Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate.
“In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate.
Nate Graham acknowledges current gaps in Wayland support but on the matter of “Wayland breaks everything” isn’t really the right perspective: "Look, if I said, “Linux breaks Photoshop; you should keep using Windows!” I know how you’d respond, right?
You’d say “Wait a minute, the problem is that Photoshop doesn’t support Linux!” And you’d be right.
Because there’s nothing Linux can do to ‘un-break’ Photoshop; Adobe needs to port their software, and they simply haven’t done so yet.
This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore.
For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on.
The original article contains 395 words, the summary contains 187 words. Saved 53%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Nate Graham acknowledges current gaps in Wayland support but on the matter of “Wayland breaks everything” isn’t really the right perspective
That’s rather disingenuous. It’s meant to be a replacement for X11. So it does break things.
It’s not intended as a drop in replacement.
Backwards compatibility forever sounds great, but the technical debt eventually becomes a giant fucking limitation on improvement. They chose not to stay backwards compatible for a reason.
I agree that at some point you have to be able to ditch technical debt, but you still should be able to do more or less the same things with the new system as with the old system and that’s currently still not the case.
The problem is that the architecture of Wayland and the organization around it themselves impose limitations that have a chilling effect on development for it. One issue is that Wayland has been deliberately left very slim, leaving a lot of complexity and implementation details up to the compositor. A compositor can be seen as something that approaches the size and complexity of an entire X display server. This means that if someone wants to create a window manager, they have to implement a whole compositor first. So instead of writing window manager code, which is what the developer is probably the most interested in, they are spending most of their time implementing the compositor.
Naturally this also leads to a lot of duplication of effort. For example: GNOME, KDE and the window managers that have implemented a wayland version each have their own compositor that by and large does the same thing.
Another issue is the standardization of the protocols and interfaces that the different compositors use, or lack thereof. There is a steering group containing the major stakeholders that votes on proposed extensions, but good proposals often get shot down because the major stakeholders can’t agree on it and sometimes ego or principles gets in the way. And then you have cases where one compositor just goes their own way and implements something regardless of what the others do.
For example, as a result of this there’s still no standard screen capture API, so if you want to do things like screenshots, remote desktop, desktop streaming, … whether or not you can do that, and with which tool, depends on the compositor you use. Another example: they’re currently still bickering over whether or not an application should be allowed to place windows with absolute coordinates, and how that should be implemented. We’re currently 15 years after initial release of Wayland…
In my opinion, this is all completely backwards. Both in an organizational and technical sense way too much has been left up to the individual compositors that should have been a core part of Wayland itself.
Unfortunately, it’s all too late to fix this. We’re 15 years into Wayland development, and the flawed architecture has been set in stone. Wayland isn’t going to go away soon either, too many parties are invested in it. So for me the reasonable thing to do is to wait and stick with X11 until the dust settles and something emerges on the other side that is better than what I currently have.
This means that if someone wants to create a window manager, they have to implement a whole compositor first. So instead of writing window manager code, which is what the developer is probably the most interested in, they are spending most of their time implementing the compositor.
wlroots has existed for almost 7 years and this misconception is still repeated.
As railways were a replacement for canals.
It was not the railways that broke the barge. But the companies expecting to gain the advantages without adapting there transportation.
Replace not upgrade.
PS i still use canals. Bur do not blame the raIlway for not fitting my boat.
Lol. Learn your history.
In the UK railways very much were a replacement for canals.
Both being built to transport good accross the nation.
Trying to gaslight others? nice
Wayland developer says X11 is bad, not Wayland
Oh boy, the Phoronix’s comment section 💀
Phoronix’s comment section is usually full of trolls, shills, and people afflicted with brain rot. So I don’t even bother reading them anymore.
