this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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I mean Red Hat does bad things, but is switching to Wayland a bad thing?
Well let's see
I could go on...
actually Nvidia largely does support wayland now
it's on those applications to support wayland, not the other way around. X certainly wasn't developed to support upstream.
adopted an extensible standard, regardless of how it makes you feel.
more secure and resilient to a variety of attacks, including keyloggers. Yes very bad.
how about the fact that nearly all X developers founded and are now supporting Wayland, and X hasn't had meaningful development aside from break/fix patching for over a decade?
you probably shouldn't.
Again, I'm not too knowledgeable about this, but isn't XWayland a reasonable stopgap for this issue?
Securing the desktop protocol against keyloggers on Linux is like wearing a helmet when you're walking down the street... yeah in theory it's a good thing and would improve your safety, but it's also wildly impractical and the things it protects you from are extremely unlikely.
And even if keyloggers were a huge everyday threat, you still have to allow for legit explicit uses of the technology (automation, accessibility etc.) But nah, they just said "we're not implementing it at all". What sense does that make?
You're proving that your hate is founded on word of mouth instead of facts. There was an accepted RFC for secure sharing of desktop resources years ago. It's solved. Many applications have already ported in.
Of all the reasons you could have chosen for Red Hat you chose "they killed a dead corpse"?
X11 was already dead, it isn't getting updated, and its maintenance is gonna end eventually. Sure Wayland still has issues but once it's ready for widespread use (which it is, save maybe for gaming on PCs with like 6GBs of RAM) the jump is unavoidable. In fact by doing this they got more people to work on fixing the issues in Wayland
Wayland on its own may be ready but you can't build a whole desktop with just Wayland. The rest of the stack needs time to catch up.^(*) And no, not everybody is willing to use KDE and restrict themselves to whatever combination of elements happens to work right now.
^(*) Because the bright people who did this decided they needed to throw the baby out with the bathwater on X. They couldn't possibly find a way to ditch only the obsolete parts and fix the problems and maintain compatibility as much as possible. No, everything had to be rewritten from scratch.
So here we are 15 years later, with another 5 or so to go until the whole Linux desktop ecosystem will be thoroughly redone.
as a matter of fact Cinnamon is also working on wayland (and here by wayland I refer to the whole thing not just the compositor), with the first release having come out recently iirc or coming very soon anyways and so are other desktop environments, and if they aren't likely someone else will port them over if enough people care (such is the beauty of open source). It's not just KDE and GNOME (which still account for a vast majority of users btw, if you choose a less popular DE you should expect slower development and less support it's not something new or crazy or wayland's problem it's normal).
If that was something possible/sensible to do, someone would have done it in the past 11 or something years of xorg being well on its way to the shitter? Like I get that companies make a lot of shit decisions due to money but clearly if abandoning deadware was chosen over resurrecting parts of it there's a good reason. Also pretty sure all of it is outdated my dude so your point doesn't stand. To my knoweledge Xorg isn't very modular but I may be wrong here.
Not a bad thing. Just like it wasn't a bad thing when computers went from just the shell to a GUI, from tapes to eventually hard disks, unix to linux, etc. Xorg can't support HDR nor lots of other things and in all these years nobody has managed to add them, not a company, not the community, not some schizo programmer with led unix socks and a custom tailored furry suit, that's why wayland was invented and what eventually will run on everything minus abandonware. Xorg has been on its way out for years now, Wayland is perfectly usable (with notes to be made for GNOME's implementation on the developer's side and Nvidia on the regular user's side) for the vast majority of users. What RH (Valve, and others) are doing is simply pushing people to get a move on and focus on wayland instead of passively waiting for it to just get better while they just stay in Xorg forever.
And btw nobody is gonna be stopping you from putting Xorg on your machine if you want. I'm using Xorg right now, merely for the sole reason my laptop with its 6GBs of RAM is too weak to run games on wayland yet due to XWayland (which again would be an easily solved issue if instead of having to make things for Xorg in mind they were made with wayland). But the switch to wayland is inevitable, not sure what you were expecting honestly you can't keep a service from the 80s running forever when a better alternative finally arrives.
In fact, as I mentioned, keeping something on life-support this long has only been damaging as it doesn't incentivise people to actually develop for wayland as much (even if they wanted, most its users were on Xorg and havng to choose one or the other thing they're forced to choose Xorg, for example), granted it's not the only disincentive there are some that are due to wayland's implementations and particularly GNOME's but without the move RH and others made the decisions on how to address these issues were just gonna be postponed ad infinitum.
So does Valve. Valve and Red Hat are the driving forces behind the recent HDR advancements.
Yes, but I can still play steam, any Valve game and atm any Linux steam game on X11.
I don't hate Wayland as a project, I just don't like Wayland as it current state. Give me better stability, better support with multiple monitors and a compositor with more customization, and I'll be happy.
But, in my opinion, Wayland is by design opinionated. Some ideas are good, such as the security model, some are both good and bad, such as the Compositor VS Server+WM debate (both good systems in my opinion), some are just bad (no unified screen management option; obviously there are LOTS of protocol extension, but not all are supporting everywhere)
So, imo, WayLand just needs a stable, (really) customizable Compositor with all useful extensions and designed to put other components together; I'm still on my X11+awesomewm+rofi+polybar, and I want a customizable, stable and module approach on Wayland.
I'm not aware of any move by Red Hat or anyone else to remove X11 support from GTK, Qt, etc.
There're discussions to drop the X11 backend with the release of GTK 5. That's still many years away and I really don't think there'll be much of reason left to use X11 by this point.
What is actually still missing for Wayland?
Both are likely to get fixed in the coming years and are pretty niche.
Obviously I'm excluding compositor specific issues, like VRR, server-side decorations and global shortcuts not being implemented on Gnome. Generally they would work, if implemented.
A question of what will happen to the X11 backend is not the same as an active push for the removal of X11 just for the sake of it, as it was claimed.
Chances are at least the Valve side of Wine development work will not care for Wine's X11 support either after SteamOS will only run Proton natively on Wayland instead of XWaxland as is the case now.
Yes, but I can still play steam, any Valve game and atm any Linux steam game on X11.
I don't hate Wayland as a project, I just don't like Wayland as it current state. Give me better stability, better support with multiple monitors and a compositor with more customization, and I'll be happy.
But, in my opinion, Wayland is by design opinionated. Some ideas are good, such as the security model, some are both good and bad, such as the Compositor VS Server+WM debate (both good systems in my opinion), some are just bad (no unified screen management option; obviously there are LOTS of protocol extension, but not all are supporting everywhere)
So, imo, WayLand just needs a stable, (really) customizable Compositor with all useful extensions and designed to put other components together; I'm still on my X11+awesomewm+rofi+polybar, and I want a customizable, stable and module approach on Wayland.
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I hate Red Hat as much as anyone, but X11 is dying even without them.
You're aware they're still the biggest FOSS contributor out there, right? Their only bad move is the CentOS situation.
Yeah people like to hate on Red Hat, but Linux development would be significantly slower without them.
red hat is the one maintening x11 lol, it only working right now because of them