In general this sentence is why the Year of Desktop Linux won't come in this millennia. Not only XOrg vs Wayland. Many such cases. Sad!
User experience is ALL that matters. Apple has this ingrained in their ethos. While the OSS communities are bickering over X vs Y, they chose to pick what's usable and polish it until it delivered great UX.
Last time I checked, Wayland was broken in fundamental ways on my NixOS/KDE machine. So I went back to Xorg, that for all its ancient faults, delivers a better UX _today_. I'll keep trying Wayland every few months, and when it becomes an improvement, I'll consider switching to it. No, I won't "deal with it". Why don't YOU fix it?*
*If you tell me that it's not up to you, but to application developers to add support for Wayland, I'll drop kick your sticker-infested laptop, and curse whoever came up with this ridiculous system.
At work I have deprecated many older software components in favor of implementing newer, less painful to maintain ones. Lots of other software engineers use those components, so a big part of it is documentation or training. Rather than harp on the flaws of the old thing, I try to objectively present the lessons learned from it, with an emphasis on all the good aspects of the original that carried forward into the replacement. That generally makes the transition smoother, especially for getting buy-in from the folk that were involved with developing the original implementation. I also wouldn't tell someone not to use an existing component that works, unless I have a concrete recommendation for a better alternative.
Do you have any open bug reports you can point to for "Wayland" not working? Which compositor were you try to use?
This all reminds me so much of ESM Vs cjs. Tech sometimes direly needs a kick in the ass. The situation cannot hold with something old & not good & the new works for most people, but also there's 1% valid problems. The world deserves to be able to eventually move on. The world can be bold & progressive & make changes, it should, and we should expect more of each other about being timely, about doing thr right thing, about making shifts. But we become so trapped by such resistance & unadaption, by staying where we are. Progress is a spirit I think should be Integral to open society & especially open source, but people don't see themselves as part of the bigger thing, they view themselves as merely at ends.
But, Android is a thing, and Linux is literally everywhere. OS has won, even if the mythical "Desktop Linux" didn't.
After installing their first distro, most people have a good experience. Then they install an update, that causes some ridiculous regression. At this time they have 2 choices: spend 2 weeks on reading all kind of arcane documentation, or go back to whatever they were using before. Or ask the maintainer, who responds "deal with it".
Just as another, fresh example, look at this: https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2023/05/10/gnome-core-app... - Gnome finally has thumbnails in the file picker, but they removed the music player. You can't have everything, I guess.
This kind of attitude why the Year of Desktop Linux will not be seen by our generation, not evil manufacturers.
No you won't be able to edit system files on Mac OSX without rebooting into the bios effectively. Deal with it.
Every platform does dumb, annoying stuff. Deal with it.
That doesn't seem to have hurt the year of Desktop Windows too much.
Still, X.org is terrible and can be reasonably called the Internet Explorer 6 of the linux desktop. At least Wayland will be easier to displace if anyone comes up with something better. This is a step forward.
That’s FUD. The reason around the controversy about screenshots is as simple as gnome wanting to do it right from first principles, that is to also include proper support for taking video recordings/streaming, which is much more complex, while wlroots were looking for a simple “take a picture” mode at first. They couldn’t come to agreement on a common protocol for a time, end of story.
This is due to the bazaar style of development, has no technical reason. Apple can just say they will switch to this new tech in x time, linux can’t really.
For example, look how saddled MS Windows is by the burden of binary reverse-compatibility. It makes the leap to other arches like ARM nearly impossible.
Yes, some features of X11 are not present in Wayland. But the incomplete reverse-compatibility allows us to decide if those features are worth it in the first place. And if you don't like it you can patch it yourself.
It came in the '90s. Not sure what people keep going on about.
Which is why people keep using xorg… wayland is NOT a drop in replacement.
For every FOSS project, it is up to the maintainers to decide the scope of what the project supports. Asahi Linux maintainers have every right to drop support for X11 when it increases the development burden and, according to the post, has lower performance than Wayland on the supported hardware.
Anyone who absolutely needs to stay on X11 due to a use case not yet available on Wayland-compatible software, your options are to switch to a different distro, fork Asahi Linux, or wait for that use case to be supported on Wayland-compatible software.
Based on the decisions mainstream Linux distros and desktop environments have been making, it's clear that Wayland adoption is increasing while X11 is gradually being deprecated. By the time Asahi Linux hits stable, supporting only Wayland will become an even more obvious choice than it is today. The words "don't come to us asking for help" may sound harsh, but they clearly communicate that X11 will no longer be supported on Asahi Linux.
Asahi just happens to focus on hardware where Xorg's flaws are more obvious, so X will be more broken than usual. But it reflects the future of Linux graphics.
Ultimately X11 works out of the box and with a quick .conf change I can easily setup my default monitors at the gdm login (or whatever Ubuntu uses these days).
I don’t have a dog in the fight on a display interpreter. But wayland just doesn’t work in my use case. And hasnt through multiple iterations (this laptop was built on 20.04 and went through a few non-lts releases before I just stuck to 22.04. )
On what planet is this true?
update: I sit somewhat corrected. I have retried KDE with an NVidia card and /usr/bin/Xwayland and am impressed. Not 100% perfect, but very usable.
Being Asahi is not only brand new but not even near a first stable release the amount of surprise about the lack of xorg focus seems as silly as those that act like wayland reached parity 2 years ago
Red Hat has announced they are depreciating Xorg already; which is a huge deal because they are almost single-handedly the only contributor keeping Xorg alive. Once they are done, work on Xorg will basically cease forever.
Considering Xorg is based on X11 which dates back to June 1984, I can’t blame them. A graphics system from 1984 is not suitable for 2023 in any capacity. Not without a ton of hacks, workarounds, and jank everywhere.
I'm not sure 'quickly' really is the right word choice there.
I don't have any issue with Asahi focusing on Wayland first. But this attitude doesn't make me feel great. Is it really so difficult to have a little bit of empathy for your end users?
That’s easy to say if you’ve never worked on Xorg. The codebase is one of the worst in existence, few people fully understand it, and fixing bugs in it is a modern Sisyphean wheel.
X: I'm not dead yet
Wayland Proponents: Well, he will be soon. He's very ill.
X: I support rootless operation and mixed DPI
Wayland Proponents: You'll be stone dead in a moment.
X: I think I'll release a new version of a window manager
Wayland Proponents: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Look. Isn't there something you can do?
X: [singing] I feel happy. I feel happy.
[whop]
We have to pick where we put our energies. No one should be expecting to see much effort or caring on X.org. It's not what's happening, going forward.
By all indications, neither is Wayland. It's barely any more usable without running an X server on top today than 10 years ago.
I personally almost never need to run Xwayland. My terminals (kitty, alacrity), web browser, all work great in Wayland with good hidpi scaling. Vscode has good support now too I hear. KiCad seems close to landing good support. I use OBS & it works amazing; Pipewire+Wayland is a modern marvel & such a faster cleaner better system than the slow costly trashfires we had. https://arewewaylandyet.com/ fills most of the rest of the little needs I have.
This isn't a good argument for adopting new technology when the new contender offers nothing of note over the old and the all but unmaintained, broken in fundamental ways option continues to work the way it did a decade or two ago.
It's his playground, it's free, and he can do what he likes with it but if people are using X11 its probably not because they hadn't heard such rants before its because people know their own needs better than the distro developer.
Seriously develop whatever you want to, but telling users what to do is a whole other class of unaware.
Who really cares what this dork thinks...
