If history is any indication then more lock-in will be the future trend. And they will sugarcoat it with reasons such as “this is more secure”.

Assuming the entire US court system isn’t in the corporate pocket

I love your optimism

This also explains why VPN is a possible workaround to this issue.

Your VPN will encapsulate any packets that your phone will send out inside a new packet (its contents encrypted), and this new packet is the one actually being sent out to the internet. What TTL does this new packet have? You guessed it, 64. From the ISP’s perspective, this packet is no different than any other packets sent directly from your phone.

BUT, not all phones will pass tethered packets to the VPN client – they directly send those out to the internet. Mine does this! In this case, TTL-based tracking will still work. And some phones seem to have other methods to inform the ISP that the data is tethered, in which case the VPN workaround may possibly fail.

Not sure if it’s still the case today, but back then cellular ISPs could tell you are tethering by looking at the TTL (time to live) value of your packets.

Basically, a packet starts with a TTL of 64 usually. After each hop (e.g. from your phone to the ISP’s devices) the TTL is decremented, becoming 63, then 62, and so on. The main purpose of TTL is to prevent packets from lingering in the network forever, by dropping the packet if its TTL reaches zero. Most packets reach their destinations within 20 hops anyway, so a TTL of 64 is plenty enough.

Back to the topic. What happens when the ISP receives a packet with a TTL value less than expected, like 61 instead of 62? It realizes that your packet must have gone through an additional hop, for example when it hopped from your laptop onto your phone, hence the data must be tethered.

If I remember right, the syncing issue was particularly egregious when you run windowed X11 programs on Wayland. So it could be that you got lucky.

It’s the explicit sync protocol.

The TL;DR is basically: everyone else has supported implicit sync for ages, but Nvidia doesn’t. So now everyone is designing an explicit sync Wayland protocol to accommodate for this issue.

It’s just a notable milestone. For as long as I can remember Linux marketshare never went above the 3.something% mark.

Desktop? I settled on Arch and Fedora.

Server? Debian. Although technically I never distrohopped on servers, been using Debian since the beginning of time.

Ackshually you still can blame Windows for not supporting live updates.

There are times when the original standard has zero forwards compatibility in it, such that any improvement made to it necessarily creates a new standard.

And then there’s also times when old greybeards simply disregard the improved standard because they are too used to the classic way.

To be fair: A notebook with a bunch of strong passwords is probably more secure than a human brain memorising a bunch of weak passwords.

Can’t replicate your results here. I play on Wayland, and deliberately force some games to run natively on Wayland (SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland) and so far I haven’t noticed any framerate changes except statistical noise.

Still really good but I wanted it to melt my face like the end of Indiana Jones.

Truly c/BrandNewSentence material.

Seriously though, never challenge Indian and Thai cooks on spiciness. They can be ruthless!

It’s not a fork of wlroots. wlroots is a library to assist developers in creating Wayland compositors.

You ably demonstrate your own inability to listen.

Or was it you?

I’m not sure how you hallucinated that Wayland got 4 years of design and 8 years of implementation.

2012-2021, or to clarify “Late 2012 to early-mid 2021” seems to be 8-point-something years to me. I dunno, did mathematics change recently or something?

With graphics programming relatively in its infancy X11 didn’t require 15 years to become usable

I hope you do understand that graphics weren’t as complicated back then. Compositing of windows was not an idea (at least, not a widely spread one) in the 90s. Nor was sandboxing an idea back then. Or multidisplay (we hacked it onto X11 later through XRandR). Or HDR nowadays. Or HiDPI. Or touch input and gestures. We software rendered everything too, so DRI and friends weren’t thought of.

In a way… you are actually insulting the kernel developers.

That is to say in practical effect actual usage of real apps so dwarfs any overhead that it is immeasurable statistical noise

The concern about battery life is also probably equally pointless.

some of us have actual desktops.

There just aren’t. It’s not blurry.

I don’t have a bunch of screen tearing

Let me summarize this with your own statement, because you certainly just went out and disregarded all things I said:

Your responses make me think you aren’t actually listening for instance

Yeah, you are now just outright ignoring people’s opinion. 2 hours of battery life - statistical noise, pointless. Laptops - who neeeeeeeeds that, we have desktops!! Lack of fractional scaling which people literally listed as a “disadvantage” of Wayland before it got the protocol - yeah, I guess X11 is magic and somehow things are not blurry on X11 which has the same problem when XRandR is used.

Do I need to quote more?

Also, regarding this:

Wayland development started in 2008 and in 2018 was still a unusable buggy pile of shit.

Maybe you should take note of when Wayland development had actually started picking up. 2008 was when the idea came up. 2012 was when the concrete foundation started being laid.

Not to mention that it was 2021 when Fedora and Ubuntu made it default. Your experience in 2018 is not representative of the Wayland ecosystem in 2021 at all, never mind that it’s now 2023. The 3 years between 2018-2021 saw various applications either implementing their first support, or maturing their support of Wayland. Maybe you should try again before asserting a bunch of opinions which are outdated.

Wayland was effectively rebuilding the Linux graphics stack from the ground up. (No, it’s not rebuilding the stack for the sake of it. The rebuilding actually started in X.org, but people were severely burned out in the end. Hence Wayland. X.org still contains an atomic KMS implementation, it’s just disabled by default.)

4 years of designing and 8 years of implementation across the entire ecosystem is impressive, not obnoxious.

It’s obnoxious to those of us who discovered Linux 20 years ago rather than last week.

Something makes me think that you aren’t actually using it 20 years ago.

Maybe it’s just my memory of the modelines failing me. Hmmm… did I just hallucinate the XFree86 server taking down my system?

Oh noes, I am getting old. Damn.

Theoretically an average user should feel nothing. The benefits of Wayland are usually more visible when more modern technologies are involved, for example VRR, high DPI, HDR, etc.

Nothing is set automatically I run a window manager and it starts what I tell it to start. I observed that at present fewer env variables are now required to obtain proper scaling.

Fun fact: zero envvars are needed for HiDPI support on Wayland.

You do possibly need envvars to enable Wayland support though, but the latest releases of Qt6, GTK4, SDL3 etc. are enabling Wayland by default these days so in the future everything will work out of the box. By default.

X actually exposes both the resolution and physical size of displays. This gives you the DPI if you happen to have mastered basic math. I’ve no idea if this is in fact used but your statement NOTHING provides that is trivially disprovable by runing xrandr --verbose.

Did I say XRandR and mixed DPI in my previous comments? Yeah, I think I did. What the Qt applications currently do is choosing the max DPI and sticking with it. There are some nasty side effects, as I will explain below.

You don’t in fact actually even need apps to be aware of different DPI or dynamically adjust you may scale everything up to the exact same DPI and let X scale it down to the physical resolution.

Don’t forget the side effect: GPU demands and/or CPU demands (depending on the renderer) increase… a lot, nearly 2x in some cases. This might not be acceptable in applications like laptops - have you used projectors in college?

Anecdotally speaking, I gained 1 to 2 hours of battery life just by ditching X11, it’s impressive considering my battery life was like 4 to 5 hours back then. Now it’s actually competitive with Windows which usually gets 6 to 7 hours of battery life.

Furthermore, scaling up and down in multiple passes, instead of letting the clients doing it in “one go” and have the compositor scan it directly onto your screen, leads to problems in font rendering because of some antialiasing shenanigans in addition to the power consumption increase. It’s the very reason why Wayland added a fractional_scaling protocol.

Why would I need to develop another X11 I believe I shall go on using this one which already supported high and mixed DPI just fine when Wayland was a steaming pile of shit nobody in their right mind would use.

Apparently the “nobody” includes GTK, Qt, SDL, and all the mainstream DEs (Xfce and Cinnamon included - even they are preparing to add Wayland support). 90% of the programs I use actually support Wayland pretty well. Good job lad, you managed to invalidate your own argument.

Besides that, you still haven’t properly answered the question of mixed DPI: have you seen a properly-scaled-up LoDPI X11 application? It’s a big problem for XWayland developers. See it here. And yes… those developers are (were?) X11 developers. I think they know how unworkable X11 is, more than you do.

On the other hand… if you are primarily gaming on your PC, then the moment Wine supports Wayland 90% of your programs will be Wayland-native.

So you simply thought the deficiencies I listed before are not problematic. Got it, have a nice day.