LWN: Comments on "Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)"

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

zlynx — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 17:10:42 +0000

Uh, Wayland is hardly new. It's been in Fedora since Fedora 23 at least, which is when I started to use it.

It has become a LOT better since then.

I honestly think that Fedora's Wayland has reached the point that it can't make any more progress by relying on interested volunteers to switch it on. It is time to make it the default and fix the problems as they happen.

People didn't like Windows Vista either but it was a necessary step on the path to Windows 7, which was almost exactly Vista SP2 with a new name and small GUI tweaks.

Change happens.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

callegar — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 14:11:22 +0000

Please, no. Don't give space to headlines like these, that suggest that something brand new and obviously still incomplete, with limitations, hardware restrictions and buggy corner cases is today sooo much easier and better. I am totally sure that if I moved to Wayland this morning I would already be struggling with things that do not work exactly as expected, with features I miss, with the impossibility of having the same environment on all my hardware, etc... and this is totally normal for a thing that is maturing. So no, today it would probably be already rather good, but not actually /easier/ for everybody. We have already seen this pattern with KDE at 5.1 and in tons of other occasions and it only leads to bad choices, frustration, flames and bad press. Trying to turn every user into an early adopter by eye catching headlines is not a wise practice in most cases.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

Cyberax — Sat, 24 Dec 2016 01:25:00 +0000

There are more subtle bits, like 256 key limit for keyboards or the lack of global fencing API in X.

Also keep in mind that X is not just a protocol, but also its chief implementation - X.org server. You not only need to invent a transition strategy, but also implement it within a hairy and deeply legacy codebase. In any realistic scenario regressions are inevitable.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

mathstuf — Sat, 24 Dec 2016 01:09:05 +0000

Round trip counts? Locking down access to core bits behind some kind of per-app authorization. I'm sure there are others, but adding these kinds of things seems, to me, that you either end up basically not supporting older X from the client (round trips), or breaking old apps (auth negotiation required). At that point, since you're either leaving old apps behind or old servers behind, why not use the opportunity to remove the cruft (e.g., drawing primitives) and bake in things like authorization while you're at it?

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

quotemstr — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 22:59:59 +0000

> The reason X11 cannot be fixed as a display manager is because there is strong expectation of forward compatibility for applications. X11 is, very literally, late 1980's display technology that has been extended over and over and over again to make it appear to be somewhat more modern.

Does not compute. I've never bought this argument. Extensions can add *arbitrary* new behavior, like XRender and Composite did. Can you please be more specific about what aspects of the core protocol make it impossible to extend with new features?

Shells

ovitters — Thu, 22 Dec 2016 13:56:21 +0000

There's lot's of small differences. That's not done to annoy people. Some bits are just different.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

halla — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 17:52:46 +0000

Yes... Sometimes the move was a bit problematical, as with the standard paths stuff -- that gave me a lot of headaches when porting Krita -- but there was no functionality dropped. And it's also not like Qt only contains stuff for mobile, or like it would have been possible to keep the KDE libraries, but not use Qt as the basis for them.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

micka — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 17:33:00 +0000

Moreover, if I remember correctly, some of the KDE lib functionality was moved to Qt (when that made sense), then the kde libs removed their version in favor of the Qt one.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

krake — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 16:20:05 +0000

KDE's libraries were not dumped by any measure, they still continue to the biggest collection of Qt addon libraries there is.

What has happened is that the code of these libraries was moved from a single repository to one per library, assisting in packaging them separately, both for the benefit of making it easier for Linux distributions to get dependencies right as well as for individual developers i search for a Qt library for a specific problem domain.

Previously these libraries had mistakingly been considered a single thing, thus often causing unneeded package dependencies as well as not being considered viable by third party Qt application developers.

KDE application products as well as programs from the desktop product continue to make use of these libraries, after all they provide functionality otherwise not available or not in such consistency.

These libraries are such an important factor for KDE as a software vendor that they are releases as another product on their own, called KDE Frameworks.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

jackb — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 15:42:13 +0000

Others have already addressed the wrong assumptions

A few people have tried to employ some sleight of hand regarding the shift from KDE libraries to Qt libraries, but nobody has attempted to explain why the Qt libraries were considered fit for purpose in the first place.

Qt does provide all the features that are needed are mobile, and just enough features of what a mobile-centric developer would call "good enough" for non-mobile platforms. Thus, the decision to dump the previously-working libraries is a decision to reduce KDE's functionality to the lowest common denominator.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

krake — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 13:05:01 +0000

> I wish there was a Linux DE focused on PC platforms that had the functionality of KWin's window rules.

Others have already addressed the wrong assumptions about "lowest denominator", but if you want to use KWin as the window manager with a different desktop shell, then just do that.

E.g. run KWin as the window manager for LXQt instead of Openbox.

Shells

roc — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 20:43:42 +0000

> to get users to figure out how they really want their GUI sessions set up

Why is that important? If it is important, Is silently breaking their setup during a system upgrade really the best way to do it?

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

niner — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 17:44:19 +0000

Well I'm actually glad someone asked, because as a non-native speaker of English, I had the same problem understanding what you tried to write.

Shells

rillian — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 16:48:46 +0000

I certainly didn't understand how it was working. It turns out I'd been using gnome-terminal's "run command as a login shell" for years, so that opening a new terminal picked up env changes without having the restart the entire gui session.

That same option works with Wayland, but setting environment variables for applications launched through the desktop session instead of the command line no longer works, and as far as I can tell that consistency was the original rationale for making gnome-terminal instances non-login shells in the first place.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

halla — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 07:31:12 +0000

>> they stripped down the interface to lowest common denominator that mobile can support

> I don't know much about KDE stuff.

> There are two possibilities that I can think of for this...

There is another possility: that this statement simply isn't true.

It's not true on a number of levels: the desktop interface wasn't stripped down for plasma 5 in the first place, and any changes to the interface hadn't got anything to do with mobile support, but everything with porting to a new version of Qt and getting some good interaction designers on board. Besides plasma 4 already had a mobile variant.

Note: I have worked full-time on getting Plasma 5 + kwin + Wayland running on top of Ubuntu Phone in 2015.

Shells

mathstuf — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 02:02:18 +0000

Agreed. Currently, I have systemd set up to start everything and all of my environment bits are set in there. I no longer juggle bits about session daemons, DBus, environment bits, etc. unnecessarily. Some things have an After= or Requires= key, but that's way better than some suitable toposort linearization in a random shell script laying around.

As for Wayland…I am heavily invested in my Xmonad setup and awaiting a Wayland equivalent.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

jackb — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 23:27:17 +0000

I'm not sure how else you'd deal with this, besides putting a title bar on every widget, which would take up space.

Some widgets already have titles on them. There could also be a "move" context menu option, just like there is for windows.

The classic menu still exists. Right click the Kickoff launcher icon, click alternates, select Application Menu, click ok. It is a separate widget, so you can even use both side by side.

Wow, that just solved about 75% of my frustration with Plasma. The place where I looked for that option was in the "Settings" menu, which is where it used to be in earlier versions.

You can scroll directly on the canvas and it goes more then a few pixels (at least for me). Not sure what is going on there?

My input device setting is for 12 lines of scrolling per click. I imagine that was getting interpreted in a non-intuitive way when when it came to scrolling in the Applications tab (who knows what the conversion function between "lines" and "menu entries" in that widget is).

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

MattJD — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 23:05:58 +0000

>Q: I create a folder view on my desktop. Why do I need to click and hold in order to get access to the widgets for moving or resizing the view?

I can understand this from a desktop perspective too. Having the move handles pop out every time you hover over a widget gets annoying fast (thus why I often left my desktop (not screen) locked in Plasma 4). I'm not sure how else you'd deal with this, besides putting a title bar on every widget, which would take up space.

Whether this behaviour is best (still relying on hidden long clicks) is debatable, but I don't think there is a simple solution either.

> Q: Once I finally get the folder view into edit mode so that I am allowed to resize it, why is the upper-right corner the only one that can move? Where'd the basic window resizing capabilities that were old when Windows 3.1 launched go?

I don't know if that was mobile first, or Plasma devs trying out that behaviour, but that is how widgets always worked afaik.

> Q: I have a 6400x1600 desktop spread across three screens. Why does Kickoff only utilize a tiny fraction of the available vertical space while simultaneously misusing that space by making all the icons, text, and element spacing unnecessarily large? What happened to classic menu style that made far more effective use of my screen space and pointing device?

1. Kickoff exited in KDE3 days, developed by Suse I believe with actual user profiling. In theory, this would be the best launcher. In practise, the one person I know who uses the launcher menu frequently doesn't use it. However, none of this matters because:

2. The classic menu still exists. Right click the Kickoff launcher icon, click alternates, select Application Menu, click ok. It is a separate widget, so you can even use both side by side.

> Q: Now that Kickoff's new design has locked me into needing vertical scrolling for the Applications menu, why is vertical scrolling so difficult? Why does each click on my middle button scroll wheel only give me a few pixels of movement? Why didn't anyone tell whoever set the width of the scroll bar in this menu about Fitts's law?

You can scroll directly on the canvas and it goes more then a few pixels (at least for me). Not sure what is going on there? And regarding Fitt's law, I tried explaining that to a Plasma dev at one point. They misunderstood it and I didn't feel like arguing.

I have a feeling scroll bars are shrinking all over as people assume hardware covers the case where people used to scroll with them (either scroll wheels or touch screens/multi-touch touch pads). They become only necessary to convey information about where in the list you are.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

whot — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 20:51:48 +0000

For the future: it is generally considered good form to have one's facts in order and reasonably up-to-date before telling others that they are wrong. It does affect how much people are willing to listen to you.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

jackb — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 20:14:16 +0000

I don't think this is at all accurate.

Q: I create a folder view on my desktop. Why do I need to click and hold in order to get access to the widgets for moving or resizing the view?

A: Because on mobile platforms you don't have a mouse that can point without clicking, much less have different types of clicks.

A: Once I finally get the folder view into edit mode so that I am allowed to resize it, why is the upper-right corner the only one that can move? Where'd the basic window resizing capabilities that were old when Windows 3.1 launched go?

A: On a mobile device, it's not practical to give you the ability to resize any corner or any side of a window when the interface needs to differentiate between move clicks and resize clicks, so they took that capability away from you.

Q: I have a 6400x1600 desktop spread across three screens. Why does Kickoff only utilize a tiny fraction of the available vertical space while simultaneously misusing that space by making all the icons, text, and element spacing unnecessarily large? What happened to classic menu style that made far more effective use of my screen space and pointing device?

A: It looks nice on mobile devices and small screens, so they don't consider it to be a regression. Also the visual appearance is finely tuned to help you appreciate the designer's abilities as you're waiting for the fancy transition effects to finish instead of getting work done.

Q: Now that Kickoff's new design has locked me into needing vertical scrolling for the Applications menu, why is vertical scrolling so difficult? Why does each click on my middle button scroll wheel only give me a few pixels of movement? Why didn't anyone tell whoever set the width of the scroll bar in this menu about Fitts's law?

A: Sucks to be you, PC user.

Do I need to go on?

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

BlueLightning — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 19:39:34 +0000

> Unfortunately at the same time, KDE is rapidly approaching unusability.
>
> Just when KDE4 had begun to recover the stability of 3.5, they stripped down the interface to lowest
> common denominator that mobile can support

I don't think this is at all accurate. AIUI most reduction in functionality from 4->5 had to do with moving to rely on classes from Qt instead of KDE's libraries and those classes not being as functional (you could however argue about whether or not that was managed well). I hadn't expected things to regress quite as much as they did, but I think most of it has been resolved as of Plasma 5.8.

(I speak as someone who uses KDE daily at work and at home - if it was unusable I wouldn't be able to do that.)

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

Wol — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 19:05:33 +0000

I'm not a prescriptivist (I like dialects etc), but I think there is a place for "Standard English" which really needs to be prescriptivist. Otherwise we can't communicate! And things like "would of" cause me to do a double-take.

Okay, you make allowances when dealing with furriners, but I'm on a linux mailing list where I regularly struggle to understand certain members. Their English is very good, but they have all sorts of their native language grammar constructs creeping in, and it's very hard to make out what they're saying.

A classic example would be a Russian saying "don't do nothing". Is that an emphatic English positive (the double negative cancels out and emphasises), or normal Russian negating both parts of the verb? We *need* prescriptive rules so that we can actually understand each other ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Shells

iabervon — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 17:50:59 +0000

That's what you get for trusting these new-fangled display manager things. You should log in from a text console and run startx or weston from there. That was the sensible arrangement in 1996 (so that a bad X configuration wouldn't repeatedly lock up your computer on boot) and it's what I've been doing since...

To be fair to the bug discussion, it is a bit weird that the display manager runs your login shell non-interactively which runs your session. I doubt many people who were relying on that understood why their sessions worked the way they did, and I don't think this transition would be a bad time to get users to figure out how they really want their GUI sessions set up, provided the session manager were able to follow sensible instructions. Seems like it would be most logical to have three options: (1) start interactive shells from the GUI as login shells; (2) provide a sensible way of arranging the environment they'll inherit in a way that's not associated with the shell you happen to use interactively; or (3) start the whole thing by interacting with your login shell like a normal Grandpa.

(NB: I haven't actually tried running my main session through wayland, because I haven't found a compositor that acts like fvwm.)

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

drag — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 17:31:01 +0000

> they stripped down the interface to lowest common denominator that mobile can support

I don't know much about KDE stuff.

There are two possibilities that I can think of for this... One is that they are really interested on very cross-platform support so they cannot have a interface that depends too much on a single platform, which means that they have to give up a lot of features on most platforms. Or, in the second case, they are doing what Gnome did from 1.x to 2.x and again from 2.x to 3.x and stripping out functionality to get to something they can actually maintain and improve on.

In the first case that is unfortunate. Then KDE/QT penchant for abstraction layers is biting them.

If the second case is true then it's really kinda unavoidable for a maturing project. Feature creep is a difficult problem and eliminating a whole bunch of features is something that can be unavoidable if you want to move forward with a project of KDE's significance and have limited resources.

> I wish there was a Linux DE focused on PC platforms that had the functionality of KWin's window rules. That's the only "can't live without" feature keeping me on KDE.

Is it this? https://userbase.kde.org/KWin_Rules

I used to use Devilspie for that in Gnome 2.x. With the add-on approach of devilspie/wmctrl you are, of course, limited by the quality of the ICCM/EWMH support in your window manager.

And, of course, all that API support stuff for WMs is toast in Wayland. So no help there.

I would think you could do this in Gnome-shell with extensions, but I don't see any generalized 'windows rules' extension. All of it is seems more specific, like auto moving windows, changing window placement rules, or adding tiling support.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

drag — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 17:12:58 +0000

Maybe I am just operating off old information.

Jeremy Huddleston work(ed?) for Apple and maintained stable releases of xorg-server. He ran for board of directors seat at least once.

https://vignatti.com/2011/02/28/x-census-for-1-10/

Maybe Apple doesn't really care about X11 support that much anymore.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

drag — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 16:57:28 +0000

Thanks for the contribution to the discussion.

Shells

corbet — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 15:57:50 +0000

That is my one problem as well. Reading the bug discussion is ... discouraging. I guess shells are what Grandpa used back in the bad old days and we don't need them anymore...

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

Cyberax — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 15:50:01 +0000

It's actually sometimes a stumbling block for non-native speakers. I had to look it up because it makes no sense grammatically and I was thinking it's some kind of a weird structure like "I wish I were".

Making phonetic connection is not easy when you study English mostly as a written language.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

kid_meier — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 15:21:02 +0000

Sounds like this bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745032

tl;dr This is an unfortunate consequence of some difference in the way libinput polls events vs. the way the older X11 driver did it combined with some of gnome-shell's architecture.

It happens for me too and its terribly annoying, and worse it seems like this is the kind of thing that is only going to be slowly improved over time rather than fixed soon. On the other hand now that Wayland-by-default is rolling out more widely perhaps this issue will get more attention.

I've spent a few weeks now on Wayland (running Arch) and the stuttering cursor does become more tolerable if only because you come to expect it.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

Felix — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 12:47:30 +0000

> You'll notice, if you care to look, that a primary developer of X Windows nowadays is Apple

Would you mind to expand a bit on this?

AFAIK Apple uses X.Org to provide X11 in macOS (XQuartz) so I quickly checked the xorg git for @apple.com addresses but that query returned only a single developer within the last year or so ("Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia").

Also the X.Org board does contain any Apple representative (https://www.x.org/wiki/BoardOfDirectors/).

While it is nice to see that Apple participates in the X.Org project (even though their contribution seem to be pretty much focussed on XQuartz) I would not refer to them as a "primary developer of X Windows".

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

mpr22 — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 12:41:10 +0000

An increasingly widespread - to the dismay of prescriptivists everywhere - rendering of the English contraction "would've" which by design or accident happens to serve as a convenient tripwire for finding people who would rather snipe at harmless grammar nonconformance than engage with content :)

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

willnewton — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 11:28:06 +0000

The fact that terminals are no longer login shells is the only problem I have encountered. There still seems to be no progress on resolving it even though it was reported a couple of years ago:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=736660

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

HelloWorld — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 10:14:00 +0000

what's this “would of” thing you keep writing about?

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

drag — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 00:32:29 +0000

You are wrong there.

The reason X11 cannot be fixed as a display manager is because there is strong expectation of forward compatibility for applications. X11 is, very literally, late 1980's display technology that has been extended over and over and over again to make it appear to be somewhat more modern. X12 would of broken this as would of X13 or any other major revision. Just like X11 broke compatibility X10 and X9. It has survived this long because it was possible to build extensions and add more modern(ish) features, but it's impossible to work around it's fundamental limitations without breaking this compatibility.

Luckily it's not necessary to have X11 running as your desktop's display manager to have X11 compatibility. You'll notice, if you care to look, that a primary developer of X Windows nowadays is Apple and they have their own PDF-ish display manager technology. People have routinely run X11 applications on Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X.

Because of the X11 compatibility built into Wayland via XWayland and the large amount of X11 software it probably has extended X11 protocol another couple of decades, at least.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

whot — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 22:01:52 +0000

"X13" would set expectations of backwards compatibility where there is none [1]. Calling it a different name at least prevents that (in theory).

[1] any actual backwards compatibility with e.g. settings is provided by the compositor, not by the Wayland protocol.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

jackb — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 19:58:01 +0000

I think that KDE Wayland is rapidly approaching primetime.

Unfortunately at the same time, KDE is rapidly approaching unusability.

Just when KDE4 had begun to recover the stability of 3.5, they stripped down the interface to lowest common denominator that mobile can support

I wish there was a Linux DE focused on PC platforms that had the functionality of KWin's window rules. That's the only "can't live without" feature keeping me on KDE.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

cschanzle — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 18:18:03 +0000

If you don't want to use rpmfusion for some reason (such as version bugs, hardware support, testing, etc), after a kernel update, you may re-run the same installer .run file you used previously and update just the kernel module. For example, after rebooting (i.e., update for the currently running kernel):

sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-375.26.run --no-network --silent --kernel-module-only

I use the above in a "well-developed" (read: complicated) boot script before gdm starts. Without that, you need to wait for gdm to give up after numerous attempts, switch to another tty, log in as root, run the above, and 'systemctl restart gdm'. Don't forget to switch back to the tty and log out. Ick.

Easier is to update before rebooting to the new kernel. Use the --kernel-name= option to the nvidia installer as described in the README.txt. Tip: to get the equivalent of 'uname -r' for the most recently installed kernel:

rpm -q kernel --qf='%{installtime} %{version}-%{release}.%{arch}\n' | sort -n | awk 'END {print $2}'

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

rsidd — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 16:43:45 +0000

My vision is excellent and yet I keep losing the pointer, especially on large screens. I don't use Gnome so my solution, if it's a touchscreen, is to tap on a safe part of the screen, and if it isn't, to just move the mouse around in circles -- the eye is good at detecting motion. But yes, this Gnome feature should be supported in Wayland.

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

zdzichu — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 15:23:04 +0000

You shouldn't be downloading drivers directly from nVidia. You should use packaged ones, those will be automatically rebuilt on kernel upgrade. Go and enable RPMFusion or http://negativo17.org/nvidia-driver/ (the latter seems to be preferred by Fedora desktop developers).

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (Ars Technica)

hubcapsc — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 15:14:13 +0000

My workstation at work was unusable with noveau. So, I run the
Nvidia binary blob and have the noveau drivers blacklisted. Now
every time I do "yum update" and there's kernel updates, I have
to download a new blob from Nvidia and go through the procedure
to install it before my monitor will function. But, at least it *does*
function afterwards. This is not a knock on noveau, I guess they
had to reverse engineer what they've got.

-Mike