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Are there any things in Linux that need to be started over from scratch? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I'm curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I'm afraid that at some point, we'll realize there are issues with the software we're using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite.

Are there any instances of this happening? Where something is designed with a flaw that doesn't get realized until much later, necessitating scrapping the whole thing and starting from scratch?

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[–] 37 points 2 years ago (10 children)

Wayland is incomplete and unfinished, not broken and obsolete and hopelessly bad design. PulseAudio was bad design. Wayland is very well designed, just, most things haven't been ported for it yet and some design by committee hell, but even that one is kind of a necessary tradeoff so that Wayland actually lasts a long time.

What people see: lol Firefox can't even restore its windows to the right monitors

What the Wayland devs see: so how can we make it so Firefox will also restore its windows correctly on a possible future VR headset environment where the windows maintain their XYZ and rotation placement correctly so the YouTube window you left above the stove goes back above the stove.

The Wayland migration is painful because they took the occasion to redo everything from scratch without the baggage of what traditional X11 apps could do, so there is less likely a need for a Wayland successor when new display tech arrives and also not a single display server that's so big its quirks are now features developers relied on for 20 years and essentially part of the standard.

There's nothing so far that can't be done in Wayland for technical implementation reasons. It's all because some of the protocols aren't ready yet, or not implemented yet.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    X11 is 40 years old. I'd say it's been rather successful in the "won't need to be replaced for some time" category. Some credit where due.

    There's nothing so far that can't be done in Wayland for technical implementation reasons. It's all because some of the protocols aren't ready yet, or not implemented yet.

    I mean .. It doesn't matter why it can't be done. Just that it can't be done.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    40 years old is also what makes it so hard to replace or even reimplement. The bugs are all decade old features, everything is written specifically for Xorg, all of which needs to be emulated correctly. It sure did serve us well, it's impressive how long we've managed to make it work with technology well beyond the imagination of the engineers in the 80s.

    There's this for the protocols: https://github.com/probonopd/wayland-x11-compat-protocols

    It can be done, it's just nobody wants to do it. It's not really worth the effort, when you can work on making it work properly in Wayland instead. That way you don't need XWayland in the first place, but also XWayland can then implement it using the same public API everyone else does so it works on every compositor.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    There’s nothing so far that can’t be done in Wayland for technical implementation reasons.

    Then make it fully X11 backwards compatible. Make Wayland X12. C'mon, they already admitted NVidia was right and are switching the sync and working to finally support the card they've been busting a hate boner over the driver simply because they're bigots against the licensing. Time to admit breaking the world was a mistake, too.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's slowly happening. KDE can now do global Xwayland shortcuts, they also implemented XWaylandVideoBridge and compositor restart crash recovery for apps. We're getting proper HDR, we have proper per-monitor refresh rates and VRR, I can even hotplug GPUs. Some of that stuff works better in XWayland because we can just run multiple instances with different settings. For the particularly stubborn cases, there's rootful XWayland. X12 would have to break things too, and I doubt an Xorg rewrite would be all that much further than Wayland is. Canonical had a go at it too with Mir which was much less ambitious.

    NVIDIA was right on that one indeed, but Wayland also predates Vulkan and was designed for GLES, pretty much at the tail end of big drivers and the beginning of explicit and low level APIs like Vulkan. They could very well have been right with EGLStream too, but graphics on Linux back then was, erm, bad. But in the end they're all still better than the kludge that is 3D in Xorg.

    It's getting a lot of momentum and a lot of things are getting fixed lately. It went from unusable to "I can't believe it's not Xorg!" just this year for me. It's very nice when it works well. We'll get there.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    At this point they could make it the best thing in the world. Won't ever fix the resentment they earned against us NVidia users, might fix some of the resentment from x11 folks... but that it needs a separate XWayland will always be a pain point. That's a kluge.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago

    I can't up-vote this enough. The "architectural purists" have made the migration a nightmare. Always blaming everyone else for simply not seeing their genius. I'm honestly surprised it's gotten as far as it has.

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  • [+] -6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Can't even update Firefox in place. Have to download a new copy, run it from the downloads folder, make a desktop shortcut myself, which doesn't have the Firefox icon.

    Can't remember if that was mint or Ubuntu I was fiddling with, but it's not exactly user friendly.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago

    This has nothing to do with Wayland, it's just AppImages kinda sucking. Use Flatpak or the one in your distro's repos, not the AppImage. AppImages are the equivalent of portable apps on Windows, like the single exe ones you'd put on a flash drive to carry around.

    Also the AppImage developer is very against Wayland and refuses to support it, which is why Wayland support is a shitshow on AppImages.

    If you pick the Flatpak it'll get updated in the background, have a proper launcher and everything.

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