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More Wayloand short fallings which will prevent from being exclussively adopted

https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/wayland_on_netbsd_trials_and#comments

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The problem with legacy APIs like wscons (other than nobody wanting to accept patches to support them) is that they're restrictive and prescriptive, as in “this is a mouse, it has X/Y and scroll and buttons”. Evdev is open-ended, kinda like passing HID events through to userspace with slight simplification/normalization. Which lets userspace support all the awesome new kinds of input. *Years* of effort went into libinput's support for touchpads&tablets. Resistance is futile. Adopt evdev in your kernel :P In FreeBSD, we support full multi-touch on touchpads and touchscreens via USB and I2C, pen tablets, gamepads.. without patching. And we can use the rich tooling ecosystem around evdev — network forwarding, record-and-replay, etc. (Also feel free to use our battle-tested libepoll-shim library instead of patching everything!)

Despite shortfallings wiht X, it is hard, if not impossible, to ignore its 30+ years of hard core development, debugging, and trial by fire.

Re: More Wayloand short fallings which will prevent from being exclussively adopted

Reply #1 –
Wayland may not be that bad, we will see, some other knowledgeable forum contributors here have been working with it and consider it reasonably favorably, dudemanguy wrote a recent blog post discussing it here:
https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2025-02-03-wayland-xorg-2/wayland-xorg-2.html
It is supposedly designed to be more lightweight and focused on desktop rather than server usage, and removes a lot of legacy baggage. Also incidentally re a point you made elsewhere I doubt desktops are going anywhere, Mate is basically Gnome 2 and has been around for over 2 decades. I would equate tablets and phones vs laptops and desktops to mp3 players and walkman type things vs home hifi setups, they coexist because they serve different purposes and people may have one or the other or both. 
I had a bug a while back, so I tried using the Gnome desktop for testing, and the bug vanished when switching to a Wayland session rather than Xorg. There was no obvious difference between the 2 options. As there has been no support in Mate up to now I haven't used it for any extended time though.
Consider this - you can get a tiny action cam running on a battery which can record 4K footage. Neither of my laptops (OK, so not the newest) with multicore CPU's and separate graphics processors using a lot more power and hot air blasting out the side from the fan can play back anything better than 2.7K, at least at a normal out of the camera bit rate! There have to be some improvements waiting to be made in there over the current situation, and if Wayland moves things forwards on the graphics front then it's a good thing. Obviously Wayland alone might not fix anything but perhaps it will help allow other elements to work more effectively in time. Mind you if Mate Wayland disappoints then I'll be going back to Xorg of course.  ;D

Re: More Wayloand short fallings which will prevent from being exclussively adopted

Reply #2 –
I'm very surprised that systemd has not made itself a pre-req of wayland ... yet
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Re: More Wayloand short fallings which will prevent from being exclussively adopted

Reply #3 –
Quote from: ####### – on
Wayland may not be that bad, we will see, some other knowledgeable forum contributors here have been working with it and consider it reasonably favorably, dudemanguy wrote a recent blog post discussing it here:
https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2025-02-03-wayland-xorg-2/wayland-xorg-2.html
It is supposedly designed to be more lightweight and focused on desktop rather than server usage, and removes a lot of legacy baggage. Also incidentally re a point you made elsewhere I doubt desktops are going anywhere, Mate is basically Gnome 2 and has been around for over 2 decades. I would equate tablets and phones vs laptops and desktops to mp3 players and walkman type things vs home hifi setups, they coexist because they serve different purposes and people may have one or the other or both. 
I had a bug a while back, so I tried using the Gnome desktop for testing, and the bug vanished when switching to a Wayland session rather than Xorg. There was no obvious difference between the 2 options. As there has been no support in Mate up to now I haven't used it for any extended time though.
Consider this - you can get a tiny action cam running on a battery which can record 4K footage. Neither of my laptops (OK, so not the newest) with multicore CPU's and separate graphics processors using a lot more power and hot air blasting out the side from the fan can play back anything better than 2.7K, at least at a normal out of the camera bit rate! There have to be some improvements waiting to be made in there over the current situation, and if Wayland moves things forwards on the graphics front then it's a good thing. Obviously Wayland alone might not fix anything but perhaps it will help allow other elements to work more effectively in time. Mind you if Mate Wayland disappoints then I'll be going back to Xorg of course.  ;D


The desktop is already dead and Wayland is broken by design.  It is designed to restrict desktops to working compositors instead of having needed modularity - let alone built in design problems with IPC and being network dead.

You can think what you want about the future of the desktop in society, but today it is already dead.  Users don't use desktops any longer and rely on tablets which they use for everything from finding Pokeman, to posting on social media, to paying the subway fare.  There are interactions with banks and government that MANDATE the use of tablets/cellphones.

There was a 30% DROP in PC sales just in a single quarter  https://www.tomshardware.com/news/idc-q1-2023-report-sales-of-pcs-drop

So this is not a theory, but a hard reality and it has nothing to do with walkmans or Hifi systems (which btw are also not used any longer and are on scrap heap with VCRs and DVD players).

Wayland will not only prove itself to be restrictive and insecure, like systemd,  but is functionally broken and stifles competition.  I am not interested in this and the dwindling number of desktop users who are not on Windows 11, will also not be interested as they like to create, code, tinker and network.... all things Wayland is designed to stifle. 

I can see Wayland being used on cellphones in the future, since those are homologous, and broken interfaces and the Free Desktop people will be headed that way anyway.  So they will take it with them.   I can see them on chromebooks as well, which are restrictive, rudimentary devices where the user is restricted from everything.  Any thing that needs to secure the user from their digital freedom, Wayland has a potential market as compositors will be made for it which restrict the end user like it is restricted on Windows.

That reminds me of when the Free Desktop people claimed that the Linux Desktop was broken and inferior to MS because... it has too many choices and users don't need choices.

Re: More Wayloand short fallings which will prevent from being exclussively adopted

Reply #5 –
Quote from: mrbrklyn – on
That reminds me of when the Free Desktop people claimed that the Linux Desktop was broken and inferior to MS because... it has too many choices and users don't need choices.
Meanwhile, wayland: a zoo of compositors having different protocols because core protocols are not enough and new ones are not accepted
ARMtix
If you need to contact me, use email

Re: More Wayloand short fallings which will prevent from being exclussively adopted

Reply #6 –
Quote from: mrbrklyn – on
The desktop is already dead

I like flamboyant grandiose statements like the next guy but this is simply nonsense. Nobody buys desktops every year so they can't be compared with phones or tablets that quickly get obsolete by design.

In other thread you claim that there is huge install base for X and that community has the strength to fork whatever is needed to keep it running. So is the desktop dead or with huge community ready to fork (and running desktops)?

Re: More Wayloand short fallings which will prevent from being exclussively adopted

Reply #7 –
You could also say nobody likes Windows 11 so they are sticking with 10, as some people I know have told me they are doing, I've never tried it but they really seem to hate 11.  ;D  If you want a large screen to use at home or work you won't want to hold it, so you want something that stands on a desk. Having got that you might as well have a full keyboard and larger more powerful computer too, with more options for ports and drives and so forth. Ergonomics results in a desktop, laptop or similar. Waydroid allows you to run mobile Android apps in Linux on a regular computer, if you really want or need closed source stuff polluting your system, although I typically just ignore anyone making such unreasonable demands.
Freedesktop has officially been running Xorg since 2019 but was doing most of the development before that, so it makes no difference if they are also involved with Wayland.
 

Re: More Wayloand short fallings which will prevent from being exclussively adopted

Reply #9 –
https://forum.zorin.com/t/the-trouble-with-wayland/36189

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Even if we assume that my use case is such an impossibly remote edge case that is not worth the time to implement a fix for it, I still can do without issues using an existing technology, a couple of clicks away. This is the power of freedom of choice, and indeed the real trouble with Wayland.

In short, it’s great that we have Wayland. Competition is good for the consumer. But there needs to be a real viable choice to be made. Gnome has made this very clear: they will stop offering Xorg as an option in the near future. Distributions like Fedora are ahead of schedule on this. And distributions like Zorin OS are implementing this as the default option. Defaults are extremely powerful.

From the user's perspective it's irrelevant why the old screenshot tool, or whatever, doesn't work. It used to work and now it doesn't. The user is being told that the improvements happen under the hood, but those improvements should not come at the cost of the ones over the hood.

If breaking changes need to happen it better be worth the trouble. With Wayland, I'm struggling to see the improvement at the moment; maybe this will change in the future.

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On Zorin OS 17 using Wayland, it breaks Gnome-Screenshot. This is why Zorin OS 17 does not include the Gnome-Screenshot package, but instead has screenshot (With less features and functionality) built into the shell.
Using Wayland, Nvidia breaks. Zorin OS must default back to X windowing in order to unbreak itself.
Wayland does not respect EWMH protocols and breaks CLI tools like xprop, xrandr, wmctrl, preventing user controls and access of their display management and ability to adjust necessary features like Refresh rate and Resolution.
Wayland breaks all X11 applications. A stop gap measure was added in the form of XWayland, which is considered a temporary means of providing basic support for these applications on Wayland.
Wayland breaks screen-sharing and remote desktop applications.
Wayland breaks Window Management - which is why Wayland is not on XFCE or many other Desktop Environments.
Wayland breaks accessibility tools and assistive technologies which, let's be honest with ourselves, is probably the worst thing you could ever break and maintain a conscience.
Wayland breaks many features of Multi-Monitor support like display hotplugging, resolution management, display arrangement and other features.