There are things that do not work on Wayland yet

Posted Feb 5, 2025 22:21 UTC (Wed) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188)
In reply to: There are things that do not work on Wayland yet by ebassi
Parent article: What’s new in GTK, winter 2025 edition

If ext-zones is a bad protocol, what should the scientific applications that need some control of their windows use instead? If their UI paradigm is bad, what is a better one?

There are things that do not work on Wayland yet

Posted Feb 5, 2025 22:46 UTC (Wed) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (2 responses)

I am not going to redesign scientific applications for free, sorry.

I'd also point out that most scientific applications are generally not designed by anybody, and are mostly thrown together to the undergrads that do the work, and then either turned in black boxes that get rewritten wholesale, or ossified by tenured professors. In either case, they rarely get iterated over by people who actually studied UI/UX principles.

The ext-zones protocol is just a way to keep stuff on life support for the sake of some random contract, in an environment that is so conservative about "how things are supposed to be done" that only death, or an emeritus position, are agents of change.

There are things that do not work on Wayland yet

Posted Feb 5, 2025 23:43 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I have never used Wayland, but I'm surprised to hear that applications cannot position top-level windows, or at least ask them to be positioned. Is that really the case?

It also seems that Wayland developers respond with "You shouldn't do that..." when it's a fairly reasonable request, but something they don't want to implement. And that's one of the reasons I will stick with X11 until it becomes completely infeasible.

Linux lacks the market share to make applications conform to Wayland

Posted Feb 5, 2025 23:52 UTC (Wed) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188) [Link]

There are two problems with this reasoning. First, such applications might choose to not support Wayland at all, and drop the Linux port instead if Xwayland isn’t sufficient. Linux doesn’t have enough of a market share to force application redesigns. Second, are you sure that multi-window user interfaces with application-driven window management are never the best way to design an application, even if one only needs to support large displays and will usually have multiple monitors?