Boy who cried wolf in reverse? [LWN.net]

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 7:34 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
Parent article: Ubuntu 25.10 to drop support for GNOME on Xorg

I think the main problem with Wayland is that it will be extremely painful to complete the transition because those with mostly default settings and common use cases have already moved over completely and everyone else has stopped trusting the constant stream of "everything works fine" the Wayland community has produced for the last ten years or so despite all evidence to the contrary long before most things actually started working well.

Since the transition is also generally more work for those with non-standard configurations and use cases just trying it is also much harder in those situations (e.g. unusual hardware, unusual window managers, lots of custom scripts working with X11 tools) and at this point it is hard to motivate giving it another try.

And it certainly doesn't help that where X11 had a relatively simple window manager to implement for many non-standard uses the Wayland way of doing things is to implement fiendishly complex compositors that are essentially an entire X11 server worth of complexity thrown on top of what window managers did. Sure, there is a workaround with wl-roots but that still doesn't seem to make compositors nearly as abundant as window manager choices were on X11.

Essentially the Wayland community has a marketing problem that is sort of similar to the "boy who cried wolf" situation in reverse, they cried "everything is fine" too many times before.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 9:31 UTC (Wed) by aragilar (subscriber, #122569) [Link] (3 responses)

That's also ignoring apps (and some toolkits such as Tk) which are still X-only, and absence a change of heart from specific wayland devs around certain protocols, will never be ported to Wayland.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 14:18 UTC (Wed) by parametricpoly (subscriber, #143903) [Link] (1 responses)

Eh, the undroidwish distribution seems to support Wayland: https://core.tcl-lang.org/tk/tktview/3f58c0871c0be6b457cb

Maybe they should start to react a little? The ticket has been open for 7 years and nothing has happened in the main project. It shows that development is pretty much at a standstill.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 15:26 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I think undroidwish is a bit of a hack, but I also think the Tk developers over-estimate the difficulty of supporting Wayland. (Not that I'm volunteering to look into it...)

Tk natively supports X11, MS Windows and Mac OS, which are three platforms as different from one another as they can be. How hard would it really be to add Wayland support?

Two things hold me back from even looking at Wayland: XFCE4 and Tcl/Tk. Can't live without those things and don't want to run them in an emulated X session under Wayland.

PS: The same person behind undroidwish also made a curses toolkit for Tcl called "ck" which was quite amazing! No idea if it compiles against a modern Tcl.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:50 UTC (Fri) by mgedmin (guest, #34497) [Link]

That's what Xwayland is for. I don't remember hearing about any plans of deprecating it.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 14:34 UTC (Wed) by parametricpoly (subscriber, #143903) [Link]

> everyone else has stopped trusting the constant stream of "everything works fine" the Wayland community has produced for the last ten years or so despite all evidence to the contrary long before most things actually started working well.

It's sad that some vendors have spread baseless hype. I did a switch like 1 to 1,5 years ago on my laptop. Had one (pretty critical) issue with Zoom screen sharing and Pipewire. On my HTPC, did a switch only after Nvidia started to support Wayland, which was also during the last year or so. On my main desktop I have a bit more complex setup to I still need patches for Gnome, but Wayland basically works 24/7. It even fixes few issues such as standby modes for monitors and DE's screen lock. I know there are lots of use cases that are not covered yet, but it works for normal stuff.

> Since the transition is also generally more work for those with non-standard configurations
Those are a small minority. I don't disagree, this is a problem, but not a major one.

> unusual window managers
Well obviously if your WM does not support Wayland, there's nothing to test yet.

> fiendishly complex compositors that are essentially an entire X11 server worth of complexity thrown on top of what window managers did. Sure, there is a workaround with wl-roots but that still doesn't seem to make compositors nearly as abundant as window manager choices were on X11.

True, but you're using it wrong. I've never understood the distro / WM hopping. Most users are happy with a single WM/DE. Besides DEs like Gnome/KDE already implement so many things that duplicating some compositor code is no biggie. For smaller WMs the solution is to build upon wl-roots. Many of the WMs are crap anyway and not intented for large audience. The WM is heavier, but the other stuff is lighter.

> Essentially the Wayland community has a marketing problem

Sure, but again many of the problems will be fixed as time goes by. Xorg doesn't have any decent PR department either. Heck, it doesn't even seem to have any developers anymore outside conspiracy theorists :D I've used Linux exclusively on desktop for 25 years now. There were lots of issues during those years. Fully functional OpenGL/DRI support (e.g. Intel was lagging behind for years and amd/nvidia drivers were blobs), support for two GPUs from different vendors, video playback and hw acceleration, font rendering, gtk/qt toolkit looks on non-native DEs, audio servers (esd, arts etc.).

In some years Wayland be in the same state as Xorg.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 16:13 UTC (Wed) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (22 responses)

Yes, sadly that is also my experience from the past decade. I tried to transition about 10 times during that time frame and it always resulted in either a right out crashing WM or a black screen or at best an unusable sluggish crashing and only partially working desktop (a couple of days ago with KDE).

Last time I tried was today with labwc.
How am I supposed to get from a black screen that only offers me an "exit" context menu to a primitive working desktop? You know, where I can actually do something.
Without reading tons of documentation and modifying configuration files, of course.
I have no idea. So I uninstalled it again. Ain't Nobody Got Time For That, I'm sorry.

I would *love* to use Wayland, but it simply doesn't work for me. For whatever reason. I don't know why.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 7:43 UTC (Thu) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link] (13 responses)

Sounds like a labwc issue, not a Wayland one.

Users don’t „use Wayland“, they use a desktop environment with Wayland as the main display mechanism. From a user’s point of view, a GNOME / KDE Plasma session works mostly the same with Wayland as with X.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 17:15 UTC (Thu) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (12 responses)

> Sounds like a labwc issue, not a Wayland one.

That's exactly the attitude that is the problem here.
Since a decade I hear "Wayland is usable/stable/ready/etc...".
Of course the user expects that it would mean to actually be usable as a whole (Desktop daily work). That's the only sane thing to assume, right?

That's the same thing as saying: "Your room is ready. What? The staircase to your room is completely blocked? Well, that's a whole different story! I only said your *room* was ready."

For a user it doesn't make a difference.

And no, apparently it's not a labwc issue. It works as expected. labwc is *designed* to start up as user unfriendly as possible. For whatever weird reason. It's clearly documented here: https://labwc.github.io/getting-started.html
Sorry, this is not going to make users happy.

I tried *multiple* ways to use Wayland and so far *none* of it worked for me.
That's why Wayland as a whole doesn't work for me, yet.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 0:32 UTC (Fri) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link] (1 responses)

> And no, apparently it's not a labwc issue. It works as expected. labwc is *designed* to start up as user unfriendly as possible. For whatever weird reason. It's clearly documented here: https://labwc.github.io/getting-started.html

That confirms it’s a labwc issue which has nothing to do with Wayland vs X.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 5:43 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

Wow.... .

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 9:18 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (9 responses)

This is the same attitude as "Rust sucks - I tried to compile ripgrep for my machine with GCC-rs, and it didn't work at all. Clearly Rust is not ready to use in serious code".

Wayland is a protocol used to communicate between clients and servers. X11 is a protocol used to communicate between clients and servers. labwc is one implementation of a Wayland server; it's not the only one, and it's working as intended by the developers.

Other implementations of the Wayland protocol exist (I'm using KDE Plasma 6.3 as the server side here, with various clients such as Firefox, KMail and XWayland), and will have different issues.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:10 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (8 responses)

>Other implementations of the Wayland protocol exist

Did you actually read my post?
I tried lots of them.
So far, I found none that works properly.

>and will have different issues.

That's my point.
All of them have issues and none of them work as good as X11.
That's simply the reality that I face since a decade.
On lots of different machines, lots of different combinations of compositors and whatever.

Currently there is *no* way for me to use Wayland. And therefore the claims that Wayland was production ready that I hear since over a decade are just meaningless.

You may like it or not. But it is what it is.

That's obviously a *completely* different thing than "I don't like riprep, therefore Rust sucks".

Show me one compositor that just works (tm) like Xfce on X11 (and is not Gnome) and I will shut up.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:23 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> All of them have issues and none of them work as good as X11.

Exactly; for my use cases the Wayland compositor I'm using now works *better* than its X11 equivalent.

> Show me one compositor that just works (tm) like Xfce on X11 (and is not Gnome) and I will shut up.

Sounds like you want a specific desktop environment, not a "compositor" per se.

If the Xfce folks finish their nascent port to Wayland [1], you may get your wish. If not, you're free to ask for your money back.

[1] https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:31 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (6 responses)

Show me one Rust compiler that just works for compiling ripgrep such that it outperforms GNU grep (and is not rustc).

KDE Plasma 6.4 works just fine for me; I don't know what's different about your setup to mine that means that it doesn't work for you. But KDE Plasma 6.3 and 6.4 and GNOME 40 have all been fine as Wayland setups for me.

And no, it's not obviously different - you're excluding things that are known to work, and then saying that Wayland as a whole does not work because, when you exclude the implementations that work, the remaining implementations don't work.

When I put it like that, it's obvious why your statement is problematic - you're excluding implementations that are known to work well for other people, and saying that the protocol is not ready, because you as one person cannot make it work after you exclude the implementations that do work. But you get upset when I try to do the same with Rust.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:42 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (5 responses)

The only implementation I exclude is Gnome, because that is not acceptable for me regardless of X11 or Wayland.
Anything else is fine.

KDE, labwc and Xfce-Wayland don't work for me.
Please tell me. Which one should I test next?
I heard Wayland was ready for use. So which one is it that works? Is it really only Gnome?

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:45 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (4 responses)

Why doesn't KDE work for you? KDE Plasma 6.0, 6.1 and 6.2 had some bugs that affected me (but broadly worked for me, as long as I didn't trip up the bugs), but Plasma 6.4 just works, and works better than it does running over X11 to X.org as server.

And you still haven't answered my question; which Rust compiler produces production ready code, apart from rustc which doesn't work for me? Or are you saying that Rust isn't ready for production use, too?

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:48 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (3 responses)

>Why doesn't KDE work for you?

I don't know *why* it doesn't work.
But I tried it a couple of days ago and it did not work at all.
Crashes, not working buttons, hanging unresponsive UI, etc. It was completely unusable.

>And you still haven't answered my question

I have.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:49 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

I missed it - which Rust compiler did you say was production ready for arbitrary Rust code, apart from rustc, which I'm excluding for reasons that I won't discuss with you?

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:50 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

Okay. Let me press the mute button then.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 14:39 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Plasma/KDE/Wayland has a bunch of known annoyances. I haven't updated my system for a bit, but windows all centre on the screen at boot, it doeesn't remember properly what was/wasn't running, probably a few more. All papercuts that are anooying but not serious.

For me, everything seems to work "good enough", but I can understand people not being willing to put up with it. I like KDE, so I do.

Cheers,
Wol

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 12:25 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (7 responses)

> I would *love* to use Wayland, but it simply doesn't work for me. For whatever reason. I don't know why.

Computer programs can smell distrust and fear.. and will stop working when they do. People say that is crazy talk, but we all know deep down its true :)

[the above is meant in humour]

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 13:32 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (6 responses)

Maybe it's meant in humour, but it's real.

The other day, my brother-in-law said "Help please; my email's not working..."

I went over to my sister's house. Did not even touch his laptop. I just had to glare at it and the email started working again...

I bet many people who've given tech support have had similar experiences. 🙂

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 13:38 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

> I bet many people who've given tech support have had similar experiences. 🙂

I've always heard it referred to as "the consultant effect"

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 16:54 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (2 responses)

A friend in college had the OPPOSITE effect. He would break things just by trying them, when they worked fine for everyone else.

And yes, his first job out of college was in QA...

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 20:10 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

I have that skill too... I am very good at breaking things, which is quite a useful thing in testing/QA.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 21:41 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

IBM allegedly had the "Black Team" - a collection of those sort of people.

Devel;opment teams used to quake in their boots when told their software was being paid a visit by these people.

Cheers,
Wol

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 17:21 UTC (Fri) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a whole bogon source/sink pseudo-quantum-mechanics joke theory around this.

But I don't think anyone did a double-blind mass experiment to search for individuals that really experience significant more issues (or significant less issues) than the median... And I struggle to even come up with a remotely serious attempt at how would one even design such an experiment.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 14, 2025 10:32 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I think this is partly to do with brain wiring.

If the programmer thinks one way, and the user thinks another, then the default expectations won't match. The user won't use the program the way the programmer thought they would. So the user is much more likely to tickle bugs. Throw in the sort of user who also thinks "what happens if I try THIS?" and they can be a nightmare for programmers as they break everything left right and centre.

As a textual person, not a visual, I don't like wysiwyg, and you've heard me wax lyrical about WP's "reveal codes". I hate Word (and by extension lowriter, sorry), because I simply cannot get my head round how it works, so as a result "nothing works" for me ...

Cheers,
Wol

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 16:17 UTC (Thu) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (4 responses)

That's also my concern. I'm seeing a big and strong push for this thing that still appears quite incomplete and doesn't seem much concerned with the support for existing tools and applications. Will I still be able to load my Xmodmap file and my Xterm settings ? Not sure. Will I still be able to use my window manager of choice ? I guess not, for having read sufficient horror stories about WM maintainers giving up due to the complexity of the task. Will I still be able to forward X applications over SSH or native TCP between my laptop and PC on the same desk ? From what I've read it's a nightmare. It looks like there's a race to support only a few very fat environments that are used by those who try to make their parents switch from windows to linux, and that those using lighter and way more efficient stuff will be out of the game very quickly. I'm really really fed up with this recurrent trend consisting in declaring stuff that works as obsolete and deciding a complete rewrite that purposely ditches the features they didn't figure how to implement. Till now all I've read about Wayland is about functional regressions from X11. I have *yet* to read about a single improvement that relates to my use cases, which have been working flawlessly for decades now.

Sadly Linux has turned highly proprietary these days. With Canonical making their own choices and being used as the de-facto standard distro targetted by a lot of software (just read the many README.md on github projects to get a sense of this), in the end it's this company that is defining what Linux should be, and it's no longer the users. Some will say "they have no other choice, GNOME is dropping support" but GNOME is only dropping support because they're seeing that a few bleeding edge distros are shipping this unfinished stuff to newcomers who don't complain since they don't have existing software to support and they cannot miss anything :-/ If distros would only adopt what completely works (as it used to be the case a long time ago), environments like GNOME would only drop legacy support once the new one is feature complete. At this point we still seem to be very far from this situation. Then again we'll complain that people don't upgrade their systems...

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 17:58 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

>Will I still be able to load my Xmodmap file and my Xterm settings ? Not sure

Why wouldn't you? XWayland is still X11.

> Will I still be able to use my window manager of choice

There's no technical reason why one couldn't run nothing but XWayland on top of of a bare-bones Wayland compositor and proceed to use whatever X window manager you'd want.

> Will I still be able to forward X applications over SSH or native TCP between my laptop and PC on the same desk

Again, XWayland is still X11. You can forward X over SSH, allow random X clients to connect to your machine, set $DISPLAY To whatever you want, and so forth. (I might add that you can trivially forward *Wayland* over SSH too; I typically do this a few times a day. And anectdotally, Wayland forwarded over chained SSH connections works a _lot_ better over the internet than using X...)

> and that those using lighter and way more efficient stuff will be out of the game very quickly.

Those who care about those "Lighter and way more efficient" environments need to step up and actually maintain/adapt them. F/OSS has always been a "do-ocracy" -- Folks work on (and/or support) what they want or otherwise care about.

Yes, getting paid to do something is a mighty powerful motivator. Should that not be allowed?

> and it's no longer the users.

The user counts beg to differ. In absolute terms (and probably relative too), Linux (and/or any sort of UNIX) on the desktop has never been more popular.

> GNOME is only dropping support because they're seeing that a few bleeding edge distros are shipping this unfinished stuff

X11 is also "unfinished stuff", and by your logic should have never been shipped.

> GNOME would only drop legacy support once the new one is feature complete.

What *exact* feature(s) are you referring to here?

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 20:53 UTC (Thu) by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576) [Link] (1 responses)

> I might add that you can trivially forward *Wayland* over SSH too

Oooh? Pray tell, how is that accomplished? I've only seen RDP in use so far.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 21:27 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Oooh? Pray tell, how is that accomplished? I've only seen RDP in use so far.

man waypipe ?

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 20:10 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Sadly Linux has turned highly proprietary these days.

No, not Linux... just a certain subset. I'm happily running Debian 12 (Debian 13 on some machines) with XFCE4 and it's fine... no proprietary nonsense at all.

Just stay away from Canonical and you'll be OK.