Hacker News Reader

Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

I tried for a while to get Wayland working in order to get rid of tearing I saw in X Windows, until I found out a kernel module parameter for the Nvidia driver fixed tearing in X. I run xmonad as well, which doesn't work with wayland. Don't see any reason to run Wayland at the moment.

View on HN

> I run xmonad as well, which doesn't work with wayland.

There is Waymonad, but not sure how mature it is:

https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad

Same. I've grown so accustomed to my xmonad setup over the past decade that sway isn't a viable replacement - I did spend 2-3 months full-time on i3 a couple of years back but the tiling models are different enough that I just won't. There is Waymonad but it is neither practically usable nor maintained.

It's like asking a taxi driver to start steering with a joystick.

Could you describe how you got rid of tearing?

It's an issue I've wanted to get rid of for a while now.

https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/video-tearing-with-gef...

How about "X is insecure, flaky, unsupported, and solves problems nobody actually has"? Such is the considered opinion of just about anybody who knows spit about the Linux graphics stack. Hint: The major Wayland devs are former Xorg devs.

I don't see how Wayland would improve security in my case. There are basically two types of applications on my system: some which can't be used in sandboxes in a reasonable way and those which work well in sandboxes. In the first case I wouldn't gain anything with Wayland because my shellrc, launcher configuration, ssh keys, personal data, ... are accessible to those applications, giving them and a potential attacker basically full access to my system, including the control of all Wayland clients.

In the second case, those applications work well with X security extensions and X11 proxies so I'm pretty fine in that regard, even with X11.

And since X11 also works just so much better in the majority of cases I care about, regarding my productivity and flexibility, I don't see any reason to use Wayland right now.

For some of us X just works right now and the security issue isn't urgent. (For serious impact someone would have to break out of browser sandbox and then spy... on the browser)

In theory I'd like to move to Wayland, but X solves my problem which is "I want to see windows, some of them accelerated".

> Hint: The major Wayland devs are former Xorg devs.

But notably, major Xorg developer Keith Packard is missing from that list.

Agreed, which means that right now Keith Packard is about the only person or entity keeping X alive. Red Hat have washed their hands of it. When the legacy versions of RHEL that still use it go out of support, maintenance on Xorg will pretty much grind to a halt. It is a moribund project, and that presents considerable risk.

I remember finding this video enlightening, a talk on the subject by someone who has worked on both X and Wayland:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

Reply on news.ycombinator.com