The comment section there is unbearable to read. I totally get that Wayland is a growing protocol, and sometimes things aren’t implemented yet, but pretending like Xorg hasn’t had a whole mountain of issues of the past 40 years is hilarious
X11 was originally built when computer monitors were commonly monochrome. It’s quite amazing it has lasted this long.
Phrononix’s forum is known for having some of the most toxic individuals in the open-source ecosystem, with flame wars, pointless complaining and arguing happening usually starting within the first 10 comments.
I have no idea why or how it got so bad there specifically, but it’s bad. Though oddly enough, in-between all the negativity, will be developers of major systems, like AMD driver engineers, calmly talking with other big movers in the industry.
I guess it’s one of the few sites that is dedicated to reporting on such things, but boy howdy is it an odd mix of spiteful users and developer networking.
It’s kind of hilarious though, when I’m bored I sometimes just browse the comment of some controversial topic on phoronix, to watch users get into the most vicious, time consuming arguments over pointless things. The fact that it’s interspersed with random engineers from AMD or whatever makes it even better
The reason it is so shit is that because there is NO moderation whatsoever (nor there is any care for having it, as there wouldn’t be cases like someone that had done ban evasion twice still being active on the forums otherwise). And I think I can safely say that it is just like the same as other social media:
More heated and stupid arguments = more page clicks and views = more ad revenue (Michael definitely inserts some ads into the forums, like come on now)
I have absolutely no regrets using adblockers on there (or internet-wide), and Michael has the GALL to call his subscription service “Premium”… unbeknownst to him that a golden coated excrement is in the end… still a piece of excrement. :V
Wayland is the future. It has already surpassed X11 in many ways. My favourite comment on Phoronix was “When is X11 getting HDR? I mean, it was released 40 years ago now.”
That said, the fact that this pull request came from Valve should carry some weight. Perhaps Wayland really is not ready for SDL.
I do not see why we need to break things unnecessarily as we transition. This is on the app side. Sticking with X11 for SDL ( for now ) does not harm the Wayland transition in any way. These applications will still work fine via Xwayland.
Sure, a major release like 3.0 seems like a good place to make the switch. In the end though, it is either ready or it is not. If the best path for SDL is to keep the default at X11 then so be it ( for now ).
Yup, I dont think this is valve shitting on Wayland because they also believe in Wayland being the future, but until their protocol suggestions are merged upstream it does hurt the Linux gaming ecosystem (and therefore valve) if games outside of Gamescope have technical issues.
That being said, I’m not sure what games I play use SDL, let alone Wayland SDL, so can’t be sure what issues im affected by
I already force Wayland global for SDL games because the xwayland one has a horrible stutter while the native Wayland works flawlessly. Making it the default sounds reasonable to me. If specific programs don’t work with it, they can override it
Interesting. I’ve been developing a game with SDL2 and think I know the stutter you’re referencing. I passed it off as an oversight in my rendering code, but maybe it’s as you say. Forcing Wayland does appear to work on my test machine, but integer scaling is broken. Might require some more tinkering or proper support in SDL3, but that’s the only thing that didn’t work OOTB, so not bad.
I have the same experience. I wrote a simple program with SDL2 to test a software renderer. All it does is create a window then go into an event loop and after each iteration it streams a framebuffer to a texture that gets displayed in the window. In the default mode (X11) my frame timings fluctuate a lot and for a while I tried to massage the code to get it stable because I was convinced that it was just my draw code. Then I eventually forced SDL2 to use Wayland and not only did the draw time per frame go down by 2ms but the fluctuations went away completely.
To have this laundry list of negatives get a reply basically saying “yeah, it’s bad, but we need to impress the stakeholders by forcing a Wayland default even if it doesn’t work correctly” is baffling.
I use SDL so this hits a bit closer to home. Hopefully they can arrive at a conclusion that isn’t harmful to us devs. It’s already kind of a tossup whether it’s even worth it to provide a native Linux build when Proton works so well anyway. I can’t imagine this will help.
one of the main reasons the linux kernel is where it is today: “never break userspace”
unfortunately not every project keeps to this principle.
There are good reasons to break userspace sometimes. If we would never do so, we would stuck on X11 forever.
Wayland is definitely on the side of not breaking userspace, though. The API design, xWayland compatibility layer, and recent focus on protocols to fix missing functionality from xorg are all designed to make Wayland a seamless transition.
Otherwise we’d have been using Wayland as the only option for years now.
“never break userspace”
As Linus once, very articulately, reminded that one guy.
