Wayland is growing up. and now we don't have a choice

> Compositors are incompatible with one another and have totally different levels of functionality.

I see far more similar about compositors than different. They have freedom of implementation & do different things, but they offer to apps a very common set of protocols, and some of the newer edgier protocols have more varied adoption. But I see standards & growth & development forward as 'what Wayland is', not "incompatibility" (that's why Wayland proper is purely 100% protocols & not a bespoke impl) and "totally different" (???).

Finding formal concensus to make special stable has been hard. But there is a pleasantly large amount of overlap and interop, even if compositors end up implementing more than one flavor of say gamma control.

> Most compositors don't do any proper kind of security and permissions and just limit data flows in the most primitive and restrictive way possible.

When starting a composite yeah, you figure out who has input and send it there. You render the surface the apps give you. Dataflow is inherently quite unidirectional for a long time when beginning a desktop compositor.

But that doesn't feel true at all today. Most compositors support advanced screen sharing, virtual pointers, and other fairly advanced data-flow protocols, almost all built security in mind, requiring more advanced routing & permissioning, as is very visible with the screen share flows of most apps.

> Using something with existing security but the possibility of cross-communication like DBUS is just easier here.

Agreed, but you yourself in your very negative comment on Wayland in this topic seem quite opposed to second systems in broad basis (and pretty radically down on Wayland in general). I'd like to see the display system protocols able to better tackle talking about and managing what's on the screen, rather than building a second parallel system for saying and working with what's on the screen.

I also think there's a decently strong basis already there in the current protocols. There's a security context to start. https://wayland.app/protocols/security-context-v1 We see more advanced flows like XDG Foreign for apps to expose surfaces and mix them onto our own apps.

At-spi d-bus was already right there & done, and it felt easy to keep using it. It was mostly convenience I feel like, and the justification of security feels like a blunt hammer to deny exploration. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/at-spi2-core/

> but worst case I'll run a Wayland compositor on my X11 server for that

This is actually surprisingly easy, too. My first experiments ran a wayland app in cage ( https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage ), but in order to better handle multiple windows I switched to sway with a lightly tweaked config, and other than some input weirdness (I think it struggles with modifiers held while switching focus) it works pretty well.

Ariadne Conill is turning Xwayland into a full X11 replacement: https://github.com/kaniini/wayback. She doesn't want to maintain it long-term, so if you're interested in contributing, please do: the more people understand the codebase, the better.

Wayland also doesn't even remotely resemble anything that would be fit to talk to modern graphics hardware. DMA buffers and DRM (direct rendering manager, not the digital restrictions management) are an afterthought, a separate protocol that is not even all in stable yet. Vulkan usually doesn't work. Latency with Wayland got worse and won't get better because "frames have to be perfect". Tons of unnecessary blitting and latency be damned. All while actually tearing in Wayland is as bad as in X11 here.

Fixing X would require a protocol that is mostly X, but of course incompatible because you have to rip out some protocol bugs. But Wayland isn't X minus the bugs. Wayland started as a little bit of broken bitmap-pushing and a whole lot of hot air. And even with tons of extension and auxilliary protocol development, multiplied by tons of unnecessary reimplementations in tons of compositors, it isn't even where X11 was when Wayland started. Wayland fixed nothing yet, broke a lot, fragmented the community, brought pain and misery.

The protocol is trivially extensible, and have had plenty of extensions that has significant altered how it behaves. Fixing X in a step wise manner wod have been perfectly doable. The problem is that the Wayland proponents didn't just want to fix the things there was agreement was broken, but also wanted to actively break things that would cause an uproar.

Tons of stuff aren't in wayland that are actually graphics and window related. Wayland just forgot about it, then later on people realized that their design was far too primitive and simplistic.

DMA buffers, color management and pixel formats, scaling and DPI, image and video capture, tons of keyboard and mouse related things, all initially forgotten, now incompatible extras that are inconsistently implemented, frequently broken and forever in beta/staging/unsupported hell...

I think XWayland is basically an X server that supports Wayland. It is based on Xorg though. But if you really think it has a bunch of features nobody uses, you could try to delete those simplify that way.

Or am I misunderstanding what you want to do?

Yes, but X11 has the excuse of being very old. Wayland was supposed to be a clean redesign, learning from the mistakes of the past. They learned from some mistakes, but they also completely ignored all of the good ideas, functionality and necessary additions that X11 and other systems like MacOS and Windows had.

They designed a system that was as simple as they could make it, trying to push the complexity that wasn't just bitmap-blitting onto others. And they isolated Wayland from all possibilities of making proper, compatible, common extensions. They tried to be the opposite of X11, because they recognized "push absolutely everything into the X11 server" as a mistake. Nobody ever used the XPrint extension. But they went too far, cut away all the useful stuff, all the necessary extensions, even cut away the "server" and just went with a library plus protocol. Now everyone has to reimplement their own server (compositor in wayland lingo), producing tons of busywork, splitting the community, ensuring incompatibility and pain. And everyone has to keep up to date on all the tons of necessary extra protocols that all the compositors have to implement all over again.

Yes, the same words do apply. But for different reasons.

Bad news for all my programming guides that use em dashes properly... ;D Luckily I have a Git history on them that predates LLMs, for whatever that's worth.

In Vim, the digraph is ^K-M.

OFF but I liked most of these points ~3 years ago. Bullet points for "what you will learn" and "what you've learnt" for example.

Now articles structured this way make me sad. I am not sure if it is acquired distaste, just tiring, or recent articles are indeed worse; either way I am not very happy about them.

I have an RTX 4060 Ti with latest drivers installed, KDE on Debian. On the login screen, I can select X11 or Wayland. Selecting X11 lets me log in fine, selecting Wayland and logging in results in a black screen and the only thing I can do to get any video out at all is switching to another TTY.

I have an Nvidia card with the default Fedora install and it works on Wayland without having to do anything.

Really? As of a couple months ago I nearly totally hosed my Debian installation trying to get Wayland GDM working under Nvidia.

Wayland is a ridiculously simple protocol: I could run it on pencil and paper. It doesn't require anything I'd describe as a "hardware backdoor". What are you on about?

Those articles were flagged by users, not moderators, and I'm not sure moderators even saw them (I didn't).

The topic isn't banned. More substantive articles would stand a better chance of not getting flagged, though.

A highly controversial guy making controversial patches to a somewhat heated topic around these parts is going to get flagged by users too, how are you so certain it's the admins doing the hiding? Even when not flagged the score to comment ratios will drag those off the front page quickly.

Both threads devolved into politics, and that's likely the reasons why they got flagged. There's no evidence these were hidden by moderators, as opposed to because regular users flagged threads.

Having seen some of your comments on one of those threads, there's a decent chance your comments contributed to getting those posts flagged.

The [flagged] indicator on a submission usually indicates user flagging. Moderators and algorithms just quietly downweight submissions without any visible indicator. So this isn't an HN moderator position, the question to resolve is why users would flag it.

In this case, I'd have flagged them too if I saw them. The "long live" post is an aggressive tirade that reflects poorly on the author and led to a poor-quality discussion. The second is a link to a git commit history, which is weird in its own right and provides no explanation, and the context provided in the comments shows that a generally dislikable figure with extreme political views is now leading a fork of X11 that has yet to prove itself viable. So I'd probably have flagged that one too as pointless drama until proven otherwise.

[flagged]

Googler, NSA'er, or Red Hatter?

This is false, he we the sole person submitting large amounts of code for about a year and was widely praised, until he forked and red hat went nuclear on his account for opposing their corporate goals, he was not kicked out for bad changes or anything of the sort. Trying to revise history on this is malicious.

The people like OA are spreading misinformation because the developer stated everyone was welcome to contribute and would oppose excessive politics. Keep in mind red hat is currently getting sued 3x over for blatantly racist policies which they used to ban other contributors and forced on their managers, they are evil people.

> I've seen enough stuff I've flagged disappear quickly, and then reappear later (with surprisingly reasonable discussion), to suggest that the admins will retrieve any popular discussion that was unreasonably assigned to the naughty step.

That's the whole point.

The default for everything that has at least a small hater base is to disappear, until for manual reenabling by moderators. This is not community moderation, it is de-facto pre-moderation. Which, in this case has a strong bias against xlibre despite it having literally nothing wrong with it (like the other stuff reappearing). It's gross censure (for the sake of a gross, user hostile corporate), and the moderators should be called out for it.