> If you saw a giant, attention grabbing billboard for something you are looking for, you wouldn't hate it.
Yes, I would. When I'm looking for something, I search for it until I find it, and then after that I'm not looking for it anymore. I don't go for a drive through the countryside in the hopes that system76 have put up a billboard which blocks the view of the countryside but shows me the specs for their latest laptop model.
The thing is that you are not looking for a new laptop while you are driving, but you may be looking for a gas station because your "low fuel" light just turned on. And how are you going to find that gas station (which may not be exactly on the road you are driving on) if there is no sign advertising for it?
You can tell me you can pull over and look at a map, or program it on your navigation app. Not only it is not the most convenient, maybe even unsafe, but how do you think that gas station ended up on that map? Most likely the business paid for that, making it an ad.
That's the idea, we dislike that laptop ad because we usually don't buy laptops while we are on the road, it is an irrelevant attention grab, especially when that billboard is disproportionately large. But a gas station, restaurant or convenience store is relevant to a significant fraction of the people on the road, and when the sign is reasonable, we don't usually call it a billboard, even though it is an ad and not a sign like a speed limit.
„For next gas station take exit 31“ is not an ad in the sense most people understand ads, just as a „toilet“ sign on a door is not an ad for that toilet. I feel like you are constructing a case of ads that doesn’t really fit the common definition, but maybe I misunderstand.
> And how are you going to find that gas station (which may not be exactly on the road you are driving on) if there is no sign advertising for it?
Well, actually, in all serious travel I do, I tend to know exactly where I'm going to stop for fuel before I ever set off. It's programmed into my gps as part of my route. And I'm going to find it using my gps software.
If I'm doing a less-serious trip somewhere and I don't pre-plan my stops, the way I find places to stop for fuel is I drive along on my route, and if I need fuel, when I see a "gas" station, I stop there. Again, no billboards needed.
> You can tell me you can (snip) program it on your navigation app. Not only it is not the most convenient,
I find it super convenient. Much much more convenient than running out of fuel or not knowing if I have enough to make it to a particular place.
> how do you think that gas station ended up on that map? Most likely the business paid for that, making it an ad.
Well, that's debatable. It's a listing for an amenity of a certain type (fuel station) on openstreetmap. To be in the "Fuel" category that shows up on my gps software, you'll need to sell fuel (or your entry will get edited and you'll show up in a different category). In much the same way as a sign saying "public toilet, this way" isn't an ad.
But the debate about the blurry lines of "what is an ad?" is beside the point: have you noticed how that pattern of: "I want a thing, I search for it, I find it, and then I'm not looking for it anymore" holds true here? And also how no obnoxious billboards were involved?
Even if it is an "ad", it's in an appropriate place - on openstreetmap, in the "fuel" category, and searchable by gps coordinates. I can toggle whether I want things in the 'fuel' category to be visible in my gps software very easily - I can turn that "ad" off with exactly 2 button presses if it bugs me. It's not a huge obnoxious billboard blocking my view of the countryside, lit up with 10000W of lights at night time.
This is the problem. Ads may not work as well for some people (who hate them) but they work great on others. Unfortunately, because the ones it does work on spend money, the rest of us are stuck in advertising hell.
I don’t want AR glasses for productivity or the social media bs they want to push; I want them to blight out every f’n ad that is everywhere. When they can do it in-device with no internet connection and I’ll fork over 1k for glasses immediately.
Given that so far the nearest things to successful AR glasses have been produced by Google and Meta, I think the relationship between wearing AR glasses and seeing ads is unlikely to go the way you are hoping.
(I too would love there to be AR glasses that you can put arbitrary software on, only under your control, rather than that of some rapidly-enshittifying company that has the device locked down. I suppose it's not strictly impossible that that might happen, but it doesn't seem like it's the way to bet.)
You can achieve some of that by moving to a foreign country which language you don't understand. A good experiment to realise what a relief it is to suddenly have all offline advertisements removed (and some online too, when localised based on IP)
What you seem to be missing is that a whole lot of people don't actually have any "frustration", except when people come along claiming that their new windowing system is "totally ready... except it doesn't support any good hardware".
For people like us, X works just fine, with our nvidia cards, and we're not actually interested in the philosophical purity of who's fault it is that wayland doesn't work with our nvidia cards. If we cared about that kind of stuff so deeply, we wouldn't be using the proprietary drivers.
IF you want people to switch to wayland, then solving all those edge cases, and making it work properly with proprietary graphics drivers (or maybe getting nvidia et al to open their code, good luck with that) is your problem.
Some people think it comes off as petulant and entitled when you create a new thing with no regard to being compatible with the old thing, and then demand that the entire world adapts to you and starts supporting your thing.
> I hope you'll invest some effort in supporting this new group of people prolonging its life.
If they can show some tangible progress and improvements I almost certainly will! :)
And here I thought the wave of the future was generative AI, which damn near requires Nvidia to even function. Sure can't wait for RedHat to deprecate and nuke and blacklist and hellban all Nvidia capability!
Indeed. I've seen tons of things that specifically require nvidia and support nothing else - more and more in the last couple of years. Some proprietary games don't support anything but the nvidia proprietary drivers on Linux.
Thanks for your anecdotes. Here's a couple of counter-anecdotes:
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X has "just worked" for me since at least ubuntu 8.04 (that's 2008, april, over 17 years ago, for those counting), probably earlier.
I don't recall having any particular issues with X on the fedora machines I ran before I switched to ubuntu 8.04, but I don't recall clearly enough to be able to confidently say that I didn't have any X issues.
OTOH, I also don't specifically recall having X issues since some time around Red Hat 6 or so, which would be around 1998 or 1999, so it might be more like 25-26 years since X didn't "just work" for me.
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About a year ago, I heard that wayland might be approaching a usable state. So I decided to give it a try on a raspberry pi that I was setting up.
It took literally about 15 minutes before I ran into a problem where I wasn't able to do something I've been doing for decades on X. And I want to stress that I was hoping it would work - I was not out to find a reason not to use wayland, I just happened to run into one inside of about 15 minutes.
I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to do what I wanted to do on wayland. I put a nontrivial amount of effort into trying to solve the issue on wayland. During the course of this, I found several different/conflicting pieces of advice, none of which worked for me. I think IIRC I found one option which sounded promising but which meant recompiling the compositor, or something very-nontrivial like that.
I balked at that and switched the system over to X.
And the problem instantly went away, and everything started working again. And that machine currently has an uptime of well over a hundred days.
I would love for wayland to be a thing that actually works to the point that it's a viable replacement for X, but I grow more and more skeptical every year that this doesn't happen. I Expected it like a decade ago.
The reason X "just worked" is that it's very bad, obolsete software that nobody would touch so we all just got used to the things that didn't work.
High DPI, multiple monitors, hot-plugging, OpenGL... these things were hacks and pretty much never worked right. There's also very necessary for modern computers. We all just didn't care.
So what if my thunderbolt dock needed a reboot to connect a monitor? So what if youtube drops a few frames here or there? So what if I need to enforce vsync across the entire desktop just so I don't get splitting? So what if vertical bars appear for a few seconds after suspend? So what if 1.25 scaling looks like ass?
> The reason X "just worked" is that it's very bad
Yeah, sure, most bad software "just works", and there's nothing contradictory about this statement at all.
> High DPI, multiple monitors, hot-plugging, OpenGL
Of these 4 examples, I have literally never had any problems with 75% of them since at least 2008 - maybe 1999 - they all "just work". And I've never tried to do the other one, it may or may not.
You can argue about how old == bad as much as you like. Meanwhile I'll be getting work done using the bad old tech, rather than trying to debug the new broken thing.
> So what if my thunderbolt dock needed a reboot to connect a monitor?
Well if you needed to reboot, i.e restarting X didn't solve it, then that sounds like it's not an X problem at all. Maybe something in the USB stack.
> So what... So what... So what...
So what if the new thing people are trying to force on us doesn't support features we've enjoyed using for decades and use every day to get work done? So what if I've been using network transparency just fine for over a quarter century? So what if the new protocol doesn't support really basic things like screen savers properly? So what if it's suddenly a problem if an application has multiple windows, or wants to record the screen, or automate desktop usage, or reparent some other program, or have a not-rectangular window?
I'm talking about very, very basic features like changing input/output at runtime, graphics acceleration, and scaling.
These are janky on X. I'm sorry, they are and we all know it, across many drivers, not just nvidia.
Yes, Wayland is missing some very niche usecases. For my money, I'd rather be able to plug in a monitor without a restart than have a "not-rectangular window". If your priorities are different then fine, I can't argue with lived experience.
Also, for the record, some X "features" were always a bad idea. The whole "every application being to record everything at any time with no permission model" isn't a feature, it's just a vulnerability. Yes, that means we now have to be much more deliberate with how we control these things, so we have popups and portals and whatnot. But that is actually a big improvement from the alternative, which is every application comes with a built-in free keylogger and screenlogger that you're just kind of hoping nobody is using for nefarious purposes.
Some people would consider the ability to record the screen or run a screensaver - like we've been able to since the 1980s - to be a "very, very basic feature"
> I'd rather be able to plug in a monitor without a restart
I'm not sure what you're not doing that I'm doing, but like I indicated before and you ignored, I've been hotplugging monitors for like 15 years. I've literally never had to reboot to plug in a monitor as far as I can recall. At worst I have to set the resolution. And if you do have to reboot, that doesn't sound like a problem with X.
> Also, for the record, some X "features" were always a bad idea (blablabla)
Sorry, did someone say X was perfect? Maybe I missed that post.
The point being made is that X works. Today. And has for decades. Meanwhile, as I mentioned earlier, wayland is over a decade overdue at this point. And still hasn't solved enough very basic issues that I was able to use it for more than about 15 minutes without running into trouble.
The problem with "X works" type arguments is that, no, no it doesn't, not generally, and when it does it only does so because it gets maintained.
Software rots, period. It doesn't matter how perfect the software is because everything else changes. X hasn't been "just working" for 15 years like you claim as if it's some magic piece of software. No... it's been actively and meticulously maintained for 15 years. It's sort of like saying my Honda Accord with 500K miles just works. Yeah... sort of.
If nobody wants to maintain it, then yeah it won't work at all and that will happen pretty quickly. Because they're dependent on user land, and drivers, and graphics APIs, and those are all moving targets.
Maybe this maintenance will work out and X will live. I highly, highly doubt, but maybe.
Wow, someone has really been chugging on that kool-aid.
> The problem with "X works" type arguments is that, no, no it doesn't, not generally
So, to summarise: what you're saying, in a thread where I demonstrated and you yourself said that X "just works", is that suddenly it doesn't now.
Well I'll be sure to tell my laptop, it's got this thing where it's super stable for weeks at a time. Maybe my laptop hearing that actually it's DE doesn't work and that I imagined all those times I hotplugged my projector is what is needed to magically make wayland usable in the real world.
Accelerated Xwayland clients (GLX)
There is currently no accelerated GLX support when running a GNOME Wayland session no top of the NVIDIA drivers, meaning X11 OpenGL applications will use software rendering.
and:
Mode setting
Mode setting is possible, but the current requirement to use dumb buffers during mode setting before establishing the EGLSurface, EGLDevice CRTC stream link, results in memory constraint issues with multiple monitors with higher resolutions.
Monitor mirroring
Monitor mirroring is currently not possible due to the issue that an EGLSurface can only be linked to a single CRTC. The way GNOME Shell currently does monitor mirroring relies on passing the same hardware buffer to multiple CRTCs, which is currently not supported by the API exposed by the NVIDIA driver.
...Which is just a hilarious, hilarious joke. So in other words, wayland is a complete non-starter for any serious use. But I suppose, to be fair, you won't have to worry about that issue you claim is with X where you say you need to reboot to plug in a second monitor: you just can't have a second monitor! Not if you want it mirrored, or at "higher resolutions"
Hey, just for fun: I bet you can't guess which windowing system has supported all these things for decades?
"Plans are underway to add Wayland support to Xfwm4 while preserving its existing X11 functionality. However, such a restructurization will be a major effort and we cannot tell yet when/if it will be done, so please don't hold your breath waiting for it."
Lol, yep, it's X that doesn't "just work", hahahahaha.
(and no, I wouldn't be holding my breath, would I, given that wayland has now been in development longer than Duke Nukem Forever)
At this point I think you're just arguing in bad faith and you have some strange ideological reasons to cling to X.
As I've already said, if this maintenance effort works out, then great! You, and maybe some other's, can continue to use X and the world will be happy.
I doubt that's going to be the case, but I do actually wish you the best of luck.
Debates, especially on highly subjective issues, will not always be resolved quickly and definitively in the absence of bad faith. That "ideological reasons" you're sensing is the worldview of the person you're talking to.
Wayland works great for me and is significantly more stable and feature-rich, so I'm not waiting for anything. I'm doing things right now that are probably never going to be possible on X just because of the legacy of X.
Obviously, our priorities are different, and probably our hardware too. Maybe I'm lucky, maybe you're horribly unlucky, I don't know. But I will continue to enjoy my higher DPI displays, and HDR, and thunderbolt :p
IMO nvidia cards are pretty much never worth the money. They're really only competitive at the very top end, which isn't where I am or where I think almost anyone else is.
At every other price point, they're just absolutely swept by the competition. Also nvidia in laptops has been a joke for as long as it's existed.
lol. I think you need to jump onto the repos for about 500 ML frameworks and tell them that the only hardware they support well "isn't worth the money".
At this point I think you're just arguing in bad faith and you have some strange ideological reasons to cling to Wayland.
With an attitude like that it'll never be ready for adoption.
> With an attitude like that it'll never be ready for adoption.
An attitude like what? That I... don't like nvidia because they've been actively hostile to OSS for decades? What the fuck do you want me to do about that? It's nvidia's software - if they want to be jackasses then that's not something I, or anyone else on Earth, can fix.
Also what I said about nvidia is 100% factually true.
Nvidia makes good hardware... at the very top end only. Only. Every other price point, they are objectively the worst option. They offer lower rasterization performance and usually it's not even that close.
You're implicitly trying to tell people (as others have more explicitly done) that rather than using the hardware they want to use - for perfectly legitimate reasons (which you've chosen to ignore) - that they should go buy something else, just so that they can adopt your preferred software stack.
I just want you to realise that with every word you type you're digging a deeper hole: when you're digging in, shifting goalposts, ignoring perfectly legitimate issues, and spewing your insane troll logic, what you're doing is making people more hostile and less interested in adopting wayland: I didn't actually give much of a shit before, I just thought wayland was a pretty funny case of vapourware that may or may not come to fruition one day, but now that I see just how evangelical and nonsensically-ideologically-driven some of you rabid fanboys are, It'll take a fairly significant shift to make me want to try it again. Your nonsense trolling here has done wayland a disservice. Congratulations.
I refer you back to this passage in my original anecdote:
"I want to stress that I was *hoping it would work* - I was not out to find a reason not to use wayland"
> don't like nvidia because they've been actively hostile to OSS for decades
Hey guess what? This might come as a shock, but nvidia release drivers for X. And they have for decades. And they work just fine. How do their drivers work on wayland? Oh that's right, they basically don't - I posted links about that what feels like a hundred thousand messages ago. Your reaction was to deflect from that by saying they're not very good anyway. Which completely fails to even attempt to respond to the issue I pointed out.
> Also what I said about nvidia is 100% factually true.
You might note if you read back over the history of this thread that I actually didn't ask for your opinion of nvidia or their hardware at any point. Nor did I ask for an "objective" evaluation of the performance of nvidia cards relative to others. The reason I didn't ask that is because I don't actually give a shit what your opinion about nvidia and their hardware is. I hope this clears things up for you.
> they are objectively the worst option
Not for use cases that explicitly require nvidia cards and don't support anything else.
Also, somewhat related, it seems that like a ton of things I've said, you forgot to address my point that cuda is basically the only game in town when it comes to ML. I guess that must have been an oversight and not at all intentional and ideologically driven deflection.
X just worked for a large subset of users. However Wayland just works for a large subset as well. In either case if you are in the subset where it doesn't work then you will complain. Wayland has a design such that if things don't work for you today we have a hope that we can make it work for you in the future. Many of the issues where X didn't work for some people could not be fixed, and some of those were issues that are becoming more important.
> Wayland has a design such that if things don't work for you today we have a hope that we can make it work for you in the future.
The reason we hate Wayland so much is that X is being killed off now, with things only ever maybe working again in the future. Wayland would be way better if the people behind it added support for all of the missing features and use cases first, and only then killed off X.
Right, and I wish them luck. Though signs point to this person not being a good mainainer - breaking basic
features and so on. Maybe this is needed to get into a long term better place though.
Not working with the Xenodm people also seemed like a sign of bad maintainership to me. I don't think the baseline is hard to improve on and him forking it is almost certainly a step in the right direction.
> Though signs point to this person not being a good mainainer
I don't know about that. If you read through the whole issue which was linked, you'll see the guy was quite responsive, fixed the issue very quickly, and gave a reasonable explanation as to the cause of the issue.
> Maybe this is needed to get into a long term better place though.
Yeah, agreed.
I think a separate repo/branch seems like a good place for him to do his work, so he doesn't have to mess with the core repo and has no chance of breaking anything.
I do sympathise with the X maintainers - 1500 commits is a lot to try to keep up with, particularly if you're not very interested in maintaining the thing. I feel like doing the stuff he's doing as a ton of PRs might be a mistake - a separate branch and a couple of huge PRs might have been a better approach.
Maybe he'll be able to make some progress and improvements. That would be cool.
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