The xorg people phylosophy seems to be: if it works, fix it. Since xorg forked XFree86 the quality has gone down.
Some of the things they did off the top of my head:
* Render extension. This enabled all sorts of things, like easier drawing and scaling of pixmaps, or better font handling.
* Less monolithic build, phase out imake. This allowed iterating various components at different rates.
* Better auto configuration - less need to write a config file for the most common configurations.
XCB was also a good idea. I don't think it lived up to full potential because interest in writing code for X waned.
I think one thing that was lost to history are some of the proprietary X servers, such as those by Sun and SGI. The XFree86/Xorg lineage is missing their input.
Better until you compile a new kernel and realize that you don't have keyboard and mouse in X because it insists using an obscure (event ?) interface. And then press the power button to restart.
And xwayland exists so porting isn’t much of an issue.
But yeah, despite all that i’m on x11 still as well. I need to use proprietary nvidia drivers and I don’t want to run full gnome or whatever to make that run smoothly. I’ll probably be dead before dwm stops working on an updated system.
I’m a security engineer, and I can’t think of many threat models in which an attacker can snoop clipboard contents but can’t do much worse things, which I assume is why neither macOS nor Windows has ever bothered with clipboard isolation.
(It’s entirely possible I’m under-thinking it!)
Afaik macOS doesn’t allow clipboard access in that naive way and you do get access in wayland, it is just not this “uncontrolled”.
No, I don't think it's "okay." I just think it's indistinguishable from running arbitrary code, which is much worse anyways.
Again, ask yourself: what is the specific threat model in which an attacker can run a process that continually polls the clipboard, but can't do anything else?
> Afaik macOS doesn’t allow clipboard access in that naive way and you do get access in wayland, it is just not this “uncontrolled”.
You can try this for yourself: the `pbcopy` and `pbpaste` utilities on macOS allow uncontrolled access to the clipboard without any entitlements. These are well-known utilities that are baked into macOS, and are widely used by tools like password managers to programmatically control the clipboard.
More generally, you can look up the NSPasteboard and UIPasteboard APIs that Apple offers on macOS and iOS. There are no special entitlements required for either.
I'm not sure if there are any compositor specific interfaces or why they would be used when xdg portals exist.
From a historical perspective, the "why Wayland?" question is incredibly obvious IMO. The old Linux graphics stack consisted of the dumb Linux framebuffer and fbcon, and the separate Xorg stack with all its DDX/UMS drivers that required root-level permissions, and only provided a graphics API for ... Xorg. Your options were either Xorg, or the framebuffer, which IIRC didn't always support all of the available display modes.
Wayland was part of a wider push to rewrite the Linux graphics stack, with the new stack of KMS/DRM/DRI3/Mesa being a huge improvement over the 2000s Linux GUI stack. This came at the cost of old UMS and DRI drivers, making e.g. PowerPC Mac GPUs largely useless now (very unstable and incapable of suspend-to-RAM), while unifying mode-setting between the kernel and userland (no more praying the video card doesn't crash when ctrl-alt-f2'ing), also allowing for an arbitrary number of shared video buffers to be created (including by non GLX video applications) which makes compositors work in a not-hacked-together sense, but also allows for e.g. hardware video decoders to work in a not-hacky way.
Coupled with the addition of evdev to replace the Xorg DDX stuff like all the custom peripheral drivers, and you finally had a kernel-level API for accessing your video and input hardware. These were all prerequisites for the idea of "Wayland", decoupling the video and input layers from the display server and creating a low level API for window server things, so that you can have both small window servers (e.g. wlroots-based compositors) as well as "thick" environments (Mutter/KWin-based desktops).
Part of what makes this confusing is a lot of these benefits trickled down to Xorg itself. Nowadays evdev (and libinput) have replaced the old DDXs on Xorg, and I think most distros have switched to using xf86-video-modesetting, which could be thought of as "Wayland-style rendering on Xorg", in the sense it uses pure DRM and Mesa to render instead of GPU-specific DDX drivers.
So Xorg has gotten a lot of the benefits of Wayland's development "for free" anyway. This is intentional, as you mention, a lot of things will never be ported to Wayland. Wayland is not a replacement for X11, but an API for implementing the display server at a lower level than X11 allowed, while allowing us to implement full X11 compatibility "for free", by embedding Xorg in the form of Xwayland.
I think this makes a ton of sense for the majority of desktop-environment level compositors like Mutter (GNOME) and KWin (Plasma), which were already massive and implemented so much of their own functionality outside of Xorg, that it made sense to just let them do their own compositing. Same with GTK and Qt, which were already doing "their own rendering" outside of X.
Didn't mean for this to become an apologetic rant for Wayland, but as a "wayland skeptic" myself I feel like most anti-wayland arguments miss the forest for the trees (screen sharing not working). As an olive branch, though, I'll also add I don't think the wayland version of the big compositors like Mutter or KWin actually do much for end users, and it's pretty shameful how they've been launched with so many bugs, with no compelling user story beyond "better scaling" and "flicker".
Mesa was in X before Wayland was a thing.
Can we just not do this useless flamewar under every similar topic’s thread? Especially that no, noone wants to force Wayland, they want something that is under active maintenance, which X11 is not anymore, since every maintainer of it left/migrated to Wayland.
> Not to mention that A LOT of stuff is X11 only and not ported (and never will be) to Wayland.
Hmm, only if the goddamn maintainers of X11 who came up with Wayland thought of that. They could have named it something like W11.. no, XWayland!
Personally, I suspect that if the Wayland developers simply dropped maintenance of Xorg completely--no more patches, no more XWayland or at least completely disassociate XWayland from Xorg--that a community would step up and carry Xorg forward. As it is, that erstwhile community remains largely hidden, maintaining out-of-tree patches. But if that community faced the prospect of 1) being able to take back the reigns of Xorg, and 2) if not, Xorg vanishes today, then it would likely become much more motivated, organized, and proactive. (Whether it would be capable of carrying Xorg forward is a different question.) Alternatively, it might create the environment for projects like Arcan to shine.
I don't. That community was sorely needed several years ago, but failed to show up.
Only the compositor has access to the composited image therefore is the only program able to make screenshots and full screen sharing. Furthermore, efficient sharing of single application windows is only possible with direct memory access to the buffer which also is something the compositor does/has. The Display protocol is the only sensible place to negotiate access to GPU resources.
No, GPU resources can come from any number of other places. That's literally the purpose of direct rendering. Any applications using GPU compute can produce them without requiring a connection to the display server. There's no reason to put that in Wayland or restrict it to the compositor. There's already a much better protocol for sharing GPU buffers: Pipewire. Dbus is only there to act as the glue between a Wayland compositor and Pipewire.
Also Wayland was supposed to be simple. A former simple "XGetImage()" call now gets turned into a process of negotiating with at least three different protocols (most of them only semi stable and only "invented" a few years ago), each running their own daemon, requiring well above 1000 lines of code.
The whole ecosystem is garbage and is either conceived by complete moronic retards or with the purpose of sabotage. The latter is more likely, nobody can be that stupid.
Can you please knock off the conspiracy theories and flames? What are you hoping to accomplish by hurting people like this on the internet?
Don't tell other people what they are allowed to say Mr Thoughtpolice. This exactly the behaviour that I would expect from Wayland apologists, though. Your arguments are obviously wrong and pointless and the best thing you can come up with is shaming other people into self censorship.
> This exactly the behaviour that I would expect from Wayland apologists, though. Your arguments are obviously wrong and pointless and the best thing you can come up with is shaming other people into self censorship.
Yeah, I'm going to shame you for that. That kind of language isn't going to convince anyone, and it's actively harmful. Please stop.
1. Scrap everything you have done so far and start over.
2. Use tried and tested engineering principles as basis for your development philosophy (such as "mechanism, not policy" or "Keep It Simple Stupid").
3. Choose the right target audience. The target audience of the FOSS-Desktop are neither car entertainment systems, nor Android consumer users that potentially download malware everyday. Your target audience are power users and developers that know what they are doing. If you don't agree, go work for a car manufacturer, work as an Android developer or do something else, just stay away from the FOSS-Desktop.
4. Do what developers and power users need! Just some examples: use simple and stable interfaces, use non-opaque low-level abstractions, standardize often used functionality, avoid redundant standards, don't litter my pstree with pointless daemons, use existing mechanism provided by the OS, use clear text for low bandwidth IPC, keep dependency trees as small as possible, keep build dependencies as small as possible, look at Plan9 as inspiration instead of Windows and MacOS.
Pretty much the only problem I have with it, is lack of good screen-recording software. OBS is a bit of an overkill for short screen-casts.
I am amazed that people try to force limited and unfinished Wayland instead of X11. I recently had RHEL on ThinkPad T14 at work - which by default uses Wayland - yet even employer by default switches settings to X11 because EVERYTHING works there as desired - including screen sharing and/or recording.
... and for my personal stuff? I have ZERO issues with X11 on FreeBSD - why would I switch to Wayland if everything works as desired on X11? FreeBSD of course supports Wayland and you can use it there if you wish - but I just do not see the point of it. I do not have ANY screen flickering or other issues on X11.
Not to mention that A LOT of stuff is X11 only and not ported (and never will be) to Wayland.