Wayland Core Protocol Is Tailored Only for Gnome and That’s Not a Good Thing

https://news.itsfoss.com/wayland-core-protocol-issue/

by FreeFull • 4 years ago

56 87 4 years ago

news.itsfoss.com

79a6ed87• 4 years ago

I'm not surprised. Both Wayland and GNOME are pushed by Red Hat.

thesuperbigfrog5• 4 years ago

Red Hat has been slowly becoming more like Microsoft used to be.

I have to use RHEL at work and since RHEL 8 the desktop experience is just painful:

GNOME 3 is the only desktop offered. Our IT team hates third-party repos, so EPEL and any chance at an alternative are right out.

I tried to use GNOME 3, but I really do not understand what the designers were thinking and how they intend for it to work.

How do I minimize a window that I do not want in the foreground? There are no buttons that seem to do this without using tweaks or extensions.

When using two or more monitors, why does only one monitor switch to a different virtual desktop while the other does not?

Trying to use GNOME 3 is frustrating and I would rather use pratically anything else (Windows, MacOS, KDE, CDE, Xfce, WindowMaker, Blackbox, Fluxbox, etc.) because at least they would follow some of the last 40 years of desktop environment conventions that GNOME 3 seems to have completely discarded.

ricktdotorg• 4 years ago

agree re: many of your gripes, but specifically re:

How do I minimize a window that I do not want in the foreground?

i use Alt+X for this, mapped via Settings --> Keyboard --> Shortcuts --> Windows --> Hide Window

unethical_ban3• 4 years ago

IT team hates third-party repos

Make sure an allocation of your frustration is pointed at this.

Gnome tweaks should be a default package. Is it not in an accessible repo for RHEL?

I just switched from Pop OS to Fedora 36 on my laptop and am getting the hang of pure GNOME 3 quickly. Other than Guale not working for some reason, Vivaldi and terminal and python run just fine. Hotkeys are abundant.

sph5• 4 years ago

Red Hat are like Microsoft because their enterprise distro offers only one desktop? Alright. I guess macOS is Microsoft as well under that definition.

Without discussing the merits of GNOME vs others, is your company prepared to pay twice for the RHEL license if they provide official support for both GNOME and KDE? Supporting more environments doesn't come for free.

thrillgore2• 4 years ago

I stopped actively using GNOME long before 3.x was an idea. Xfce has remained consistent, performant, and beautiful. GNOME has become a victim of mismanagement, trends, and monoculture.

Remember that Ubuntu spurned GNOME for a long time because they had their own monoculture issues.

csdvrx• 4 years ago

Maybe it's time to give up on Wayland and write something better?

Just like how pipewire did all that pulseaudio was trying to achieve, and some more, while also fixing all the rough issues.

Iteration seems to be the key to perfection

euclaise• 4 years ago

Arcan has been in works since even before Wayland iirc, but frankly nothing has a chance without the big-name support that wayland gets

amluto• 4 years ago

Pipewire is compatible with the Pulseaudio protocol, so Pulseaudio clients work on Pipewire. In contrast, Wayland is a protocol. A Wayland-compatible compositor that also speaks something else would still be a Wayland compositor.

I think the fact that Wayland isn’t a program is a big part of the problem. The dominant Wayland compositor in use is gnome-shell, and it’s obviously extremely GNOME centric. With X11, the interaction between clients and gnome-shell was intermediated by Xorg, so, if gnome-shell wanted to support Xorg (which it did), it had to support relevant features of Xorg. Xorg supported server side decorations, so gnome-shell did too.

But gnome-shell as a Wayland compositor supports whatever set of features it likes, and clients that require additional features don’t work on GNOME, so they largely don’t get written, so there is little pressure on gnome-shell to support them. A Wayland competitor won’t help here. An alternate Wayland server that sits in front of gnome-shell might, but it would be a mess.

Ultimately the best solution would be to break GNOME’s mindshare dominance. If enough users demanded something better/different, then IT departments and sales would notice, and GNOME would need to either catch up or get left behind.

noahtallen• 4 years ago

I’ve never had any real issues with wayland. It supports high DPI, fractional scaling, and high refresh rates very well — couldn’t say the same about X!

All of my struggles with wayland were adoption. It’s a struggle to force every older electron app to use wayland via CLI flags because the authors, even big ones, haven’t bothered.

I guess there are some unsupported things — like screen control. (If you wanted to control another person’s screen over a video call, it’s unsupported in wayland.) But it also actually sandboxes a lot of things which should be (like screen control!)

Adoption would be a problem with a different system as well, unless it was fully compatible with X. Which defeats at least part of the problem wayland solves.

EddieDante6• 4 years ago

I think this is a good thing. The more tightly coupled with GNOME Wayland becomes, the more useless it will be for everybody else. X11 will remain relevant and useful for everybody who thinks the GNOME environment is crap.

GoOnThenDoTell• 4 years ago

For x11 to survive it needs people motivated to maintain it

EddieDante6• 4 years ago

If Wayland is useless without GNOME, that's reason enough to maintain it.

jrm46• 4 years ago

I keep hearing this and yet I keep being able to use X just fine.

zaik• 4 years ago

The other possibility is that it is feature complete and bug free.

riolu• 4 years ago

No one wants to. Wayland is the successor to X11, X devs now work on Wayland. Gnome has first party support for Wayland because the same devs also work on Gnome and Red hat.

The inconvenient truth is they are working towards a cohesive desktop experience, even supporting mobile. X11 will still be here, but you can't blame the devs for wanting to move on.

Operating systems should be designed for all humans, not just programmers. Gnome seems to be the only DE that cares about accessibility. All of your settings and extensions mean nothing to someone who needs all of their apps to work with a screen reader.

This article and these comments suck. No one wants to contribute code, just opinions. Reminds me of the systemd FUD.

You can fork, hack, make your case with Wayland, maybe it gets merged, maybe you just maintain your own fork. These criticisms by people who aren't going to contribute anyway are getting tired.

bsder• 4 years ago

And yet, for all the gnashing of teeth, those people never seem to appear.

Fixing X11 is basically shaving an infinite number of yaks. Wayland is the X11 developers trying to bound the problem to a finite number of yaks. They can only do this by punting everything they possibly can out of the system.

To be perfectly honest, the Wayland developers don't have an option.

Screenshots are a continual complaint--but it is by no means settled as to what entity and mechanism controls the security and permissions behind that and how. Punting window decorations to the clients is annoying--but any other choice likely means that you need a full text rendering system in your window manager. And if you want an "interesting" task, go help both the X11 and Wayland devlopers deal with all the race conditions and problems around the "simple" task of integrating with Vulkan and getting/presenting a surface and handling the swapchains (extension VK_KHR_surface, VK_KHR_swapchain, VK_KHR_xlib_surface, VK_KHR_wayland_surface)--lots of bugs exist and have since 2015. Try tackling the sequence of events around "resize"--you're in for an eye-opening experience.

Yet, even after the Wayland guys atomized this stuff, nobody in the open source software world is picking up the work. Maybe the DeadRat guys are rejecting submissions, but I suspect it's more that people simply aren't willing to grind through this stuff. It's a bunch of detailed, system-level programming with LOTS of gotchas all over the place.

Dunno. Maybe they should say that they are rewriting it in Rust. That might actually attract some people willing to put in work.

malermeister2• 4 years ago

But why would you want X11 to stay relevant? In my experience using Desktop Linux, X11 has always been a janky pain.

Why should we let GNOME keep us from moving on to newer tech?

Edit: In case you want to know why X11 is janky and bad, check out this architecture overview: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html

d_tr3• 4 years ago

For some people X is just better at the moment. I am one of these people and, honestly, Wayland has nothing to offer me but issues here and there.

So I decided to just stick with X and not bother with Wayland until at least 2023-2024, and of course I would like X to still work in the meantime and it probably will.

bitwize3• 4 years ago

X11 with a bare wm has had less jank for me than GNOME, Wayland, and all the fixings. Wayland is an effort pushed by those who want to make their desktop "more digital"[0]. Which is fine, but when what you have works and is rock solid, you tend to want to keep it around.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32270950

EddieDante6• 4 years ago

This is the third time I've read it, and I must be constipated because I still don't give a shit. X11 with Openbox works fine for me. Likewise for FVWM and Window Maker. Maybe you should learn to use a plain old window mangler; if you want Windows you know where to find it.

Nor will I give a shit about Wayland until OpenBSD forks it, audits it to within an inch of its miserable life, and incorporates it into its base distribution to replace Xenocara.

kahnclusions• 4 years ago

Why anyone would want X11 to remain relevant is beyond me…

brnt5• 4 years ago

It works a whole lot better for me.

majewsky3• 4 years ago

The core protocol is minimal because it considers not only PCs and laptops as a target, but also smartphones and tablets (where supporting xdg-shell is usually not desired because it breaks the UI paradigm), IoT and embedded usecases. In particular, IVI (in-vehicle infotainment) was a hot area that every hardware vendor was trying to get into at the time (around 2010), including companies like Intel that contributed to the Wayland spec.

Source: I was active in KDE development around the time when the Wayland core protocol was defined, and followed the discussions on the side lines.

iforgotpassword• 4 years ago

Then there should have been a set of core protocols, so for example, something like core-desktop. Going for the bare minimum just to be super flexible and support desktops, phones, tablets, fridges and graphics cards with RGB lighting is the typical overthinking that hurts everyone and slows adoption. Wayland was conceived in 2008, and has had paid full time devs working on it. For that, the current state is pretty pathetic.

ahartmetz• 4 years ago

The xdg-shell protocol is a sort of core desktop protocol. It has an opinion about everyone's favorite Wayland topic (server-side decorations), and if you have a different opinion, you need to use the xdg-decoration-unstable-v1 (as it still seems to be called) protocol. Fortunately, it seems like the Wayland desktop scene is converging on that one now.

There are still some missing pieces, but the situation isn't disastrous anymore.

jrm46• 4 years ago

Maybe I'm old, but it's just stunning to me how many pro Wayland people seem to strongly miss this general point.

Whatever good things Wayland's been up to, it's been historically dismissive if not outright hostile to backward compatibility and integration, and that's not acceptable. I keep hearing, well it's what the old X people want, and I don't care.

Similarly, don't come with the goofy "It's open source so you don't have the right to criticize." False false false. That wrongly implies it's a bunch of plucky happy-go-lucky volunteers doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. Nope. It's companies with agendas and they need to do better.

bitwize3• 4 years ago

I can't say whether Wayland was specifically designed for GNOME or not. There seems to be evidence that it was also designed for the use cases of mobile devices and embedded applications like in-car entertainment systems.

(Let's leave aside the fact that Nokia designed a beautiful mobile interface built on X, in-plane entertainment systems have been running on Linux and X for over a decade, and X servers were historically implemented on 286 hardware for use as dedicated X terminals.)

What I can say is Wayland was developed and promoted with a GNOME developer mentality, which is a combination of:

* CADT (jwz dot org slash doc slash cadt dot html)

* What you're using sucks! Here, adopt my shiny new thing to make your environment not suck! (literally dates back to GNOME's inception, see: https://qodsec.blogspot.com/2004/06/unix-lets-make-unix-not-... )

* We've built a solution for what we have determined to be the common use case. Why should we care about your obscure, niche use case that absolutely nobody (that matters) uses?

With a heaping side of "it's from Red Hat, so it's the standard" and "it's open source so you don't have the right to criticize". Basically, what happens when young, eager developers are given the opportunity to implement and potentially standardize core desktop features (and thus build what they think is "a better Windows" or "a better Mac") but don't have the advantage of experience of previous software designs in the Unix/Linux workstation space and their benefits and drawbacks.

If people keep staying on X11, I suspect that the next phase will be "refusal to adopt Wayland is a strong indicator of racism/misogyny/homophobia/transphobia".

sph5• 4 years ago

Nice straw man you've built there.

jrm46• 4 years ago

Ha. I somehow love and hate your last sentence. Generally, this criticism is spot on.

vfclists• 4 years ago

Sounds like https://github.com/thestinger/termite, the vte-ng issue, the https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679658 issue which goes as far back as https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78291.

Yes that is 2002, over 20 years old.

I guess GNOME never stops being GNOME.

Isn't Redhat IBM now?

from2• 4 years ago

Wayland's protocol is basically an isolation prison that requires "big DE's" and destroys choice. The protocol moves everything into one central place called the "compositor.” This machinery must provide:

- the window manager - the hotkey daemon - the compositing effects - the windowing server - screen reading tools - screenshots - screen casting

magnifying glass tools global dictionary tools etc etc etc everything. Wayland's design makes it impossible to write a portable hotkey daemon for instance. Supposedly for "security reasons.” Wayland is a GNOME dev's dream, it kills the ability of people to control their own system. If you're actually excited for Wayland you either thoroughly misunderstand what it brings and just like it because it's new or you're a GNOME-lover who hates customization.

And don’t get me started on the security argument. If someone has arbitrary code execution on your machine, you’re already toast. I’ve yet to see an example of malware that can use xlib to read keyboard inputs on X (the supposed vulnerability Wayland was made to stop) but can’t just write some LD_PRELOAD hook to .profile or bashrc to make the compositor keylog on Wayland too. Is there a real world example where this supposedly great isolation that is easily circumventable actually prevented any security issue?

None of this is to say that X.org isn’t the accumulation of 30 years of cruft and technical debt but I don’t think Wayland is the right alternative.

tadfisher• 4 years ago

The protocol says nothing about the compositor implementation, because it is a protocol. X11 is the same way; ICCCM and EWMH are protocols that use X11 as an IPC mechanism. There is nothing stopping you from writing a multi-process compositor swarm with all the traditional pieces broken out using an IPC channel of your choice.

The fact is, given that a compositor must necessarily handle display and input, it is much more convenient (and secure) to centralize display and input dispatch in a single process. This is also how X11 works, except it dispatches all display and output to any process that asks nicely.

_abox• 4 years ago

But simple window managers for Wayland exist. Like sway (i3 clone for Wayland)

Personally I also still use X11. Mainly because KDE on Wayland is currently broken on FreeBSD. And I'm not in a hurry anyway.

brnt5• 4 years ago

KDE on Wayland is currently broken on FreeBSD.

Is for me too on Linux. On both a variety of Intel and Nvidia GPUs. On a variety of distros. And everytime I ask around, I'm told it works for others, so it must be me. Everytime forcing X11 solves all my problems.

To be honest, last time I tried KDE on Wayland was a year ago, so perhaps it works now. Then again, so many years have passed where it turned out it didn't, that I'm not particularly keen to try.

c7DJTLrn• 4 years ago

It's arguable whether sway is "simple". Last I remember it clocked in at ~50k lines of C excluding wlroots.

Some X window managers are a few hundred lines.

malermeister2• 4 years ago

As far as I know, wlroots [0] comes with implementations for most of the "machinery" for folks wanting to write their own compositor.

Here's [1] a tutorial on writing a compositor with it!

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots

[1] https://drewdevault.com/2018/02/17/Writing-a-Wayland-composi...

imtringued6• 4 years ago

Wayland forces you to move most of the logic into libraries that you can mix and match. X has this one monolithic server that nobody knows how to maintain anymore. You either use the only implementation or you live without a GUI. X destroys choice because there will only ever be one Xserver.

Gigachad4• 4 years ago

If someone has arbitrary code execution on your machine, you’re already toast.

Funny how this isn’t the case for many other OS. My system isn’t toast when I load a website or install an app on my phone.

from2• 4 years ago

There certainly are sandboxing efforts on Linux but most of them have incredibly permissive rulesets to the point where nearly every program has read/write access to everything in $HOME.

mariusor• 4 years ago

I can't really tell for sure, but it seems the author makes the confusion that the authors of the Wayland protocol are GNOME developers. That, of course, is not true.

Wayland has it's origins in members of the X11 developer team, and AFAIR Kristian Høgsberg is the sole author of the original protocol spec.

At present the protocols and extensions are discussed and merged by a group that, as far as I know, includes GNOME developers, but they are not in majority nor can they do as they wish overruling the other stake holders (wlroots, KDE, etc).

Now, to the main premise of the article: plenty of applications (at present) make use of client decorations vs. compositor decorations, and it can be easily experienced with Chrom[e|ium] in sway, by enabling/disabling "Use system title bar and borders".

I think the whole piece is a misinformed piece that builds on top of a faulty premise, and the author didn't bother to do minimal research before putting words to paper. I would expect more judgement on the part of the HN crowd instead of accepting it on the idea that conforms their biases towards Wayland being somehow "bad".

Gigachad4• 4 years ago

It’s beyond misinformation now. These same incorrect statements get made again and again. It’s an actively malicious campaign from a group of trolls spreading fud.

Wayland Core Protocol Is Tailored Only for Gnome and That’s Not a Good Thing

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