I think Wayland should have been approached differently
I think Wayland should have been approached differently
Now, I really like Wayland, and it's definitely better than the mess that is X11
BUT
I think the approach to Wayland is entirely wrong. There should be a unified backend/base for building compositors, something like universal wlroots, so that applications dealing with things like setting wallpapers don't have to worry about supporting GNOME, Plasma, Wlroots, AND Smithay (when COSMIC comes out). How about a universal Wayland protocol implementation that compositors are built on? That way, the developers of, say, wayshot, a screenshot utility, can be sure their program works across all Wayland compositors.
Currently, the lower-level work for creating a compositor has been done by all four of the GNOME, KDE, Wlroots and Smithay projects. To me, that's just replication of work and resources. Surely if all standalone compositors, as well as the XFCE desktop want to, and use wlroots, the GNOME and KDE teams could have done the same instead of replicating effort and wasting time and resources, causing useless separation in the process?
Am I missing something? Surely doing something like that would be better?
The issue with X11 is that it got big and bloated, and unmaintainable, containing useless code. None of these desktops use that useless code, still in X from the time where 20 machines were all connected to 1 mainframe. So why not just use the lean and maintainable wlroots, making things easier for some app developers? And if wlroots follows in the footsteps of X11, we can move to another implementation of the Wayland protocols. The advantage of Wayland is that it is a set of protocols on how to make a compositor that acts as a display server. If all the current Wayland implementations disappear, or if they become abandoned, unmaintained, or unmaintainable, all the Wayland apps like Calendars, file managers and other programs that don't affect the compositor itself would keep on working on any Wayland implementation. That's the advantage for the developers of such applications. But what about other programs? Theme changers, Wallpaper switchers etc? They would need to be remade for different Wayland implementations. With a unified framework, we could remove this issue. I think that for some things, the Linux desktop needs some unity, and this is one of these things. Another thing would be flatpak for desktop applications and eventually nix and similar projects for lower-level programs on immutable distros. But that's a topic for another day. Anyways, do you agree with my opinion on Wayland or not? And why? Thank you for reading.
Don't worry too much about the duplicated effort of different projects implementing the same standard on their own. It's good to have lots of implementations of a standard. That's what makes it a standard rather than just some code we all depend on.
That's what makes it a standard rather than just some code we all depend on.
succinctly encapsulates the importance of code diversity. 👍
Things like taking screenshots and setting wallpaper actually do have a standard API. That stuff is just part of xdg desktop portals and not the core Wayland protocols. If, for example, a screenshot app uses the org.freedesktop.portal.Screenshot API then it should work with any compositor (as long as the compositor follows the API standards).
Interesting. It seems like the functionality Wayland doesn't have is supposed to be implemented in other things.
Well, those requires D-Bus. The wlroots project decided early on to support non-dbus software stacks, so wlroots compositors expose Wayland protocol extensions which could either be used directly or wrapped by the
xdg-desktop-portal-wlrdaemon.*
*(Well... many wlroots devs argued that the ecosystem should have chosen WP extensions instead of dbus, but I think most relented when Pipewire entered the equation.)
- person using software developed in opposition to monolithic architectures rediscovering the benefits of monolithic architectures
Wayland isn't to blame for duplicate effort. Instead of 4 different efforts doing the same thing, they can collaborate to build a common base. Heck, wlroots is exactly that.
There's a ton of duplicated work in Linux ecosystem. Just think about every new distro coming out doing the same things other distros did. Just think about all those package managers on different distros. They do almost the same thing. Do they need to have codebases that share nothing? No. But they don't care. They rather duplicate effort. They chose this.
I don't quite follow your arguments. X11 got big and bloated, wayland applications need to worry about the different compositors? So we should use one implementation? Implementations should be irrelevant. That is the whole point of an API/protocal - a description of how things should talk to each other even for different implementations.
I don't see how one implementation helps here - that one implementation still needs APIs for the applications to talk to. The problem is not that there are different implementations but maybe that the wayland protocol does not cover enough of the API space needed by applications. Some of which are addressed by things like the xdg-desktop-portal.
Well, yes, but there are programs like wdisplays, wlr-randr, etc. which only work on wlroots compositors. Why is that the case?
It should work in any compositor that implements the wlr-output-management-unstable-v1 protocol. Compositors that are known to support the protocol are Sway and Wayfire.
It uses a new unstable protocal that others dont support yet. The fact it is unstable suggests it might change over time as well,
The issue with X11 is that it got big and bloated, and unmaintainable, containing useless code. None of these desktops use that useless code, still in X from the time where 20 machines were all connected to 1 mainframe.
I don't think that is very fair to say. From what I heard, the X.org code as in the implementation of the protocol and its extensions is actually of very high quality, so it can be maintained. The problem as you correctly describe is the design and the resulting protocol with its extensions which don't fit modern needs.
It's also not like theoretically multiple X11 servers implementing the X Window System couldn't have existed simultaneously, it was just too much effort regarding the complexity of the protocol. In fact, for a short time, two different implementations existed: XFree86 and the X.org server. Granted the latter was a fork of the former, but they were independent projects during the time of their coexistence.
But it is fair to say that considering they started Wayland because they could not fix the issues with X11.
Yea, sometimes new problems need new solutions and the old architecture can get fundamentally outdated!
Yeah, that's why I think it would be better to focus on existing standards rather than multiplying work so much, when that time could have been used for more productive tasks like working on accessibility or fixing bugs, or addressing documentation issues, or when everything else is done, working on the Mobile space, which is very much an emerging market.
So why not just use the lean and maintainable wlroots
wlroots can't be used (comfortably and idiomatically) in Rust because it's too hard (if not impossible) to provide a memory-safe interface for it.
we can move to another implementation of the Wayland protocols.
So unfortunately this has already happened.
What i wonder about, why do compositors have to handle Keyboards (again)? Wayland does and X did. Shouldn't that be separately handled?
What do you mean by handled seperatly? Both wayland compositors and X11 use libinput nowadays to get input from the hardware. But then it needs to be routed to the right application - the one that is in focus minus any global shortcuts that the compositor might want to deal with. The compositor is what understand what application has focus and thus is what knows where to send input to so it makes sense for it to handle that. It is not just about where to render windows - but manages all events such as input that applications require.
Right, forgot that part.
I approach from behind, and then hog tie the bastard!
On my desktop computer (debian testing + Sid + experimental; AMD Ryzen; Nvidia GPU RTX 3080), that I use mostly for multimedia (blender) and gaming, I avoid Wayland cause I lose 10%-15% FPS on games (both native ones n using wine/proton/proton_eggroll)... so, for me, yet, Wayland ain't an option!!!
Personally, I haven't had a performance hit, but many games don't work properly. I also use a tiling window manager though. Gaming on Linux is not as easy as Wincrap. Gaming on a Tiler is harder. Gaming on Wayland on a Tiler is still quite crazy.
Normally projects like this address real needs. If X would actually fail to provide crucial functionality on modern desktop someone would develop alternative that would cover it and people would switch in a matter or years. Instead Wayland set out to build something complex and useless for most people and now is surprised it takes a lot of time for it to gain traction.
How it should be approached is that if people need some very specific setup (like multiple displays with fractional scaling and different refresh rates and they want to play games on it and need to get 100% of their configuration) Wayland should provide them a tool to do just that with dedicated server and DE. Most people wouldn't need any of this and would stay with X, few people would use the new DE. If more and more people would require the functionality provided by the new DE it would grow, get forked and other DE would start supporting the standard. The approach of "we build something 1% of users need, spend a lot of effort to support us" is what's silly.
X is bad code and to hard to maintain. You do know the people developing Wayland are the same ones who developed X11? I think their biggest issue is they should have called it X12 or something so people new it was the successor to X11.
