Comment by blueflow 3 days ago
During CachyOS installation, select "i3" as desktop environment and look how many of the accessory programs die from linking errors. That should not happen with a package manager with dependency management.
> start maintaining the stack instead of just endlessly complaining about Wayland it'll only get worse.
This is actually what forced me to migrate to Wayland, seeing lots of people complaining about Wayland but not seeing people stepping up to maintain X11. And those who used to maintain X11, built Wayland instead.
Yes, Wayland isn't perfect, but for professionals who just want shit to continue working, you kind of have to move to the software that is being maintained, for better or worse.
Always the same lies. People "stepped up" in the and as a result were outright banned from the gitlab (instead of e.g. just rejecting pull requests). Current maintainers refuse to do any release management and instead treat every merge into master as a new release. This kind of sabotage makes development or contributing very difficult. Also the people that used to maintain X11 (e.g. Keith Packard) had nothing to do with building Wayland.
Wayland on the other is just a insanely stupid API. Everybody advocating for Wayland should be forced to write a simple client at least once without relying on behemoths like GTK or Qt.
> outright banned from the gitlab
Yeah, lies and then you come in with shit like this. You can surely show several proofs then, right?
> Wayland on the other is just a insanely stupid API. Everybody advocating for Wayland should be forced to write a simple client at least once without relying on behemoths like GTK or Qt.
Why would you do it outside of toying around? Btw, I have and it's nothing out of ordinary.
> People "stepped up"
If by "people" you mean a fascist who doesn't know how to program, then sure. But the sensible people who don't present a security threat with their politics or with shitty code are 100% in the Wayland camp.
> Also the people that used to maintain X11 (e.g. Keith Packard) had nothing to do with building Wayland.
Those people aren't maintaining X11 today, are they? The people who are maintaining X11 today have put it in bugfix-only mode and have told you, many times, that the future is Wayland. End of discussion.
Look, you want to run a retro 90s desktop for shits and giggles, that's great. There's even an officially supported path for this use case: Ariadne Conill's Wayback. But the DEs and the toolkits are all removing X11 support within the next year or two. There is no future there. You want to keep running modern software, you will have to switch to Wayland eventually—and soon.
> Wayland on the other is just a insanely stupid API. Everybody advocating for Wayland should be forced to write a simple client at least once without relying on behemoths like GTK or Qt.
Nobody actually develops applications that way. They all use a toolkit, and the behemoths cover pretty much 90% of actual application development (modulo things like Electron). Both of those, by the way, are deprecating X11 support.
X11 is still in fact maintained to a degree insofar as minimally fixing bugs.
Last activity 2 hours ago at time of writing.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/groups/xorg/-/activity
Most of the people complaining are users who don't write any software. There is no practical difficulty in using an x11 wm at this point nor expected to be until major software not only doesn't support x11 by default but cannot be built with support for same.
Maybe it will be difficult to run X in 2030?
> All of the X11 based WMs are slowly bit-rotting.
An absolute metric TON of code in general that is/was largely dependent on free $0 volunteer labor has been bit rotting for the past 5 years. The COVID pandemic and the ongoing tech layoffs have really opened our eyes to just how much tech got built for free by firms pushing "always be coding" down our throats in the 2010s. It's why the only truly stable Linux OSes right now are largely Ubuntu and RHEL (even more RHEL lately) - you get what you pay for if no one else is footing the bill.
I know what you mean, but there is bitrot. I'm currently trying dwm. Zero out of the three patches I downloaded from the website applied successfully. I'd call that bitrot.
Not sure how much I like "hand-write your own code from snippets" as a way to configure software.
One advantage of the patches not working is that manually applying a patch (usually quite simple) brings you some familiarity with the code. In my case this let me make my own modifications that were not available as patches. Altering window manager code is fun!
And while you have a good point, I don’t think this is what most people have in mind when they use the term “bitrot” (but I could be wrong). I say this because dwm as supplied continues to work perfectly without modification. The patches are enhancements contributed by third parties (as far as I know) and, as you’ve discovered, are not maintained.
(Also, once you have a working, patched dwm, it should continue to work forever, even if the patches that you used may no apply automatically to future versions of the base dwm.)
There's still bitrot on the X.org side even if your DM is maintained
> All of the X11 based WMs are slowly bit-rotting.
was the statement I was replying to. In 10 years of using dwm I've not been aware of any bitrot that affects me. Certainly nome in the WM itself.
There's X11libre for Linux and there's X on OpenBSD and FreeBSD. I am sure it will be fine.
There is no X11 bitrot. Just a lack of funding. If funding for Wayland stopped today, Wayland would die much quicker than X11 because there is essentially zero community involvement whereas for X11 there are enough people that care to keep it alive for free.
The only real Wayland community effort is Hyprland. The author of that has been banned from contributing to Wayland by the corporate sponsors of Wayland.
Hence there is no community.
Also the whole "there is no Wayland" "it's just a protocol" spiel has been played so often that I believe Wayland apologists are mostly bots.
Desktop Linux is more of a love project, it has basically no real support. Compared to the kernel it's more like YouTube $5 comments.
And given that Wayland has less moving pieces (it properly sits on top of kernel abstractions), your take is even less likely to be true.
> Desktop Linux is more of a love project, it has basically no real support.
Ubuntu and RHEL exist, but you're right that they're outliers. This is potentially the next killer app if someone wants to take this on.
Desktop Linux needs standardized and stable infrastructure. X11 delivers on that perfectly.
Wayland despite receiving huge amounts funding has actually far more moving pieces. Even for the simplest tasks you have to deal with a dbus infested portal maze, many parallel infrastructure effects and high fragmentation. The API is atrociously stupid and cumbersome.
Besides that the modesetting driver of xorg also sits "properly on top of kernel abstractions". How is this in any ways a relevant criterion. What matters is that Wayland clearly makes the wrong abstractions for Desktop applications and the vast amount of parallel infrastructure required to do even the simplest tasks shows that.
almost every distro that offers an i3/sway/awesome install option seems to do a really poor job of it.
I don't know why.
Last time I started an endeavoros install with a default i3 it borked the login manager and set no system handlers of any kind. When I went to fix the handlers the entire package that set them was gone. When I went to install that (on the advice of the accompanying forum) I had to install most of GNOME.
If you're using something that isn't KDE or GNOME you're probably going to hit rough edges.
> If you're using something that isn't KDE or GNOME you're probably going to hit rough edges.
Anymore it's literally anything that isn't GNOME. Red Hat is basically keeping that project going.
I use CachyOS as my daily driver and I gave up on i3 after few tries. It just doesn’t work.
I’m happy with XFCE now and it is very performant.
What are examples of packages that fail with linking errors? What are the errors?
Vanilla Arch would fail in the same way with this package. Not sure I follow.
I had a similar beef with FreeBSD ports. And to be fair, they specifically disclaim "liability" to what the package maintainers do because they are separate groups. But the one time I tried going off the beaten path from pkg (which installs binaries) and went to /usr/local/ports and actually tried to build something from scratch, it just choked on dependencies and quit.
IIRC, I tried to build vim from scratch, but during the menuconfig, selected different "cflags" (or whatever they call them) to add additional features. When you do this, it pulls in more packages, and eventually something failed to compile the way I had configured it. I realize there's probably N! different combinations of packages / dependencies. But still it left me thinking "why bother releasing this crap/give me the option to customize at all if you don't even do basic tests on it?".
This kind of bug shouldn't happen in the first place. Totally unacceptable move by the CachyOS team.
Yah well? Why would I when there is Plasma/KDE which never did that to me? :-)
I used i3 for the longest time and I'd say a wayland based alternative like sway or miracle is a better choice nowadays. Even KDE Plasma recently dropped x11 support [1] so going forward, most apps will target wayland first.
Migrating my i3 config to sway hardly took any effort. I was also able to get rid of a lot of xorg specific configurations from various x11 dotfiles and put them directly in the sway config (Such as Natural Scrolling)
[1]: https://itsfoss.com/news/kde-plasma-to-drop-x11-support/.
This isn't surprising. All of the X11 based WMs are slowly bit-rotting. Unless the people that care about them step up and start maintaining the stack instead of just endlessly complaining about Wayland it'll only get worse.