[hello_computer]

> moles from certian big corp are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project

That's what I've always thought. The "X11 developers" pushing for Wayland weren't original developers so much as RedHat "maintainers," who (understandably) wanted a frontier to explore rather than janitorial work. All I know for certain is that X11 (even as of 15 years ago) mostly worked, while Wayland of 2025 is still full of headaches & breakages.

[dralley]

X did not "just work" for me 10 years ago, and neither is Wayland "still full of headaches and breakages"

I've had no substantial problems because of Wayland in the last, like, 5 years.

[antisol]

Thanks for your anecdotes. Here's a couple of counter-anecdotes:

---

X has "just worked" for me since at least ubuntu 8.04 (that's 2008, april, over 17 years ago, for those counting), probably earlier.

I don't recall having any particular issues with X on the fedora machines I ran before I switched to ubuntu 8.04, but I don't recall clearly enough to be able to confidently say that I didn't have any X issues.

OTOH, I also don't specifically recall having X issues since some time around Red Hat 6 or so, which would be around 1998 or 1999, so it might be more like 25-26 years since X didn't "just work" for me.

---

About a year ago, I heard that wayland might be approaching a usable state. So I decided to give it a try on a raspberry pi that I was setting up.

It took literally about 15 minutes before I ran into a problem where I wasn't able to do something I've been doing for decades on X. And I want to stress that I was hoping it would work - I was not out to find a reason not to use wayland, I just happened to run into one inside of about 15 minutes.

I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to do what I wanted to do on wayland. I put a nontrivial amount of effort into trying to solve the issue on wayland. During the course of this, I found several different/conflicting pieces of advice, none of which worked for me. I think IIRC I found one option which sounded promising but which meant recompiling the compositor, or something very-nontrivial like that.

I balked at that and switched the system over to X.

And the problem instantly went away, and everything started working again. And that machine currently has an uptime of well over a hundred days.

I would love for wayland to be a thing that actually works to the point that it's a viable replacement for X, but I grow more and more skeptical every year that this doesn't happen. I Expected it like a decade ago.

[const_cast]

The reason X "just worked" is that it's very bad, obolsete software that nobody would touch so we all just got used to the things that didn't work.

High DPI, multiple monitors, hot-plugging, OpenGL... these things were hacks and pretty much never worked right. There's also very necessary for modern computers. We all just didn't care.

So what if my thunderbolt dock needed a reboot to connect a monitor? So what if youtube drops a few frames here or there? So what if I need to enforce vsync across the entire desktop just so I don't get splitting? So what if vertical bars appear for a few seconds after suspend? So what if 1.25 scaling looks like ass?

[antisol]

> The reason X "just worked" is that it's very bad

Yeah, sure, most bad software "just works", and there's nothing contradictory about this statement at all.

> High DPI, multiple monitors, hot-plugging, OpenGL

Of these 4 examples, I have literally never had any problems with 75% of them since at least 2008 - maybe 1999 - they all "just work". And I've never tried to do the other one, it may or may not.

You can argue about how old == bad as much as you like. Meanwhile I'll be getting work done using the bad old tech, rather than trying to debug the new broken thing.

> So what if my thunderbolt dock needed a reboot to connect a monitor?

Well if you needed to reboot, i.e restarting X didn't solve it, then that sounds like it's not an X problem at all. Maybe something in the USB stack.

> So what... So what... So what...

So what if the new thing people are trying to force on us doesn't support features we've enjoyed using for decades and use every day to get work done? So what if I've been using network transparency just fine for over a quarter century? So what if the new protocol doesn't support really basic things like screen savers properly? So what if it's suddenly a problem if an application has multiple windows, or wants to record the screen, or automate desktop usage, or reparent some other program, or have a not-rectangular window?

[const_cast]

I'm talking about very, very basic features like changing input/output at runtime, graphics acceleration, and scaling.

These are janky on X. I'm sorry, they are and we all know it, across many drivers, not just nvidia.

Yes, Wayland is missing some very niche usecases. For my money, I'd rather be able to plug in a monitor without a restart than have a "not-rectangular window". If your priorities are different then fine, I can't argue with lived experience.

Also, for the record, some X "features" were always a bad idea. The whole "every application being to record everything at any time with no permission model" isn't a feature, it's just a vulnerability. Yes, that means we now have to be much more deliberate with how we control these things, so we have popups and portals and whatnot. But that is actually a big improvement from the alternative, which is every application comes with a built-in free keylogger and screenlogger that you're just kind of hoping nobody is using for nefarious purposes.

[antisol]

> I'm talking about very, very basic features

Some people would consider the ability to record the screen or run a screensaver - like we've been able to since the 1980s - to be a "very, very basic feature"

> I'd rather be able to plug in a monitor without a restart

I'm not sure what you're not doing that I'm doing, but like I indicated before and you ignored, I've been hotplugging monitors for like 15 years. I've literally never had to reboot to plug in a monitor as far as I can recall. At worst I have to set the resolution. And if you do have to reboot, that doesn't sound like a problem with X.

> Also, for the record, some X "features" were always a bad idea (blablabla)

Sorry, did someone say X was perfect? Maybe I missed that post.

The point being made is that X works. Today. And has for decades. Meanwhile, as I mentioned earlier, wayland is over a decade overdue at this point. And still hasn't solved enough very basic issues that I was able to use it for more than about 15 minutes without running into trouble.

[bluGill]

X just worked for a large subset of users. However Wayland just works for a large subset as well. In either case if you are in the subset where it doesn't work then you will complain. Wayland has a design such that if things don't work for you today we have a hope that we can make it work for you in the future. Many of the issues where X didn't work for some people could not be fixed, and some of those were issues that are becoming more important.

[josephcsible]

> Wayland has a design such that if things don't work for you today we have a hope that we can make it work for you in the future.

The reason we hate Wayland so much is that X is being killed off now, with things only ever maybe working again in the future. Wayland would be way better if the people behind it added support for all of the missing features and use cases first, and only then killed off X.

[bluGill]

You are welcome to naintain x if you want. However there is a reason nobody wants to. Wayland is not perfect but it is a lot easier to maintain.

[antisol]

I thought the whole point of the repo in the original link was that somebody does want to maintain X.

[blueflow]

Nvidia, vmxgfx. I would run wayland if i could.

[mariusor]

> I would run wayland if i could.

You can if you stop buying nvidia. The problem with missing drivers is principally the fault of the hardware vendor not of the kernel community.

[blueflow]

You know what runs on these platforms? Xorg.

[worik]

With binary blobs from Nvidea

[mariusor]

Perfectly true. What I was getting at is that you should direct your frustration to the correct place: not with the efforts of wayland and kernel devs but with the stubbornness of the hardware vendors that don't want to make their code public, and in the case of nvidia, (or) use the same driver building blocks that the kernel community recommended.

[antisol]

What you seem to be missing is that a whole lot of people don't actually have any "frustration", except when people come along claiming that their new windowing system is "totally ready... except it doesn't support any good hardware".

For people like us, X works just fine, with our nvidia cards, and we're not actually interested in the philosophical purity of who's fault it is that wayland doesn't work with our nvidia cards. If we cared about that kind of stuff so deeply, we wouldn't be using the proprietary drivers.

IF you want people to switch to wayland, then solving all those edge cases, and making it work properly with proprietary graphics drivers (or maybe getting nvidia et al to open their code, good luck with that) is your problem.

[e844dbe8fb]

We normal people buy NVidia specifically because it DOES NOT support filthy Poettringware like Wayland.

[antisol]

>> I would run wayland if i could. >You can if you stop buying nvidia.

This response is so hilarious.

"The wave of the future is coming! And you can get with it too! All you have to do is just give up gaming!"

Seriously, what are these people smoking??

[theodric]

And here I thought the wave of the future was generative AI, which damn near requires Nvidia to even function. Sure can't wait for RedHat to deprecate and nuke and blacklist and hellban all Nvidia capability!

[antisol]

Indeed. I've seen tons of things that specifically require nvidia and support nothing else - more and more in the last couple of years. Some proprietary games don't support anything but the nvidia proprietary drivers on Linux.

[hello_computer]

2016-01-23 https://github.com/MaartenBaert/ssr/issues/431

2019-01-04 (only took 3 1/2 years to resolve!) https://github.com/flathub/us.zoom.Zoom/issues/22

2020-03-07 https://github.com/vkohaupt/vokoscreenNG/issues/51

2020-03-07 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2471

2020-03-24 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/6389

2023-09 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/wayland-and-screen-savers/

2023-11-17 https://github.com/raspberrypi/bookworm-feedback/issues/149

[moron4hire]

More than 2/3rds of your examples are from over 5 years ago, and one of the links is to a site that replaces its content with an image of a testicle when hotlinked from HN.

[blueflow]

> and one of the links is to a site that replaces its content with an image of a testicle when hotlinked from HN.

jwz is calling other people manchilds, but as someone who also had such a script on their website and also had HN blocked this way... he is the manchild who needs to grow up.

[airhangerf15]

Nah I think JWZ cool. He's doing the right thing.

One of my favourite tech blogs has been shadow banned on HN for years. Sad I can't share his stuff on here.

[hello_computer]

> More than 2/3rds of your examples are from over 5 years ago

Exactly! If you scroll to the bottom of each one, you will see that most are either a) still open, or b) abandoned (too hard or impossible), then closed as stale.

> image of a testicle when hotlinked from HN

Rightly so.

[dralley]

One open issue has a comment at the bottom saying that the issue is fixed and was an issue with Mutter. There's no evidence to think that it was ever a "wayland" issue.

One open issue has had locked comments for 5 years. It's probably fixed but nobody has bothered to close it.

Most of rest were not actually "wayland" issues, either. Yes, someone's hobby project screen recorder might not get updated to work with wayland, but there's dozens of those, feels a bit unfair to ignore that there's alternatives.

[hello_computer]

obs, jitsi, & raspbian are not “hobby projects”. do you work for redhat?

[bitwize]

Wayland is working as designed. The fix is to:

* design and implement a dbus protocol that does screen sharing the way you want it done

* get buy-in from all the major compositors and applications to implement your protocol themselves

I mean, should be a doddle for any serious project.

[msgodel]

Most of the stuff that's come out of freedesktop.org always seemed to make things less usable. I'm glad to see people are finally giving up on it.

[zzo38computer]

> Most of the stuff that's come out of freedesktop.org always seemed to make things less usable.

I thought so too. I also thought they have many problems and do not help very well. I mostly try to avoid them.

(There are problems with X window system as well (and with Xlib), but still it seems the freedesktop had made things that are designed in a worse way.)