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.
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
This post isn’t bullshit. The title indicates that we should discuss in the comments. 🙂 I’m not OP btw.
Reduces bugs 🤣
Adding 10 bugs to your apps for every bug removed from the display manager
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.
deleted by creator
I suddenly have the urge to daily drive Hannah Montana Linux
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.
Great projects, but far from a finished product.
do you really expect people, who do this work in their free time out of the goodness of their heart, to release fully finished products that are supposed to work 100% flawlessly right from the get-go? maybe FOSS isn’t the right space for you then.
that’s not at all what they said but stay angry nerd
There are projects that beg to differ. PipeWire, a perfect example. The author thought it wasn’t stable enough even though some distros addopted it as default. He switched to version 1.0 a few months ago.
And I do also use non-FOSS software. I use whatever I like, I don’t discriminate, FOSS or not. Sure, it’d be great if every piece of software was open source, but hey, things are what they are 🤷. DaVinci Resolve is closed source, but there are a lot of things NLE video editors can learn from it.
I didn’t realise Red Hat, SUSE, Microsoft etc. didn’t pay their staff?
are they working on wayland?
From the first result on Google:
The Wayland Display Server project was started by Red Hat developer Kristian Høgsberg in 2008
So yeah, I suspect Red Hat does in some way contribute to development. As I’m sure does Microsoft, Canonical etc.
None of this happens in a vacuum.
This is what I found:
Wayland is developed by a group of volunteers initially led by Kristian Høgsberg
I can’t deny that maybe some larger company allocated resources to the project, even if, to me, it seems like no large company is directly funding the project right now, and Kristian seems like he hasn’t really participated in the development of wayland for the past year or so. The fact remains that it’s a FOSS project and you aren’t a paying customer, so IMO it’s kinda ridiculous to complain about it not being perfect right away. Work on improving it if you think it’s so bad.
I mean, they’re never gonna be finished if people don’t migrate to them and work on them. A lot of the wayland issues like “wayland breaks X” is because of the devs of said app rather than wayland itself. Kinda like adobe products and Linux, it ain’t linux that’s breaking them.
Yeah this thread is full of people expecting the new thing to immediately surpass the old, ignoring the decades of development and refinement that went into the old solution.
I get that, I really do, but don’t try and push a product that isn’t usable for everyone to everyone. Sure, whoever wants to use it, they can, report bugs, open PRs, whatever, but don’t push this thing like it’s the second comming to everyone out there. One, not everyone needs the features it has, X11 works fine for most people. Two, it’s not backwards compatible, meaning they’d have to abandon a lot of software that just doesn’t work with it (waypipe doesn’t work all the time and with every piece of software there is).
The transition is rushed, everyone feels that. Why? Because a lot of new features that new hardware had couldn’t be implemented in X11. And let’s be honest, this rushing to switch to Wayland is mostly because of gamers. Regarding a lot of things Linux related, they are the de facto standard that dictates whether somethings get’s changed or upgraded. I’m sorry, but not everyone is a gamer. Most people just need a working PC to do whatever. If you can’t be backwards compatible completely with the old UIs, I’m sorry, but that’s a deal breaker for me and I believe most regular users.
Xwayland is a thing, and nobody stops you from installing Xorg if you wanted. They’re just dropping official support so they can focus that energy to Wayland instead.
Also not all Xorg features should be ported.
I have found Wayland will work for 99% of users who aren’t gamers, all the major programs work well, ironically Wayland has been worse for gaming so far for me on the underpowered laptop, but that’s due to it having to run also through xwayland, which will be a problem solved by Valve pretty soon as they don’t have to worry about Xorg anymore and can make proton work better for Wayland.
Tried Xwayland… jump through hoops to get something meant to be run on Wayland on X11… sorry, not for me. And it didn’t work in the end BTW, have no idea why.
Though, I have to admit, this was over a year ago.
Still, my stand point is, this is not a finished product no matter how you look at it. If you don’t have at least 90% of the stuff that are supposed to work, working, without major problems, then yes, but this is more like 50/50. Some things work, some don’t, we really have no idea what does and doesn’t… except Wayland and Nvidia of course, we know that doesn’t work.
Ummm… Sure… Progress takes time, and it won’t speed up at all if everyone says “it’s not ready,” and edge cases never get tested. I mean, the project is sixsteen years old now. It’s been more than just " pretty good" for years at this point.
And I doubt that your distro is going to drop X11 session support anytime soon. So if you reinstall, you may need to do one more step to make that the default. Big whoop.
But the real meat here is that you had a bad experience something like a year ago, and it seems like you’ve developed true hatred over it. Would it help to know that Nvidia and Wayland play nicely now? They have for quite some time.
FWIW, I had very little trouble with xwayland even years ago. It didn’t really require any setup for me. It just kinda worked. Sure, there will always be SOME weirdness, but overall it’s been working really well for years.
Anyways, I’m sure you can still toggle over to your X session for years to come. At least until your DE decides it wants to go wayland only.
Ok, but nobody explained what the equivalent of “ssh -X” was supposed to be with wayland.
It doesn’t exist as far as I know.
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.
Actual Unix users care. Maybe people that just jumped ship from Microsoft don’t, but I think that’s just because they don’t know what’s possible and how convenient it is.
I have also jumped ship from MS, but it is actually a cool feature. I don’t use it that frequently, but a few times a month, yeah.
waypipe
Does this work well with X11 -> Wayland communication? Or do both computers need to be Wayland?
after a brief glance it looks like it, but that’s the same case as x over ssh. otherwise there’s things like vnc that wouldn’t care what each side is running
Oh, cool. I’ve been looking for that for ages. Thank a lot!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
If Windows users had to deal with the dependency issues
Have you never heard the term “DLL Hell?” It’s called that because DOS and Windows specifically use
.dllfiles for dependencies.No I haven’t, learn something new every day
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.
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?
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
Nope, I don’t remember and after it happened couple of times I just started avoiding it.
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.
appimage and flatpack ftw
Yeah, appimage and flatpack for the waste dump. I agree.
i am going to steal your pan’s and sell them on ebay
edit: and for the waste dump would be ftwd
More like “Wayland is getting killed by my Nvidia card”
Honestly if you care about Linux don’t buy Nvidia at this point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Oh god, how bad flatpak is. I say this as someone who used to head up a security group for an OS.
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
Every time I update my flatpak apps I get a warning about deprecated libraries. I don’t think flatpak is the issue but rather apps being able to not update really old libraries that could have security patches available. Does anyone know of a way to force these old libraries to update?
On Flatpak? Probably not. You update those libraries, even manually, and things will most probably break.
One of the many reasons I don’t like Flatpak. You really don’t have any control over how these packages are delivered. What the package maintainer did, that is it. But there’s a new version. Nope, not if the package maintainer doesn’t update.
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
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.
Why not? Maybe I’m using a niche architecture which doesn’t gets built by default. Or maybe I don’t use glibc.
