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Jamey Sharp

@marcan I worked on X for a number of years: I wrote XCB, and in one X server release I authored more commits than anyone else. And… you're right that people need to move on. I'm confused about why that would be controversial.

13 May 2023 at 15:00 | Wall-to-wall | Open on toot.cat
16 comments
Kensan

@jamey @marcan Is it partly because people get attached to “the way things work”? It’s usually hard to break a habit so I can understand reluctance to move to something else. However, in software, I have the impression that people feel personally attacked if something they use/like gets criticized…

13 May 2023 at 15:05 | Open on mastodon.social
Jamey Sharp

@Kensan @marcan As I said, I'm confused about why this is controversial—your guess may be better than mine. 😅 As usual though, there's an XKCD with one possible answer: xkcd.com/1172/

13 May 2023 at 15:12 | Open on toot.cat
Kensan

@jamey @marcan hah, yes that’s spot on 😆

Somehow with open source there comes a lot of entitlement and strong opinions… one of the good things is, that one can put in the work to back up these opinions.

What’s clear to me in this scenario is that Asahi/ @marcan are putting in so much work improving the whole ecosystem by chasing down obscure issues down to the compiler. I would think that would afford the project/him some more credibility when weighing in on issues like Xorg etc…

13 May 2023 at 15:28 | Open on mastodon.social
mirabilos

@jamey @marcan @Kensan experience in one thing doesn’t mean experience in another thing (the field is HUGE), although he probably has that, nor does it mean recognising what’s important about Unix (which he’s truly lacking, permitting only the subset of poettering’d users’ needs)

13 May 2023 at 15:56 | Open on toot.mirbsd.org
Josh Triplett
I think people have some notion that if they complain hard enough or throw up enough roadblocks, the thing they prefer will magically start getting maintained. It's the same notion that arises around architecture archaeology, init intransigence, OS ossification, and other dead-end development.

Closely related: most Open Source projects let obscure use cases get some free maintenance, both because we have sympathy for such cases and because they're *usually* not much trouble. People get used to the free maintenance. So, when a project comes along that says "no, that's not supported" because something *isn't* trivial to support, people get angry.
I think people have some notion that if they complain hard enough or throw up enough roadblocks, the thing they prefer will magically start getting maintained. It's the same notion that arises around architecture archaeology, init intransigence, OS ossification, and other dead-end development.
13 May 2023 at 18:37 | Open on social.joshtriplett.org
James Tucker

@Kensan @jamey @marcan there are non-contributor users (people who can’t or haven’t read any of the associate code) who have direct or indirect experience with wayland not working for them. They are not considering the trajectory of the ecosystem, but just drawing from that experience with fear and doubt that wayland will work for them. All the new subsystems suffer this :-( sorry it’s all front an center and rude in your feeds all the time

13 May 2023 at 19:46 | Open on don.rag.pub
James Tucker

@Kensan @jamey @marcan youtu.be/FKgD65Um8Mo this video, and top comment are perfect examples of things driving the mass thinking from those without deeper background

13 May 2023 at 19:49 | Open on don.rag.pub
Oblomov

@jamey @marcan
because people don't care about how complex and difficult to maintain something is, what they care about is stuff working, and possibly in the way they expect and/or are used to. If the Wayland space wasn't dominated by a group of opinionated uncooperative “my way or the highway” know-it-alls the situation might have been different, but such is life.

13 May 2023 at 15:52 | Open on sociale.network
mirabilos

@jamey @marcan simple non-DE WMs, using X as xterm multiplexer, over the network, mixing sparc and x86 windows, the much better tooling for e.g. xmodmap, xcompose, etc. and the fact that XFree86 works with just 64 MiB RAM and doesn’t need a 3D graphics card, is well-established so huge portability and program availability, and that’s just what’s on top of my head

13 May 2023 at 16:00 | Open on toot.mirbsd.org
mort

@jamey It may be controversial because there are *real* issues which won't be fixed, such as global hotkeys being intentionally broken, and (at least until libdecoration improves) native-looking decorations requiring GTK thanks to GNOME's lack of SSDs.

I use Wayland myself and the intentionally missing features are worth it for me, but people understandably get upset when you take away very important features and tell people to suck it.

13 May 2023 at 18:19 | Open on fosstodon.org
jokeyrhyme

@mort @jamey there's also a portal now for global keyboard shortcuts: flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-

Waiting for all the push-to-talk apps to support it, though

13 May 2023 at 20:02 | Open on aus.social
mort

@jokeyrhyme That's interesting. Is it (or will it be) supported in GNOME?

Also, I really wish that portal stuff would separate itself from flatpak. It really isn't a good look to say that "flatpak portals" is the solution to all kinds of Wayland stuff that *should* be completely unrelated to flatpak. But that's neither here nor there.

13 May 2023 at 20:04 | Open on fosstodon.org
jokeyrhyme
mort

@jokeyrhyme The reason I asked is, my impression is that a whole lot of Wayland people see global shortcuts ans an anti-feature which shouldn't be supported. Therefore, the existence of a DBus interface specification doesn't really matter; what matters is whether Wayland people have actually reversed their opinion or not.

So what I'm interested in is really official communication about intent.

13 May 2023 at 20:15 | Open on fosstodon.org
jokeyrhyme

@mort interesting

well, I guess it's technically not _in_ wayland, and I can see why as there is a fair bit of UX that is better implemented at the portal/desktop level

I filed some feature request issues, let's see what happens:
- github.com/pop-os/xdg-desktop-
- gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/xdg-des
- github.com/emersion/xdg-deskto

13 May 2023 at 20:29 | Open on aus.social
jokeyrhyme

@mort agreed regarding naming, it's a little awkward

xdg-desktop-portal as a concept works even in X11 (although it's less necessary there), so it's not even a wayland-specific thing let along a flatpak-specific thing

Although, I certainly don't mind credit going to the flatpak folks seeing as they took some initiative and started addressing these features

13 May 2023 at 20:15 | Open on aus.social
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