I think tearing may be one of those personal preferences where the population is divided down somewhere near the middle, but people on either side can not fathom the existence of the other as anything other than some sort of bad-faith exercise in contrarianism. At least, I for my part could never imagine ever willingly giving up a "real feature" (my perception!) like xdotool for the cosmetic benefits of no tearing (which to me feels like a problem on the importance level of "getting the blinky blue LEDs on your GPU fan to work"), but at the same time there is clearly a large number of people on tech support forums, stackexchange etc. to whom it is of show-stopping significance, as evidenced by the effort and time put into achieving non-tearing and how often it is presented as a self-evident killer feature of systems like Wayland.
That tearing issue even comes from a tradeoff space: a couple days ago on another thread about X people were noting that to avoid the tearing Wayland seems to have higher latency, and some people (and I would be one of them, were I to experience this) care way more about lower latency than "never ever ever see tearing".
I can't find the story you're talking about here, but one thing that would be good to understand here is whether this is some flaw in the Wayland protocol, or whether this is an implementation issue in a specific Wayland compositor like Gnome's Mutter. People tend to blame a lot of issues resulting from immature implementations on some unspecified "Wayland" (whatever that means).
All I can find is that in the past Mutter had lower latency for its Wayland implementation when compared to it using X.org, but it seems that Mutter's latency story has always been iffy in the past. FWIW it seems that Sway for example has finely grained input latency tweaks built in while being Wayland compliant [1].
...which was a peculiar discussion because I don't think anyone mentioned that just about everyone runs X today with some combination of DRI2 or DRI3, which involves plenty of latency, boundary-crossing, and buffer-copying.
> First, I want to make it clear that I’m not accusing the compositor of true evil, which I define roughly as deliberately causing suffering. There’s unfortunately too much of that in the world. I mean it in the more metaphorical sense that it causes serious problems and forces other parts of the system to be more complex to work around its limitations.
> but people on either side can not fathom the existence of the other as anything other than some sort of bad-faith exercise in contrarianism.
I do not understand this position. Why attack Wayland? X.Org works, it would probably work for another 10 years, XWayland maybe 20 years. If X.Org is such a marvel surely someone would maintain it.
There are a lot of options to support X.Org — programming, hiring, donations, asking company to buy license from the vendor that maintains it. Companies buy all sort of licenses, office suits, editors, I have not seen buying Linux licenses.
> I do not understand this position. Why attack Wayland? X.Org works, it would probably work for another 10 years, XWayland maybe 20 years. If X.Org is such a marvel surely someone would maintain it.
Because most people are dependent on distributions to provide them with a standardised setup, packages and security updates, and few distros have proven willing to support more than one option for a component as central and dominant as the display server. Sysvinit also works, und unlike Xorg doesn't even have the problem that graphics hardware will eventually leave it behind; and yet, it is now basically impossible to avoid systemd and its many tentacles if you want a mainstream-compatible Linux experience with timely security patches, because its proponents have successfully persuaded every major distro to adopt it and drop everything it replaced. Wayland, unfortunately, is not willing to exist as just another option until it has reached feature parity with X11; rather, it is competing with it for a limited resource (distro support) now, and poised to go in for the killing choke.
In other words you believe distro maintainers does bad job. They push product that is not ready.
I've seen enough arrogant quotes from systemd developers. But it solves user problems. Arch Linux was first among systemd adopters, boot become much quicker. And I think it solves maintainers problems, that's why it was adopted so quickly.
Oh, I've heard GNOME also helped adoption, but is it systemd fault or GNOME fault? I believe GNOMEs. As I know OpenBSD does not run systemd so it is possible if people care enough.
I do not use PulseAudio, but I have not tried since 2008 (pushed by Ubuntu, wrong choice). Maybe it works, ALSA works so I do not care. If I cared enough about ALSA, I'd support its development like maintaining Firefox ALSA backend.
> Wayland, unfortunately, is not willing to exist as just another option
I do not believe this is developers attitude, more like your opinion. You would gain nothing by attacking Wayland. Some developers would burn out sooner, same developers that could have implemented features you need. And lets face it no one wants to work on XFree86, not you, not me, hardly anyone. Because it is a mess:
> The size isn't so much the issue, it's the design. The xfree86 ddx seriously believes that you have one video card driving one monitor with one keyboard and one mouse, and anything beyond that only works well because we sank a ton of effort into it. (It used to have code to disable interrupts! From userspace! What could go right.)
> X is a tremendously successful project whose core design and reference implementation do not reflect how computers work anymore, in ways that make it painful to develop and maintain as the system display server.
I equate obsession with tearing with not being serious about the topic. I can't think of any single thing that tearing ever interferes with getting done.
That said, it's been years since I saw tearing on X. I can't really even remember what it looked like, or when it went away. Intel graphics used to crash all the damn time, but I don't recall ever seeing tearing on it. Is it an NVidia driver artifact?
I would agree with you about not seeing tearing... except that it only applies to the "desktop experience". Any time I'd watch a video with, say, VLC media player, I'd get absolutely horrendous tearing that was nearly unwatchable. And upon switching to Wayland it would all disappear.
