Wayland is great and ready for (idk) 95% of users/use-cases.
There is a long tail of more-or-less critical stuff that depend on X11 and do not have working Wayland substitutes. While the tail has been shrinking for every year, it will be decades if ever until all can be realistically migrated. Consider the Lindy Effect and that some of these systems have been running for >10y already. Consider shared but secured environments at universities and research institutes. Consider obscure hardware incompatibilities and hardware-specifix performance issues which might never be fixed.
On the software side, acessibility aside, there are a lot of VNC and other remote-X setups out there with no viable replacement in sight (yet).
Alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire and jack can all coexist and so can display servers.
I understand GNOME and RedHat will do things their way. I understand distro and GUI framework maintainers wanting to reduce their load. I understand people who like Wayland, want it to succeed, and want to evangelize. I do not appreciate when it turns into tribalism, forcing of monoculture and insisting "X11 is deprecated".
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OP is from 2023 but as they note in their update, the situation is fundamentally not that different 2y later. Are maintainers and decision-makers really sincerely imagining that a supposed deprecation and removal of X11 can be forced onto the wider community over a couple of years from now?
> On the software side, acessibility aside, there are a lot of VNC and other remote-X setups out there with no viable replacement in sight (yet).
I've been using wayvnc for probably 5 years now? Works great. Sway can output fine to virtual-crtc out for headless mide; I expect other compositors can use this part of your GPU too. If you really desperate & your Wayland server just can't for no reason, get a DisplayPort dummy plug for $15.
I know less about others but krfb and gnome-remote-desktop are both there. KDE is recently kicking off a bunch of work to make sure their login manager is remote friendly too.
> I do not appreciate when it turns into tribalism, forcing of monoculture and insisting "X11 is deprecated".
Most of the devs doing X11 agreed en masse that it was at a dead end and not worth caring for anymore. It's not tribalism. It's technics.
As an aside, you talk about wayland as if it were one thing. But the wayland protocol is intentionally minimal. Each wayland compositor picks and chooses between different third party libs to support various features. So you never know if something will actually work on the wayland compositor you use. If you stick within your ecosystem, yes, but it's not unified like X11 linux is. It's very fragmented and one's personal experience definitely doesn't say anything about other people's experience. Unlike with X11 where everyone uses the same thing.
For example, mouse and keyboard support and libei, libinput, or nothing (looking at you, weston). You never know what you're going to get and so applications that need to do basic keyboard/mouse things have to guess. It doesn't work all the time. In X11 it does.
Another example, accessibility features. The only wayland compositor that supports screen reading is GNOME's. They invented two new protocols, incompatible with all existing linux accessibility libraries. Only GNOME's wayland compositor and userspace applications use them.
So, in summary: one's experience can't be extrapolated with wayland because there is no single wayland.
It makes sense for something like accessibility to be part of the protocol because it almost always needs access to stuff that Wayland restricts by design.
I was speaking at a conference recently and was asked to chair the session at the last minute. It was hybrid, so all the speakers needed to share their slides on Zoom. I have been daily driving Linux for 14 years, and this has almost never been a problem (there was a moment with i3 but it seems better). But I hadn't bothered to test this since installing (and generally loving!) PopOS COSMIC.
The problem, at root, is Wayland. Zoom has some kind of workaround it seems, but it's not working yet in COSMIC.
The result was sad: speakers having to speak with their slides being run by one of the remote speakers, and anyone who recognized the computer running Zoom as Linux surely strengthened their conviction never to try that.
Millennials are responsible for Wayland, Trump, and the majority of everything that sucks today. As a whole, they don’t care about reducing change to allow for environments to thrive. They’d rather change shit into whatever they feel like or think is better. I’ve given up trying to stop them because they gang up on anyway that doesn’t support them. I just bitch and moan now, because it’s better than killing myself to avoid seeing how fucked up things will become. They’re not blind or deaf so why should they give a shit about accessibility? Good luck.
The Wayland protocol "lacks" some things "by design" in that they are not specified. However, this is not intentional omissions, not even under the guise of "security", it's stuff that simply hasn't been done yet.
The most promising work towards improving accessibility support in Wayland was the work done on the Newton protocol:
Unfortunately, the project appears to have stalled. I think the Linux desktop just lacks important strategic investments, and this is one of them. For now, existing accessibility bus support in UI toolkits is mostly being leveraged. Some compositors (i.e. KDE's kwin) also can support some old X11 features used for automation/accessibility (i.e. XTEST works, although applications will need to be granted permission first)
The situation is somewhat similar for IME: There are a few protocols for handling basic IME/text input, but it's not really finished, and further work on text input protocols has stalled.
This is not an ideal state of affairs at all, and it is a major threat to the future of the Linux desktop. I doubt many Wayland proponents (of which I do consider myself to be one) seriously believes that shipping Wayland-only without robust support for accessibility or internationalization is really a good idea. It's basically only happening because progress on Wayland has been rather slow, for many reasons, a lot of which really aren't in the control of open source contributors or maintainers. However, at the same time, maintaining both X.org and Wayland paths everywhere forever is also not sustainable: with limited resources, there simply has to be a point at which the line is drawn. X.org outside of XWayland has been unmaintained for a fairly long time.
On the flip side, if anyone working on Newton or Wayland accessibility has any idea what anyone on the outside can do to help things along, we'd love to know. I really hope that one of the major investors in the free software desktop (Valve? Red Hat?) can be convinced to help shift some resources to this. It's one thing to have some software work somewhat sub-optimally (as is the case with KiCAD), but it's a bigger issue that users who upgrade to newer free operating systems may face a system that is not usable for them because of limited accessibility tools. Possibly a compliance problem for companies that wish to ship systems based on free software desktops.
> The Wayland protocol "lacks" some things "by design" in that they are not specified. However, this is not intentional omissions, not even under the guise of "security", it's stuff that simply hasn't been done yet.
Two things: First, yes, a lot of Wayland's missing features absolutely were intentional omissions in the name of security. This is even almost understandable; the only difference between a vital a11y tool and horrible malware is whether the software acts on behalf of the user or against them, there is no technical distinction. Second... Wayland is almost 17 years old. If it was 2010, I would readily accept that it was early WIP software, but we're past the point where 'they just haven't gotten there yet' is convincing.
> However, at the same time, maintaining both X.org and Wayland paths everywhere forever is also not sustainable: with limited resources, there simply has to be a point at which the line is drawn. X.org outside of XWayland has been unmaintained for a fairly long time.
I'm actually cautiously optimistic that https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback or the like will help significantly; sharing as much of the stack as possible should reduce the maintenance burden.
By all means feel free, but know that you commit yourself to an endless task; every compositor has to have every feature implemented independently. The big two, GNOME and KDE, will need to be handled completely independently. After that, you can ease the process by getting support into wlroots, but that merely makes it easier per compositor; you'll still need to submit patches to every consumer of the library to actually wire up support. (For a worked example: wlroots has a way to set the keyboard layout. This does not mean that every compositor using wlroots has a way to set keyboard layout.)
It's been almost two decades and we're still taking steps backwards on accessibility and features because of Wayland.
From day 0 Wayland put their idea of a beautiful design above the needs of users. It's hard to see how we can claim to be inclusive when even our most basic decisions are hostile to large groups of users.
I never thought I would say this, but after 30 years of open source and Linux I don't see much of a bright future. Everyone I know from the community back then has moved on to using a Mac because of these issues.
But the Mac compositor (Quartz) implements the same permission model as Wayland, that's why you get a popup requesting permissions to share screen etc.
This particular case is about accessibility not permissions. AFAIK accessibility still isn't completely supported in major Wayland compositors so it's a legitimate complaint.
There is a long tail of more-or-less critical stuff that depend on X11 and do not have working Wayland substitutes. While the tail has been shrinking for every year, it will be decades if ever until all can be realistically migrated. Consider the Lindy Effect and that some of these systems have been running for >10y already. Consider shared but secured environments at universities and research institutes. Consider obscure hardware incompatibilities and hardware-specifix performance issues which might never be fixed.
On the software side, acessibility aside, there are a lot of VNC and other remote-X setups out there with no viable replacement in sight (yet).
Alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire and jack can all coexist and so can display servers.
I understand GNOME and RedHat will do things their way. I understand distro and GUI framework maintainers wanting to reduce their load. I understand people who like Wayland, want it to succeed, and want to evangelize. I do not appreciate when it turns into tribalism, forcing of monoculture and insisting "X11 is deprecated".
---
OP is from 2023 but as they note in their update, the situation is fundamentally not that different 2y later. Are maintainers and decision-makers really sincerely imagining that a supposed deprecation and removal of X11 can be forced onto the wider community over a couple of years from now?
I've been using wayvnc for probably 5 years now? Works great. Sway can output fine to virtual-crtc out for headless mide; I expect other compositors can use this part of your GPU too. If you really desperate & your Wayland server just can't for no reason, get a DisplayPort dummy plug for $15.
I know less about others but krfb and gnome-remote-desktop are both there. KDE is recently kicking off a bunch of work to make sure their login manager is remote friendly too.
> I do not appreciate when it turns into tribalism, forcing of monoculture and insisting "X11 is deprecated".
Most of the devs doing X11 agreed en masse that it was at a dead end and not worth caring for anymore. It's not tribalism. It's technics.
For example, mouse and keyboard support and libei, libinput, or nothing (looking at you, weston). You never know what you're going to get and so applications that need to do basic keyboard/mouse things have to guess. It doesn't work all the time. In X11 it does.
Another example, accessibility features. The only wayland compositor that supports screen reading is GNOME's. They invented two new protocols, incompatible with all existing linux accessibility libraries. Only GNOME's wayland compositor and userspace applications use them.
So, in summary: one's experience can't be extrapolated with wayland because there is no single wayland.
* With 0 implementations, Wayland is good for 100.0% of users
* With 1 implementations, Wayland is good for 95.0% of users
* With 2 implementations, Wayland is good for 90.2% of users
* With 3 implementations, Wayland is good for 85.7% of users
* With 4 implementations, Wayland is good for 81.5% of users
* With 5 implementations, Wayland is good for 77.4% of users
* With 6 implementations, Wayland is good for 73.5% of users
* With 7 implementations, Wayland is good for 69.8% of users
* With 8 implementations, Wayland is good for 66.3% of users
* With 9 implementations, Wayland is good for 63.0% of users
* With 10 implementations, Wayland is good for 59.9% of users
The problem, at root, is Wayland. Zoom has some kind of workaround it seems, but it's not working yet in COSMIC.
The result was sad: speakers having to speak with their slides being run by one of the remote speakers, and anyone who recognized the computer running Zoom as Linux surely strengthened their conviction never to try that.
The most promising work towards improving accessibility support in Wayland was the work done on the Newton protocol:
https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the...
Unfortunately, the project appears to have stalled. I think the Linux desktop just lacks important strategic investments, and this is one of them. For now, existing accessibility bus support in UI toolkits is mostly being leveraged. Some compositors (i.e. KDE's kwin) also can support some old X11 features used for automation/accessibility (i.e. XTEST works, although applications will need to be granted permission first)
The situation is somewhat similar for IME: There are a few protocols for handling basic IME/text input, but it's not really finished, and further work on text input protocols has stalled.
This is not an ideal state of affairs at all, and it is a major threat to the future of the Linux desktop. I doubt many Wayland proponents (of which I do consider myself to be one) seriously believes that shipping Wayland-only without robust support for accessibility or internationalization is really a good idea. It's basically only happening because progress on Wayland has been rather slow, for many reasons, a lot of which really aren't in the control of open source contributors or maintainers. However, at the same time, maintaining both X.org and Wayland paths everywhere forever is also not sustainable: with limited resources, there simply has to be a point at which the line is drawn. X.org outside of XWayland has been unmaintained for a fairly long time.
On the flip side, if anyone working on Newton or Wayland accessibility has any idea what anyone on the outside can do to help things along, we'd love to know. I really hope that one of the major investors in the free software desktop (Valve? Red Hat?) can be convinced to help shift some resources to this. It's one thing to have some software work somewhat sub-optimally (as is the case with KiCAD), but it's a bigger issue that users who upgrade to newer free operating systems may face a system that is not usable for them because of limited accessibility tools. Possibly a compliance problem for companies that wish to ship systems based on free software desktops.
Two things: First, yes, a lot of Wayland's missing features absolutely were intentional omissions in the name of security. This is even almost understandable; the only difference between a vital a11y tool and horrible malware is whether the software acts on behalf of the user or against them, there is no technical distinction. Second... Wayland is almost 17 years old. If it was 2010, I would readily accept that it was early WIP software, but we're past the point where 'they just haven't gotten there yet' is convincing.
> However, at the same time, maintaining both X.org and Wayland paths everywhere forever is also not sustainable: with limited resources, there simply has to be a point at which the line is drawn. X.org outside of XWayland has been unmaintained for a fairly long time.
I'm actually cautiously optimistic that https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback or the like will help significantly; sharing as much of the stack as possible should reduce the maintenance burden.
AT-SPI is a protocol for talking between the compositor and an accessibility reader.
It's not in Wayland's jurisdiction to define how AT-SPI should be used.
<expletive> ANY Linux project that strongly breaks backwards compatibility.
Not surprised that it's still messing with people even this late in the game.
I don’t really care about your opinion here.
Personally I think a full forever commitment to the past is a form of folly which I can only laugh at the premise of.
Also no one is preventing this app from working, for whatever reasons the devs just haven't got it working.
Open source software is about freedom. Freedom to say fuck backwards compatibility or freedom to use X11 for the next 100 years.
Also the freedom for the X11 devs to say they don't want to maintain it anymore...
From day 0 Wayland put their idea of a beautiful design above the needs of users. It's hard to see how we can claim to be inclusive when even our most basic decisions are hostile to large groups of users.
I never thought I would say this, but after 30 years of open source and Linux I don't see much of a bright future. Everyone I know from the community back then has moved on to using a Mac because of these issues.