Wayland never fails to impress me with how much stuff has still been left out (are screenshots still broken?) that it hardly shocks me to learn that it doesn't support screensavers.
Progress over many years worth of time. This is why whenever people ask me what display I run it's always X. X is a piece of work for sure but it's the only display server that actually works for almost every conceivable use case. Despite all the time and effort Wayland devs have spent to try and wrest control over the Linux graphical rendering server they are still a long ways from replacing X for good.
I was thinking the same. This is the second link I click today to jwz.org mostly expecting to see the usual "welcome HN" page, only to be surprised by actual content.
Anyone knows if he has grown out of his hatred for HN, or is this just a misconfigured server?
Ahh, that makes a lot of sense now. Genius, thank you!
(Just bummer that a lot of legitimate sites won't be able to figure out who's sending them traffic. But I guess http referer (sic) isn't very reliable these days anyway)
as do screen recordings, if you have the right tools that support it. the problem is that apps need to be written specifically for wayland to make that work, and so many apps are broken and can't make screenshots or screen recordings. just this week i tried a few for a quick recording, and none worked. either they got sound or video but not both.
what did work was obs with the pipewire plugin. so it can be done, it's just that there are a lot of old apps that haven't been updated yet.
I had to abandon it over screenshots. I realise X is deprecated, but it works and it never gives me a reason to notice it. Wayland gave me a few. Till it matures I don't mind sticking with x.
> Wayland never fails to impress me with how much stuff has still been left out
That's the problem when you replace a desktop system with something which has been designed for the embedded use case, Wayland's proponent always boasted that there had much less line of codes, but of course they had much less features too..
And the NVIDIA proprietary Linux module for NVIDIA GPUs hardware video decode doesn't work on Wayland; along with a number of other things: "NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver README and Installation Guide > Appendix L. Wayland Known Issues" https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/535.54.03/R...
And yet swaylock(-effects) and swayidle exist. While they don't implement the functionality of classic screensavers right now, it seems that one should be able to implement them using the exact same APIs as these applications use.
However, they do use protocol extensions, so you can still make the argument that this is bolted on after the fact.
Things are "bolted on after the fact" a lot in X11 too, it's just that those are bolted on for so long that people thinks that they're part of X11 already.
Things like XDND, XKB, XRender, Xft, Xinerama, RandR aren't "base X".
It’s the job of the display manager / compositor to handle screensavers.. yes any arbitrary app can’t become your screensaver welcome to the 21st century.
To me Wayland has the problem that too much functionality is done inside it. Basically it does the function of the display manager (X), compositor and window manager. While the last two were usually done by the same component also under X (while not strictly required), having the display manager and the window manager as separate components makes sense. Also having the compositor as a separate application to be fair, since that way the compositor could crash but the window manager would continue to function (without compositing, but this is not a fondamental thing).
The window manager can crash, but under X it can be restarted (or is restarted automatically). You don't loose all your windows and open applications. On Wayland this is not possible. In GNOME if you type F2 and r you restart the graphical session under X, useful if some extension created some trouble. Under Wayland no way, log out and log back in and loose all your work. Is this good 21st century design? To me, not.
A program should handle a single task and should do it well. X did one thing, the window manager another, the compositor another, XScreensaver another, etc. If I want to substituite a component I could.
Also X is a client/server program, Wayland is not. Why does it matter? Under X I can run applications on a remote server and they are rendered locally. I use it time to time, because it uses far less bandwidth than using (let's say) VNC, since the rendering happens locally and only X drawing commands are passed trough the SSH connection (instead of a video stream). Wayland decided that this is not needed.
To me Wayland is not that good design. It's not reliable after nearly a decade of being "nearly done", while X still works and it's still solid as a rock. If only they spended some time to improve X instead of rewriting everything from scratch... whatever.
And if we want to talk about performance... to me it seemed that 10 years ago Compiz under X with a crappy GPU was more reactive than the modern Wayland window managers.
Finally... X did have the possibility to change DPI of the fonts in the ~/.Xresources file! Yes, natively. Thus a window manager that only used X primitives (such as i3) did work flawlessly on HiDPI screens from decades. They seems to be still figuring it out in GNOME under Wayland for fracional values...
X11 is obviously insanely flexible, no one will argue that. It is also riddled with complexity, security problems, and performance problems. Programs like xlock are notorious for numerous security problems over the years, for precisely this reason. Yeah programs like xlock work now, but it took 20 years to get them to be not completely broken. If you think X11 is basically secure and just works, you're either delusional or brand new to Linux/Unix.
Wayland is way simpler, has a more secure design, and handles modern GPUs much more efficiently. It's missing a lot of features X11 had, but the fact that you can use one program to run a screensaver, another program to lock the screen, and another program to do window management (oh, and also another program which is the actual X11 server) is something that 1% of users care about. The other 99% of users are OK with using Gnome or KDE or XFCE or whatever other desktop environment just does all this stuff.
The client/server argument held weight 5 or 10 years ago, but waypipe exists now and works great (I would know, I use it regularly myself). Actually it works much better than X11 forwarding ever did thanks to the modern compression codecs it has built in. And the fact that the waypipe code is just a regular unprivileged application rather than something built into the compositor means that I don't need to worry about what security holes.
Your comment just reads as a bunch of half thought out anecdotes (not all of which are factually accurate). There's a reason why basically EVERYONE who is actually knowledgeable about how X11 works decided that it was completely broken and welcomed Wayland when it came along.
To me, it doesn't seen like X11 or Wayland was designed for the future spatial displays of computers. Compositors in 10 years are complex three dimentional stenciling things. So ultimately its still unclear to me which will be more flexible in the long run.
To me Wayland has the problem that too much functionality is done inside it. Basically it does the function of the display manager (X), compositor and window manager. While the last two were usually done by the same component also under X (while not strictly required), having the display manager and the window manager as separate components makes sense.
i thought it was the other way around. in X11 everything including display manager and compositor are part of X itself, only the window manager is a client, whereas wayland separates the protocol and the compositor and display manager. the latter includes the window manager because a window manager always had a privileged position, and that i think interfered with the security architecture. by not having the need to allow a privileged window manager, wayland apps are more secure against interference by other apps.
That is false dilemma between 'only compositor can handle screensavers / global keybindings / screen grabs' and 'arbitrary app can grab screen / read all keystrokes'.
It is easily conceivable to have a system, where regular applications cannot do these things, but privileged programs can do that (without being integrated into one big compositor).
Why is the 21st century all about software moving in the direction of becoming a monolithic brick with centralized bottlenecks on adding functionality?
When I enable the Screen Blank option (Ubuntu 23.04, Wayland), after the screen is back on, the system operates normally for some time and then completely freezes with no option to unfreeze other than a soft reboot. I'm seeing more and more annoying things like that.
I’m probably part of the minority but I simply power off my laptop whenever I don’t need to use it for more than 10 minutes. Perhaps PTSD from when battery used to drain if it hibernates
I've noticed that Wayland advocacy (read: bot spam) has dropped off by quite a bit. Used to be you mention X.org or X11 and the bots would pour out of the woodwork to remind you it's "deprecated" or whatever - it's not - but I think the bot herders finally realized they were doing more harm than good. That bot spam left a bad taste in my mouth and I simply will never ever use Wayland because of it. I have no proof but it all seemed to be the same kind of spam that you'd encounter when discussing System D or pulse, so I suspect it was being organized from Red Hat itself. Evil company, that.
This is a wild conspiracy theory with no actual basis. No one is organizing people's opinions on random mostly-irrelevant pieces of tech by "herding bots". And no, Wayland is not closely tied to Red Hat.
To play devil's advocate, it's possible that Red Hat wasn't actively evil, but they just believed in throwing cash at open-source projects, which enabled a lot of jerks within the community.
I think there's a bit of selection bias - people interested in esoteric choices like your display manager will be prone to fairly strong opinions.
Personally, I'm a fan of Wayland - but I'm not deluded either. Sway offers one of the better experiences, but you have to craft an awful lot of it.
I'm also fortunate that everything I need/use either supports Wayland or is a game that benefits from gamescope. Some requires more tweaking/encouragement than others.
Mixed environments are awful - ie: copying/pasting between Wayland/XWayland tends to freeze/hang in a specific direction. Making xlsclients return nothing should be the goal before getting too frustrated.
Screen sharing is fine thanks to Pipewire... and screenshots with grim/slurp - but again, some curating was involved and limitations apply (ie: no sharing 10-bit color displays)
Progress over many years worth of time. This is why whenever people ask me what display I run it's always X. X is a piece of work for sure but it's the only display server that actually works for almost every conceivable use case. Despite all the time and effort Wayland devs have spent to try and wrest control over the Linux graphical rendering server they are still a long ways from replacing X for good.