this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023

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The cost of maintaining Xorg (mastodon.social)

submitted 11 months ago by ugjka to c/[email protected]

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[+] [email protected] 69 points 11 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 39 points 11 months ago (7 children)

It's not only software vendors but Wayland itself lacks some crucial features. For me it's auto-type and screen magnification - both are showstoppers for me.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

Autotype is already solved - ydotool, wtype and dotool exists (and possibly others as well).

Screen magnification is already present in KDE (Meta + +, Meta + - to zoom in/out). There's also a magnifier tool (KMag). There may be similar functionalities in other DEs.

My issue is the lack of an overall GUI automation tool, ie, like AutoHotkey. X11 had PyAutoGUI, but there's no such AIO equivalent for Wayland yet, and the PyAutoGUI devs don't seem to be interested in Wayland support - it's neither on their road map, nor have they even answered any Wayland questions on their Github page, which is disappointing. But this isn't Wayland's fault, when other tools have shown that automating the GUI is possible, we just need someone to put together a complete package like PyAutoGUI / AHK.

[–] donio 18 points 11 months ago

Autotype is already solved - ydotool, wtype and dotool exists (and possibly others as well).

These tools work by creating a virtual keyboard so they don't let you send input to a specific window. The input goes to whatever happens to be focused at the moment. This makes them less reliable than the X11 equivalents and unusable for tasks where you need to guarantee that the right window gets the input.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

KMag doesn't work on Wayland.

[–] shiro 5 points 11 months ago

feel free to check out map2, I'm currently working on version 2 which will do lots of the stuff you need when it's ready, but currently the API might still change and docs are active WIP

still, it can already do most stuff I need it for :)

[+] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

People, your only alternative to Wayland is dead and unmaintained. If you push against Wayland as the default option, you only make your transition in the future more painful than it needs to be.

Nobody's pushing "against Wayland". I don't give a shit about Wayland or Xorg. What I care about is having a full-featured, easy to use desktop stack readily available. The "dead" Xorg works perfectly with everything. That's the bar.

When I get a checkbox on the login screen saying "use Wayland" (or when the distro does it by default) I need everything to work. If everything does not work, I do not use it.

The Wayland choice of pushing complexity onto individual software projects by making them all reinvent a hundred wheels, and onto users by making them hunt down a hundred pieces of software to build a wobbly desktop stack sucks. I have no incentive to take part in this particular rat race.

[+] [email protected] -2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Install Xorg yourself. Don’t make it easily accessible to new Linux users.

New users will drop any distro whose default desktop doesn't work perfectly and with all the features they want. Linux already has a high enough bar competing with Windows, creating additional artificial hurdles is dumb in the extreme.

And if it does, then it’s still insecure by design.

Security vs convenience has always been a give and take. There's a cutoff point that users will not cross if the software becomes too inconvenient to use, even if it means greater security. The Wayland stack is currently on the bad side of that line and needs to step over if it wants to see mass adoption.

Substitute Wayland for X11 here. Both Wayland and X11 are protocols. X11 is such a lackluster protocol that all implementations died, except that Xorg still has users.

Nobody cares, all they see is the stack, with Wayland leading the point on the bad decisions.

And you obviously care a lot about Wayland and Xorg.

You are projecting. If this were any other piece of software, say, a text editor that works and does everything you need, and someone came and told you "you must use this new one, it's the way forward, but oh it doesn't have all the features you need from a text editor" you would say "thanks but I'll wait until it's ready". But you see no problem in pushing Wayland on people who can't use it?

Please understand that nobody will ever successfuly push through incomplete software. Not on Linux. There's nothing you or anybody can do to convince people that incomplete software is complete and usable when it's not.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I really wanted Wayland to work for me. I just bought a new ASUS laptop (and ASUS has a great Linux compatibility track record, mind you!), 7th Gen Ryzen+Radeon, all AMD. I figured, let's use Wayland on this one.

I installed KDE Neon, updated the kernel (some stuff is broken on the LTS kernel, no big deal, easy fix), switched to the Wayland session, everything was fine...until I opened any chromium-based app. Crashed kwin, killed the session completely, it recovered, but in a new session. Switched to X11, everything works. Maybe if I grabbed a newer mesa from a PPA it would work, but:

Crashing the window manager killing the session is awful and doesn't happen in X11
Chromium shouldn't crash the compositor at all
Even if it's AMD's new graphics drivers being buggy, that still shouldn't kill the session!

And I know, technically KDE could (and afaik, is) implement session management so that doesn't happen. But to my knowledge, literally 0 WMs/DEs can recover the session after a compositor crash currently, and that's a big deal.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

auto type

ydotool?

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago

10 years was enough time to make your software work on Wayland.

By that logic, one could answer that 15 years was enough time to make Wayland work better than it does... but that would be petty and disingenous.

Desktop stacks are very complex. X.org took 30 years to beat that complexity into a usable shape. Wayland pushed most complexity up the stack and still took 15 years to finally put together a protocol of beta quality.

It will take the rest of the stack however long it will take to build on that protocol. Most of the Linux community are volunteers, and Wayland was and still is work in progress. Nobody in their right mind rushes to write software on top of an unstable protocol.

If Wayland is truly ready I think we will see meaningful stack adoption within the next 5 years. But I don't think trying to force developers into it will achieve anything.

As for forcing users that's completely unreasonable. If you're using XFCE on Nvidia you'll have to wait for XFCE to get Wayland support and for Wayland to get Nvidia support. Very few people are willing to change their whole desktop stack or able to buy a new graphics card for the sake of... of what? Bringing about the Year of the Linux Desktop?

[–] interceder270 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This is a terrible recommendation and I hope as few people follow it as possible.

People like you are why Linux has a reputation for always being broken; as soon as we get something that works and is stable, we gotta move to the next broken thing.

The same thing will be said about Wayland in 20 years, if it ever reaches feature-parity with X.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 11 months ago (4 children)

The sense of entitlement in some of the replies on that post are absolutely awful

As for me personally, I want to love Wayland. It has great performance on ALL my devices, (except one with a nvidia GPU) and is super smooth compared to X11!

However... the secure aspect of Wayland makes it very difficult, if not impossible to easily get a remote desktop going. Wayvnc doesn't support the most popular desktop environments depending on how Wayland was compiled, and the built-in desktop sharing on distros that have switched over to Wayland often require very specific Linux-only VNC and RDP clients, otherwise you run into odd errors.

I really hope the desktop sharing situation improves because it's a pretty big showstopper for me. On X11 you just install & run x11vnc from a remote SSH session and you have immediate session access with VNC from Linux, Android, and Windows. If you want lockscreen access too then you run as root and provide the greeter's Xauth credentials. But Wayland's not so simple sadly AFAICT...

Waypipe is something I've found out about recently though, so need to check that out and see how well it works at the moment. If anyone has any helpful info or pointers please share, I'm completely new to Wayland and would appreciate it!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

For me its especially services like RustDesk or even RealVNC that are essential, because I have no DynDNS

[–] BrownianMotion 3 points 11 months ago

I know this is not useful for most use cases, but if you login to the desktop on the 'remote Wayland', locally first then RD will work as expected. So if you can change the behaviour of the remote desktop to stay unlocked (IE its in a secure place where others cannot just access the device), then and RD will work with Wayland.

I use NoMachine (since I manage all sorts of devices, and its nice that there is a client and server for everything including phones/arm) and it works for me because many of the machines are actually VM's and I can keep the desktops unlocked and logged in. NoMachines solution for Wayland - is to disable it and use X11 !!

But I wish many of the RD developers would just embrace Wayland and add/rewrite code to support it (If it is in their scope, I don't know) It might not be, since I am aware of Waypipe and Pipewire, but I'd assume that RD devs would still need to include support for that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I use freerdp for Linux and rd connect on Android, Windows to connect to my Ubuntu laptop as a second monitor on gnome Wayland and it works great

[–] uis 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Also wayland is just slower for gaming

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago

The more it’s on its way out, the harder it will be to find people that even want to maintain it.

[–] MaximumPower 14 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I honestly don't get these posts, there's a couple of things that is super weird.

Why does every discussion about Wayland include trashing xorg?
Isn't the solution pretty obvious, stop mainting xorg if you don't like to maintain xorg, who is forcing you to maintain xorg?

I really don't care if I'm using xorg or wayland, I just want something that works, and I have tried wayland and that isn't the case as of the moment. And I don't care about the why, because I can't be like yeah I use Wayland that's why I can't be on this video conference.

Just stop mainting it if you don't want to maintain it, problem solved, move on.

[–] interceder270 1 points 11 months ago

Why does every discussion about Wayland include trashing xorg?

~~I don't know, really, but it's something I feel I've seen before.~~ I thought about it and it's just fanboyism.

Some people get legitimately angry when they see someone using something they don't like, and I think Wayland fanboys fit in this category to a tee.

I see the exact same kind of backlash whenever someone brings up Nvidia or Manjaro. The fanboys come out and all take it as an opportunity to recommend what they like because they believe their tastes are superior to everyone else's.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

When will SSM come to Gnome?

When will the client be able to set the window size and position?

[–] interceder270 -2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I guess Wayland isn't as feature-rich as X because people from RHEL don't want to put in the work to maintain it.

Not surprising, really. It just follows the modern trend of removing features so incompetent programmers have an easier job.

[–] danielfgom -2 points 11 months ago

You are the boss! 💪