It's definitely not Unix-like, since file handles and writes and epoll, and mmap for IPC are nowhere to be found. Instead you have 'objects' with these lifecycle methods that create/release resources (probably committing the design sin of having these for things which should be pure data, like descriptors).
What's with these XML headers? It's UNIX standard stuff, to have a C API for your code, that declares an API for a library, and then a makefile can just consume it. There's a standard way of supplying, finding and consuming them. Even binding generators are probably more comfortable with C headers, than this XML thing
And what's with the callbacks for everything, like screen resolution queries? In Win32, you can do it with a single synchronous API call that returns a struct that has all the info. It's not like you have to touch the disk or network to get this. In cases where you do, you usually have a call that dispatches a message to another window (which you can also dispatch yourself), and you have to listen to the response.
I did some X11 programming as part of work, and its entirely reasonable and conventional compared to this, much more like Win32 (even maybe a bit more pleasant, but I'm no expert on it).
The API sounds awful (and I've had ChatGPT generate me some example programs, and it's somehow even worse than the author describes), and not only that, the requirement of 'everything be an object', with chains and trees of objects being created introduces a huge source of bugs and bookeeping performance overhead on the application side.
Yes, you do have to do something like this with some things under Windows, but the reason for this is that these objects have duplicates in the Windows kernel.
But here it looks like this is just to satisfy the sensibilities of the designer.
Honestly this sounds like the most epic case of NIH syndrome. Like these guys wanted to write their own OS and userland and break with existing conventions.
That's a big problem. When things become an optional extension for a compositor, that means you cannot reliably deploy something that depends on it to Wayland.
At this moment, things in the wild are coupling themselves to libwayland-client and in practice ossifying its ABI as a standard no matter what the wayland orgs say about it.
I'm not happy with how the collaboration and planning between various parties involved went over years and I do believe that a lot of these adoption pains are fully self-inflicted, but that has absolutely nothing to do with Wayland's technical design.
Do you mean the Window Manager layer?
That sounds like a different way of saying "impossible".
In X11 I can create an automation tool that works regardless of the underlying WM, or even if there isn't an underlying WM.
Can't do that with Wayland.
This issue is typical of the thinking that went into Wayland: No consideration was made when Wayland was announced of the fact that there were far simpler ways of achieving the same level of security.
Those aren't the only two options. There's no need to compromise the entire system for everybody if the Wayland devs would agree to configuration that controls these things.
Then those of us who need stuff to work rgardless of WM would get stuff to work and the rest of the Wayland users can simply go with a WM that suits them.
The extra security meant many automation tasks need to be done as extensions on composer level making this even worse
When designed by committee.
With conflicting interests.
And Veto Powers.
At the same time, most of this post really is just a rant essentially saying that a low-level library is so flexible that using it directly results in code so verbose it can hardly be read. Yes, that's how good low-level designs always are.
You can turn a generic portable asynchronous ANSI C interface into a simple, blocking and platform-specific one with an abstraction layer. You can integrate it with all sorts of existing event loops and programming frameworks. You can customize it all you like but using it directly in an application will cost you a lot of patience. At the same time, you can't go in the opposite direction; from a "simple" blocking black-box interface to something that can reasonably host a complex GUI toolkit. If you're after simplicity, go higher-level.
At the very least there should be a standardized (and centralized) client library on top of Wayland but below widget frameworks like GTK or Qt which implements the missing "desktop window system features": opening, moving, sizing windows (with decorations please), mouse and keyboard input events, clipboard, drag-and-drop. Non-GTK/Qt applications should never have to talk directly to the asynchronous Wayland APIs, only to this wrapper library.
Such a library should be designed to make programmers want to move on from X11 (because writing code against Xlib is horrible, but somehow Wayland managed to be even worse) - and tbh, this new window system client library (at first on top of X11) should have been the top priority of the Wayland project before starting to work on the actual X11 replacement, and it should have shipped on all desktop Linux distros at least a decade ago so that application programmers could have been won over (and for collecting feedback) even before Wayland shipped its first version.
Not to draw any specific analogy, but sometimes a fussy low-level interface is just important to have.
Vulkan's "API design deficits" (to put it mildly) have been recognized by Khronos though, and turning that mess around and making the API a "joy to use" is one of Khronos' main priorities at the moment (kudos to them for doing that).
Regardless, that's sort of my point: having a lower level fiddly layer is a desirable quality, and Xlib being rebased on top of it isn't exactly a counterexample.
Win32 has exactly the same setup of problems here as wayland does. Moreso because Win32 just gives you back opaque handles which you are expected to keep track of and use the Win32 API to do any meaningful interactions.
The only understandable complaint is that wayland makes it hard for different windows to interact with one another for security. IMO, that's a silly goal to chase after, but that's just me.
>Getting any example application to work is so incredibly ridiculous, that every second I program on Wayland, I yarn for the times I did Win32 programming.
And that comes from the core of how Wayland is designed.
In Win32, the stable interface / ABI is the set of C functions provided by the operating system through DLLs. These are always dynamically loaded, so Microsoft is free to change the internal interface used for controlling windows at any time. Because of this, decades-old .exes still run fine on Windows 11.
In Wayland, the stable interface is the binary protocol to the compositor, in addition to the libwayland-client library plus extensions. Instead of that socket being an "implementation detail", it's now something that all programs that just want to make a window have to deal with. You also can't just use the socket and ignore the libwayland libraries, because mesa uses libwayland-client and you probably want hardware acceleration.
The other big issue is the core Wayland protocol is useless; you have to use a bunch of protocol extensions to do anything, and different compositors may implement different versions of them. On Win32, Microsoft can just add another C function to user32.dll and you don't have to think about protocol how that gets transformed into messages on the socket layer, or compatibility issues with different sets of extensions being supported by different compositors.
Anyone know of exceptions? People who get mesa working anyhow, some way?
It also doesn't preclude people from making nicer experiences on top of libwayland. Again I'd be curious to see what material is out there. It feels like a library that materializes the current state of things into a local view would go a long way to dispel the rage of people such as the author here, who seem to detest callbacks with firey rage.
The idea of the wayland registry seem unifying & grand to me. Ok yes it's async & doesn't hide it? Lot of ink spilled to be upset about that, and doesn't feel like an immutable fact that must govern life, if that for some reason makes you as mad as this dude.
You don't have to use Mesa's wayland-egl to make EGL work with Wayland, you can easily pass dmabufs by yourself - though this will theoretically be less portable as dmabufs are Linux specific (but practically they're also implemented by various BSDs).
However, such a thing could be relatively easily added to X11 without changing the X protocol, so this does not appear as a sufficient motivation for the existence of Wayland.
I have not tried Wayland yet, because I have never heard anyone describing an important enough advantage of Wayland, while it definitely has disadvantages, like not being network transparent, which is an X11 feature that I use.
Therefore, I do not know which is the truth, but from the complaints that I have heard the problem seems to be that in Wayland it is not simple to control the access rights to windows and clipboards.
Yes, access to those must be restricted, but it must be very easy for users to specify when to share windows with someone else or between their own applications. The complaints about Wayland indicate that this mechanism of how to allow sharing has not been thought well. It should have been something as easy as clicking a set of windows to specify something like the first being allowed to access the others, or like each of them being able to access all the others.
This should have been a major consideration when designing access control and it appears that a lot of such essential requirements have been overlooked when Wayland was designed and they had to be patched somehow later, which does not inspire confidence in the quality of the design.
At a higher level, I've never found someone who is deeply familiar with the Linux GUI software stack who also thinks Wayland is the wrong path, while subjectively as a user most or all of my Linux GUI machines are using Wayland and there's no noticeable difference.
From an app dev perspective, I have a small app I maintain that runs on Mac and Linux with GPU acceleration and at no point did I need to a make any choices related to Wayland vs X.
So, overall, the case that Wayland has some grave technical or strategic flaws just don't pass the smell test. Maybe I'm missing something?
The only problem that has existed is that originally there was a single DPI value, not a different DPI value for each monitor.
This has never created any problem for the people using multiple monitors with the same resolution, but only for the people who have used multiple monitors having different resolutions and who might have not liked the changes in windows size when moving a window from a monitor to another monitor.
That was indeed a problem, but it really affected a rather niche use case and it was also trivial to solve without any change in the X11 design, by just making DPI a per monitor variable, which was done long ago.
So criticizing X11 about a supposed problem with HiDPI is incorrect. I have used only multiple 4k monitors with my PCs, with X11, for more than a dozen years and I never had any problem with HiDPI, with the exception of many Java programs written by morons, which ignore the system settings and which also do not allow the user to change the font used by them. I do not know which is the problem with the Java programmers, but I never encountered programs with such a behavior, except those written in Java. Moreover, the Java programs are also the only that had problems with monitors using 10-bit per color component.
While X11 itself never had problems with supporting HiDPI, at least not in the XFCE that I am using, I heard that other desktop environments have created problems with HiDPI that have nothing to do with X11, by not exposing the X11 DPI settings but providing instead some "window scaling" settings, which is something that I do not know how it is implemented, but there are good chances that it is implemented in a wrong way, judging from the complaints that I have seen. I cannot imagine how one could use correctly a "window scaling" factor, because the font rendering program must know the true DPI value when rendering for instance a 12-point font. If rendering is done at a wrong DPI and then the image is scaled, the result is garbage, so in that case it would not be surprising that people claimed that HiDPI works badly in X11, when in fact it was Gnome or whatever desktop environment was used who was guilty for bad support, not X11. I never had to fight with those desktop environments, but I assume that even those would have worked correctly with HiDPI, when using xrandr to configure X11, instead of using the settings of the desktop environment.
These kind of posts just show how disconnected from reality some of y'all are from what most Linux desktop users nowadays actually need from the desktop platform.
Even without configuring distinct DPIs per monitor that was not a problem for me, because on the small screen of the laptop I kept only some less important application, like the e-mail program, while working on the bigger external displays, so I had no reason to move windows between the small screen of the laptop and the bigger external displays.
But like I said, setting a different DPI value for each monitor has been added to X11 many years ago, I do not remember how many.
I do not see why one would want to move windows between the external displays and the laptop, when you have connected external displays, so I consider this a niche use case, i.e. moving windows between small screens and big screens. I agree with you that having simultaneously big screens and small screens is not niche, so I was not referring to this.
Without a per-screen DPI value you cannot control the ratio between the sizes of a window when is moved between the big screen and the small screen, but even when you control the ratio, moving windows between screens of different sizes does not work well because you must choose some compromise, e.g. if you keep the same physical size some windows from the big screen will not fit on the small screen and if you make the windows occupy the same fraction of the screen size they will change their sizes during moving and they will be more difficult to use on the small screen.
But like I have said, this no longer matters as the problem has been solved even for this niche use case. I do not even remember if this problem still existed by the time when Wayland became usable.
Some compositor's insistence on CSD can make it a bit more complex since you get that in Win32 for free, but on the sane ones you just add xdg-decoration and you're done.
Also, this is all apples-to-oranges anyway, as Win32 is a toolkit, while wayland-client is just a protocol (de)serializer.
I believe the youth nowadays calls what you wrote "copium". Because creating a simple window in Win32 (a whole program, in fact) looks like this:
#ifndef UNICODE
#define UNICODE
#endif
#include <windows.h>
LRESULT CALLBACK WindowProc(HWND hwnd, UINT uMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam);
int WINAPI wWinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, PWSTR pCmdLine, int nCmdShow)
{
const wchar_t CLASS_NAME[] = L"Sample Window Class";
WNDCLASS wc = { };
wc.lpfnWndProc = WindowProc;
wc.hInstance = hInstance;
wc.lpszClassName = CLASS_NAME;
RegisterClass(&wc);
HWND hwnd = CreateWindowEx(0, CLASS_NAME, L"Hello World! Program",
WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW,
CW_USEDEFAULT, CW_USEDEFAULT, CW_USEDEFAULT, CW_USEDEFAULT,
NULL, NULL, hInstance, NULL);
if (hwnd == NULL)
{
return 0;
}
ShowWindow(hwnd, nCmdShow);
MSG msg = { };
while (GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0) > 0)
{
TranslateMessage(&msg);
DispatchMessage(&msg);
}
return 0;
}
LRESULT CALLBACK WindowProc(HWND hwnd, UINT uMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam)
{
switch (uMsg)
{
case WM_DESTROY:
PostQuitMessage(0);
return 0;
default:
return DefWindowProc(hwnd, uMsg, wParam, lParam);
}
}
It's absolutely trivial in comparison. Same thing with Xlib; < 100 lines of C code is enough for a simple app.
Those applications seemed quite simple to write in comparison with what is described in the parent article, despite doing animation in real time based on the mouse and keyboard inputs.
I've been struggling with this initially as well, it's pretty poorly explained in docs. Short explanation:
Wayland-client library implements a queues over the socket. So to get it, you have to think about when is the socket read from and written to, and when are the queues pulled from or pushed to. There is always a default queue, but for example EGL+OpenGL creates it's own queue, which further makes it more confusing.
- `wl_display_dispatch_pending()` only pulls messages from default queue to callbacks
- `wl_display_dispatch()` also tries to do blocking read on the socket if no messages are in queue
- quite recently `wl_display_dispatch_queue_timeout()` was finally added, so you can do non-blocking read from the socket. earlier you had to hack the function yourself
- `wl_display_flush()` writes enqueued messages in queue to socket
- `wl_display_roundtrip()` sends a ping message and does blocking wait for response. the purpose is that you also send all enqueued requests and receive and process all responses. for example during init you call it to create registry and enumerate the objects, and you call it for second time to enumerate further protocol objects that got registered in registry callback, such as seat
- `eglSwapBuffers()` operates on its own queue, but reading from socket also enqueues to default queue, so you should always call `wl_display_dispatch_pending()` (on default queue) afterwards
There is also a way to get around being stuck in `eglSwapBuffers()` during window inhibition: disable the blocking with `eglSwapInterval(0)` and use `wl_surface_frame()` callback, and you get notified in callback when you can redraw and swap again. But you can't do blocking reads with `wl_display_dispatch()` anymore, have to use the timeout variant. After using it this way, you can also easily manage multiple vsynced windows independently on the same thread, and even use wayland socket in epoll event loop. None of this is documented of course.
The clipboard interface is definitely compromised a bit by being shared with drag-and-drop events, but it's not that complicated. Also there is a pitfall when you copy-paste to your own application and don't use any async event loop, you can get deadlocked by being expected to write and read on the same file descriptor at the same time.
What scares me though are all the responsibilities passed to compositors, because what ends up happening is that each compositor may reimplement what should be common functionality in annoying ways. This is especially true for input things, like key remapping. This ultimately fragments linux desktop experiences even harder than it was before.
It also has noticeable mouse lag for me, I really hope this isn't due to avoiding tearing.
What it does is simple - all the functions that deal with windows/handles or events simply do not work on ones that you don't have access to, for example, the EnumWindows function allows you to wall through the tree of windows simply do not see the ones the process has no access to. SetWindowsHookEx which allows you to intercept and modify messages meant for other windows simply doesnt fire for messages you're not supposed to access.
Granted, outside of UWP apps, the application of security is rather lax (this is for legacy purposes, the security's there, just not enforced), but for apps running as admin, or UWP apps, the sandboxing is rather solid.
Moreover, it is possible to choose as the default policy that no program may access a window that it did not open, but then there must exist a very simple method for the user to specify when access is permitted, e.g. by clicking a set of windows to grant access to them.
I have experienced tearing only once, on a laptop about 10 years ago, which used NVIDIA Optimus, i.e. an NVIDIA GPU without direct video output, which used the Intel GPU to provide outputs. NVIDIA Optimus was a known source of problems in Linux and unlike with any separate NVIDIA GPU, which always worked out-of-the-box without any problems for me, with that NVIDIA Optimus I had to fiddle with the settings for a couple of days until I solved all problems, including the tearing problem.
Perhaps Wayland never had tearing problems, but I have used X11 for several decades on a variety of desktops and laptops and tearing has almost never been a problem.
However, most of the time I have used only NVIDIA or Intel GPUs for display and it seems that most complaints about tearing have been about AMD. I have always used and I am still using AMD GPUs too, but I use those for computations, not connected to monitors, so I do not know if they could have tearing problems.
This only matters if you compare properly sandboxed apps, otherwise an app that runs with your uid can still do harm and practically indirectly completely compromise the system..
Are most flatpaks _properly_ sandboxed? Of course not.
Sandboxing defeats the point of said applications. If you want your computer to have no functionality, check out Figma. A clickable prototype sounds like precisely the security the world needs right now.
The only thing keeping those away from Linux was its market share. With npm malware on the rise, this is no longer enough of a protection.
Linux always has been a system were the existence of malware was ignored, specially Desktop, contrary to other OSes (tooling included). But since a couple of years ago can be observed (I observe) slooow movements trying to correct this colossal mistake.
If this is the best way to do it or not, I do not enter. I particularly just welcome most of the advancements about this matter in Linux due such absence of worrying, keeping my fingers crossed that the needed tooling arrives on time (ten years behind Windows, I think).
> Make easy things easy. Make hard things doable.
is generally unachievable. Instead, pick one:
- easy things easy, hard things impossible
- easy things tedious, hard things possible
(Unless you want to maintain two sets of interfaces in parallel.)
We can argue about limitations of X.org's implementation of the X server, but, as demonstrated by Phoenix, X.org doesn't have to be the only X server implementation.
It satisfies the requirement to "make easy things easy, make hard things doable" and it also gets you cross platform support.
https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-...
It's getting a bit boring, especially since none really does more than complain.
Especially coming from people who don't put in the work to build something else.
It's really bizarre how the opensource community degraded into this space of constant aggresive, insulting screeching over every single project thats actually moving something in the Linux world. Coming from people who don't put any code behind it or do anything but attack any change since 1990s.
To hell with that, Linux developers deserve better than this constant barrage of hate.
The problem with systemd and Wayland is that they are not like any other projects which the users may choose depending on how useful they are for their needs.
Wayland and systemd are forced by a few distribution maintainers upon a great number of Linux users, regardless of what those users may want.
Many users may not be directly impacted by these changes, so they may trust that the maintainers know what they are doing.
There are also many users for which this replacements would require a lot of work so such users would expect a better justification of why systemd or Wayland are an improvement over alternatives.
I agree than it would be very desirable for X11 to be replaced by something better.
But I have never seen any piece of information that would indicate that Wayland is better. On the contrary, almost every detail that I learn about Wayland shows a bad design decision.
For example, before reading the parent article, I was not aware that the Wayland client API is so reliant on callback functions. In my opinion, this is bad because such an API is inefficient, as it leads to a lot of code duplication.
In my opinion, the cases when it is a good choice to use callback functions are very rare. Instead of callback functions, it should have been better to use some kind of event queue, because there is little else that callback functions can do, except inserting the event into a queue, for handling by the main thread.
The only "advantage" of callback functions is that the implementer of the API might have chosen a bad implementation of an event queue, while an API based on callback functions is not yet committed to a particular queue implementation, allowing the user of the API to do the right thing, but possibly with a waste of code in the initial part of all callback functions.
They backed systemd. I think you need to stop with conspiracy thinking and admit to yourself that maybe the solution was actually better than before. And as such, if you build something even better, they'll switch too.
But it has to BE better, not just a pile of yelling.
For other open-source applications, if you do not like them you do not install them and you choose something else. There is no reason for any complaint.
On the other hand, you may have used some Linux distribution for a decade and then someone forces upon you systemd and/or Wayland, regardless whether you want them or not.
In such cases it is very reasonable to complain about this, because whoever has chosen systemd and Wayland now forces you to do a lot of unnecessary work, either by changing your workflow to accommodate them or by switching to another distribution, which also requires a new workflow.
I have not switched to either systemd or Wayland, because I have never seen anyone capable to explain even a single advantage of them over what I am using.
I have tested once systemd, by installing Arch and using it for a month, but I have found a bug so ugly that my opinion about the technical competence of the systemd designers has dropped so low that I have never tried it again.
I am using Gentoo, which unlike other distributions does not yet force the choices of the maintainers upon the users, so I can still choose to not use either systemd or Wayland. However, I am worried about the future because both of them continue to invade other software packages, so even without using the complete systemd you may need to use some parts extracted from it, because other traditional packages have been substituted with packages that depend somehow on systemd.
Eventually, it is likely that I would have to write myself replacements for those packages, to expel completely systemd, but I hate to do such unnecessary work when I was happy with the older packages, which worked perfectly fine and they needed no replacement.
Some people just wanna complain
People who grew up on sysvinit based service management and can't handle change (the partially straw man group you are complaining about).
People who only know about sysvinit based service management and systemd and formed their opinions of systemd based on "sysvinit == terrible confusing shell scripts; systemd == config files" (you - as a first impression).
And people who actually know the advantages, disadvantages, and functional details of sysvinit based service management, systemd, and the plethora of other attempts/approaches at solving these issues and can support their arguments in favour of or against systemd with actually reasoned arguments.
The first group is easy to ignore, and a minority. The third group produces the biggest chunk of well informed content on systemd. And the second group seems to think that anyone in the third group who is in favour of systemd, must be one of them, and anyone who is against systemd, must be in the first group (note also: the false dichotomy).
Rather than straw manning your opponents in this discussion while pretending this is a discussion of the pros and cons of "declarative service management", could you instead contribute something useful? Lacking that, maybe just stop trying to contribute?
By saying stuff like this, you aren't going to convert sysvinit users to anything and you aren't going to convince anyone who has genuine criticism of systemd of anything.
Some people just want to live in the 80s forever.
I think this shaming of free software users that want to make other choices is rather terrible.
Because those libraries will not materialize in time, and more importantly the hobbyists who are supposed to write those libraries don't have the testing capabilities of large organizations (e.g. testing across hundreds of hardware configurations).
So I feel your pain. I did hear programming for Wayland is harder than X11, but I never did either so I have no idea if that is true.