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by chlorion 957 days ago
Wayland has been flawless for me, but for others not so much.

Every thread about wayland has people claiming it's broken yet they aren't reporting bugs or providing useful information at all, just vague complaints.

Many people experience no issues with wayland, and some people do experience issues, but without any information nothing can be done to even attempt to fix things. It's possible in many cases that something is misconfigured, or a known issue that has been fixed in newer releases of whatever you are using, or a genuine bug that hasn't yet been discovered. Nobody will ever know though.

3 comments

Basically your complaint is “Linux users aren’t spending hours to reproduce every single issue and keep following up with additional debug info from every developer new to the conversation”. What if instead the model was done survey who has issues and pick 1 random person who’s reporting issues and build up a knowledge base of the ways it’s failing (ie formally “here’s the symptoms, here’s the root cause and here’s the fix” whether that fix is something the user has to do on their end or a new SW version. I think if you did that enough times, you’d be randomly sampling the highest effect bug rates. It’s not the cheapest way to do this but if you’re having so many foundational issues with something as it’s looking like Nvidia is with Wayland (especially given how old Wayland is), that’s what I’d be telling the Linux driver team at Nvidia to own end to end until we believed all the largest Nvidia issues were resolved (whether or not it’s a driver problem) and then go back to normal triage processes. This stuff is normal shit that happens at high performing teams when things are this bad (eg an entire component critical to Wayland working on a Linux desktop isn’t working if you’re an Nvidia customer).

Asking users to contribute to fixing their own issues is the quickest way to make sure nothing ever gets done. I’m an extremely technical user but im using Linux for my day to day engineering needs. I have other SW that needs my attention and debugging my personal desktop issues is not what I’d like to be doing. If it gets bad enough I’ll reinstall the OS from scratch or switch back to Mac and figure out how I can make Linux work in a VM so I can test the software I need. But right now the SW I’m working on is Linux-only and if I can solve and figure out a workaround for the problem by myself without having to pause and follow up about some bug is not where I want to spend my energy. I have enough trouble keeping track of conversations on GitHub. I just hope any bugs I can’t figure out myself will eventually get solved without me having to do anything. And I do follow up some times but the value of that has been hit and miss enough that I do it as rarely as possible.

I did. It was a base distro install just booted up, as I already stated.l, on three different, bog standard machines. They were not interested either.

I take my bug reports a bit more seriously, and I don't use instances of success to discount instances of failure. A bug's a bug, a good proces cares about outliers (and as you say, Wayland erroring does not seem like an outlier) too.

I understand not all combinations of hardware can work flawlessly, but Intel machines with Intel hardware seems like a good baseline to ensure always works before you mainline Wayland.

> yet they aren't reporting bugs or providing useful information at all,

When you have to register on a website to report bugs, you just switch back to X (path of least resistance).