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Comment by AshamedCaptain | Hacker News Reader

Was Pipewire even on distros by the time they decided to "abuse the one API" ?

Even I have had to resort to abusing the one API, and it was just for taking the values of a couple pixels on the screen. Everything else is just too slow, requires setting up way too much infrastructure (e.g. PipeWire! a H264 encoder!), or has been fixed "last year" or some other uselessly recent date.

X11 is no longer maintained is also flat-out wrong, and I'm willing to bet, it's still the most used option (since even on the distros which use Wayland, in-place updates do not usually turn it on). The fact that today's screencast API does not even bother to implement support for the most used window server out there does not inspire confidence, either.

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x11 is no longer maintained. you're thinking of xwayland, which is the only thing getting releases these days. but that is built on wayland.

gnome shell has had some version of the screencast API for 8 years now. pipewire is irrelevant to the discussion.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/blame/main/data...

the first commit for the desktop portal (which is the end result of the gnome api above) for wlr was in 2018.

https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/commit/4e...

2 years before the 2020 date in the article. so in short: in 2020 zoom abused a gnome only api to implement desktop sharing, when a proper gnome only desktop sharing api already existed for ~8 years. which was the precursor to the current desktop portal stuff and you're trying to blame wayland for the problem.

1. X11 is definitely maintained, unless you are thinking of XFree86. Xorg's last release 2 weeks ago. Many LTS distros containing it are preparing releases with it _right now_ and they will also be supporting it for at least one decade, probably way more. I would bet that Wayland will become unsupported way before (at least some implementation of) X11 does.

2. This entire article is about avoiding the Gnome private API. The only other alternative, the XDG/portal API, uses Pipewire. It's literally the only alternative even if you don't use Flatpak.

EDIT: Your "2018" link is also not showing the screencast portal API. And I am not blaming Wayland; I am blaming the distros who switch to it and as a consequence BROKE user programs.

1. no its not, no security fixes or new features are being developed, its entirely on life support: the changes are to just keep it limping along while distros finish transitions to wayland. https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2022-January/060...

2. the article is about them abusing a gnome only API when alternatives existed that would have worked better. WLR had its first commits for its desktop portal api in 2018, gnome has had some form of the desktop portal api for 8 years now.

if you're going to use a DE only API at least use the right fucking one.

1. Even if what you were saying was true (which it is not, even your own link is just showing that bugs and regressions are still being fixed), the distros who are shipping have commited to decades of security updates.

2. "The right fucking" Gnome-exclusive API is, obviously, Gnome-exclusive, and just didn't work for me for the reasons I mentioned in my original message, and probably didn't for them either (my guess because they have a custom H264 encoder for latency/licensing reasons). The "less-Gnome-specific" XDG portal API, Pipewire-based, wasn't really usable when the distro is not even packaging Pipewire.

My go-to conferencing solution is still Jitsi Meet and I am well aware of how crazy the entire situation is, even for browsers.

the last release was afaik I know just to get the majority of patches contributed out that had stagnated and to finally split xwayland out of the xserver release.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XWayland... https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XWayland...

its dead, the maintainers have said its dead, all major distros have either moved or will be moving in the coming year. x11 as an api will limp along due to xwayland but that's about it.

no amount of assertions will change that unless individuals/organizations step up to actual maintain it.

as for rest of your statement ./shrug I've already been very clear on the fact they were already using a gnome only api incorrectly. the generic desktop portal api not being strictly ready in 2020 due to pipewire doesn't change the fact they had a perfectly reasonable api to use inside gnome and they decided not to and were burned.

> no its not

Yes it is, the mail you linked at was about a new standalone X server (ie. not XWayland) release by its new maintainer.

> no security fixes

The very previous version released just last month[0] has security fixes.

> or new features are being developed

Two versions before that[1] added a bunch of new features.

[0] https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2021-December/060842.html [1] https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2021-October/060799.html

> Was Pipewire even on distros by the time they decided to "abuse the one API"?

No. Pipewire only arrived on the most unstable distros end of last year. It's in no way available for all, and not a common standard (yet). And you are right, wayland in general is not the norm yet. I'd even say it's likely to never replace X11 completely, given its shortcomings and X11's stability.

X11 is moribund. Part of why is because literally everyone who was working on it in a major way, possibly excepting Keith Packard, eventually considered it a dead end and jumped ship to Wayland.

Regardless, if I want to do something as simple as running a Minecraft client, I need to run X11 or else live with about 20 FPS.

If the old thing is broken, and the new thing isn't ready yet, then what are we supposed to do? Use Windows I suppose.

Back to the TTY like Lord Stallman intended

moribund, stable, I don't care what you call it; X11 actually works consistently, which remains more than Wayland can say

YMMV but I've found both to work fine, with Wayland providing the advertised tear-free video experience that X never could. Granted, when I tried OBS about a year ago I had to resort to an X-session, and that worked as expected. Not that OBS works properly on Wayland, my own use for X - I think - is done.

The solution for tearing is adaptive sync monitors.

Wayland's justification should be a (theoretically) better platform and codebase.

You can also set TearFree in X.

Pipewire has been there for more than that, I've been using it for a few years now. You might be mistaken with the audio part of it (that replaces Pulseaudio and Jack).

It's possible I did not notice the non-audio part was already in the wayland-enabling distros before, if that was the case.

It was definitely available in distros like arch and gentoo. Fedora as well when then switched to wayland by default. More conservative distro might not have included it though, but they are on X11 by default so it's not needed in the first place.

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