In response to Wayland Breaks Your Bad Software

I say that the technical merits are irrelevant because I don’t believe that they’re a major factor any more in most people moving or not moving to Wayland.

With only a slight amount of generalization, none of these people will be moved by Wayland’s technical merits. The energetic people who could be persuaded by technical merits to go through switching desktop environments or in some cases replacing hardware (or accepting limited features) have mostly moved to Wayland already. The people who remain on X are there either because they don’t want to rebuild their desktop environment, they don’t want to do without features and performance they currently have, or their Linux distribution doesn’t think their desktop should switch to Wayland yet.

  • @orangeboats
    2•1 year ago

    That is to say in practical effect actual usage of real apps so dwarfs any overhead that it is immeasurable statistical noise

    The concern about battery life is also probably equally pointless.

    some of us have actual desktops.

    There just aren’t. It’s not blurry.

    I don’t have a bunch of screen tearing

    Let me summarize this with your own statement, because you certainly just went out and disregarded all things I said:

    Your responses make me think you aren’t actually listening for instance

    Yeah, you are now just outright ignoring people’s opinion. 2 hours of battery life - statistical noise, pointless. Laptops - who neeeeeeeeds that, we have desktops!! Lack of fractional scaling which people literally listed as a “disadvantage” of Wayland before it got the protocol - yeah, I guess X11 is magic and somehow things are not blurry on X11 which has the same problem when XRandR is used.

    Do I need to quote more?

    Also, regarding this:

    Wayland development started in 2008 and in 2018 was still a unusable buggy pile of shit.

    Maybe you should take note of when Wayland development had actually started picking up. 2008 was when the idea came up. 2012 was when the concrete foundation started being laid.

    Not to mention that it was 2021 when Fedora and Ubuntu made it default. Your experience in 2018 is not representative of the Wayland ecosystem in 2021 at all, never mind that it’s now 2023. The 3 years between 2018-2021 saw various applications either implementing their first support, or maturing their support of Wayland. Maybe you should try again before asserting a bunch of opinions which are outdated.

    Wayland was effectively rebuilding the Linux graphics stack from the ground up. (No, it’s not rebuilding the stack for the sake of it. The rebuilding actually started in X.org, but people were severely burned out in the end. Hence Wayland. X.org still contains an atomic KMS implementation, it’s just disabled by default.)

    4 years of designing and 8 years of implementation across the entire ecosystem is impressive, not obnoxious.

    It’s obnoxious to those of us who discovered Linux 20 years ago rather than last week.

    Something makes me think that you aren’t actually using it 20 years ago.

    Maybe it’s just my memory of the modelines failing me. Hmmm… did I just hallucinate the XFree86 server taking down my system?

    Oh noes, I am getting old. Damn.

    • @[email protected]English
      -1•1 year ago

      You ably demonstrate your own inability to listen. The monitor on my right hand side right here as I type this isn’t blurry there is no amount of proving that it MUST be blurry that is more persuasive than the fact that as I type this I’m looking at it.

      Furthermore I didn’t say that the existence of desktops obviated the need to worry about the impact of resolution/scaling on battery life. I said that the impacts on battery life were both minimal and meaningless because mixed DPI concerns by definition concerns exclusively desktops and laptops which are plugged into external monitors at which time logically your computer is also plugged into power. In fact the overwhelming configuration for those which use external monitors is a dock which delivers both connectivity to peripherals and powers. If you are using a desktop OR a plugged in laptop the benefits of scaling more efficiently is zero.

      I started using Linux with the release of the very first release of Fedora then denoted Fedora “Core” 1. I’m not sure how you hallucinated that Wayland got 4 years of design and 8 years of implementation. First off by the end of the month it will be 15 years old so you fail first at the most basic of math. Next I’m guessing you want to pretend it got four year of design to make the second number look less egregious.

      With graphics programming relatively in its infancy X11 didn’t require 15 years to become usable and Apple took how many years to produce their stack was it even one? Working with incredibly powerful hardware, with a wide variety of approaches well understood and documented 15 years is downright embarrassing. Much as I enjoy Linux the ecosystem is kind of a joke.

      • @orangeboats
        2•1 year ago

        You ably demonstrate your own inability to listen.

        Or was it you?

        I’m not sure how you hallucinated that Wayland got 4 years of design and 8 years of implementation.

        2012-2021, or to clarify “Late 2012 to early-mid 2021” seems to be 8-point-something years to me. I dunno, did mathematics change recently or something?

        With graphics programming relatively in its infancy X11 didn’t require 15 years to become usable

        I hope you do understand that graphics weren’t as complicated back then. Compositing of windows was not an idea (at least, not a widely spread one) in the 90s. Nor was sandboxing an idea back then. Or multidisplay (we hacked it onto X11 later through XRandR). Or HDR nowadays. Or HiDPI. Or touch input and gestures. We software rendered everything too, so DRI and friends weren’t thought of.

        In a way… you are actually insulting the kernel developers.