My point there was not so much the specific details of that issue but more to point out that “it’s been around since 2008” is essentially meaningless when Wayland to this day does not provide ways to do several of the most basic operations offered by other windowing systems. The fact that, in an attempt to “be better than X Window”, Wayland’s designers and developers did not notice that they had just skipped over basic stuff found in win32, Quartz/Cocoa and X Window, doesn’t speak well of their understanding of the task we need them be involved with.
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I’m not realy sure why is wayland considered “superior” over x11, and why it is pushed so aggresively. And yes, Linus is a tech genius but he sometimes says pretty blind things for such a smart man. I would like to know his excuse better, but, i suspect he’s keeping it for himself for good reason.
On the other hand, Stallman’s philosophy is my philosophy of choice, but yea, he’s kinda paranoid and appears stubborn and passive, also same as many inteligent people, and if you try to do things his way, you’ll most likely hit a real world walls.
But:
“Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not after you”.
I think we should all keep that in mind, freedom in this world is actively going down the drain right now.
There have been multiple reports, and they have been rejected or, effectively, ignored.
The Wayland community, at least those in control of the specifications, seem ideologically opposed to it. They seem to want everyone to redesign their applications, from the ground up, to support Wayland.
The problem is, without this sort of capability: Wayland is FUNDAMENTALLY not fit for purpose for many applications
And this causes a huge concern both for the ongoing maintenance/viability of existing Linux applications, and the potential for applications to be ported from other platforms, because there is this huge barrier of a lack of fundamental capability in Wayland.
Personally, I see XLibre going nowhere fast. Ignoring the political stuff, I think there’s far too much brokenness and bloat with XOrg and I think it will take many years to properly tidy it up. I’m sure they will probably launch a fork of XFree with a few minor tweaks in the mean time, and hope that they pick up some support from those opposed to Wayland for less practical reasons.
I suspect XWayland is a better approach in the medium term, although that doesn’t seem to be fit for purpose at the moment. I honestly think the long term best outcome would be if the Wayland developers extract their heads from their butts and realise they need to fix this.
Ironically, it seems to me that it’s the (manufactured?) conspiracy theories, paranoia and distrust that has ultimately driven the current erosion of freedoms.
Cheers,
Keith
Interestingly, TiL that Valve have, basically, started building their own solutions to Wayland issues after getting fed up with the ineptitude and inaction there.
Cheers,
Keith
Hi, I don’t disagree with what you’re saying in general. Is Xorg that broken and bloated in comparison to what they’ve achieved with Wayland in so many years? I mean at least it works and can be developed on… Obviously after Wayland was conceived and the chief Muckety Muks decided it was the new way is it not possible that Xorg was relegated to bastard stepchild status and systematically neglected? Is it also not conceivable that a concerted effort over a relatively short time could at the very least improve and optimize some of the neglected areas. Maybe XLibre ain’t the ‘guy’ but surely there are some industry people somewhere that could do this and are not going happily with Wayland. I am completely aware that Xorg’s server-type way of working has considerable limitations but ‘broken’ I don’t think so. Rusted perhaps…lol
How are we measuring the ‘bloat’? In my experience Wayland is deployed in the Desktop Environments that use the most RAM of course that is only one metric but I’d rather have reliable, rusty and chubby than the current alternative…
Same problem of high CPU usage when navigating in the mini timeline in a X11 session under Ubuntu 24.04. So it’s not Wayland. This also happens in an empty Ardour project.
Does anyone else is seeing this?
It was the CPU usage shown in Ardour. Just checked that some cores go over 50% in htop
On the Wayland/X11 debate, I will just say this:
Having used Linux since 2008 (first Ubuntu, then CrunchBang Linux, and now Debian proper), I was there when everyone slowly transitioned over. And, at least on the Debian side, they were super conservative with making Wayland the default — they took (IMHO) the right amount of time to wait until major bugs had been ironed out, APIs had been developed, etc. It’s sort of ridiculous to claim that Wayland is still experimental and new when, as others have pointed out, its first release was in 2008.
That being said, it’s clear that the Wayland devs are very opinionated and are loathe to add new features if they don’t agree with it, no matter how necessary those features are.
I will say that screen configuration, hotplugging, etc have become way less painful with Wayland than it ever was with X11. I can pretty much guarantee that if I take my Linux laptop and plug an HDMI cable in, it will dynamically reconfigure to make it available. I remember when that was not the case, when I had to statically setup the configuration, perhaps manually reroute audio, etc. Wayland may not be perfect, but it’s better than X11 for most day-to-day usecases.
I agree with @Majik that the medium-term way forward is probably XWayland. For most cases, it’s currently…fine? Like, I don’t even realize something is running under XWayland unless I do xlsclients or something. Hell, even Ardour works fine most of the time under XWayland, despite not being officially supported. Long-term, Wayland devs need to realize that not everything fits into their existing model and they should be more open to adding APIs to do what devs need it to do.
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It been said that Wayland project is an open-source initiative backed by Intel, Red Hat & Collabora.
Backed by Intel? Why? I’m not looking forward to major hardware manufacturer steered software in FLOSS world.
Maybe i’m looking at it the wrong way, but i see GNU/Linux as a part of possible free world (or at least more relaxed than this one), not just as another OS like Windows or MacOS.
Another thing is, i care more for application side. I care for things like KDEnLive, Gimp, Blender, Ardour. If you are forcing implementation of new display server protocol and break application compatibility (especialy compatibility with important, large, good applications like Ardour is) by doing so, you just come accross as arrogant in my eyes.
So, Wayland can be excellent, it can fly on every machine, it can do the unimaginable stuff with graphics on technical side, but if it messes with things i find great with FLOSS, they can shove it, i’d rather use the ancient, bloated, messy xorg.
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this is funny: When I increase the height of the mini timeline temperature reaches only 65°C.
It’s worse when the mini timeline is minimized (i.e. maximized area of the editor window).
Intel is a massive contributor to open source software.
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Yes, sure thing, i realise that.
Also, i’m not against Wayland or any other innovation for innovation or improvement sake. I’m just not sure that this is what we are seeing in this case. It all seems forced. The way it’s all framed - xorg is trash, we’re dead without Wayland…I mean *#???
I’m just saying, people, don’t get all hyped up on Wayland as a teenage girl on a fun night, or you’ll surely end up feeling not so great tomorrow morning. Intel being involved is okay. Intel leading the way smells funny.
That’s just my humble opinion, and i’ll leave it at that. I’d surely like time proves me wrong.
I admittedly don’t have the answers nor do I know all the technical details of either… I will say it is the oldest marketing trick in the book that when you want to replace something proven with a new idea you have to throw shade on the ‘old’ way and erode people’s trust in it and find ways to make it appear to fail. That’s not paranoia or conspiracy theorizing it’s literally Car Salesman 101. Usually the more pressure needed the less actual confidence there is in the abilities of the ‘new’ way to prove itself. I can certainly catch a whiff of this concept in this whole process.
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By mini timeline you mean the summary pane at the bottom?
I have spikes in cpu when moving around that but never increasing the cpu temperature more than a couple of degree momentarily. Are you getting high cpu temperatures in other programs?
The cracks with X11 were showing way before Wayland was made default, though. Like, genuinely…we can shit on PipeWire and Wayland all we want, but having used the old stuff extensively, this is 100% better…for daily driver use.
I really want to make a distinction here between the user perspective (casual computer user who browses stuff, maybe writes a few documents, video calls w/relatives etc) and the developer perspective, right? From the POV of someone who is immersed in this 24/7, who has no problem with manually configuring screens and so on, the ‘old way’ was perfectly fine.
But I can’t tell you how many times it was annoying to want to do something and suddenly my screen config or audio config or whatever was borked. And this is coming from someone who didn’t have a problem per se with doing that, but…it’s not what I want to be doing or worried about. It’s like…I’m sure when NetworkManager and friends came out first, people were annoyed that there was this new automated thing going on connecting to networks and the old way of configuring using ifconfig and ifup and ifdown and whatever wasn’t good enough. But honestly? If I had needed to manually configure my wireless network settings beyond entering the password, I’m not sure I would have stuck with Linux. Not because I couldn’t figure it out, but because I just wouldn’t have seen the point.
Wayland, PipeWire, SystemD, etc have all lowered the friction to actually doing stuff with Linux, that much is undeniable. And for most use cases, it’s honestly great. Nobody had to pretend as though X11 sucks - we pretty much used it because there was no alternative. The cracks were showing years before Wayland was made the default. Nobody had to pretend as though we needed a sound server - it was badly needed, no matter how shitty PulseAudio was in the beginning. And don’t even get me started on System V - sure, it worked, but SystemD is vastly superior (again, having used both as a technically-inclined end-user).
It’s valid to have gripes with Wayland because they won’t consider expanding the protocol so that things that Ardour (and other software) needs will be possible. But let’s not pretend as though X11 is this amazing piece of software and everything was totally fine before Wayland — it really wasn’t.
Sorry if this is tangential, but it really irks me as someone who has seen the usability of Linux as a daily driver — not just for me (as someone who is more technically minded), but for people who don’t want to fiddle with random things — increase dramatically since I started using it, and then see technically-minded folks shitting on the same software that literally made that possible. We always talk about the “Year of the Linux Desktop” and like, we’re definitely way closer to that today than we were in 2008.
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As someone who used Linux for years on X11, yes it is an improvement for daily-driver usage.
It’s not very considerate for you guys to spam someone’s thread asking for help with an off topic essay discussion.
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Sorry, you’re right! I’ll shut up now 
But X Window is an amazing piece of software!
The real issue is that the critical feature of X Window (network transparency) became massively less important, and the things that XOrg never got really really good at (multi-monitor, HiDPI etc) became much more important.
That said, I have a triple monitor setup (2 x 1920x1200 monitors plus a 4k “TV”) and XOrg has been handling it just fine from my perspective, so the nominal failures of XOrg don’t really trouble me personally on a day to day basis. Even when I was using a linux laptop, plugging in an extra screen via HDMI actually worked pretty well almost all the time.
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Yeah, maybe I was too harsh on X11 
I’ve struggled enough with a borked xorg.conf that I don’t exactly look back fondly on those days