My experience lately has been similar. Most things work well now.
But, I think the article has some valid points about how long it's taken to get even this far. And it just kinda sucks that some things are still broken or don't have alternatives (the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop). HDR gaming on linux is possible thanks to Valve but it's still nowhere near as simple as plugging in your HDR display and toggling one switch.
And it's been rough getting here, and it seems like there are still some things that are slow and hard to get right. I'm not a display protocol dev, so I don't really have educated opinions about the protocol. But I know it's been a rough transition relative to other projects I've adopted even when there was major pushback (systemd springs to mind).
No I do get that, it's definitely been a slow and painful migration. But just having a very insecure X11 "forever" with no fractional font scaling wasn't a long term plan either imo.
The amount of time it’s taken to get here I think is THE fair criticism.
They had an absolute ton of work to do to design it and get it all running. It was never going to be fast. And it’s not like they could order any of the desktop environments to do what they want.
There have always seemed to have been commenters who were annoyed it didn’t come practically done with every feature from X plus 30 more from the day of announcements.
> the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop)
It's admittedly tough to keep up with all of the forks that have happened, but the current iteration, Input Leap, has worked for this for me for years now
That's not even the most recent iteration, there's also Deskflow now which is maintained by the main Synergy developer and a very active independent dev. Works fine on Wayland afaik. Also has a wiki page with the history of all the forks!
I tried that recently and it didn't seem to work with my particular setup (Sway window manager). Or at least, the tray app won't open any windows to see if it's enabled/disabled/configured properly.
If the Python 2 to 3 migration took a decade, isn’t it reasonable for a display server migration to take even more time to stabilize?
Especially given:
(1) The (relatively) fragmented reality of Linux distros and desktop managers. I am sure that such a migration could have been executed faster had the Linux desktop world been more centralized like Windows or macOS.
The python 2 to 3 situation was a similar colossal mistake of honestly incompetent developers who really enjoy programming in their free time who don't understand that time is money for most people.
By comparison, Rust with its edition system understands this.
But this is the major issue. They don't understand that even if Wayland had feature-parity with X11. The simple fact that it works differently means that if I am to migrate I would have to rewrite a tonne of scripts that hook into X11 that just organically grew over time that I've now become dependent on for my workflow. It has to be substantially better and have killer features for me to switch and yes, fractional scaling per-monitor is that killer feature for many, but not for me, and the simple fact that XMonad runs on X11 and not on Wayland is a killer feature for others.
Not to mention that p3 on its own was prettymuch functional and p2 quite stable and the major issue was migrating/porting all the legacy over to p3 .Hence bridges like six and 2-to-3 that at least attempted to smooth the transition over by allowing bot to coexist for a time.
With wayland they seem not to be even entertaing this optionality - with wayland itself being not yet feature complete to standalone.And the attempts to bridge like xwayland coming way after the fact and pushing a oneway path with no coexisting situation.
As a result introducinga whole lot of friction and surprises in UI functionality. So yeah at a time when the presentation layer should be a boring afterthough, it is too timeconsuming in part of a Linux setup and daily usage.
> The python 2 to 3 situation was a similar colossal mistake of honestly incompetent developers who really enjoy programming in their free time who don't understand that time is money for most people.
It’s been years but even then, this sincerely cannot be repeated enough.
Indeed. And what many seem to fail to notice is that at it's core it's exactly the same mistake being made all over again. A mistake that I've seen so many times over and over again, increasingly commonly in recent years, which can be summed up thusly:
"I want to make some incompatible changes in my thing that is being widely used by (say) thousands or millions of people. I could spend a bunch of time ensuring I'm backwards compatible as much as possible, or doing a compatibility layer which would make the transition seamless for most, but that's not sexy work, and it would be something I would have to maintain (also not sexy), and it would take me (let's say) 1000 hours to do. Instead, I'll just insist that each and every one of those thousands/millions of people put (say) 100 hours each into adapting to what I want to do"
It's disrespectful of your users. It devalues their time. It says that your (say) 1000 hours is more valuable than (say) a million people putting in (say) 100 hours each. And it's inefficient - wasting the time of many to save the time of a few.
It also undermines their trust in you: if you're willing to force them to spend a bunch of time re-writing something that already works just to suit your whims, what's to say you won't do it again next year when you have a newer and even shinier whim?
Now someone will jump in to argue about how "FOSS developers are volunteers, they do it for free, you can't expect them to do the boring stuff". Which is false, false, and false: You'll find that for a large number of these projects (like say gnome and wayland) the core developers are indeed professionals who are paid (by e.g redhat) to work on it, even if they started off as volunteers. And the boring stuff is part of the job, too, otherwise don't call yourself a software engineer.
If you're working on a widely-used piece of software, then the users should be your god.
> They don't understand that even if Wayland had feature-parity with X11
See, I don't think you're giving them enough credit. Or is it too much credit? These are not stupid people. I say they do understand this, they just don't care about your time enough to do anything about it.
> Indeed. And what many seem to fail to notice is that at it's core it's exactly the same mistake being made all over again. A mistake that I've seen so many times over and over again, increasingly commonly in recent years, which can be summed up thusly:
Yes, just as the idea of “We will start anew because the codebase is a mess and this time we'll make it clean.”. 10 years ago, whenever I saw something like that I would've said that person has zero actual experience working as a programmer. I've seen teams go through this multiple times but at the end, the new codebase when all the features are added is just as much of a mess as the old, at best a slight improvement. People who say this just underestimate the scope. But these people have experience. They're just optimistic and full of wishful thinking maybe?
> See, I don't think you're giving them enough credit. Or is it too much credit? These are not stupid people. I say they do understand this, they just don't care about your time enough to do anything about it.
I disagree. I've talked with many of those people both online and in real life who don't understand that for most people time has value. They really just don't get it. They're not stupid; they just don't really think about it that way and don't have much to do in their lives aside from this one specific hobby.
> 10 years ago, whenever I saw something like that I would've said that person has zero actual experience working as a programmer
That, or maybe they've just never really tried the whole "I'll start from scratch and get it right this time" thing and discovered for themselves how misguided it is.
It's also really easy to tell yourself "but this time I'll get it right!". I'm still guilty of believing it sometimes.
> But these people have experience. They're just optimistic and full of wishful thinking maybe?
Or perhaps simple myopia and lack of long term planning? I don't know.
I feel like it's probably easy in a project like this to lose sight of what regular users want, or to feel like you know better and so should be able to dictate to them what they should want. And because you've had your head buried in the project for a decade, dealing only with team members who share all the same opinions, you're shocked when people don't find "but if you ever get a HDR monitor it might be marginally better" to be a compelling reason to have to re-write all the scripts they've been building and relying on for 20 years.
> I disagree. I've talked with many of those people both online and in real life who don't understand that for most people time has value. They really just don't get it. They're not stupid; they just don't really think about it that way and don't have much to do in their lives aside from this one specific hobby.
Yeah you might be right. I don't have anything to back up my opinion, I was really just trying not to assume they're stupid. And I feel like I have run into people like this.
I’ve heard reports of issues on Windows were you often have to switch between HDR and non-HDR modes to get the colors or brightness to appear correctly. Something about tone mapping I think?
I don’t know if that’s fixed in newer versions or if it has to do with specific drivers or what. But it didn’t sound like it worked very well.
But, I think the article has some valid points about how long it's taken to get even this far. And it just kinda sucks that some things are still broken or don't have alternatives (the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop). HDR gaming on linux is possible thanks to Valve but it's still nowhere near as simple as plugging in your HDR display and toggling one switch.
And it's been rough getting here, and it seems like there are still some things that are slow and hard to get right. I'm not a display protocol dev, so I don't really have educated opinions about the protocol. But I know it's been a rough transition relative to other projects I've adopted even when there was major pushback (systemd springs to mind).