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WTF is wayland?

…and? Exactly what is it missing other than the “ooooh shiny” factor?
Oh you know, countless things, like basic security features that one would expect from a modern desktop such as the ability for a lockscreen to actually lock a session (bet you didn’t know that wasn’t possible in X, because you think X is perfect… because you’re clueless as to its very many shortcomings).
It really would have made more sense from an effort expended standpoint to extend X to have those things than to build a new system that doesn’t include the one feature the people who use X care about most.
The people who were in a position to do it simply didn’t want to do it, and wanted to do this other thing, and that is their prerogative but it doesn’t mean I have to like it.
If there are problematic old parts of X that nobody is using then by all means deprecate them on a schedule that lets people come up with alternatives, and remove them, and move on. But having an inferior networked experience because the devs don’t like the code they’ve been maintaining seems unfortunate at best. What’s next, throw away Firefox and start a new browser from scratch because the code base is complicated?
It wasn’t necessary.
If anyone wanted something more secure, they could have put the lock screen in a compositing WM, just like in Wayland.
Thing is, someone trojaning your machine and pwning your screensaver then getting physical access to your computer and going to town on it (even though that likely already have remote code execution prove by that point) is such an unlikely attack vector that no one bothered to fix it.
I think it’s worth fixing it, I just don’t think it’s worth moving to Wayland. I’ve been using X for a long time (not as long as some in these parts, but since R5 anyway) and I’m pretty happy with it today. I even had those hijinks played on me on IRIX 5.3 where they put xhost + in the session by default, the stupid bastards.
I mean to say the mechanisms to fix it exist, you just need the screen locker to be part of a compositing WM (i.e. how Wayland does it). No one’s taken the time, but X allows it to be done.
That’s not very X, in that it would be nice if there is a general mechanism, rather than every man & his dog having to reinvent the wheel (which is how Wayland does it ahem). But you know the GNOME people love reinventing everything anyway which is why they keep putting security holes into gnome-screensaver which are

The people who were in a position to do it simply didn’t want to do it
It is way more than just that. 1980 style graphic arrays that are VRAM, a clock, some CMOS logic to handle it all, and a DAC for the VGA match up nicely with how X11 thinks graphics should work. 2020 era video cards with controllers for networking on a PCIe bus, advance DMA channeling, pipelining, various other processing elements and so forth DO NOT distinctly fall cleaning into what X11 thinks a video card should be doing.
Now back in 2004, you may remember then, we were all having a discussion about GLX
Not sure what youâ(TM)re talking about, lockscreens have been a thing in X11 since the 70s. It is not possible to get features like a third party lock screen or screen saver to work in Wayland if thatâ(TM)s what you mean.
X11’s basic architecture doesn’t match modern video cards. Pretty much any video card made post 1999 requires direct channels between the CPU and GPU. For the most part extensions that completely bypass X11’s methods have been created with those extensions still having to report back to X11 because the fundamental architecture of X11 requires it to still be in the know about events. This is one the things that made the whole GLX and AIGLX even a thing. When the solution was to keep most of X11 and thus
You’re not wrong. But on the other hand you can rant about X over ssh being horrible all you want, but it is an incredibly useful and critical tool that I use every day. Are you simply going to argue I shouldn’t be trying to run any apps over ssh and just use Xvnc server on all my headless machines? No thanks. ssh makes it work seamlessly with my remote terminal workflow. I understand the point you are making about how crufty and unmaintainable X has gotten over the years, and how it’s just inefficient

Unless you have something to replace it with directly under wayland
Waypipe

And you go on to bash waypipe too
Yes. Because

how it’s just inefficiently passing bitmaps around now over ssh, which is worse than VNC
But

but it works well for what I need to do
So… (from my original point)

So you don’t even have to leave that horrible comfort behind
The point though, is that at some point, you’re not going to be able to setup that forwarding, because no one will ship Xorg in their repo. And even the BSDs will not be a respite for those wanting to hold onto X [phoronix.com]. At some point, the major X11 implementation will have no actual hardware to run upon and be distributed with no releases of Linux nor BSD. You will at some point be completely on your own. That’s down the road for sure, but each day that poi
So yes, I am sure that hitting ssh -X is amazing. That will be gone one day. What you plan to do, I’m not here to tell anyone what to do.
This just boggles my mind that wayland developers and wayland apologists don’t think this is necessary and useful. This was literally one of the key selling points of unix-like OSes over the decades. In the enterprise it is often used. The need for something like this isn’t going away.
I’ve been apologizing for wayland for some time now because Xwayland makes this stil

X11 came out almost 40 years ago and the last stable release was 11 years ago.
Because it’s stable!!! It’s seems to be boring for some so they needed to re-invent the wheel I guess…
I still regularly apply X server patches to my system nowadays so it’s not like it wasn’t maintained.
The horse was also sable, tried, true and tested. That doesn’t mean it was suitable going forward.
Computers evolve, as do our use of them. X may have been stable, but it had very real shortcomings, shortcomings that over the years have resulted in a shitshow of patchwork to make it do basic things, and do them poorly.
Basic features such as creating a lockscreen that isn’t trivially bypassed (for one example) just isn’t possible on X because of its fundamental architecture.

I still regularly apply X server patches to my system nowadays so it’s not like it wasn’t maintained.
It gets a minimum of security patch
This is fundamentally not true about X.
The vast majority of screen lock flaws are overblown, except for the GNOME ones but they have raging NIH syndrome and ignore decades of best practices.
The rest of the the flaws undone the X security model which while little used actually solves a lot of the problems.
The final problems ignore that if you are using a compositor then everything gets routed through that, so if you put the lock in the compositor it in fact has precisely the same model as Wayland.
In other words, if X is fundamentally flawed, so is Wayland. Unless you ignore any APIs newer than 20 years old, but that would be silly.

The horse was also sable, tried, true and tested. That doesn’t mean it was suitable going forward.
Computers evolve, as do our use of them. X may have been stable, but it had very real shortcomings, shortcomings that over the years have resulted in a shitshow of patchwork to make it do basic things, and do them poorly.
Basic features such as creating a lockscreen that isn’t trivially bypassed (for one example) just isn’t possible on X because of its fundamental architecture.
The *wheel* was also sable, tried, true and tested. That doesn’t mean it was suitable going forward.
Vehicles evolve, as do our use of *wheels* . *Wheels* may have been stable, but they had very real shortcomings, shortcomings that over the years have resulted in a shitshow of patchwork *like adding tires* to make it do basic things, and still do them poorly because of the energy lost due to *tires* .
Basic features such as *changing a tire* that isn’t trivially bypassed (for one example) is just too hard with *wheels* because of its fundamental architecture.
Thus, we definitely needed to re-invent the *wheel* !
FTFY!

X11 came out almost 40 years ago and the last stable release was 11 years ago.
Because it’s stable!!!
A project can become a victim of its own success. If you stop needing to do updates to something, you begin to lose the ability to respond to maintenance needs as they arise. When I ran a development consultancy I would sometimes have clients come up and say, “Hey we’re really happy with this stuff you did for us five years ago, but we’d like this little thing added.” They’d be shocked by the cost, because it’s one thing to do some tweak an active project, it’s another thing to reactivate a project that’s
Then, perhaps your projects are simply poorly written and badly documented! I have no problems modifying projects written 10 years ago and I have done so recently at minimal cost.
A serious problem with untouched 10 YO projects although is when you need to upgrade them to a recent OS release so the 10 YO old project I recently modified would cost a lot to upgrade to recent OS and libraries versions so it still runs on legacy OS and libs because the customer didn’t want to pay for a full upgrade.
That isn’t a
It’s really a “it depends” situation. It depends on the amount of specialized knowledge a project needs. It’s all well and good to say you should be able to look at your code from five years ago and know exactly what it does, but that’s armchair engineering. In the real world you often have to interface with all kind of weird proprietary shit, so understanding your own code only gets you so far.
It manages the windows and their rendering and it uses a client server architecture. It’s controversial because x11 is old, mostly works mostly sorta, if you stay within the comfort zone (don’t care about a compositor that destroys gaming performance, don’t use multi-monitors with different refresh rates and variable sync, and so on). Wayland is the future but it has been playing catch up for a very long time.
X11’s codebase is just oh my gosh its just… exactly what you’d expect from a window manager from
At some point in my brain I thought this question was WHY Wayland. Oh how I wish I could edit on ./ when I haven’t had my coffee
Wow, VESA! That takes me back! OK great now you reminded me of IGP thanks a lot!
Are you sure you know what you are talking about?

It manages the windows and their rendering and it uses a client server architecture. It’s controversial because x11 is old, mostly works mostly sorta, if you stay within the comfort zone (don’t care about a compositor that destroys gaming performance, don’t use multi-monitors with different refresh rates and variable sync, and so on).
I have 4 monitors with different refresh rates and sync connected to my desktop X server. I can post my xorg.conf file if you wish.

Wayland is the future but it has been playing catch up for a very long time.
X11’s codebase is just oh my gosh its just… exactly what you’d expect from a window manager from the 1980’s. It was always cool to play pranks on friends by opening terminals to their x server, and this is still a flippin’ cool feature of X11, and wayland lacks it. A lot of people don’t like that.
That’s this idiots understanding
It was fun indeed back in 1990 but all distros using X don’t allow that anymore. You even need to give permissions to a user on the same machine (I run stuff as different users) to access the X display. Example: xhost +SI:localuser:other_user
Hopefully, Wayland developers didn’t create it starting with the same knowledge you seem to have about X in the first place. Maybe they should have contributed to maintaining X instead.
I also run programs on other computers displaying to my desktop X server with sound. Best way to do that is over ssh using compression, like this:
ssh -C -Y host
I also run remote XVNC servers in datacenters and access them with ssh tunnelling with compression enabled:
ssh -C -L:5901:127.0.0.1:5901 remote_host
As far as I can tell Wayland seems like a step backward to me and reminds me of a MS-Windows display.

I can post my xorg.conf file if you wish.
The problem in a nutshell really. X works when you figure out some complex config. Great for a server, not at all suitable for a modern desktop OS where I don’t expect any configuration, I expect it to detect and magically work. (and no your config isn’t working ideally for all 4 monitors, fundamentally the driver support is lacking, you cannot have gsync on multimonitor configurations, it flat out is not supported by the nvidia driver under X regardless of how fancy your config gets)

Hopefully, Wayland developers didn’t create it starting with the same knowledge you seem to have about X in the first place. Maybe they should have contributed to maintaining X instead.
Wayland is developed by

And yes I have a multi-monitor setup with X here. It was a FUCKING PAIN IN THE ARSE to get working, and it soured me on X.org forever more.
Just use MS-Windows, who has time to lose with pesky and silly Linux? Can you imagine all the changes we still *need* to make to Linux so it’s just like Windows? I wouldn’t waste my precious time at it!

Just use MS-Windows,
I don’t *use* any OS. I use applications. Some of them run on Windows, some on Linux, some on Mac. I have all 3 systems at home.

Can you imagine all the changes we still *need* to make to Linux so it’s just like Windows?
The goal is not to make Linux Windows. It’s to make Linux functional. Can you imagine how retarded (in the literal dictionary definition of the word) your computer would be if development in Linux stopped in the 90s? No thanks.
Computers are better and more functional than ever thanks to ongoing development and thanks to ignoring grumpy old men who are upset someone moved their chee

There is no system in the world that is perfect and shouldn’t be developed further. And even if there was, that system would not be perfect 10 years from now and therefore should continue being developed further.
Exactly what I was saying about X in a post above! “Developing further” doesn’t mean replacing your car wheels with square ones! It means enhancing X but strangely enough, they are strong tendencies nowadays to re-invent everything, to trash all efforts that have been put into getting us where we are and to replace what we already have and use with sub-par solutions.

don’t care about a compositor that destroys gaming performance
When I took my machine (this current one in fact) from Windows to Linux the performance stayed broadly the same. Compatibility suffered obviously, but some games actually give better frame rates on Linux with the same or even higher settings, while only a few were slower. So no, I don’t care about a thing that doesn’t exist.

don’t use multi-monitors with different refresh rates and variable sync
This is a real problem. I’m just still not convinced that Wayland is the right way to get it. If they had designed in the network transparency from the start then there would probably be
there are a lot of flaws in X. The problem is Wayland fixed roughly none of them.
It also introduced a bunch more, by declaring almost everything “out of scope” so now critical parts are left to a mishmash of third party libraries and are still hashing out which are going to become dominant and do a defacto part of Wayland.
The basics like automation and screen capture are still a crapshoot in 2023.
As far as I can tell it’s a pet project from Red hat/GNOME elevated to the level of system infrastructure through sheer weight of funding.
It’s pretty sad that so much effort has gone into something which yields no improvement. Apparently I won’t get tearing any more which is interesting since I already don’t get it on X.
And in doing so, has been pissing off a lot of professional Linux users who have, for *decades*, built systems and workflows predicated on being able to display application windows from networked servers onto remote workstations.
I’ll note that while they greybeards have been doing their thing for close to 40 years now, the pissing off has been going on for a while too. This whole Wayland experiment is entering its second decade of sticking its fingers in its ears and going lalalalala.

And in doing so, has been pissing off a lot of professional Linux users who have, for *decades*, built systems and workflows predicated on being able to display application windows from networked servers onto remote workstations.
I’ll note that while they greybeards have been doing their thing for close to 40 years now, the pissing off has been going on for a while too. This whole Wayland experiment is entering its second decade of sticking its fingers in its ears and going lalalalala.
I wish I had mod points. Spot on.

And in doing so, has been pissing off a lot of professional Linux users who have, for *decades*, built systems and workflows predicated on being able to display application windows from networked servers onto remote workstations.
If there is a cohort of professional users who have use cases you describe then they are free to use a distribution and window system that suits their needs. That is the amazing wonder of open source and the biggest benefit Linux brings to the computing world.
We do not subscribe to tyranny of the minority here, any professional user who thinks they should have a say on what software is developed for other people can fuck all the way off.
Six of one half a dozen of the other.
In practice it’s looking like the newfangled stuff is looking to displace and deprecate the old stuff to the detriment of people who use it.
If it had incorporated some mechanisms to replicate the functionality “the minority” (probably a large minority of people who work on system software) use, there wouldn’t be any complaints.

If there is a cohort of professional users who have use cases you describe then they are free to use a distribution and window system that suits their needs. That is the amazing wonder of open source and the biggest benefit Linux brings to the computing world.
Unfortunately, all the people who designed truly tested things that work and are stable eventually pass away and are replaced my young dudes which many nowadays think they are smarter than anybody who existed before them. Those dudes who think they are so smart have a negative impact on the ecosystem and other young dudes which wouldn’t have cared are influenced by them. How many distros are left without systemd?
The main people behind Wayland are the main people who were behind X for a long time. They got tired of X and wanted to do something else so they said X couldn’t be saved, but then they said X wouldn’t be saved by them which is at least honest.
waypipe is great. Xwayland is also ok.
And if and when it becomes as seamless asDISPLAY=remotebox:0.0 /path/to/program or ssh -CY user@box /path/to/program I’m reasonably confident that most complaints will stop and the few that remain will be bitching about having to change shell scripts and such that ran fine for decades to keep working instead of bitching that shell scripts and such that ran fine for decades won’t work anymore period.
Here’s the take of a (mostly) Linux noob:
It’s a feature with lots of potential which was adopted too quickly, too soon.
Very recently, I wanted to test something on a spare RPi I had, so I got the latest image, etched it on an SD Card and went on to use it. Turned out the OS (which came with Wayland as default) did not support RealVNC due to incompatibility. I spent one hour figuring this out, because it’s not apparent and counterintuitive (why am I getting a weird error when enabling VNC via raspi-config?).
Thanks for reporting that issue with RealVNC. I was going to try the new OS but now I’ll wait a few months.
Some info here:
https://help.realvnc.com/hc/en… [realvnc.com]
VNC/RDP and other such features that can manage the display (lock screens, screen savers) donâ(TM)t work by design in Wayland and they have no intention to add it. They also donâ(TM)t want to be arsed with X-over-SSH, streaming windows over the network etc because netcode is too complicated.
What a bunch of unconscious silly fools then! They is obviously a major regression! In short, it’s just like the MS-Windows display!
Nice of you to generalize that way.
My use case was around a Pi Camera and an USB webcam, I wanted to use the Pi as streaming source for surveillance in my workshop. Testing the resolutions and framerates via various software required displaying the images locally in the UI.
After testing was done, there was no need for the UI any more, but those initial couple hours of testing were important.
But that is even beside the point. All we need to look at is whether that functionality existed before (it did) and wh

WTF is wayland?
A reflection of the fact that you do not belong on Slashdot given the several hundreds of articles about Wayland that have come up on this site. Please go to a site more suited to your interests.
s/que/queue
You don’t realize that if it weren’t for neckbeards making your shit work, it wouldn’t.
Standing on the shoulders of others and thinking you’re a giant is an old phenomenon.
It’s just user noshellwill who just found out he can post at 0 as anon when he usually posts at -1. He didn’t use his usual “trotsky-sluts” expression to camouflage himself but he forgot that he is the only user on Slashdot who posts in monospace font!
They sold out, not just literally but figuratively. Why did they increase the price to $80? That makes it inaccessible to a lot of things. The whole mission they sold us was cheap ubiquitous computing. They should have stuck to the $35 somehow or actually tried to reduce the price even more. Instead they got greedy. Screw ’em.
Not to mention you need a hat to use the PCIE functionality which raises the effective price even more, they should have put one of the mini connectors on the bottom of the board. Preferably Mini-PCIE I suppose, which you can adapt to M.2 easily and cheaply.
It’s called inflation. Get used to it.
I can’t see a movie for a dollar or eat a nice dinner out for 2 with drinks for $20 anymore, either.
Afghanistan says hello and offers you cheap prices 🙂
Sure whatever that meant.
The price is one thing but not the most important. They completely alienated their customer base that built the company in to what it is.
Also, they’re jackasses. Nothing about the Pi is open-source other than some of the software it runs. It depends heavily on custom binaries for the proprietary chipsets.
They also do stuff like take an off-the-shelf part and tweak it so that you can’t replace and fix the device if that part breaks (buy a new Pi is their “solution”). And they do other tweaks like set the inp
Except that RISC V is no better. RISC V chips and sbcs are just as closed source as any arm device. We’ll still need dealing with binary blobs and proprietary GPUs. There only difference with arm is the licensing cost.
Year of the Linux Desktop Wars
Nothing can ever replace x11 that doesnâ(TM)t allow for opening UIs on remote machines. VERY OFTEN linux machines are running remotely, it is insane to think a local only desktop is an acceptable replacement for a desktop that can run interfaces locally OR remotely. WTF Wayland developers? Get that feature out and then your product is worth having a look at.
And this is especially important on Pis.
Fortunately, however, your concerns are fairly groundless. Even while using Wayland, X11 apps are supported transparently using Xwayland. As long as your DISPLAY variable is set (which it is with Gnome and KDE on Wayland at least), you can ssh to another host and run remote X11 apps all you want. At least for now, GTK and Qt both support X11 as a backend alongside Wayland. So it just works. I expect the X11 backends to be around for years yet.
In the future, Waypip
Was setting up Ubuntu 22.04 on a new laptop the other day. The user that will get this machine needs a good screen capture app, and since I use and love Shutter, I installed it. Since I wanted to show the user the specs of the system he was getting, so I fired up shutter and *tried* to do a screencap of the Ubuntu “about” screen. Everything in Shutter was greyed out.. And SURE ENOUGH, the f’ing system was running Wayland.. After switching back to Xorg, Shutter then worked as it should… Until/Unless Wayland starts working with screencap stuff, it ISN’T READY FOR PRIME TIME!!!!!!!!!!
Yes any X app that expects to take a screen capture isn’t going to work when running under Xwayland on Wayland. No surprise there. But of course to users it’s not readily apparent which apps are wayland and which are X still.
Wayland screen capture support has to come from the compositor, and to my knowledge it works now on both KDE and Gnome and can work through pipewire as a video source. OBS Studio can now capture the screen after you grant permission for it to do so. From what I can tell Shutter doe
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