> There are two seemingly irreconcilable camps at this point as to whether X itself is fundamentally sound technology for remote display or any kind of display technology going into the future.
Are there? I don't think anyone seriously thinks X is the way forward do they? They just don't like some of Wayland's poor choices, which I think is fair.
>I don't think anyone seriously thinks X is the way forward do they?
I think "forward" is the wrong mindset here. X works. Plenty of tooling is just done, lots of people have their workflow just perfect, the whole ecosystem is mature, and at worst the Wayland devs decided to uproot the whole thing in the name of "progress".
Wayland could be nice, but its compositors require 10x the code that a WM would (which is why there aren't that many Wayland "WMs") and its supposed benefits aren't better enough to justify the ambitious rewrite. I could imagine a universe where Wayland did the minimum to replace X's jank and make the thing maintainable, and nobody would have objected to that IMO.
Those goddamn Wayland devs and their individual free will. How dare they not continue to maintain this miserable, crusty old spec and continue to make their marketable skills less valuable.
> Wayland could be nice, but its compositors require 10x the code that a WM would (which is why there aren't that many Wayland "WMs"
Nah, this is an ecosystem maturity problem that is improving rapidly.
There will always be a few hold outs for the old way, but people will and are moving on.
It’s silly to compare the number of anything with a project that had a 30 year head start.
> Wayland did the minimum to replace X's jank and make the thing maintainable
That’s called Xorg. It still exists and you are free to do whatever you wish, even invest in its development,
Wayland didn’t “uproot” anything.
One of the biggest pieces of “jank” replaced is the nonexistent security model. You can research why the proposed SECURITY extension was unworkable and smarter people decided it was better to start from scratch. This benefit alone is better enough for most people with a stake to justify a rewrite.
In pure economic terms there is certainly a price where Xorg can continue to remain viable - this isn’t some ancient artifact lost forever. In this lens it’s hard not to see these comments as anything but unproductive bitterness at not being able to provide or raise these funds. It doesn’t help that part of this price is a direct result of the qualities of the thing you’re trying to save.
>Those goddamn Wayland devs and their individual free will.
That's not the problem. The problem is all the heckling for everyone to switch to Wayland, and to make it default. And also pretending that reversing the "mechanism, not policy" wasn't a fundamental change of philosophy and was just "progress".
And to be clear, by "at worst" I meant "this is the least-charitable interpretation".
>Nah, this is an ecosystem maturity problem that is improving rapidly.
TinyWM is 50LOC and wlroots's TinyWL is 900LOC. This hasn't changed. Writing Wayland compositors is a pain in the ass compared to WMs.
Wayland started in 2008 IIRC, so here in 2024 Wayland is 16 years old. It doesn't have teething issues, it just has issues.
Plenty of WM makers have just straight-up said they won't ever port their WM to Wayland (so talking about time and how "X is older" is irrelevant here), because Wayland's opinionation breaks too many things.
>One of the biggest pieces of “jank” replaced is the nonexistent security model.
You mean like how X clients can read keyboard inputs? There's so much FUD around this. /dev/keyboard does that already, you need to sandbox every app anyway - at which point your sandbox should just interdict the X interface. Security is the worst argument. Wayland isn't necessary for security, and for the longest time it's been locking the door and leaving the window open. Portals.
> The problem is all the heckling for everyone to switch to Wayland
No one’s making you switch and Xorg is as open as it ever was. X is dying, slowly, that’s just a simple fact of the universe.
> Plenty of WM makers have just straight-up said they won't ever port their WM to Wayland
There are plenty of up and coming WM makers willing to produce suitable stacking and tiling WM/compositors. Active projects exist today.
> You mean like how X clients can read keyboard inputs?
No.. how every X client has global access to all of the X state of every client and how the only response to this are extensions that no one really uses for well established reasons.
> you need to sandbox every app anyway - at which point your sandbox should just interdict the X interface.
As someone who actually researched X I don't really see the problems with it. Xorg has some, but the X11 protocol seems to have fewer problems than the Wayland protocol.
For instance it already supports mixing windows with different colour modes, which can be used for HDR.
X11 the base protocol is wholly unsuited to the needs of modern display systems, full stop. Moreover, the base security profile is also completely outdated. Now you can always extend the protocol, and continue to use the myriad extensions over the years like XRENDER, DBE, DnD, etc, etc (or paper over deficiencies with contraptions like NX/x2go and Xpra). The question is what useful benefit is being provided by that miniscule still relevant base that justifies its existence along with the other legacy cruft and baggage.
"X11 seems to have fewer problems than the Wayland protocol" is too vague to be cogent so I will not address it. But the argument is more than just X11 vs Wayland, as Wayland isn't the only alternative display system nor is it the only answer to network transparent remote display technology either. "Wayland sucks" really is not a valid response to "X I don't really see the problems with it."
True, X11 the wire protocol isn't the most horrible thing in a world where SOAP exists, but in practice the latency story is overall bad. Yes you can pipeline with xcb and not with Xlib, so a few of the rehashed latency issues by the peanut gallery are false attribution, but the core protocol still makes many basic operations inherently synchronous and strictly ordered, many just a consequence of how the X server manages state. There are fundamental architectural issues.
I don't think that using extensions to support new features is much of a problem - if you disagree with that then you'll have to admit that Wayland has an even bigger problem because it requires even more extensions.
X11 doesn't inherently require that many round trips. Xlib does, because Xlib is bad. But, for example, clients choose their own object IDs, so they don't need round trips to find the IDs of newly created objects. Of course it requires a few round trips to do anything, but that is also true of Wayland. The complaint was about excessive round trips, not a few.
> I don't think that using extensions to support new features is much of a problem
You are arguing issues that were not even raised. Read 1st para more carefully, especially the last sentence.
> X11 doesn't inherently require that many round trips. The complaint was about excessive round trips,
Why do NX, x2go, and xpra exist if the X11 protocol over high latency networks is such a peach? It's lovely that clients don't need to round trip for IDs, but this is like saying the Trabant is one the best cars ever made because it possesses a steering wheel (and fwiw Wayland has an even more flexible client side ID allocation). As already said, just because something isn't horrible doesn't mean it's any good either.
There is so much other typical crap that has to go on that is suboptimal: property requests, chatty window management, inefficient frame synchronization, inefficient event handling.
Even if certain operations don't require a lockstep roundtrip, overall chattiness also contributes to latency.
> Of course it requires a few round trips to do anything, but that is also true of Wayland
The Wayland project is not perfect (it is implementing de facto X12 and a large undertaking in a computing world much more complicated both technically and financially than 1986), but it's patently ridiculous and just misinformed to imply the core protocol doesn't address some fundamental shortcomings of X11.
Meanwhile I thought it should be obvious that dispensing with the baked in network transparency of X11 was done as a conscientious choice not because a bunch of smart people just "forgot".
"So here's the thing: X works extremely well for what it is, but what it is is deeply flawed. There's no shame in that, it's 33 years old and still relevant, "... "Though the code happens to implement an unfortunate specification,"
Are there? I don't think anyone seriously thinks X is the way forward do they? They just don't like some of Wayland's poor choices, which I think is fair.