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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

This is very impressive.

tl;dr they are adding Wayland support while maintaining X support by abstracting both into an interface so they never lose support to either.

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Wayland still intrigues me - it was first released 16 years ago but still support like in XFCE is "experimental". I really don't know much about Wayland but its initial goals and the excitement if caused (at first) seemed always very noble.

what I love about X is how stable it became after it was abandoned.

Exactly:)

XFCE is the one running late here. Gnome, kde, and even all the wlroots based compositors have been pretty solid

some value of "solid" that ignores machines with vmgfx or nvidia modules.

An argument where this is a problem with the protocol instead of uncompliant vendors is disingenuous.

The protocol might be good, but my hardware is not supported by wlroots. Whether this is the fault of upstream or the hardware vendor does not matter. I cannot run wlroots, ever. Period.

It does matter, because one post before you felt entitled to put the blame on the protocol. Nuance is pretty important when you take into account the difference in amount of resources available to the two groups.

Don't know which post you are referring to. We must be reading different threads.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you when you argue against desktop environments and wlroots compositors having "solid" wayland implementations due to not working under nvidia cards. If that's the case I might argue that you could present your point in a less terse manner.

If you ignore things like randomly running into screen sharing problems or issues configuring XYZ thing because Gnome or whoever can't be arsed to expose it in their Wayland implementation. I keep trying Wayland and then swapping back to X11. Less issues and I never notice the things Wayland "solves", just what it breaks.

Yeah, I have the same experiences with Wayland. In fact, whenever I see it being mentioned and that it may be the default, I tend to just try to avoid the program in which it is default because I've always had issues with it. X11 works. These days are long gone where you have to modify X11 config as well, just run "nvidia-xconfig" or whatever. I do not remember the last time I had to mess around with X11. Wayland less so, as many essential features were not working. X11 has more than one clipboards as well, and I have no clue if Wayland has them, too, and we are talking about something very basic.

Indeed. I kept hearing "Wayland solves problems with two monitors at different refresh rates" But when I set up mismatching monitors, X11 didn't skip a beat (1440p native/120Hz, 1440p (being fed to a 4k native monitor)/60Hz

Conversely, the worst issue I had with dual monitors was with Wayland: Wayfire thought it was a brilliant idea to not support "window spanning two monitors" as default policy.

It feels to me like Wayland, GNOME and Systemd all come from the same sort of developer brain infection making them build vast, all-inclusive structures that are explicitly hostile to anyone who doesn't have the exact same underlying assumptions and needs.

both your monitors are being fed 60hz with x11 then right? It uses the lowest supported value of all screens

Well, the monitor itself says it's being fed 120Hz in its status popup, I don't think X11 is smart enough to lie in that way.

Your monitor says it's in 120hz mode but it's not actually being fed 120hz

  I never notice the things Wayland "solves", just what it breaks.

I wish I could say otherwise - but this has 100% been my experience as well across multiple distros and is 100% why I still run X11 today.

There's definitely a lesson to be learned from Wayland's rollout. Technically it's a vastly superior approach to system graphics. The major roadblock to its adoption has been that it didn't deal with all the "extras" that X provided to desktop distributions as well. Things like copy/paste, screen sharinf, and others don't have a single standard way of accomplishing through Wayland because those aren't things related to Waylands core goals. As a result, it's been a no man's land of distributions waiting to see if someone else will build a standard for those things they like, or building a very opinionated standard that no one else likes.

Future projects wanting to overturn crusty old incumbents by supercharging the worst part of that incumbents' process should at least provide a side project where all the extra bits that maybe people liked can grow a replacement, even though it's not the focus.

> provide a side project where all the extra bits that maybe people liked can grow a replacement

The whole point of freedesktop.org was to provide such a side project in the first place. The fact that it doesn't seem to be doing this with any effectiveness at present is the real issue.

FTFY: s/extras/essential features/

the decision to roll window management and keyboard management and screen management into one thing called "compositor" looks very cavalier to me. It resulted in a need to duplicate so many things that are modular and pluggable under X.

(Repeating myself, I wish somebody created a Wayland compositor that explicitly delegates most tasks to plugins, providing a stable interface, so that you could use your own WM, your own keyboard switcher, etc. Thankfully, screenshooting is using a similar approach already, but in a limited way. The idea is so obvious that somebody must have attempted this already.)

> The idea is so obvious that somebody must have attempted this already

You'd think that, wouldn't you?

The closest thing I know to a universal Wayland server that's WM and desktop independent is Mir.

I blame the disappearance of the one concerted competitive rival effort to the primarily Red Hat-backed complex of Wayland+GNOME+Flatpak to a single HN thread.

In my experience, HN commenters are often surprised when I say that I find this place to frequently be toxic, negative, with a strong element of groupthink. It's all on display in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821

It is also why Jamie Zawinski blocks incoming URL requests from here, and redirects to a famous image.

https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png

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