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Wayland Isn't Ready For the Fedora 24 Desktop (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: There was much hope that Fedora 24 would be the first major Linux distribution using Wayland by default in place of an X.Org Server, that didn't pan out with Fedora 24 Workstation developers deciding not to use Wayland by default but it will remain a log-in time option. Fedora Wayland has made a lot of progress but functionality like on-screen keyboard, accessibility, remote displays, USB display hot-plugging, and other functionality is incomplete for the Fedora 24 timeline. At least there are many other Fedora 24 features that made it for this next release due out in June. Wayland will turn eight years old this year.
What unsolved problem does Wayland address?
No one has any difficulty securely running GUIs across networks.
I'm sure the developers have been using things like covscan, valgrind, cppcheck, and etc., throughout the development.
So we can expect it to be fairly clean right out of the gate, right?
right?
Linux is for g0atse lovers.
Yes indeed
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Hm.
As an open source developer for minetest, I've been really hoping that Fedora doesn't ship wayland yet.
Our game client simply isn't usable on wayland: https://github.com/minetest/mi...
And this isn't about minetest not being able to run natively, no its a bug with the abstraction layer, xwayland. I understand the underlying issue that the devs want to forbid pointer warping, this is one of the security features of wayland, but please find a way for legacy applications like minetest to still run. All I've seen is pointer locking and pointer confinement being discussed, but no warping specifically for applications that still use and rely on X.
And other games have this precise problem too.
Its okay if the devs need some time to develop a great successor for Xorg, that's fine, Its a very large task, and I welcome the concepts of wayland. But Fedora, a fairly stable distro, really shouldn't ship immature software to their users as the default option.
// Lame joke about Hurd & DNF goes here
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yet at the end of the day it's still... wayland.
The X protocol is not in line with how modern graphics is handled, this precludes good compression on X over ssh and also forces a lot of unnecessary complexity which is bad for security. Although I would be happier if they had just called it X12 an update that included dumping some of the old stuff in the core of the old protocol was necessary, now that they have decided to include network "transparency" equivalent functionality (single window tunnelling over ssh) and select+middle click paste the rest of it just looks like clean-up.
For Fedora, which underpins RHEL and other Enterprisey OSes, that's a major absence, even if Wayland's own developers don't consider it important.
I really hope Wayland's developers stop treating it as a minority application unworthy of serious consideration (even though it's supposedly on their long term roadmap) and actively start work on it. They have a proof of concept. They have X to show them how security can work in practice. It's time the work was done.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I've come to see Wayland as one of those open source projects that receives a huge amount of hype and attention, yet never manages to produce anything usable, even after many years.
It's up there with Rust, Servo, Perl 6 and Diaspora. It's like their supporters spend more time writing articles about how great these projects are, and little to no time actually writing code to make them a reality!
Even if they do write code, they never write useful code. They'll implement something, then decide to change up their approach mid-way through, then write more code, then decide to try something else, then write more code, then go back to the first approach but with a twist, and they'll write more code, but then change their philosophy, and they'll repeat this over and over and over and over and over and over. Nothing gets accomplished in the end.
I think if an open source project hasn't had a usable release after 4 years, it should be considered a dead-end project and thrown away. Diaspora clearly falls into this category. Perl 6 fell into it over a decade ago. Servo is well on its way there. Rust is borderline. At least the Rusters have produced something that's kinda minimally usable but it's still rather shitty overall. If Rust 2 doesn't get its shit together, then we can consider Rust a failed project, too. And we can surely include Wayland among this group of failures, too.
"The Fedora 24 Desktop Isn't Ready For Wayland"
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Yes, Linux very badly needs a decent windowing system to make it competitive with Windows and OS X. They've both always been much better than X, but they've really kicked the living shit out of it the past half-decade.
I read a very negative review of Wayland recently.
It sounds pathetically unusable to me. I mean the tester had problems with just about every single application that was tried! There were crashes, slow performance, incompatibilities, lags, and all kinds of other just plain dumb problems like that.
How the fuck is Wayland supposed to be our savior when it can't even compete with X, for fuck's sake?!
I don't give a fuck if X does "too much crap". It's actually somewhat usable! Wayland? Fucking unusable!
Hasn't systemd deprecated Wayland? Or is that just Rawhide?
What I love about X is the flexibility one gets, which is unparalleled by any other system: I can easily start a window of an application running on another host on my machine, works fine if I am logged into that other machine using ssh. I can tunnel a whole session through sse usinv VNC and use the remote desktop directly on my local one. It supports mutliple monitors spanning one desktop or several desktop on several monitors.
Does Wayland support these things too?
For example, how do you use remote windows or something like VNC on either of those right out of the box?
I'm waiting for the Yutani release of Wayland.
Why not DELAY the next Fedora version so people aren't forced to upgrade as often?
Ah, Wayland. The Hurd of windowing systems. I'm sure it will be amazing once finished.
Holy fuck! Can somebody please mod the parent down? He's totally wrong.
The Perl 6 1.0 he's talking about is the standard, not an implementation! There is no official Perl 6 implementation like there is for Perl 5. There are several Perl 6 implementations, and all of them are shit. Rakudo Star is the least-shitty of them all, but it's still very shitty in my experience. I have found it to be very slow, and I've had it crash on me. I don't think I've ever had the Perl 4 or Perl 5 interpreters crash on me, and I've used them for so many years now. There was also the Pugs implementation, but it died as a project when the maintainer had some sort of a gender identity crisis. There's also the damn useless Yapsi implementation, which is useless because it's implemented in Perl 6, and Perl 6 hasn't really been implemented yet!
Perl 6 1.0 doesn't actually exist in any useful form.
I ran Wayland during F23 Beta and on F23 for about ten weeks. It worked a lot better than in F22 but still has some usability issues. A couple of examples: In gedit the user should be able to drag a tab to a new window. In Wayland this causes gedit to crash. In XWayland apps such as Firefox or LibreOffice, the cursor will randomly disappear. Once that happens you have to restart Gnome. I am a bit frustrated with the lack of Wayland fixes in F23 promised here https://fedoramagazine.org/hel... That being said I encourage anyone running F23 to try Wayland. Most of the time you won't notice a difference. I'll run it on a spare system when F24 beta lands.
Seeing a lot of comparisons between X and other remote-access protocols such as VNC. From a personal use perspective I've found:
One nice thing about X is that the active window is independent of a particular desktop, or parent etc. When I use VNC, one frustration is that everything is bound inside the parent window (which is generally also restricted to a particular monitor). Larger desktops tend to suck, performance-wise, as you end up with a lot of pricey redraws.
One *nice* thing about VNC is that you can push stuff that's been accelerated on the remote GPU.
There's also stuff like Citrix, which I've that in concept is nice enough to draw things as separate windows without an MDI-style parent or virtual desktop, but in practice weird crap starts happening as soon as I move said windows between monitors etc. One good way to mess with Citrix is to have the overall desktop size change (say by hotplugging a monitor). It's also sometimes ugly with overlapping windows etc.
At the moment my current setup is a combination of a remote X window and VNC (X11VNC+tightvnc). I've been working on OpenGL-based applications, which won't render across machines with X, however the beefy hardware is not on my main box. To that end, I've got the remote machine running X11VNC (which is able to grab the framebuffer) and tightvnc locally for rendering. That at least gets me the hardware acceleration for rendering. In addition, running the actual code editor+compiler via X allows me to have all the dialogs, debuggers, etc on my local machine and move stufff between monitors with ease.
I believe there are tricks to make this work all in X-land, e.g. with xvfb, but I haven't had much luck with that yet. What would be nice is to see those capabilities all pulled together in something like Wayland where the network stack, framebuffer, etc and all the userland stuff play nicely with each other out-of-the box with minimal hackery needed to get things to work.