Wayback gives X11 desktops a fighting chance in a Wayland world

A new project addresses one of the biggest differences between how X11 and Wayland work, and that could be a winning combination. Wayback is an interesting new venture by Ariadne Conill, one of the core Alpine Linux developers – and indeed of the Alpine-based postmarketOS, as we have reported before. Wayback bridges some of …

[nematoad]

Fiddling about while Linux burns.

Wayland, a re-invention of the wheel that does it worse than the original. Great job guys!

I may be getting paranoid but there must be a reason why all these projects like Wayland and systemd are being thought up.

Is it an attempt to hijack the Linux ecosystem for private gain? Or is that developers are bored and thinking up jazzy new solutions to problems that do not exist?

I don't know but I think it may be telling that the likes of Miguel de Icaza or Lennart Poeterring start working on things that throw the Linux system into chaos and then move to work at MS.

There may be a good reason for all this chopping and changing that is going on but for the life I me I can't see it.

[DanielsLateToTheParty]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

The Unix philosophy has always been "Do one thing and do it well". SystemD fails at this because it tries to do many things. X11 is guilty of trying to be too many things as well. EMACS historically was criticised for the same. PulseAudio (another one from Poeterring) feels like it falls into the same trap.

Wayland is distinct in that it tries to uphold the philosophy and focus on one thing, compositing. It wasn't thought up just to annoy people. It was created to fix a single problem. Arguably it hasn't fixed a whole lot because clearly people are annoyed but please don't lower it to the level of SystemD.

[m4r35n357]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

It is _just_ like systemd; it is a weapon, created & wielded by the _same people_ for the same ends.

[Greybearded old scrote]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

Maybe not.

[hmv]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

To be fair, Emacs has non-Unix origins.

[jake]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

EMACS started life as a set of Editor MACroS for TECO.

TECO (Tape Editor and Corrector) started life on a PDP-1

[Dizzy Dwarf]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping

[jake]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

That's a backronym from the mid '80s when 8 megs of ram became possible for mere mortals.

Also from the same era, probably a trifle earlier: Escape Meta Alt Control Shift

[jake]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

From my fortune file:

''Initially, if I remember correctly, EMACS was Eugene Ciccarelli's init file which made use of MIT TECO's ^R mode ("Realtime") that repainted the screen. RMS started hacking on it around '76 I think and it kind of, um, grew."

Unfortunately, the quote is un-attributed, sorry ... Can anyone put a name to it?

[Liam Proven]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

> Eugene Ciccarelli's init file

https://multicians.org/mepap.html

[jake]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

That's not just a rabbit hole, that's the whole damn warren, with all the neighbors.

Ta :-)

[DrXym]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

systemd consists of many small executables that are designed precisely to do one thing and do it well. So I don't understand how you think "Unix philosophy" is violated. Is it because they're bundled up in a single package or reside in a single repo?

For example, here is "backlight" - https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/src/backlight/backlight.c. It's an executable whose sole purpose in life is to look for devices that have a backlight and preserve and restore that value when the computer stops and starts. That's it. The directory above shows many other such processes with singular purposes. That's actually a strength of systemd as it works on principle of least privilege.

[jake]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

That's a major part of the problem ... its not housebroken, and leaves little piles of shit all over the filesystem.

Red Hat implemented the systemd-cancer to make their Linux Distribution more Windows-like, which should be a red flag to anyone with a clue. Debian followed along for internal political reasons, the tech involved had nothing to do with its implementation in that space. Another red flag. Most of the rest followed on blindly through ignorance and/or apathy, with a pinch of sheer laziness, because they use one of those two distro's repositories.

In no example that I can find did any distribution choose the systemd-cancer because it is demonstrably a technologically better system. Not one. Think about that for a minute, and then ask yourself "Have I been had?".

There is a reason that an init, traditionally, is a single small bit of code that does one thing very well. Yes, like most of the rest of the *nix core utilities. All an init should do is start PID1, set run level, spawn a tty (or several), handle a graceful shutdown, and log all the above in plaintext to make troubleshooting as simplistic as possible. Anything else attached to this base is a vanity project that is best placed elsewhere, in it's own stand-alone code base.

Inventing a clusterfuck init variation that's so big and bulky that it needs to be called a "suite" is just asking for trouble. The systemd-cancer is b0rken by design and implementation.

[FIA]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

They're often trying to fix problems that do exist... then religion steps in.

In projects like Linux (using that term to mean the whole ecosystem, not just the kernel), you need a certain amount of force of will to get things done. That often means the prominent people in projects can be quite polarising.

But generally, if you step back, most of these things were started to solve problems, but then, like all good religions the 'why' can get lost a bit and the shouting starts. (A Jewish friend once pointed out to me that 'Don't eat pork or shellfish' is actually quite a good rule if you live in a hot desert before refrigeration was invented).

Is it an attempt to hijack the Linux ecosystem for private gain?

No. How would that actually work? Think of the level of co-ordination required for something like that to actually be true.

Linux is developed for private gain, otherwise it wouldn't exist, developers do have to actually pay bills and put food on the table.

Had there never been any private investment in Linux it would be an entry in Googles archives and little more. (Hello AROS, Hello Syllable, Hello SkyOS).

However, can we please all stop normalising this 'shadowy cabal' crap, or at least provide a single shred of evidence if not. (Much as I do like the mental image of Bill Gates and Davros sat round a table, it's not true...)

E.G. What is being hijacked? How is replacing one open source window drawing thingy with another open source window drawing thingy going to get you to step 3? How are the Wayland people gaining by doing this? IT seems to me that being a Wayland dev or advocate just sets you up for a lot of online abuse. Where's the money train? How does one board it??

There may be a good reason for all this chopping and changing that is going on but for the life I me I can't see it.

You're getting older, change that seemed glacial when you're 10 seems like lightening when you're 50.

As of this writing Wayland is 16, and just starting to be used as the primary display server in some distributions. That's not really 'chopping and changing'.

[Adair]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

I always understood that the point of Wayland was to simplify things for machines that never ever require a GUI to be served over a network, i.e. your average home PC and a fairly large proportion of business PCs—do one job and do it well: present graphical info to the local machine. End of story.

Possibly 'religion' and 'feature creep' have got a hold since those innocent days.

[boblongii]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

The issue of course is that Wayland's developers thought "We don't use these features, let's take them out". Which is nice for them, and shit for everyone who does use a remote GUI.

It's just ego; same as systemd and freedesktop.org. Wankers slapping themselves on the backs and cashing the cheques from sponsors.

[Bill 21]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

waypipe - Transparent network proxy for Wayland compositors

[Paul Hovnanian]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

"simplify things for machines that never ever require a GUI to be served over a network"

Simplify things for commercial applications vendors who couldn't or didn't want their product hosted on one system but popping up on every display in the company. X11 broke their per processor/per seat licensing model.

XWayland might support the legacy xclients running from remote hosts. But if you buy a Wayland (commercial) application, you need one for each seat. At least that's my understanding of how and where Wayland breaks the networking.

If Wayback provides a way to plug Wayland apps into the X11 protocol, it will give vendors developing for the (un-networked) Wayland display world fits. And perhaps they'll just drop the whole attempt at locking applications and displays in a 1:1 relationship.

[abend0c4]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

there must be a reason why

Developers, on the whole, want to create new things over which they have more influence. They're also as susceptible to fashion (though perhaps not in their dress) as most humans. And there's noone to stop them.

The reasons those things find their way into distributions is rather more complex, but it's usually because commercial customers are prepared to pay for them - the same reason that the simplicity of the humble toaster is under constant assault.

[blu3b3rry]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

The typing on that Tefal page is truly astounding. Such entertaining captions as "Measuring baker" instead of "beaker" and "High-Lift Facility - To remove easily the toast, even the smallest!"

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

Truly we live in an age of miracles.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

"Truly we live in an age of miracles."

Correction ...(to 'Tefal' that ... obviously a not very good 'disciple' of the 'Gruniard')

Trewly we liv inn an agg of micarles !!!

:)

[Jonathan Richards 1]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

You didn't mention "the variable browning control in the form of a sliding dial". Sliding dials, that's real innovation.

I looked hard to see if that page was some sort of spoof, but no, it seems that a designer, and a production engineer and finally an advertising copy-writer have all conspired to bring us the least-desirable consumer of kitchen workspace. Actually, the copy-writer has been replaced by someone almost competent to polish some LLM crap.

Oh, maybe the designer has, too!

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

As a kid many, many, many years ago, my parents finally bought a toaster and it's USP was the browning adjustment via a slider, or, in the modern parlance quoted above, a "sliding dial".

Just a few years ago, in a large electrical retailer looking at the washing machines, we decided to buy a new toaster. The salesdroid tried to "up-sell" us on a £5 set of wooden tongs "for safely pulling the toast out when it get stuck". My response was a) I've never burned myself getting stuck toast out in my life and b), it must be a pretty poor design if you expect it to get stuck often enough to need a dedicated tool to solve the problem. :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

My sister bought a set of those wooden tongs for our dad, when she found him trying to prise a jammed slice of toast out of the toaster using a metal knife, while the toaster was still plugged in!

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

In theory[*], that should be perfectly safe[**} so long as it's not still toasting. And if it is still toasting, the bread has probably caught fire ;-)

* if it's properly made, and it really should be fairly easy to make a toaster that has a very low probability of jamming and still "build to a price".

** and yes, I understand that not everyone understand "how things work[tm]" and/or may have cognition issue later in life and need to be protected from themselves

[Jamie Jones]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

You can scoff, but you missed the bit where this toaster has something unique in the world of toasting:

"a toast-lift facility, which makes it easy to remove bread without burning fingers."

Check mate cynics and skeptics!

[Paul Hovnanian]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

"the humble toaster is under constant assault"

Is that an email client I spy on the user interface?

[ChoHag]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

It's called CADT. It's not a good reason but it is the reason.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2003/02/the-cadt-model/

[DrXym]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

You ask "why?" yet you're responding to an article that discusses the issues with X11 and how the likes of Xlibre isn't liked even by someone who likes X11.

If you want to understand why X11 is terrible in so many ways (security, efficiency, support for modern hardware), the rationale for Wayland is here - https://wayland.freedesktop.org/

[jake]

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

So I should read a rival's propaganda for flaws in a system? What are you smoking?

OF COURSE wayland devs claim X is shit. They want people to use their code.

It's like asking the maga-cult to teach you why the trump is a totally excellent president.

Are you aware that I can see with my own eyes[0] that X is better than most in the security and efficiency world, and is only lacking modern hardware support due to the intentional blocking of that support being added to X by supporters of Wayland[1]?

_{[0] But I only have 40 years of X experience ... I might have missed something; I'm only human.}

_{[1] This fact alone is a good enough reason to fork X. Or to at least force the rabid Wayland supporters to abdicate out of X ... if they don't like X, why are they still there?}

[m4r35n357]

Red Hat are responsible for all this

They started it last century with FVWM95, an unconfigurable mess generated with M4 macros, to prevent user customization (RedHat 5.2).

The harboured de Icaza, Poettering et al, who have done all they can to bring the wonderful world of Windoze to Linux.

The have browbeaten Debian into accepting systemd, and now they smell victory because the die hards are being outvoted (& outlived) by Windoze "escapees" who think all these things are wonderful and don't understand why there is such resistance.

Wayland is the next step, I believe this will be the most effective way of removing BSD as a possible alternative.

They are probably working on a Red Screen of Death (A1 enabled, natch).

Alpine _is_ a breath of fresh air, if Linux must return to the hobbyist status so be it, but this is a nice clean way to do it. I have replaced my PiOS (XFCE) installs with equally functioning Alpine desktops.

To utterly take over, all they need to do is make sure Firefox only runs on Wayland, so let's hope Wayback is successful.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Red Hat are responsible for all this

"an unconfigurable mess generated with M4 macros"

If M4 is involved I imagine an utterly incomprehensible infinitely configurable mess might be more accurate and arguably more intimidating.

I actually quite like M4 and it can solve some realy ticklish problems when used very sparingly.

I can imagine that AI is to intelligence what M4 is to a programming language - might do a few things well; the rest, a dog's breakfast.

[m4r35n357]

Re: Red Hat are responsible for all this

Agreed. But to someone only used to config files it was a bit of a shock! Fortunately there was an early release of Debian soon after, so it became moot, for a long while, then . . . (see above).

One of my very first lessons in Linux was "avoid Red Hat".

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Red Hat are responsible for all this

One of my very first lessons in Linux was "avoid Red Hat".

That was my first experience with Linux. Didn't like it, so tried a few others and eventually went with FreeBSD. Mostly because it supported the hardware I had at the time (which sounds unusual now as Linux mostly has better OOTB h/w support!) but also mainly because if I searched for help on installing/setting up/using FreeBSD I found relevant information, whereas Linux help for a specific topic may or may not have referred to the specific distro I was trying out, or I had to find out which distro it was descended from or based on to find the help I needed. It all felt a bit of a weird mish-mash while FreeBSD always (and still does) seems more organised.

[Jamie Jones]

Re: Red Hat are responsible for all this

I cut my teeth on SunOS, OSF/1 (Digital Unix), HP/UX and various other SVR4 implementations, around the time the only PC was an 8086.

Fast forward a number of years, when I first saw Linux, my reaction was "wow! this is great! just like Unix, but on a PC"

When I first saw FreeBSD a few months later, my reaction was "wow! this is great! It *is* Unix, but on a PC". (to pedants, I'm not talking about the legal naming issues, but the actual OS from a usability point of view)

I stuck with FreeBSD ever since.

[m4r35n357]

Re: Red Hat are responsible for all this

Probably too late to get a reply on this - are the BSDs taking any public stance on X/Wayland? I know that last time I tried it Open BSD was using an X distribution called "xenocara", but nobody seems to mention it out loud.

[midgepad]

the gap between

...people who want to say how things will be, and people who want to make things that allow various or particular activity, some of it new, is wide and being widened.

Very large lessons from a lifetime ago are being forgotten.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: the gap between

"Very large lessons from a lifetime ago are being forgotten."

So is life ... from the world of IT to world politics !!!

Man runs in an endless cycle of 'Forgetting valuable lessons' ... Pointless wars (Religious, Political, Financial, Real as in 'Dead Bodies') etc ... Learning the 'valuable lessons' again ... repeat ad nauseam !!!

This cycle scales up and down throughout EVERYTHING man does !!!

Do I despair ... YES ... but I hope that eventually someone will notice the cycle and TRY to break the endless chain of despair !!!

:)

[Peter 51]

Wayland is just hard work

We live in 2025 and it's still easier to write an X window manager from scratch than it is to create a Wayland Compositor from scratch. The scope of a Wayland Compositor is much greater in terms of features that have to be included.

This disconnect is why only the larger, in terms of developers, desktops have ended up being 'ported' over. As such I very much appreciate the effort to not leave a large chunk of interesting and usable desktops behind.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wayland is just hard work

Agreed. Sadly the Wayland guys tend to be the same crowd who never experienced the interesting world of X11 WMs so don't know what they are breaking.

That said, they perhaps only want a computer to browse reddit and play Steam DRM Platform games anyway.

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Re: Wayland is just hard work

Per Wikipedia:

Kristian Høgsberg, a Linux graphics and X.Org developer who previously worked on AIGLX and DRI2, started Wayland as a spare-time project in 2008 while working for Red Hat. His stated goal was a system in which "every frame is perfect, by which I mean that applications will be able to control the rendering enough that we'll never see tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker."

In short, Wayland was started by someone familiar with the shortcomings of X who wanted to create something better.

[Jim Mitchell]

Re: Wayland is just hard work

And yet I've never seen an article about Wayland touch on visual qualities mentioned, either as a plus for Wayland or a negative for X.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wayland is just hard work

"In short, Wayland was started by someone familiar with the shortcomings of X who wanted to create something better."

And... "The road to hell is paved..."

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: Wayland is just hard work

How often have we seen well-intentioned developers try to improve something by removing complex and less-frequently used features which affect performance or configuration, in order to to streamline it and make it easier to use? The inevitable result is that eventually someone who needs those features glues them back on, as an even clunkier wart than the original.

[Anonymous Coward]

Love Wayland

X11 never used to work with my multiple monitors with different refresh rates. Wayland instantly worked.

[Steve Graham]

Re: Love Wayland

"X11 never used to work with my multiple monitors with different refresh rates."

You're doing it wrong.

[Moonshine]

Re: Love Wayland

“You're doing it wrong”

Oh of course. Silly us.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Love Wayland

This, of course, is the other Unix philosophy: everyone who's anyone knows how to do it right, so if you don't know you're no-one.

[Joe W]

Re: Love Wayland

I guess this is not the best place to repost a bunch of tutorials...

So telling people that it works in principle is the only thing one can do.

I know from reading the man page that this should have been possible for a long time, though I never had to try it, and I haven't written an xorg.conf in a long while...

[Arthur the cat]

Re: Love Wayland

This, of course, is the other Unix philosophy: everyone who's anyone knows how to do it right, so if you don't know you're no-one.

"Unix is user friendly. It's just very picky about who it's friends with."

[Jamie Jones]

Re: Love Wayland

This, of course, is the other Unix philosophy: everyone who's anyone knows how to do it right, so if you don't know you're no-one.

No, it was a response to the philosophy "X is crap because I couldn't get it to work. As I couldn't get it to work, it doesn't work for anyone."

[zeigerpuppy]

Re: Love Wayland

I must admit to a good experience with Wayland too. My thinkpad p14s had a lot of random graphics hang/crashes in X11 window managers (even with most recent kernel, probably due to memory remapping in the GPU drivers). Since switching to Wayland (hyprland) on Debian testing, it has been rock solid.

As a note, I generally use Devuan as I agree with many here that systemd is problematic. But the wonderful thing about Linux in general is the choice it affords. Wayland is another choice and has some compelling benefits. While systemd has gone way out of scope and should be taken out the back amd strangled...

[Greybearded old scrote]

Re: Love Wayland

Is your surname really Jobs? I recommend some reading matter from Donald Norman.

[David Newall]

Re: Love Wayland

Why not? X11 has always worked with individual refresh rates per monitor.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Love Wayland

“X11 has always worked with individual refresh rates per monitor.”

*Sigh*, clearly it hasn’t always worked for our poster.

[FIA]

Re: Love Wayland

In the days before reliable autoconf setting up monitors in X did require a fair bit of knowledge of things many people would consider arcane (I first played with one mid/late 90s, and even then EDID was fairly widespread so knowing about various timings wasn't common).

Also you were making changes to a file filled with dire warnings of fire and explosions if you were to get one of the magical numbers wrong. (For example, see this handy guide... including the 'How to fry your monitor' section...)

To an 80s greybeard the component frequencies and timings needed for a given monitor display mode may be second nature, but even to someone who grew up in the 8 bit era those kind of details had already been abstracted away. I used to dread touching those files.

[LionelB]

Re: Love Wayland

Oh, christ, please don't... just had a flashback to typing 'startx', hitting RETURN and hiding under the table¹ with gritted teeth.

¹_{Not the table with the monitor on it.}

[Arthur the cat]

Re: Love Wayland

just had a flashback to typing 'startx'

Which is how I start my desktop to this day.

Yes, I am an old.

[LionelB]

Re: Love Wayland

Me too - I struggle to get under the table these days.

[stiine]

Re: Love Wayland

Ha! I simply have to fall down to roll under the table...

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Love Wayland

...but getting back up is another matter entirely :-)

[Ken Shabby]

Re: Love Wayland

Damm Sniper

[DS999]

Re: Love Wayland

Thanks for bringing back my X related PTSD!

I first started using Linux on the desktop in 1997. I went through at least a half dozen builds before I finally had one where X actually worked out of the box despite me not having some wildly obscure monitor or resolution/timing, without having to tweak to get for example the resolution right or make it start up at all. And even after that sometimes an OS upgrade would break something and I'd have to dig through various log files to figure out where the error was and how to get it working properly again.

And years before that when I dealt with Unix workstations that had their own idiosyncrasies because they were not quite Unix (HP-UX, AIX) or they layered some crap on top of X (SunOS/Solaris) or they had a bunch of early days 3D support gumming up the works (Irix) or I got the fun task of trying to port 32 bit SunOS X Windows medical imaging research code to the first 64 bit CPU/OS in the world (way too much bad code in early 90s X libraries that making it 64 bit clean and knowing that dereferencing or freeing a NULL pointer is a bad thing that I eventually had to give up before even getting to the researcher's code!)

If I never use anything with an X server again I won't be sad!

[damiandixon]

Re: Love Wayland

I find my 3 monitor setup fine on X11.

One 4k at 250Hz, one extra wide display 250Hz, one 1920x1080 @ 144Hz.

If I drop the refresh rates I can run 4 monitors... Hardware limitation.

All the current posts are missing the point that accessibility is extremely lacking in Wayland.... plus the ability to stack windows, place them and move them programmatically.

[DS999]

Re: Love Wayland

plus the ability to stack windows, place them and move them programmatically

Shouldn't placing, stacking and moving windows be the job of the window manager? I'm using Wayland / GNOME right now and I can move, resize, minimize, maximize, stack and place windows all I want. Not sure what you mean by "programatically". If I can do it in GNOME, I'm telling a program (GNOME's window manager) through my clicks, drags etc. what I want and it is making it happen "programmatically".

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

Re: Love Wayland

It should be the job of the compositor. The problem is the compositor may not provide features to do so *or* expose the protocol to allow other programs to do so.

GNOME is a poor example - it's very fully featured on Wayland but people may not wish to run GNOME, choice is a large point of Unix.

I'm running labwc under FreeBSD. Run wlclock and you can't move it, can't resize, can't even *kill* it without resorting to ps last time I looked. This is because it's using an overlay, and labwc doesn't offer an obvious or easy way to interact with an application using the overlay plane. Maybe I've overlooked something but if it isn't obvious with a few minutes effort, and a web search returns nothing notable for third party apps to do so that's rather a problem. Whereas with X - you just click and drag!

I do realise that if you run a minority compositor or window manager you need to expect some pain, but using X11 it is largely possible to use external programs if your window manager doesn't provide the desired feature which is what the poster above you is talking about. Wayland is designed to be more secure (a good idea) so the X model of 'sending messages to any window you want using another program' won't work, but that then places an unreasonable burden on smaller developers or compositors and to achieve full functionality and accessibility you're realistically forced into using a large desktop environment such as GNOME.

[DS999]

Re: Love Wayland

Why should the compositor being messing with that stuff? A compositor is responsible for RENDERING windows, dealing with stuff like transparency and so forth. It gets its instructions on where windows are located, which windows are on top or bottom (so that it knows what parts to render as visible and what parts are hidden and not rendered or partially rendered if there's a transparent overlay) and so forth from the window manager. Its in the name!

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

Re: Love Wayland

Please go and look at how Wayland works. The compositor is not 'just a renderer'.

A very large part of the problems of Wayland lie from how difficult it is to write a compositor, and how the wheel has been endlessly re-invented rather than the design being based on a base compositor everyone can easily link to.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Love Wayland

> the design being based on a base compositor everyone can easily link to

The reference compisitor is Weston as it always has been.

https://wayland.pages.freedesktop.org/weston/

In fact, most compositors I've seen, including Wayback, are based on wlroots.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

Re: Love Wayland

Yes Liam but as I've mentioned more than once :

For a 'reference' it only runs on Linux (There's a rotting old NetBSD port if you want to be accurate). A reference that runs on one platform is barely a reference.

The fact many compositors are based on wlroots is irrelevant. e.g. Compositor A links in the wlroots library and works in 2021. In 2022 a new wlroots release adds more protocols essential for everyday Wayland operation. Compositor A is not updated, so *does not receive these changes*.

The Wayland model relies on continuous updating of compositors, the X model does not. This is a huge problem for smaller developers and effectively pushes users to large desktop environments driven by corporates who have the necessary resource and funding.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Love Wayland

> For a 'reference' it only runs on Linux

A lot of the problems in this area depend on perspective.

I put a summary of the big picture of the Linux world on the end of this article:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/17/debian_turns_30/

I expected to get flamed and attacked for it. Nobody seemed to notice.

From the perspective of Debian, it's the universal OS. Most of the Linux world runs on Debian or derivatives of Debian.

From the perspective of Ubuntu, it's Ubuntu: about twice as many people run Ubuntu derivatives as Debian derivatives. It's not a contest, it hasn't won, but it brought Debian to the masses.

From the perspective of Red Hat, they don't matter. RHEL makes almost all the money in the Linux world and so from RH's perspective, as I was lectured when I joined RH in 2014, RH _is_ Linux and everyone else is downstream of RH. Other distros are rounding errors.

But the thing is, there are roughly 50x as many Debian users as all the RHelatives put together. But they don't pay.

*Both sides are right.* They just judge by different criteria.

ChromeOS dwarfs both: I estimate it has about 10x as many users as all other Linux distros put together, _and they paid for it._

It outsells Macs, and that's by $ value not units. By units it probably outsells Macs 10x over.

It doesn't outsell iOS as well, though. That dwarfs all end-user Linux computers.

Then comes Android. That dwarfs _all computers_ and outsells all x86 kit put together by about 10x a year.

Arm kit outsells x86 by even more than that.

By both sides' numbers, all the other Unixes in the world are rounding errors compared to Linux and so _they do not matter_.

It is not that anyone here is wrong.

The thing is it all depends on how you measure.

Revenue? Units? Users? Seats or installations? Do you count phones? Do you count servers? Do you count concurrent users of servers?

All give different answers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Love Wayland

>>> It gets its instructions on where windows are located, <<<

Not with Wayland, it doesn't. https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/issues/7197

[LBJsPNS]

Re: Love Wayland

Yup. The show control software I use that was a buggy house of cards on X is rock solid on Wayland. Horses for courses and all that.

[lsces]

4 days into the week ...

And I'm finally back in control of most of the desktop ...

An update Monday resulted in my not being able to browse to sites other than opensuse. Several hours later I found a hidden KDEWallet window that was waiting for me to give a password so that the wifi could be connected ... not that I actually needed it! ... the real problem was down to a wrong DNS setting which came about because LAST week I lost 3 days when the BT Business Hub decided it did not want to work at all and I had to hack things to get the local network talking. Anyway, Tuesday I had X11 running as it had been, but the 'global size' setting was not playing ball and after some time I gave in and switched to wayland just to see if it would play ball, which it sort of did. But just as many problems that do not compensate for the alleged advantages. Yesterday was spent trying to get something stable in wayland and not succeeding.

This morning a post appeared on one of the threads I was using which brought out a light bulb moment. "Log in as root to set the font on Myrlyn ... it runs as root" ... gave it a try, and of cause everything was fine on BOTH X11 and wayland ... So despite the fact that I am the only person using this machine I created a new user and we are back in business. YES something has been upset the the latest updates to tumbleweed in relation to X11, but many of the problems with wayland that had prevented me using it previously vanished. Just how many files do need removing to restore a 'clean' state in either system?

It's taken a few hours to get the key apps moved from one user to another. Another layer of aggro which has been helped by the fact I've been through a LOT of this over the past months and have an assortment of notes on how to 'hand adjust' many of the layout bits hidden away in many different config files which needed moving to the new profile.

OH for a "window.zoomLevel": which one sets at the SYSTEM level?

Do I like wayland any better? No I can't see any reason that X11 could not simply have been restored to how it worked across multiple displays many years ago ...

[Neil Barnes]

Wayback could prevent that happening

One of these for the developer, please -->

[wub]

Thanks for the Rocky and Bullwinkle shout out!

I have read numerous threads here which I could not really connect with, as folks waxed nostalgic over shows from their childhood that never made it to the left side of the pond. Finally, a chance for me to take a moment to remember a show that really mattered to me back when I was still in single digits.

I loved Rocky and Bullwinkle - probably the place I learned how rewarding word play and punning can be. I have no idea if this show was exported: even as a kid I recognized their "low budget" animation style was also a way to highlight that listening to the dialog was the real point. In hindsight, the fact that a sizeable amount of the humor they were offering wooshed over my head was actually a good thing. I understood that the creators were adults, with adult interests and still loved a chance to get silly, and liked to poke fun at "serious" topics. It helped me realize that humor made them more tolerable. I was often aware that I was missing a joke, and it sharpened my attention to both the show, and to things in the "real world" that seemed like they might help explain jokes I had missed.

It never occurred to me that "Way Back" should properly have been WABAC, and since I had not heard of ENIAC or UNIVAC when I was 8 or 9: I didn't even notice that one as it went over my head, since the name so beautifully suited the function of the device.

"Mr.Peabody and Sherman" segment was my favorite part of the show.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Thanks for the Rocky and Bullwinkle shout out!

> I have no idea if this show was exported

I don't so. As a kid in Britain and Nigeria, I never saw it. I am not sure I have even to this day. I had to look it up, and so I thought I'd spell it out for others who might not know the reference.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Thanks for the Rocky and Bullwinkle shout out!

>> I have no idea if this show was exported

Was shown in NZ at least late 60s and in the 70-80s repeated incessantly on regional commercial TV in AU.

Still remember Natasha Fatale and Boris Badanov with his band of Nogoods. (Nogooodniks?)

Although I think Roger Ramjet was probably more popular.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Historical note/quibble

The Bootnote says:

This Wayback is no relation to the Internet Archive's Wayback machine, which itself was named as a nod to a time machine called the Wormhole Activating and Bridging Automatic Computer – or WABAC for short — from 1960s American kids' cartoon Rocky and Bullwinkle.

This is only sort of correct.

The WABAC was introduced in Peabody's Improbable History¹, which was a segment of Jay Ward's Rocky and His Friends² cartoon show, which ran from 1959 to 1964 (and then seemingly perpetually in syndicated reruns thereafter).

I think Wormhole Activating and Bridging Automatic Computer is a backronym introduced in the 2014 abomination adaptation Mr. Peabody & Sherman, since the concept of a "wormhole," while first postulated in the late 1950s, was probably not in common usage outside of theoretical physics at the time.³ The AC⁴ part of it was certainly a nod to the acronymic naming of computers of the day (ENIAC, UNIVAC, EDSAC, et al). Otherwise, in the original cartoon series, the naming of the machine was never explained.

Yes, this is excessively pedantic but at least it's a slight respite from yelling at each other over the politics of developers.

__________________

¹ Wikipedia: Wayback Machine (Peabody's Improbable History)

² That was one of the show's names. Through the years, the show had at least seven names as it wended its way through different networks (ask your Grandparents) and syndication.

³ Wikipedia: Wormhole (Terminology)

⁴ Standing for Automatic Computer or the like.

[Herby]

Re: Historical note/quibble

Kist for completeness, the name of Bulwinkle (J. Moose) was named after a car dealer in the (San Francisco) East bay (possibly Oakland). The show usually began with the opening serializing of Rocky & Bulwinkle adventure, then a couple of intermediate segments, Mr. Peabody & Sherman and the Wayback machine was but one. Others were "Fractured Fairytales", and "Dudley Do-Right". The cartoons always had some silliness to them. One Wayback adventure was to go to Pizarro's conquering of the Inca. At the end Mr. Peabody said "And those are the Amos mountains", to which Sherman said "The Amos mountains??" Mr. Peabody: "You haven't heard of the Amoses and the Andies??" [end].

Good times as a kid of the times. Nowdays all you get are hours of news programs repeating the same thing over and over in the 5pm hour (*SIGH*).

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

Sort of missing the point

Well, unless the point is to neuter Wayland.

OK, so it's a method of doing a little more than XWayland by letting an X Window Manger run, but that still maintains all the issues of X such as security (i.e. one window being able to just peek at another or control it), at the same time as removing the advantage of effectively a uniform config file in the form of xorg.conf, and all the disadvantages of Wayland, because if you want to still run Wayland apps the compositor needs to support extensions.

Want multi monitor control and similar functionality? Needs to support the Wayland protocols, the X Window Manager isn't going to be able to do it running under Wayback.

The problem is X was created in an era when heterogeneous companies co-operated and funded for the advantage of all. That's been lost a *long* time ago, now things are pretty much Linux only, mostly x64 based, and driven on commercial self interest[1].

As I've posted before, the solution isn't actually a million miles from Wayback. There needs to be *one* compositor base (or a very small number) which all other desktop environments or window managers link into dynamically. When Wayland protocols get updated, only the base is updated and the functionality flows down to the desktop environment/window manager with *zero code changes*. If this requires third party programs outside the WM that's OK too. This base also needs to be cross platform, and large commercial interests on Linux don't get to create a situation where the base is effectively Linux only, just like how the 'reference' Weston compositor runs on Linux and.. Linux.

As it is, I currently do use Wayland as I thought I should move with the times and mostly it works. Mostly. Except for the fact my choice of compositor is extremely limited if I don't want to use Linux, don't want to use a huge desktop environment, and do want something that works. I'm on labwc, and currently can't get overlays to work so if wlclock is launched I have no method of moving it. It's also not possible to set my monitor configuration in a compositor config file, because unlike xorg.conf, the functionality *simply does not exist*. Third party programs are needed after the compositor starts - which isn't a deal breaker, but is irritating.

[1] Don't worry though, this was and is also the fault of the Linux community. You wanted your shiny operating system to forge ahead without bothering to consider smelly old BSD Unix or other obscure OS. You got what you wanted, and Wayland is one natural result.

[Adair]

It has to be said

... regardless of the rights and wrongs of Wayland's devs, they don't help themselves with a development process that is bordering on fusion-like timescales: it's always just n years away.

I suppose they may eventually reach some kind of Xsane-like stability, with version 0.999999, being as humble as they are and willing to admit that perfection can never be achieved, but they still ain't there yet.

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

obXKCD, etc.

I'm in agreement with Randall's feelings, although, thankfully, it's been a long time since I've had to fiddle with xorg.conf by hand.

I'll be honest, I had no idea what problem Wayland was trying to solve, so I looked it up and found this article, which gives a decent high-level explanation. It seems honest about the teething problems Wayland has had while painting an optimistic picture about where it is and where it's going.

A quote which particularly stands out me is, "It should be clear that Fedora’s target audience consists of people who are excited about change." This mindset stands in opposition to that of many Register commentards, who seem aggressively opposed to change, having apparently forgotten their youthful enthusiasm for the possibilities of technology. "Ah," you say, "we're just opposed to change for the sake of change. After all, why mess with something that works?" The problem with this attitude is that it can equally be applied to any technology. Why have a car when a horse works just fine? The car, after all, is more expensive, more polluting, and requires a specialized fuel to run. (And yes, jake, we know.)

The truth seems to be that each of us imprints on what we learned early, and we get less adaptive as we age. I know I struggle with the constant changes to Linux's network configuration methodology; I just deployed an Ubuntu server and had to learn about the netplan file, which was definite WTF? moment. On the other hand, having also just learned a bit about Kubernetes, I understand why Ubuntu moved in that direction: netplan is very similar to the YAML files used by Kubernetes, making it, presumably, easier to configure for DevOps folks. It would also be nice if different Linux distros used the same damn commands. However, as I have been repeatedly lectured on these forums, Choice is Good. Presumably, there will be plenty of distros which stick with X, others will move to Wayland, and Wayback (or something like it) will provide a shim for people who want to use a Wayland distro but insist on clinging to some X dependency.

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

Re: obXKCD, etc.

Yes and no. It's really easy to get set in your ways, but there's moving on from stuck in your ways :

Some time ago I implemented a text processing thing in Powershell instead of AWK which I'd normally use, because every other colleague is horrified at using the line noise like complexity of an AWK script even if it's as simple as 'run with these parameters'. Mostly it worked out, AWK does a few things better, Powershell can be coerced to do similar things and has many other interesting and modern features. I doubt I'll go back to AWK at work - Powershell is installed on Windows and will do what I want.

Then there's 'new is not always better' :

At home I tried using Unbound and nsd, they were fantastic, and my config worked first time, until I realised they didn't support DDNS and I had to go back to BIND. BIND works, but there's a lot of configuration complexity, a number of gotchas, and it still doesn't seem to be 100% perfect here.

Wayland is akin to nsd, and the change excited Fedora audience would be wise to remember that. It may be it has a better architecture, security advantages, and the ability to achieve new tasks that would be difficult or impossible with the old but that doesn't matter one jot if it doesn't do what you need it to do. From the very limited availability of non Linux based compositors, their lack of functionality, and the limited selection of usable Wayland applications, it simply does not have the breadth of offerings.

I looked for a Wayland based Usenet reader. Everyone says 'use Thunderbird' - but Thunderbird does not seem to support news server logons, only public access. Apparently Sylpheed might do the job. I installed Pan, it looks very old school but worked without an issue.

'It does what I want if I run Linux, only use modern services, and my interface is a huge corporate company driven desktop environment (Gnome/KDE)' is not much of a flex and remarkably inconsiderate of users who are willing to change but *not* follow the one true Fedora, either because they dislike it, or Fedora cannot do what they need.

[Liam Proven]

Re: obXKCD, etc.

> Thunderbird does not seem to support news server logons

Yes it does. I use Eternal September, which needs a logon.

[martinusher]

Re: obXKCD, etc.

Its not 'set in your ways' so much as a sort of pushback against making 'ix' systems like Windows systems. Not every computer has a 'seat' -- a graphical screen, keyboard and mouse -- but the way we train programmers has meant that for many this is all we know.

The main problem with 'X' is that its too damn clever for its own good. its built around a general computing model that's way too abstract for a lot of users. (It took me ages to understand it and I'm not even sure that I really do). Sure, it has shortcomings, but anything designed back in those halcyon days before we learned (the hard way) that abuse and crime were important problems has similar shortcomings. It could do with a rebuild but because most of us have been brought up to think of a computer as a user interface we're just too steeped in the methodology (and mythology) of PCs to design anything other than a Wayland.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Re: obXKCD, etc.

If you want "too damn clever for it's own good" take a look at the late and very unlamented X Image Extension sometime.¹

I still wake up shrieking in horror some nights after dreaming I was being forced to code an image processing client in it.

To quote Joseph Conrad's character Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. . . "The horror! The horror!"

___________________

¹ Wikipedia: X Image Extension

[ChoHag]

Re: obXKCD, etc.

> I know I struggle with the constant changes to Linux's network configuration methodology

Whereas I don't struggle with a network configuration methodology that hasn't seen any significant changes since 1983 ("The ifconfig command appeared in 4.2BSD") and yet I somehow manage to be online along with all my VMs and chroots despite doing so using a network medium (wifi) which didn't exist then. Go figure.

Choice is good. Change just because you want to fuck with things to put your name on them is not.

What is the latest attempt to make noises in linux called and when can we expect it to reach 90% functionality so it can be replaced with the next new shiny?

[Vincent Manis]

I find conspiracy theories endlessly entertaining. Whether it's systemd or wayland, or for all I know, the Linux ls command, things are invented by nefarious cabals of evil profiteers, bent on corrupting our software systems, and, I don't know, polluting our precious bodily fluids. Debian was forced to switch to systemd because of a Jedi mind trick, we are assured. The developers of Wayland know nothing of graphic user interfaces, which is not surprising, given that their entire computing experience was using punched cards on an IBM 704, we are assured.

Is it not possible to regard these products on their own merits? One can substantially disagree with their design while simultaneously respecting their designers' serious desire to produce something that advances the state of the art. Similarly, one can believe that Debian chose systemd, not because of possession by evil spirits, but because the majority believed it was the best available option. (I comight have picked GNU Shepherd, which wasn't even finished at the time; they made a better choice than I would have.)

I respect the right of the Devuan developers to remove systemd, on technical grounds, and replace it with another init system. I do not respect the right of anyone to assume, in the absence of evidence, that software developers are either evil or stupid, just because they disagree with the design that was produced.

[tinpinion]

Hear, hear!

I can, at the same time, think that Lennart Poettering is a disrespectful prick, disagree with the design philosophy of systemd, and feel that he built systemd because he identified a problem and attempted to solve it rather than being some kind of bad actor.

... Either that, or he's a ridiculously talented bad actor Microsoft plant who's been plotting Linux's downfall since the very beginning! *gasp*

Nah, time for sleep!

[ChoHag]

Point of order!

Having spent many decades working with them, I can assure you that it is safe to assume that software developers are stupid until you have evidence to the contrary.

Not dumb, but the special kind of stupid reserved for particularly intelligent people. It is practically ubiquitous.

[Anonymous Coward]

subborn?

By 'subborn' do you really mean 'fully functional'?

[mrcreosote]

Xvfb

Does Wayland have an equivalent for Xvfb?

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

Re: Xvfb

There's a load of compositors out there. Try Cage, it can run headless. Does depend of course which Wayland protocol extensions your program requires.

[JoHasp]

Don't break what works

All new things look shiny at start. Problem it is easy to throw away the child with the bathtub water (not sure this a true English expression but you certainly get the feeling).

As argument just look to the comment of serious professional application developers on Wayland:

"According to KiCad’s devs, the frustrating reality is that these problems aren’t within KiCad’s control. Wayland was intentionally designed without certain features to prioritize security and simplicity, leaving application developers in a bind.

Many problems stem from fundamental gaps in Wayland’s design—features that X11, Windows, and macOS have long taken for granted, such as window positioning and mouse cursor control."

Thing that says enough and why we may applaude for Wayback. Because if we like it or not the community pressure on Wayland can't be stopped even if the approach is flauded.

But do not fear, within 10 years someone will develop the (modern) X11 protocol because of all the limitations in Wayland. Certainly as the days of the desktop are over and everything will be (self) hosted, cooperative and AI driven. There will be a lot to say about splitting application and presentation.

[rcxb]

DEI context

Again the reg is posting that DEI quote seeming intentionally out of context...

The VERY NEXT sentence is: "Anybody who's treating others nicely is welcomed."

By all means, read it for yourself and see if it's some racist tirade its made out to be:

https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver

[jake]

Re: DEI context

The issue isn't the words. The issue is the context in which the words are being used. That DEI nonsense was put in there specifically to cause controversy. He WANTED to be toxic.

Imagine if he had just said "I'm forking X, because X development seems to have stalled. Please feel welcome to join me in this new endeavor!"

And then simply got on with it. With no mention whatsoever of DEI (or a CoC, or ... ).

Folks would have flocked to it, there would be no controversy (outside the usual forking nonsense), and we certainly wouldn't be having this conversation.

Remember, it's supposedly about saving X ... and NOT about some social bullshit that X never heard of, and wouldn't understand if it did.

Can you imagine how nice the world would be if people would collectively get off their high-horses and CODE?

[Mockup1974]

Re: DEI context

>Can you imagine how nice the world would be if people would collectively get off their high-horses and CODE?

I wish Red Hat would do that instead of politicising everything.

[Dimonic]

Will this layer allow for the traditional thin client xserver setup?

[Liam Proven]

> Will this layer allow for the traditional thin client xserver setup?

No.