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Widespread Adoption of Wayland Would Mostly Benefit IBM, Which Has Become Increasingly Hostile Towards Software Freedom

Video download link | md5sum b5050651c89ba81b53d466010de6b384 Wayland Creating New Problems Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: Ryan wrote about his agonising experience with Wayland this month [1, 2]; 4 more of us weighed in and expressed similar scepticism/concerns over IBM's push to put Wayland in every distribution

TODAY'S and yesterday's posts from Ryan Farmer ("DaemonFC") included rants about Wayland. As he put it himself: "If Wayland still isn’t working right after 15 years, if it still behaves like some bugged, crummy, perpetual beta software, when will it work right?"



Wayland is explained in the video above, as it's a subject we never properly covered before, at least not in a dedicated (to Wayland) video.

Ryan's first article did not mention or barely noted that Wayland does not implement important features (X.org has had those features for over 20 years and many programs of longtime GNU/Linux users STRICTLY DEPEND on these features). To make matters worse, many program swill never adopt Wayland (no support to be expected ever from old or "legacy" software) and Wayland already wastes developers' and projects' time. Is it worth it?

"Ryan noted that APIs and ABI alike are being ignored/discarded in order to shoehorn Wayland."Does this sound familiar? It did happen before and it disrupts momentum. Who benefits here?

Ryan noted that APIs and ABI alike are being ignored/discarded in order to shoehorn Wayland. "They break both," he said. In his post he explains the consequences of that. "The golden rule about X11," he said in IRC, "is that whatever the client does is right as long as it's been part of the protocol at some actual revision. I think the Wayland people know this promise isn't actually fun to maintain, not touching core code, and so they don't consider themselves bound by it."

"It’s become a fixture," he said in his first post, "like an old refrigerator that never breaks down."

The two laptops I use at the moment have uptime of 200+ days with KWin and X11. This would not be possible with Wayland in its 2023 form. Wayland in 2023, at least with KDE Plasma, simply isn't ready. Based on those who put it to the test, if you do many advanced things (something beyond "GMail" and other "Web apps"), reboots will become necessary very often. A Wayland system is rarely a stable system.

"Based on those who put it to the test, if you do many advanced things (something beyond "GMail" and other "Web apps"), reboots will become necessary very often."Ryan notes that "Wayland can stop applications from reading input events from the other ones." But your windows are typically trusted, unless it's a "modern" Web browser, in which case untrusted programs get run on your machine and then some remote entity controls your machine. "I don’t have “Linux malware” because I haven’t installed any," Ryan said, but some time soon they want to control what you can and cannot install on your GNU/Linux PC/server (sigStore, which is being falsely painted as vendor-neutral by the Linux Foundation, has Google and Red Hat behind it).

"Apropos X11," one reader has noted, "Ryan's post is spot-on but some 10 years ago there was a lot of analysis of some design flaws in how keystrokes (or anything else) from one window can be captured by another. I can't remember the term for that flaw and will never find it. It got a little coverage and then all went quiet."

Over in IRC, jrmu said: "I'm on OpenBSD and recently there's been discussions of having adding a Wayland shim" though MinceR expressed hope that "maybe OpenBSD will keep X alive" because "waylandows is pointless".

"...your windows are typically trusted, unless it's a "modern" Web browser, in which case untrusted programs get run on your machine and then some remote entity controls your machine."He added that "the x.org maintainers don't understand x, so they started waylandows instead and it sucks because of that [...] then again, probably this whole industry of failure is finally coming apart at the seams. [...] they decided, as a "feature", that they will not support pointer grabbing or warping, so some programs become impossible on waylandows, for example, an FPS that doesn't cover _all_ of your screens will lose the mouse pointer and be unplayable [...] they decided, as another "feature", that no clients can read the screen, so screen sharing is impossible [and] they decided, as yet another "feature", that the official, beloved waylandows implementations can't do server side decorations, so window management is an unreliable, inconsistent mess under them [..] "security" is their excuse for everything even though proprietarydesktop software is many things, but secure is not one of them [...] another "feature" is that you must run cancerd [systemd] so you can run their official implementations and you probably already know how secure cancerd is [...] what ibm/proprietarydesktop/systemd cabal does is in direct opposition to the users' freedom and community, therefore it is proprietary [...] everything they do is focused on forcing users into a walled garden controlled by IBM, where they get to pay for a support contract with IBM for any hope of support, which they won't get because users don't matter to IBM anyway [...] waylandows, like cancerd, was designed around the demented ideas of a small group of people like [Lennart] Poettering [...] and they wield dependencies as a weapon against the Free software community [...] the license is open source, therefore it is open source, but as you can see on the above linked page, Free software is not defined in terms of license, so it's OSPS -- Open Source Proprietary Software" (we explained this in past years [1, 2, 3]).

"Wayland might give many people a negative first impression of GNU/Linux."As psydruid explained in IRC, "the license being libre is the Trojan horse in this case because it's hard to argue against software that is libre, right? But that's just a decoy to distract you from what it really is proprietary software with a thin layer of libre on top. If you can't study the code, can't understand the code, can't modify the code and it makes no sense to distribute modifications, what is the purpose of it being libre? They've been making use of this confusion among Free software enthusiasts for more than a decade. I only realised it in 2017 as things changed beyond the pulseaudio nuisance I had become aware of in 2011. I gladly use OpenBSD on some of my (older) systems, mainly those that aren't supported well by GNU/Linux distributions anymore, but I've also successfully run it on some of my more newer systems. I'm getting the idea that IBM would rather stand in the way of others than contribute anything at this point, which isn't very different from what Microsoft has been doing since its inception."

So those are the views of at least 5 people, whose experiences vary but whose conclusion is similar. My own views are expressed in the video. Wayland might give many people a negative first impression of GNU/Linux.

Just like Mozilla is trying to force everyone to use PulseAudio, it might soon try to force GNU/Linux users to adopt Wayland. Mozilla is a bad company which does not value users' freedom or or even choice. Mozilla's CEO, Baker, is "just a front for Google," one reader has remarked, "keeping Mozilla alive as long as Google needs it to remain alive but without it getting in the way ever."

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