Demi Marie Obenour

@alwayscurious@infosec.exchange
123 Followers
117 Following
2.5K Posts
Software developer and security researcher. Currently working on Spectrum. Follows are not endorsements.
PronounsShe/her
GitHubhttps://github.com/DemiMarie
Matrix@alwayscurious:matrix.org

@david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard@circumstances.run I have poured most hours of my last 10 years of life into listening to users and pushing things forward on Wayland even if I personally wouldn't need the feature. I really saddens me that someone would think that Wayland developers don't care.

We do care, but we only have a finite amount of time in our volunteer life. Yes, we don't copy-paste solutions from X11: we try to fully understand the problem space and do better. This does mean that coming to us with technical solutions rather than use-cases tends to be met with "please, explain why you need to do this?".

I don't really know what you mean when you say that we silence criticism. I've read enough in the past years to guarantee that it's not silenced. I appreciate constructive criticism better than rants, rants tend to demoralize me.

I am also saddened about the conspiracy that big corp deprecates X11 against the community's will. There is no single company with a monopoly here, please take a bit of time to look at Wayland developers' employers. Personally, I'm ex-SourceHut and now just a volunteer (my day job is unrelated: SNCF Réseau).

I've never said that X11 was deprecated, and I always tell people to use whatever works best for them. The only reason why X11 has less activity nowadays is because X11 lacks volunteers. (We severely lack volunteers on the Wayland side too.)

People, distros, communities move away from X11 if/when they collectively decide that they should. Nobody's pulling the strings here.

@strlcat @davidgerard not to be pedantic but is it really monopolization when the main developers of X11 have since move on to another project deliberately to replace the old?

Like to my understanding, it isn’t about “competition” in this case, but about moving standards from one system to another and making that work happen. Ie. we use computers in 2025, not 1985, and the way graphics for computers work has changed significantly from then til now, and part of the reason Wayland exists is to be able to modernize graphics on anything that uses it. So it’s a shift in standards vs Competition. Especially when it’s all X11 devs who moved on to Wayland and have generally stopped putting much work into X11 as is.

(And that isn’t even touching on most of the code added to base X11 from the founder of XLibre being reverted out due to breaking changes and weird modifications of licenses retroactively as people started looking over the commits and noticing some issues..)

Idk, I think a lot of the arguing around this issue is stemming from a handful of malignant actors that are deliberately throwing chaff into the wind and getting into everyone’s hair about it while fundamentally misunderstanding what is going on and why we have Wayland to begin with. Arguably deliberately misunderstanding for the sake of arguing and causing drama.

Are there technical issues with Wayland? Yeah! But there’s also a fuckload of technical issues with X11 as well, and the decision was made to focus on Wayland and modernizing graphics on Linux rather than maintaining something who’s primary promise of network transparency stopped being true decades ago.

@Lyude Nvidia is making an enormous profit. Don't go to mine gold. Go to sell stuff to the miners.
Normally I don't like when I predict the future correctly but this time it actually ended up being good for once.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/13/investing/remote-work-impact-real-estate
Basically exactly what I said is happening - remote working trends are making it look like that rent might FINALLY start actually going down. And good.
Anything that gets lost in the cities from this is frankly nothing of value. In Boston, we've had so many actually important places in Boston close down due to rent costs, only to be replaced by bougie soulless copy-pasted restaurants and luxury apartments. We've had numerous queer venues close down (not all of them because of the rent, mind you) and dozens of actually beloved restaurants close from how high the rent has been
Working from home could wipe $800 billion from office values globally

Remote work risks wiping $800 billion from the value of office buildings in major cities worldwide by 2030 as the post-pandemic trend pushes up office vacancy rates and drives down rents, according to a new report.

CNN
The economy of a city should not be reliant on businesses with office buildings. It should be reliant on the actual people who are living in the actual city. Living in the city shouldn't be some magic privilege only afforded by the wealthy. All an economy like that does is destroy anything unique in your city in a desperate attempt to appeal to people with too much money whose only reason for being in the area is to go into the office five days a week and do something that doesn't require them to actually be there.
Meanwhile literally everyone around gets fucked over by infinitely rising rent costs.
I'm glad money is being lost from this, I'm excited for what's going to be left because it'll be a hell of a lot better then this
@karolherbst @dotstdy @Lyude Good faith and open minds from all sides are absolutely critical. I hope I have shown that. If I ever don't show them, I hope someone tells me, because that means I made a mistake and need to fix it.
@karolherbst @Lyude What this would give is something that third-party application developers could point to. "Sorry, but the compositor you are using doesn't support protocol XYZ, which is required by the Wayland desktop profile. Only compositors that support the desktop profile are supported. Therefore, I'm closing this bug."

@swick @Lyude @karolherbst It is completely valid for GNOME to not want to add a feature. It is equally valid for application authors to only support compositors that have that feature.

Are there specific protocols that GNOME does not implement that are needed by specific applications to work properly? If so, GNOME's developers have two equally valid options:

  • They can decide that this is a situation they are okay with, in which case certain applications will not work properly (or at all) under GNOME.
  • They can implement the missing protocols so that the applications work properly under GNOME.
  • @pauldoo @Lyude @karolherbst The bigger pattern is that it appears to me (whether it is true or not) that GNOME is only interested in implementing protocols useful for GNOME applications. There are some protocols that no application following the GNOME HIG would have a need here, but are absolutely necessary for some applications to work properly.
    @pauldoo @Lyude @karolherbst XDG decoration is the first one that comes to my mind. GNOME is literally the only desktop compositor I know of that doesn't implement it. I don't consider Weston to be a desktop compositor as it is missing a lot of other protocols.