This post is in part a response to an aspect of Nate’s post “Does Wayland really break everything?“, but also my reflection on discussing Wayland protocol additions, a unique pleasure that I have been involved with for the past months.
Before I start I want to make a few things clear: The Linux desktop will be moving to Wayland – this is a fact at this point (and has been for a while), sticking to X11 makes no sense for future projects.
By switching to Wayland compositors, we are already forcing a lot of porting work onto toolkit developers and application developers. This is annoying, but just work that has to be done. It becomes frustrating though if Wayland provides toolkits with absolutely no way to reach their goal in any reasonable way.
Many missing bits or altered behavior are just papercuts, but those add up. And if users will have a worse experience, this will translate to more support work, or people not wanting to use the software on the respective platform.
What’s missing?
- Window positioning
- Window position restoration
- Window icons
- Limited window abilities requiring specialized protocols
- Automated GUI testing / accessibility / automation
I spent probably way too much time looking into how to get applications cross-platform and running on Linux, often talking to vendors (FLOSS and proprietary) as well. Wayland limitations aren’t the biggest issue by far, but they do start to come come up now, especially in the scientific space with Ubuntu having switched to Wayland by default. For application authors there is often no way to address these issues.
I forced myself to use Wayland for a week.
Most of the applications worked out of the box. For some I had to manually change the settings and/or environment variables to make them work on Wayland… And single ones did not work at all.
If it weren’t for the fact of these “single ones” I would have stayed on Wayland.
However, as long as I can’t use my system fully functionally, I remain on XOrg.
What apps didn’t work on Wayland at all? Java apps usually work through xwayland, and most other toolkits are wayland native. Of course, except features like screen sharing, which have to be supported by the developer. And 5 missing features from the blog.
What are these “single ones”, if I may ask?
I’ve been using fedora for the last couple years and I finally got an AMD card for myself and holy shit Nvidia sucks. Everything I thought was a Wayland bug was just an Nvidia bug
yeah, at the end of the day there is zero reason to ditch a perfectly working setup while it’s still supported by distros… computers are for productivity I really do not understand why so many people insist everybody must migrate now :)
If they didn’t insist on it, things would migrate never :)
but they who? I will not change a bit of my setup because a random internet neckbeard mandates that lol :P
Don’t cry us a river once you are actually forced because party of your system are out-dated or programs are not working as expected anymore. Times move on.
rotfl, rest assured I would not cry you nothing even if I wouldn’t be able to do basic maintenance to my things.
It’s time you figure out you are not an elite superhaxxor because you use a software or another 😭😭😭 or maybe not, after all I’m here for the lulz
eh “ok”.