Weekend drama: I've woven this fine article and rant discussing the alarming dev-centric fads and hypes around continuously reinventing the wheel, with ifconfig and nestat system administration tools as prime examples, focusing on concepts like job security, intrinsic skill and technology value, the philospher's mind, a clash of mindsets, real-life examples, backward compatibility, commandments for healthy code, and more. Enjoy. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/dev-nonsense-netstat-ifconfig.html Cheers, Mrk
In general I agree (similar thoughts, but about bug fixing), but I don't agree about Wayland. I think Wayland was justified, because X11 can't be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility. X11 is a disaster from a security point of view and this is probably quite strong argument for people on this forum.
Are you serious? X11 causes problems all the time. It caused a lot of trouble when to dual GPU systems (Optimus - Intel GPU and Nvidia GPU). Apart from that a lot of people experience tearing and other artifacts. Compare that with Windows. Remember that in this day and age you have technologies like AMD FreeSync or Nvidia G-Sync that eliminate tearing even better, but fundamental technical reasons does not allow to apply them effectively for X11. X11 means being vulnerable to keyloggers. X11 also means unreliable screenlocker. With all that isolation mechanisms in kernel (user accounts, namespaces, AppArmor/SELinux) to isolate programs it is just stupid to have X11 which does not allow for isolation of GUI programs from each other. All these problems are just tip of the iceberg.
Dual gpu issues are NOT security issues - and in this regard, X is still years ahead of Wayland. Keyloggers - show me ONE example. Where has this ever been exploited? Mrk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1fZAZTwyPQ You can also search github for the phrase "linux keylogger". Can you provide names of people that you privately know, used Windows and their passwords were eavesdropped by keylogger. Write here their first name, last name and date of exploitation.
No I cannot - but then I've always claimed that security is overrated. Besides, I don't care about individual cases - I want large-scale scenarios that justify something. There isn't one industry case where X was exploited. Not one. The fact a linux keylogger exists is not an exploit - nor evidence of any big problem that requires architectural change. I can write a Linux keylogger in about 10 minutes. That's not the point. The point is that: Wayland claims on their own site it is designed to make development easier. The functionality it offers is supposed to be identical to X (and 6 years down the road, still inferior to the product it replaces). Wayland is being introduced into production when it's still beta quality at best - you take away something that works and provide a broken replacement. Because none of this justifies its introduction - the security flag is waved, and it's supposed to be the holy argument that everyone agrees with. X satisfies all current technology needs (drivers, resolutions, dpi, etc) without any catatrophe or armageddon happening. Functionality > security. If a product does do the basics, it does not matter if it's secure or not or whatever. Mrk
No one is forcing you to use Wayland. In Debian repository X.Org is present and will be there for years. They are existing in parallel to each other. X does not satisfy need of tearless experience. Actually I used X11 yesterday (now I use Windows) and have seen tearing like two times in one day. And this is a tip of iceberg. Another example: Wayland lets its clients to have feedback about how many of frames was actually presented on the screen. This let developers to optimize rendering while PC is under a heavy load or for power-saving. It is not possible with X11.
Reasons for Wayland are more nuanced. They just oversimplified them. Some things are not possible to do with X11 without breaking backwards compatibility. They are not just harder to be developed - they are impossible to be developed.
It's not about being forced. No one forces me to use Linux either. It's about USE CASE and superior functionality. There's no real use case for Wayland (or pretty much any tech developed in the past 5-6 years) and no superior functionality. Some things might not be possible with X - true - but then the replacement needs to actually be able to do all of the existing PLUS new stuff. Wayland doesn't do either yet. And yet, it's being offered as a replacement. To put things into perspective, it would be like someone replacing your car with a motorcycle so you could wear a helmet, and then give you a motorcycle that only has one wheel and only turns right. The correct way would be: Wayland - 100% production ready, 100% backward compatible, new functionality - and only then being offered. The half-baked agile approach is wrong on every conceivable level. It's mediocrity taken to the extreme. It's everything opposed to good quality, philosophy and striving for excellence. Mrk
Excellent writing and agree 100% It really seems like users of the FOSS software are second-class citizens now. Almost everything is done to satisfy highly paid software engineers sandbox games. No real progress or new ideas, just stagnation and playing games and patting each others backs. Poor code quality, poor or nonexistent documentation, no optimization of RAM or disk space use, tons of dependencies.... But there are still few good apples that do remarkable little things in the field.
Problem with Wayland and X11 is that it is more like ecosystem rather than one project to change. When it comes to Wayland you have: 1. Upstream Wayland protocol and reference library developers 2. Wayland compositors developers which include desktop environment developers: Gnome, KDE, but also developers from mobile industry (Tizen, SailfishOS) and automotive industry (infotainment systems). 3. Developers of GUI toolkits or frameworks (GTK+3, QT5). 4. Developers of client programs who may or may not use previous. 5. Downstream distribution developers packaging libraries and programs for Gnu/Linux distributions. They are not owned by single, rich company with thousands of developers, so it is very hard to coordinate this ecosystem to develop Wayland-enabled ecosystem while still sticking to X11. Chicken and egg problem.
That's not something that users should ever care or know about - what matters is functionality and stability. The dev thing is propagating into the user space, and this is the absolute wrong way of doing product. Mrk
