One thing I saw in comments about the removal of xorg server is that some might not see how much work is/was to maintain xorg server. I understand is hard to see from outside, but maintaining xorg server with the standards we have in RHEL is not a small beast. Let me share some:
It’s not only software vendors but Wayland itself lacks some crucial features. For me it’s auto-type and screen magnification - both are showstoppers for me.
Autotype is already solved - ydotool, wtype and dotool exists (and possibly others as well).
Screen magnification is already present in KDE (Meta + +, Meta + - to zoom in/out). There’s also a magnifier tool (KMag). There may be similar functionalities in other DEs.
My issue is the lack of an overall GUI automation tool, ie, like AutoHotkey. X11 had PyAutoGUI, but there’s no such AIO equivalent for Wayland yet, and the PyAutoGUI devs don’t seem to be interested in Wayland support - it’s neither on their road map, nor have they even answered any Wayland questions on their Github page, which is disappointing. But this isn’t Wayland’s fault, when other tools have shown that automating the GUI is possible, we just need someone to put together a complete package like PyAutoGUI / AHK.
Autotype is already solved - ydotool, wtype and dotool exists (and possibly others as well).
These tools work by creating a virtual keyboard so they don’t let you send input to a specific window. The input goes to whatever happens to be focused at the moment. This makes them less reliable than the X11 equivalents and unusable for tasks where you need to guarantee that the right window gets the input.
feel free to check out map2, I’m currently working on version 2 which will do lots of the stuff you need when it’s ready, but currently the API might still change and docs are active WIP
still, it can already do most stuff I need it for :)
People, your only alternative to Wayland is dead and unmaintained. If you push against Wayland as the default option, you only make your transition in the future more painful than it needs to be.
Nobody’s pushing “against Wayland”. I don’t give a shit about Wayland or Xorg. What I care about is having a full-featured, easy to use desktop stack readily available. The “dead” Xorg works perfectly with everything. That’s the bar.
When I get a checkbox on the login screen saying “use Wayland” (or when the distro does it by default) I need everything to work. If everything does not work, I do not use it.
The Wayland choice of pushing complexity onto individual software projects by making them all reinvent a hundred wheels, and onto users by making them hunt down a hundred pieces of software to build a wobbly desktop stack sucks. I have no incentive to take part in this particular rat race.
Install Xorg yourself. Don’t make it easily accessible to new Linux users.
New users will drop any distro whose default desktop doesn’t work perfectly and with all the features they want. Linux already has a high enough bar competing with Windows, creating additional artificial hurdles is dumb in the extreme.
And if it does, then it’s still insecure by design.
Security vs convenience has always been a give and take. There’s a cutoff point that users will not cross if the software becomes too inconvenient to use, even if it means greater security. The Wayland stack is currently on the bad side of that line and needs to step over if it wants to see mass adoption.
Substitute Wayland for X11 here. Both Wayland and X11 are protocols. X11 is such a lackluster protocol that all implementations died, except that Xorg still has users.
Nobody cares, all they see is the stack, with Wayland leading the point on the bad decisions.
And you obviously care a lot about Wayland and Xorg.
You are projecting. If this were any other piece of software, say, a text editor that works and does everything you need, and someone came and told you “you must use this new one, it’s the way forward, but oh it doesn’t have all the features you need from a text editor” you would say “thanks but I’ll wait until it’s ready”. But you see no problem in pushing Wayland on people who can’t use it?
Please understand that nobody will ever successfuly push through incomplete software. Not on Linux. There’s nothing you or anybody can do to convince people that incomplete software is complete and usable when it’s not.
I really wanted Wayland to work for me. I just bought a new ASUS laptop (and ASUS has a great Linux compatibility track record, mind you!), 7th Gen Ryzen+Radeon, all AMD. I figured, let’s use Wayland on this one.
I installed KDE Neon, updated the kernel (some stuff is broken on the LTS kernel, no big deal, easy fix), switched to the Wayland session, everything was fine…until I opened any chromium-based app. Crashed kwin, killed the session completely, it recovered, but in a new session. Switched to X11, everything works. Maybe if I grabbed a newer mesa from a PPA it would work, but:
Crashing the window manager killing the session is awful and doesn’t happen in X11
Chromium shouldn’t crash the compositor at all
Even if it’s AMD’s new graphics drivers being buggy, that still shouldn’t kill the session!
And I know, technically KDE could (and afaik, is) implement session management so that doesn’t happen. But to my knowledge, literally 0 WMs/DEs can recover the session after a compositor crash currently, and that’s a big deal.
Not the same as “on demand zooming”, which let’s one stick with a high, native resolution, but zoom in when required (e.g. websites with small text that can’t be zoomed via browser’s font size increase; e.g. referencing some UI stuff during UI design, without having to take a screenshot and pasting + zooming it in e.g. GIMP).
What? Strg + Mousewheel, you can even set the option to only zoom text. At least on firefox. No clue what kind of browser you are using which is not capable of that.
Yeah, that browser zoom. And I too used / use Firefox.
I’m not saying these kind of sites are common, but nevertheless I’ve encountered them occasionally. Back then, the most pragmatic workaround was to use desktop zooming of Xfce.
My intention on the previous comment was simply to give some examples of desktop zooming that go beyond the typical accessibility viewpoint (e.g. vision impairment).
It’s not only software vendors but Wayland itself lacks some crucial features. For me it’s auto-type and screen magnification - both are showstoppers for me.
Autotype is already solved - ydotool, wtype and dotool exists (and possibly others as well).
Screen magnification is already present in KDE (
Meta++,Meta+-to zoom in/out). There’s also a magnifier tool (KMag). There may be similar functionalities in other DEs.My issue is the lack of an overall GUI automation tool, ie, like AutoHotkey. X11 had PyAutoGUI, but there’s no such AIO equivalent for Wayland yet, and the PyAutoGUI devs don’t seem to be interested in Wayland support - it’s neither on their road map, nor have they even answered any Wayland questions on their Github page, which is disappointing. But this isn’t Wayland’s fault, when other tools have shown that automating the GUI is possible, we just need someone to put together a complete package like PyAutoGUI / AHK.
These tools work by creating a virtual keyboard so they don’t let you send input to a specific window. The input goes to whatever happens to be focused at the moment. This makes them less reliable than the X11 equivalents and unusable for tasks where you need to guarantee that the right window gets the input.
feel free to check out map2, I’m currently working on version 2 which will do lots of the stuff you need when it’s ready, but currently the API might still change and docs are active WIP
still, it can already do most stuff I need it for :)
KMag doesn’t work on Wayland.
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Nobody’s pushing “against Wayland”. I don’t give a shit about Wayland or Xorg. What I care about is having a full-featured, easy to use desktop stack readily available. The “dead” Xorg works perfectly with everything. That’s the bar.
When I get a checkbox on the login screen saying “use Wayland” (or when the distro does it by default) I need everything to work. If everything does not work, I do not use it.
The Wayland choice of pushing complexity onto individual software projects by making them all reinvent a hundred wheels, and onto users by making them hunt down a hundred pieces of software to build a wobbly desktop stack sucks. I have no incentive to take part in this particular rat race.
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New users will drop any distro whose default desktop doesn’t work perfectly and with all the features they want. Linux already has a high enough bar competing with Windows, creating additional artificial hurdles is dumb in the extreme.
Security vs convenience has always been a give and take. There’s a cutoff point that users will not cross if the software becomes too inconvenient to use, even if it means greater security. The Wayland stack is currently on the bad side of that line and needs to step over if it wants to see mass adoption.
Nobody cares, all they see is the stack, with Wayland leading the point on the bad decisions.
You are projecting. If this were any other piece of software, say, a text editor that works and does everything you need, and someone came and told you “you must use this new one, it’s the way forward, but oh it doesn’t have all the features you need from a text editor” you would say “thanks but I’ll wait until it’s ready”. But you see no problem in pushing Wayland on people who can’t use it?
Please understand that nobody will ever successfuly push through incomplete software. Not on Linux. There’s nothing you or anybody can do to convince people that incomplete software is complete and usable when it’s not.
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I really wanted Wayland to work for me. I just bought a new ASUS laptop (and ASUS has a great Linux compatibility track record, mind you!), 7th Gen Ryzen+Radeon, all AMD. I figured, let’s use Wayland on this one.
I installed KDE Neon, updated the kernel (some stuff is broken on the LTS kernel, no big deal, easy fix), switched to the Wayland session, everything was fine…until I opened any chromium-based app. Crashed kwin, killed the session completely, it recovered, but in a new session. Switched to X11, everything works. Maybe if I grabbed a newer mesa from a PPA it would work, but:
And I know, technically KDE could (and afaik, is) implement session management so that doesn’t happen. But to my knowledge, literally 0 WMs/DEs can recover the session after a compositor crash currently, and that’s a big deal.
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ydotool?
Increase your scaling/decrease resolution.
Not the same as “on demand zooming”, which let’s one stick with a high, native resolution, but zoom in when required (e.g. websites with small text that can’t be zoomed via browser’s font size increase; e.g. referencing some UI stuff during UI design, without having to take a screenshot and pasting + zooming it in e.g. GIMP).
What? Strg + Mousewheel, you can even set the option to only zoom text. At least on firefox. No clue what kind of browser you are using which is not capable of that.
Yeah, that browser zoom. And I too used / use Firefox. I’m not saying these kind of sites are common, but nevertheless I’ve encountered them occasionally. Back then, the most pragmatic workaround was to use desktop zooming of Xfce.
My intention on the previous comment was simply to give some examples of desktop zooming that go beyond the typical accessibility viewpoint (e.g. vision impairment).