this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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GTK, Qt, Firefoxes XUL, Electron (Chromium), Iced, and more support Wayland. You dont develop apps for Wayland, you develop them with a GUI toolkit.
Fair enough. All I know is to get something as simple and necessary to my workflow as using KeePassXC, I had to adjust a few QT flags in my environment variables. No big deal as I actually enjoy configuring my system, but it's in my opinion Wayland will be "ready" when this sort of under the hood tweaking won't be necessary by the user.
Here, I'll pose a simple question that kind of gets at the heart of what I'm talking about. Libreoffice works great on Wayland right? Good, fantastic, kudos to Libreoffice, kudos to Wayland. Now, name me a 2nd office suite that works on Wayland. Just one. This is a genuine question and despite my decent google fu, I can't find a one. I got Open Office to open on Wayland, but it doesn't recognize the entire suite.
Now, this may seem like an unfair argument to make, as there were never many office suites available on Linux to begin with. And there's always been people in the Linux community who will call for more uniformity, but I, like many others, love Linux for it's extreme customizability (amongst other reasons). Wayland severely cuts down on my choices of what TWMs I can use, what DEs are available, and various widely used productivity tools like office suites.
The amount of knots Wayland enthusiasts tie themselves up in to say "but if you just configure this flag, if you just run this through xwayland/game scope, if you just don't use nvidia, then wayland is ready" is just pointing to the fact that it's straight up not.
And that's not the fault of any one entity. Writing a protocol like Wayland is a massive endeavor and is needed. But developers across the board who want to provide support for Linux, are now scrambling to rewrite parts of their applications to conform to this new protocol because yes, they see the writing on the wall (especially with the latest lines in the sand drawn by Red Hat). But isn't the fact that their scrambling to get this accomplished, and convert their apps to Wayland, an indicator that maybe, just maybe, that Wayland as a daily driver for, if not the majority, at least a reasonable part of the Linux community, not ready?
I'm not saying Wayland isn't the future. What I'm saying is until discussions like these are the outlier, not the norm, Wayland isn't ready.
the calligra suite works fine too. open office is basically dead and replaced by libreoffice. I don't know if any development is still happening. I can't name another office suite Wayland or otherwise though
xwayland does just work though. I don't even know how to explicitly run something under it
explicit flags are more of a problem, but they're going away slowly, and for the most part people can just let things run under xwayland instead of dealing with flags. there are some apps that just won't work, but for the most part it's not a widespread issue in my experience
.Uhm...
What did you need to set for KeepassXC? The flathub version and fedora RPM just work.
You can modify flatpak permissions easily in KDE or using Flatseal though, to remove a lot and especially restrict keepassXC to only readwrite one directory.
Uhm, what other Office Suite is there on Linux?
I have no idea why Wayland should cut down your choices. Use XOrg if you want, nobody stopping you, it is simply unmaintained for years pretty much.
There are TWMs for Wayland and they are said to work (have a look at wayblue), I use KDE and tried GNOME and both work. Use any weird old TWM through rootful XWayland if you really want to. This is not waylands problem, X.org is old spaghetticode that nobody wanted to maintain, and there still is no rise in contributions even with all those self-entitled Linux Experts complaining about their weird old nieche Desktop being abandoned.
Nearly (?) all development is done for XWayland, which is normally used in rootless mode, but you can use it rootfull too, and run a complete XOrg Window manager on a minimalist Wayland compositor. Brody Robertson made a video about that.
XWayland is automatically used for all Apps without Wayland support. I never used Gamescope but suppose this is nice, but I dont care about Gaming as I wasted way too much time of my life there. If you want to game, use uBlue Bazzite and call it a day. Its a modern Distro, based on Fedora, using Wayland, made for steamdecks and also PCs.
I never set a single flag for anything and have no idea how Wayland works, but I used it since at least 1½ years.
Wayland has nothing to do with NVIDIA. It was not ready when it "came out" so people where not giving it a chance for obvious reasons. They preferred to use extremely insecure and unmaintained but working Display management.
Now the pressure finally rises, NVIDIA already shipped a lot of updates for Wayland, but in the end it is their fault and you may not want to use hardware from a company that doesnt give a sh*t about FOSS on Linux. I have no idea why people would want to do that? There is literally the high likeliness of backdoors in your damn GPU driver, allowing the green team to see everything you do.
Why use Linux if you entire Graphics are using a proprietary black box?
Wayland is ready. I have no idea of developing Apps, but I suppose just using a good Toolkit is the start. If you are lazy just use Electron, but Qt works just as well cross-platform, if you are fancy use Slint. We can argue if developing apps for Linux is ready.
I think there are bigger problems like good easy IDEs (only GNOME has one) for Linux, or the packaging issue that is fixed by Flathub. Wayland is just a change.
I maintain a repo with a list of recommended, modern software
I have tested a lot of apps, and those are the best. Keep your system secure with modern apps following best practices, using portals, that are Wayland native.
And to be honest, people can just use old Software through XWayland forever. They often dont even need to change.
Projects like Bluerecorder are nice and very alpha on Wayland, here I agree they are struggling to make it work but it works. Using OBS for minimalist screen recording is huge bloat.
A respectable rebuttal. Nicely done. Here are some of my responses.
I prefer my distro's repos whenever possible. But good to know.
But it works on X. I like using alternatives to the big players in any and all tech spaces. That's why I use Open Office. That's why I want an alternative office suite that works on Wayland to actually compete with Libreoffice(that isn't the online office suites, etc. We appear to be in agreement on that one). But good point, not a Wayland problem. I'll acquiesce to you on that one.
I'm not arguing to use Xorg per se, though I can see my arguments being interpreted that way. I'm arguing that the switch to Wayland is more trouble than it's worth right now for some people, and to say Wayland is ready for all is disingenuous, and to somehow look down on those who simply want to keep using X is a shitty thing to do.
No argument that X is abandoned, no argument it's spaghetti code. No argument that Wayland is the future. I'm just saying it's not quite the present either. Diversity within the Linux community is a good thing dude. Customizable work flows are awesome for everybody, that's one of the things that makes Linux so much better than the alternatives. I can't wait for Wayland to get to the point where it has that many weird possible workflows going on the way X does right now. That way we can have all the security and no screen tearing you want, with the insane amount of customization options I want.
Personally I want BSPWM and sxhkd on Wayland for the same low RAM cost. River is close, and I'm hoping it gets there, but unless I know c, zig, or rust, I'm not going to be able to customize it to the way I have BSPWM out of the box. Is this Wayland's problem? Hell no! But if I have all I want on X, why switch?
I love Brodie's channel, and that was a great episode! That said, the fact that so much backporting has to be done through xwayland is an unfortunate necessity. If everything just works on X, and I still need a translation layer on top of Wayland to use what already just works, then why not just wait until everything just works on Wayland? Or just use both?
I know you're not saying this, but a lot of the sentiment online seems to be ”stop using X entirely now! Wayland is the future because everybody says so. You use Nvidia? Stop! Your favorite app doesn't work on Wayland? Just use xwayland!" The sentiment is so emphatic, it fails to acknowledge that some entire workflows have been built up around these older applications where no security breaches were encountered, little to no screen tearing was even noticed, and basically no problems occurred. Why bash on these people with this noise when at the end of the day, we just want to get shit done on our computers efficiently, and if X gets us there quicker, and Wayland doesn't, then why switch right now? Especially considering the Wayland enthusiasts have to argue so hard to convince me it all just works when it clearly works on YOUR machine, and hasn't for at least me and also a good number of users? Meanwhile nobody's arguing that despite X's flaws...everything pretty much has worked for a while now.
I actually have little to say on the state of Gaming on Wayland. I have played Cyberpunk on Steam with proprietary Nvidia drivers on Wayland and it looks okay. Once Nvidia fixes the stuttering issues that hit in 545, I'll have no complaints on that. But I only play a single game, so I can't speak to that too much (others have pointed out in this very chat better insights in this regard).
That's good dude. I genuinely look forward to the day when this is the norm.
Are you going to also criticize Linux users who then use any proprietary software? Is your pure FOSS system running GNU boot and Parabola Linux? I'm not going to defend nvidia the company, but their users who want support on Linux shouldn't be told to just chuck their old cards and go AMD. There are many good reasons why they can't/won't do that, and it's not just gaming or cost. They want CUDA support for AI and also:
Because I bought one before I knew about the Linux ecosystem and the issues with Nvidia and don't want to contribute to Ewaste if I can help it. Yes I can afford an AMD GPU, and one day, when my Nvidia GPU craps out, I'll buy one, but why spend the money, time, and effort to replace a perfectly working GPU solely for Wayland support? You listed some good reasons why, it's just not enough for me personally and probably for others as well.
I'm sorry, you're adamant that Wayland is ready, but are willing to argue if developing apps for Linux is ready? This seems counterintuitive. Bur yeah, intuititons are often wrong, care to elucidate on why Wayland is somehow ready but app development might not be?
This seems like a Linux problem and not an X or Wayland problem. But hey, the Libreoffice argument I made was based on this same unrelated logic, so I'll digress.
Again, I'm not arguing that Wayland isn't the future. What I'm saying is that, even now, it's not ready yet. It's closer than ever and there's obviously a big push to have Wayland everywhere, so it's coming one way or another.
Thanks. I'll check this out later.
Also will have to check this out, thanks.
This is not needed when using the flatpak. And even if the native package falls back to xwayland for whatever reason, maybe that is their choice? There is no problem here.
Wtf haha, you know Openoffice is the original? Bought by Oracle, abandoned, everyone was pissed and renamed the project to Libreoffice. Openoffice is dead, it is abandonware and that it exists in repos and is still used today is insane.
Libreoffice is Openoffice, but with updates.
No we dont need an alternative always. We dont need 6 audio recorders, we need 1 good one that does everything right, is fast, secure and usable.
What means look down? There are people not updating their systems, using outdated and insecure stuff but in the typical old people manner try to convince them this is the way. If people refuse to go with the actual development and accept that things will change, this is a huge burden on Developers that are already struggling to get an agreement among people that all agree things need to change.
Nobody is looking down, it is just annoying trying to hold on old crap that made Linux insecure and broken. Flatpak too, Flatpak has the good possibility to end 3rd party packaging for a lot of stuff. This means official packages, less packaging efford and more free time.
Nvidia sucks, and it is their job to fix Linux.
Legacy apps work normally through XWayland, most of the time. Multi window stuff is being worked on right now, in a well designed way instead of "apps do what they want" chaos like in x11.
This is free software. People want to use outdated stuff that nobody maintains. If they dont maintain it, they have to deal with what the developers want to do and what not. This is not a paid product, Devs dont owe anyone anything. "Using Linux" is not helping them.
Things will break. And the question is, do you trust every app so much that it can do all the stuff it can on Xorg?
Nobody stopping anyone from staying with Xorg. It is simply not maintained anymore, and they should know they are using dying software that will break. For me XOrg didnt work better than Wayland, I think it had more errors in a lot of Laptop stuff like scaling, fonts, etc.
If you use modern software packaging you may see that these things are already there. Flatpak has this, easily.
Its a state in between so Electron apps may not use Wayland yet, some apps may simply not work, some may use Xwayland for no reason. But its just a few switches and testing, or in most cases the user could not do anything and it would work somehow.
I simply want to stress how absurd it is. I know even Coreboot is mostly blobs, and Linux-libre doesnt run anywhere. I am on a Thinkpad... I had to not use a kernel hardening parameter because my BIOS sucks.
But really, using a proprietary driver is not like "yeah it is not very cool but works", this is literally the biggest weakness in your entire system. You can for sure sell that card to someone, and I am not telling you I dont hate E-waste and artificial obsolescence through bad Software.
I really love the effords of Coreboot, OpenWRT, Linux on Macs, Nuveau etc. But its a lot of work.
I hope Intel produces some cuda alternative soon, they care about FOSS afaik.
Nearly nobody will write an app for wayland, but in a Toolkit that supports Wayland. So IDEs need to improve for Linux to improve, to stop people from doing lazy stuff like Electron. If people use nieche toolkits like those Go Apps do, I just say goodbye and use an alternative (alternativeto.net).
Fantastic breakdown and rebuttal. I concede on all points save one. But before I nit pick a bit a couple things.
One is thank you so much for tsking the time to rebuke me with such detail and finesse. I enjoy prodding people on these things because I find back and forths like this more engaging and informative when a stance is taken rather than just Q & A. I know it must bave taken you a bit of time to write up thede answers, so thank you.
Secondly, I just wanted to commend you on totally eviscerating me on the Only Office bit. i had forgotten on that point and hadn't taken the simple step of searching beforehand. It was a poorly made point and I sincerely apologize for posing that weak argument. Yeah yeah, you're probably thinking "the entire argument was weak". And I'll not try to convince you otherwise (I'd be unlikely to succeed anyways, right?).
Now, my only point of contention:
Now, my only contention here is that competition, true competition, is good. I'd say you always need at least 2 major nearly equal players in any of these fields. I don't want there to be 1 Linux distro, I don't want there to be 1 Office Suite, I don't want there to be 1 package manager, and hell, I don't want there to be 1 display protocol (and for that I am very happy wayland exists for that reason alone).
Competition over best implementations is good, and more selfishly for me in particular, more choice is good. You can argue that those choices can stifle innovation as it divides the talent base over possibly trivial minutiae of implementation (or just create a poor implementation outright), but ultimately what drove me to Linux was not my admiration for it being secure or light weight, but rather it is the availability of the many choices available.
I'd rather not see that wrangling up of the diversity that exists within the Linux ecosystem go away in the interest of conformity to a singular best practice. With all the consequences that entails.
You are welcome, it took some time and I actually accidentally swiped back and deleted like 6 paragraphs but hey.
I dont know... KDE is using Qt, GNOME is using GTK. KDE breaks all the time, GTK attracts many developers of small software with nearly no customizability, but that works.
KDE apps are still looking a bit dated but refuse to follow the "padding everywhere" BS that GNOME, Windows 11, MacOS etc use.
I dont know what the word "competition" means in FOSS. These are not companies serving customers, fighting for marketshare. These are just products by and for the community. It sucks that KDE does all the cool stuff, but is inherently memory unsafe as f*ck, GNOME not even having the most basic features but being very stable, and nobody caring about Cosmic really.
Wlroots is nice, and it would be really cool if all projects could just use that. Wlroots is not complete like KWin.
Actually, XOrg, Linux, GNU, there are so many projects that just dont have an alternative and that helped to create products that all work but have a different look and feel. Under the hood they where all just fancy XOrg.
I think there are problems with monopole projects that are bloated and eat up more and more subprojects. This makes 0% sense and should not be done.
The Linux kernel is a mess. It is full of random vendor blobs for XYZ hardware, poorly written code (according to Jeremy Soller) and everything on every machine.
Look at windows. It kinda "feels weird" to have those branded "AMD Radeon Driver®" display in the task manager. But the fact that they show up, nobody gets that. They are seperate processes in the equivalent to Linux userspace. You can restrict them, give them permissions etc.
It "just works" but its horrible. Any random code by any weird manifacturer just gets thrown into the Kernel, because Distros can't unite on how userspace is supposed to look like. So instead of fixing that problem and putting all drivers into userspace so users can just use what they actually need and just remove the rest, we have this huge and not even FOSS blob that runs everywhere.
I think I want to switch from Fedora Kinoite to something like NixOS, as I think building the kernel for your actually used hardware, removing everything else, is essential for security.
The next project is systemd, which works well, is somewhat nice to manage (I still find it very confusing to create services but I guess this is nice?) But it is pretty horrible.
It is a huge binary, a single one, always running. You would need to fork it and remove and replace stuff to not break it. It is a de facto standard and makes no sense, why would you
Their Github issues are insane, I cant imagine anyone even wants to look at 1k open issues. This would simply not be the case if it was split up. Could still be used as a bundle, but if (like with rust rewrites of GNU core utils, like uutils) people would rewrite parts, they could test them seperately and slowly move the project to Rust for example.
So yeah, monopole projects suck if they are not modular. Desktops should work on the same things though, to make them work well. GNOME is supposedly very specific about mutter so nobody wants to use it, but KDE could possibly switch to wlroots if it has feature parity with Kwin and that would really reduce useless duplication of work.
You dont need competition, just talk to people in the same project, everyone has different goals.
Weird. The link is bazzite.gg
~~I think it may be a Lemmy 'caching' issue (has to be cached at least once kind of thing, as someone explained to me once). I'm not using an app. but the https://lemmy.world/ web site (on Firefox/Linux).~~
Edit: This link works. This link does not.
Nvidia had good working support from 2003-2024. From 2003-2014 ATi/AMD GPU support on Linux was hot garbage and at first not even open source, from 2014-2016 it was decidedly inferior, and from 2017 on it was supposedly decent. I say supposedly because I'm still a little paranoid about buying that shit because between 2006-2014 AMD fanboys were just steady continually lying their asses off about AMD cards not being steaming piles of runny shit on Linux. The only people less honest than Nvidia fanboys its a SOBs who have been telling us Wayland was ready for prime time for the last 9 years. Hey it might even be true now but who believes liars?
I like nvidias tooling and features. Gaming on X works well. Screen sharing works well. High DPI works well. Mixed DPI works well. i3wm works well. Everything has continually worked well for 21 years.