The no future of X.org, FreeBSD becomes headless?

astyle said:
… Wayland issues can be traced to NVidia …
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Whilst none of the four reports mentions BSD, I should not treat the Linux-specificity as definitive.

One of the four:

448866 – [NVIDIA] Graphical glitches and unresponsive after waking from sleep

bugs.kde.org bugs.kde.org
  • assigned to David Edmundson, IIRC he has written to me a few times.
Edmundson aside, at <https://discord.com/channels/727023752348434432/831066226074976267/1180310398008832080> I asked:

… please, how might we achieve the equivalent of <https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Tips_and_tricks#Preserve_video_memory_after_suspend> on FreeBSD?
Click to expand...

ashafer responded, and so on.
 
I think the community hate on Wayland is way overblown. I switched to usind it as the default session on my Linux desktop install running Hyprland and KDE and it's smoothed over a ton of problems, especially with my FreeSync monitors with an AMD graphics card with all bells and whistles running perfectly (with the exception of HDR not being supported).

I haven't had any reason to specifically run Wayland on FreeBSD, but I wouldn't be averse to it. X.org hasn't gotten any major updates in ages anyway, so it'll always be there for those who prefer it.
 
i also have an impression of community being just overly constrained in "works-for-years-don't-touch-i-hate-all-the-new-ideas" paradigm. Wayland is clearly better designed protocol than X.org and delay is actually not on the Wayland side but on all the zoo of 3-rd party toolkits that lagging to port to it. There are cons in the protocol too, of course.
 
piizog said:
X.org hasn't gotten any major updates in ages anyway, so it'll always be there for those who prefer it.
Click to expand...
To be fair, neither have many Wayland compositors. Most of the work is in the mesa / libdrm / modesetting layers.

I actually see a fair bit of work in the Xorg specific parts here (i.e 1 week ago, 6 days ago). For something that is pretty much feature complete, that is quite impressive that people are working so hard on it around Christmas.

To clarify, there is currently more work going on in Xorg (not Xwayland), than there is in the GCC compiler.
 
Wayland lacks screen saver ability, reparenting ability which some want, and a good way for server client forwarding. The screen saver is an important one for everyone.

This has been discussed in this thread, and there were a few links posted of it:
cy@ said:
for example, Think twice before abandoning Xorg. Wayland breaks everything!
Click to expand...

Until it has screensaver ability, Wayland isn't viable. Reparenting may not be important for everyone, but some want it to fine-tune window manager/composition style. As for server client forwarding, it may not be needed on the traditional desktop, but would be needed for headless servers, and nifty tasks which require it. For them to fix it requires forking Wayland as well. Forking Xorg would be better, as the BSD and similar communities keep control over it, and it's not done as the Linixism way. We'll need it anyway for X programs. Forking Xorg gives the opportunity to drop legacy components from it.
 
sidetone said:
Wayland lacks screen saver ability, reparenting ability which some want, and a good way for server client forwarding. The screen saver is an important one for everyone.
Click to expand...

The crazy one for me is that if your "Window Manager" crashes, it takes out the entire display server! Merging the WM and display server together is frankly a security hazard which will reveal itself sooner or later.
 
sidetone said:
Wayland lacks screen saver ability
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But it supports screen locker? Why not just rewrite a compatible screen locker to behave like a screen saver? (I'm just throwing an idea out there, I have no skill to actually do that). It's entirely possible that this idea is not technically possible due to the very design of Wayland...
 
kpedersen said:
For something that is pretty much feature complete
Click to expand...

The kids nowadays call that "old".

So many times people say something must be bad just because it's been around a long time. They never consider that maybe a thing is just done.

From what I read (and linked to earlier) Wayland breaks a lot of things. I also read it lacks some functionality X has. Maybe we need to jump all over Wayland for those things.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
… what I read (and linked to earlier) …
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Not an ideal point of reference. A GitHub gist was a poor choice of medium for something so controversial (and somewhat misleading).

drhowarddrfine said:
Maybe we need to jump all over Wayland for those things.
Click to expand...

Please, don't.

It's non-methodical and counter-productive.


From KDE e.V. Board member Nate Graham:

pointieststick.com

Does Wayland really break everything?

I’ve written some other posts on Wayland recently, and it’s time for another one! Feel free to skip it it you aren’t interested in a discussion of Wayland and platforms. Many may …
pointieststick.com pointieststick.com

With regard to the gist in GitHub, politely:

… There’s a bit of chuckling and jeering over this in developer circles, …
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It's not exactly true that Fedora is dropping X11 support entirely. Nate addresses this at:

old.reddit.com

Does Wayland really break everything? – Adventures in Linux and KDE

Posted in r/kde by u/jari_45 • 129 points and 104 comments
old.reddit.com old.reddit.com

Additional discussion:

Does Wayland really break everything? | Hacker News

news.ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com
 
grahamperrin said:
Additional discussion:
Click to expand...

It looks like that blog post was in response to a post from probonopd (Linux dev turned FreeBSD; author of helloSystem) regarding the issue.

From one of his comments on his GitHub page;

Truth be told, the best outcome would be if upstream Wayland developers would finally acknowledge that there are application and desktop environment developers and end users out there who don't buy into this whole Portals-Flatpak-Systemd-Pipewire thing, and deliver feature parity with X11 on "pure" Wayland. If that happens, mission accomplished!
Click to expand...

I don't think anyone in the BSD community has a seat at the table to influence such an outcome. Wayland is incomplete, and X.org is riddled with vulnerabilities; which endeavor are we willing to alleviate if we were to forge our own path?
 
Beastie7 said:
Wayland is incomplete, and X.org is riddled with vulnerabilities; which endeavor are we willing to alleviate if we were to forge our own path?
Click to expand...
Yeah, Wayland is about as incomplete (in comparison to Xorg) as FreeBSD is (in comparison to Windows).

I agree with Nate Graham's assessment that Wayland is a political mess (in the Open Source arena). And I think that he knows what he's talking about.

Sometimes design flaws get addressed not by (adding extra code that does error correction for the old code base), but by (reworking the program's entire design and behavior). A good comparable example would be the IPv4/IPv6 transition. IPv6 has no concept of 'private networks', unlike IPv4. Very different designs. Same with Wayland vs. Xorg - the designs are just so technically different that people who are used to Xorg - they want a drop-in replacement, and they start complaining when they discover that's not the case.

Yeah, when a design is THAT different, there's bound to be complaints that the new thing doesn't work as well as the old thing, that there's features missing. IPv6 is still going through growing pains, just like Wayland is (Which is why most OSes still support IPv4... Try redoing net/samba416 without IPv4 support. Should be transparent, but without a completely configured IPv6 stack, something will break.)

And then there's armchair analysts like us. We don't really know the technical difference between Wayland and Xorg beyond a bit of superficial research, just bringing up random examples from the Internet and holding them up as definitive and authoritative evidence that one is better than the other. This is at least partly why devs who do the actual work on Wayland have such disdain towards uninformed noobs who pretend to know everything needed, and hide behind the 'customer is always right' idea. Well, if you know your manners, and are aware of your position, you can get surprisingly good info from dev mailing lists.
 
astyle said:
And then there's armchair analysts like us. We don't really know the technical difference between Wayland and Xorg beyond a bit of superficial research, just bringing up random examples from the Internet and holding them up as definitive and authoritative evidence that one is better than the other. This is at least partly why devs who do the actual work on Wayland have such disdain towards uninformed noobs who pretend to know everything needed, and hide behind the 'customer is always right' idea. Well, if you know your manners, and are aware of your position, you can get surprisingly good info from dev mailing lists.
Click to expand...

that's why some of us posters (including myself and grahamperrin) quote information from developers who work with such software directly to further discourse; instead of compounding their own hypocrisy in criticizing other peoples take in shared interests. But of course, if it's not only from a dev mailing list (rather than a developers GitHub page); it's not a legitimate citation, right? right? ?

Yeah, Wayland is about as incomplete (in comparison to Xorg) as FreeBSD is (in comparison to Windows).
Click to expand...

what? ?
 
astyle said:
A good comparable example would be the IPv4/IPv6 transition. IPv6 has no concept of 'private networks', unlike IPv4. Very different designs.
Click to expand...
That's not true. IPv6 offers unique local addresses for building private networks. That's not exactly the same as the reserved IPv4 address ranges for private networks, e.g. all subnets usable with ULAs have the same size (/64, much larger than any IPv4 network) and the standard mandates using an additional random prefix in order to avoid the typical problem of having to "renumber" your whole network when two private networks are merged. Nevertheless, this is "the same with a few extras", so it can't be compared at all with X11 vs Wayland which is indeed a completely different protocol.

The reason it "feels" so much different is the fact that IPv4 private networks were used a lot for networks that shouldn't be "private" at all (IOW, have outside connectivity), because public addresses were a very limited resource. The workaround was using "NAT" to offer connectivity although only a "private" address was used. This doesn't make much sense any more with IPv6, so it's rarely done in practice.
 
Beastie7 said:
that's why some of us posters (including myself and grahamperrin) quote information from developers who work with such software directly to further discourse; instead of compounding their own hypocrisy in criticizing other peoples take in shared interests. But of course, if it's not only from a dev mailing list (rather than a developers GitHub page); it's not a legitimate citation, right? right? ?



what? ?
Click to expand...
Maybe it's just me coming from from a long line of pure academics in my family, but there is such a thing as bias in research. One can come up with a ton of quotations from a ton of different places that support a pre-conceived idea (i.e. 'Wayland does not have feature parity with Xorg', 'Wayland breaks stuff'). A competent academic or dev can see through the nonsense and see stuff like cognitive bias and confirmation bias, which are very much present in the Wayland vs Xorg debates all over the Internet.

With that being said, there's official sources and unofficial ones. If you're competent, you can look at info, and separate nonsense from real-deal expertise no matter where you look. There's far less nonsense in official sources than in unofficial ones, just because official sources make the effort towards that difference. Who's making that effort - that does make a difference. And there's plenty of examples of nonsense even in university-sponsored research journals for any field of expertise - sometimes PhD's actually try to publish nonsense in a research journal just to see what they can sneak past the editor.

astyle said:
Yeah, Wayland is about as incomplete (in comparison to Xorg) as FreeBSD is (in comparison to Windows).
Click to expand...
Beastie7 said:
what? ?
Click to expand...
? Multi-faceted sarcasm did not register with the intended audience... ? There's may ways to understand this.

With all that said, I do think it's a good idea to acknowledge the efforts of the devs at the source of Wayland. Even simple compositors like the ones mentioned in the Handbook are demonstration of the technical feasibility. Firefox, even the one not optimized for Wayland - it does work fine in Wayfire, BTW. So before complaining that Wayland doesn't work (and looking on the Internet for support of that), how about actually seeing for yourself? That's actually the same idea that drove the establishment of the FreeBSD screenshots thread (Thread freebsd-screen-shots.8877)...
 
astyle said:
old??? funny, graphics/blender (since 1994) is still 'new kid on the block', even though it's arguably just about as feature-complete as AutoCAD (since 1982). Nobody calls either of those two 'old' or 'crappy'.
Click to expand...
I didn't mention, and was not talking about, either of those but I see this all the time on low level boards similar to reddit. Such-and-such software needs to be replaced because it was created in the 1990s!! A couple of weeks ago someone complained cause some software was from 2009.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
I didn't mention, and was not talking about, either of those but I see this all the time on low level boards similar to reddit. Such-and-such software needs to be replaced because it was created in the 1990s!! A couple of weeks ago someone complained cause some software was from 2009.
Click to expand...
Yep, and we do have debates about replacing ed(1), which is from 1973, or, more recently, about vi(1) (ca. 1976) (Thread is-vi-worth-learning-in-2022.87593)... those are older than I am...
 
For clarity:

drhowarddrfine said:
gist.github.com

Think twice about Wayland. It breaks everything!

Think twice about Wayland. It breaks everything! GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
gist.github.com gist.github.com
Click to expand...
  • current title: Think twice about Wayland. It breaks everything!
  • current heading: Think twice before abandoning Xorg. Wayland breaks everything!
cy@ said:
… many hours of reading enjoyment, for example, Think twice before abandoning Xorg. Wayland breaks everything! …
Click to expand...
  • current title: Think twice about Wayland. It breaks everything!
grahamperrin said:
Maybe a better point of reference from the same author (I have not read either page, I'm in no rush):
Click to expand...
  • current title: wayland_transition_notes.md
Beastie7 said:
… a post from probonopd (Linux dev turned FreeBSD; author of helloSystem) regarding the issue. …
Click to expand...
  • current title: Think twice about Wayland. It breaks everything!
  • current heading: Think twice before abandoning Xorg. Wayland breaks everything!

Two pages. I have not read either one.

The first of the two required more than one hundred and forty clicks to simply load the full set of comments on a well-specified HP ZBook with 32 GB memory in my fastest available browser. I attempted a print to PDF, there's silent failure … (six minutes, and counting). Postscript: PDF available on page 8.

The first page, in FreeBSD Discord​

The first page, in Reddit​

The first page, in Hacker News​

Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet | Hacker News

news.ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com

Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet | Hacker News

news.ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com

Both pages, in the Wayback Machine​

<https://web.archive.org/web/2023000...om/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277>
  • first captured 2020-10-30 (two comments) as Boycott Wayland. It breaks everything!
<https://web.archive.org/web/2023000...om/probonopd/d57e9c77e4fccc5e5f87d7000beb9730>

Both pages, at archive.today​

<https://archive.today/https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277>
<https://archive.today/https://gist.github.com/probonopd/d57e9c77e4fccc5e5f87d7000beb9730>
 
astyle said:
Maybe it's just me coming from from a long line of pure academics in my family, but there is such a thing as bias in research.
Click to expand...
Exactly, you can find decent references from both side of the Xorg / Wayland argument. This is because, same as systemd, it isn't a clear improvement for many use-cases; it really is split.

And because of this, people are instead pushing well known and popular internet personalities to help sway the argument. It is a childish popularity contest at this point.

The biggest example of this is that Asahi Linux developer (I believe Hector, Marcan or AsahiLina are his main aliases). What they wrote here about "unsuited to modern display hardware" is considerably untrue since Wayland compositors simply use Xorg's modesetting driver underneath anyway. Classic sleaze word "modern" used of course.

Ultimately the Linux desktop has stagnated for almost a decade because of all this nonsense.

astyle said:
old??? funny, graphics/blender (since 1994) is still 'new kid on the block', even though it's arguably just about as feature-complete as AutoCAD (since 1982). Nobody calls either of those two 'old' or 'crappy'.
Click to expand...
Kind of off topic. I recently was contracted to port the older Blender 2.49b to a current Linux and OpenGL 4.6 core (a client needed it for a specific rendering middleware). It took a couple of hundred patches. Agreed, it was feature complete back then, now they are just bloating it. I'm going to see if I can open-source it because I am sure many people would prefer this version.

grahamperrin said:
Not an ideal point of reference. A GitHub gist was a poor choice of medium for something so controversial (and somewhat misleading).
Click to expand...
Disagree. For technical guys (who have the best chance to have a decent opinion about this stuff) they have been writing important notes in TODO files in VCS systems for decades. Doesn't make them any less relevant. Once it has bubbled its way outside the forges to "project management", then you know its usefulness is considerably reduced.

To be precise. A big public statement from a programmer on a nice user-friendly medium should raise red flags that they are trying to bullsh*t people.

grahamperrin said:
For clarity:
Click to expand...
? Current title, current heading? How is that adding something useful or any clarity to the discussion?
 
kpedersen said:
The biggest example of this is that Asahi Linux developer (I believe Hector, Marcan or AsahiLina are his main aliases). What they wrote here about "unsuited to modern display hardware" is considerably untrue since Wayland compositors simply use Xorg's modesetting driver underneath anyway. Classic sleaze word "modern" used of course.
Click to expand...
Lina is definitely a different person than Hector. I believe the context of Hector's complaint is that he had recently been trying to get the Macbook Pro keyboard supported and the X keyboard system has like six bits or something absurd for scan codes and the Fn key has some crazy high number so making a driver was going to be literally impossible.

I tried to figure out what you mean by "xorg's modesetting driver" but all I could find were wayland compositors claiming to use nVidia's X driver. Dunno if that really "counts"....
 
msplsh said:
Lina is definitely a different person than Hector.
Click to expand...
I believe (95.4%) Lina is a youtube streaming cartoon character (I think it is called a "vtuber"). It seems that marcan/hector is behind it. He doesn't seem to take advantage of it, but it would actually be funny to see him "self-cite" himself with regards to "how bad Xorg is" using these different characters / personas.
msplsh said:
I believe the context of Hector's complaint is that he had recently been trying to get the Macbook Pro keyboard supported and the X keyboard system has like six bits or something absurd for scan codes and the Fn key has some crazy high number so making a driver was going to be literally impossible.
Click to expand...
I feel that is a much weaker reason. The way i.e VNC gets round this is a simple lookup table. Plus Xorg uses the same input system (libinput) as the majority of Wayland compositors.
msplsh said:
I tried to figure out what you mean by "xorg's modesetting driver" but all I could find were wayland compositors claiming to use nVidia's X driver. Dunno if that really "counts"....
Click to expand...
Basically compare the code between:
They are so similar that I definitely suspect the Wayland "backend" is based on the Xorg driver. I used both as inspiration for my own raw graphics API project and I even recall running into the same quirks / typos in both. But importantly, at this level of the stack, whether X11 or Wayland is above it, it has zero bearing on what is better for "modern" hardware.

The sad truth is, that Wayland is actually so identical to Xorg that most people don't realise but at the same time has the potential to break so damn much.
 
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