largest desktop user base. We dislike them, dislike them so much.
Now, will it keep us from using that crap when it finally works? No. We don’t have much choice. They’ve seen to that. x11 will go the way of the dodo. But can we dislike them forever for dragging us through the mud until they were finally forced to fix the darn thing? Yeah. Wish them nothing but the worst.
Nobody is being “bigoted” to Nvidia lmao, get some perspective.
And if you’re this butthurt Bout Wayland, don’t use it. I’ve been using it for years without issue, because I didn’t choose a hardware manufacturer that’s actively hostile to Linux. Nvidia is too bigoted for me, unfortunately.
It is so much better than X
Yup, Wayland is so old it already has old concepts. But it is also changing a lot
Needs to be replaced already. They’re having to change to explicit sync, which they should have done from the start. So throw it out, start over, make X12.