A sad, painful, and infuriating read for this calm Sunday. In recent years, a lot of attention has gone into improving the output side of the accessibility story on Wayland – screen readers and the like – but apparently, the input side has languished. People with reduced mobility need affordances and tools to use computers, but those aren’t ready for Wayland.
A popular set of tools here is Talon Voice, which allows people with reduced mobility to create powerful hands-free input methods. The examples the article gives are incredibly cool, and it’s easy to see how Talon would become a cornerstone for people with reduced mobility who needs hands-free (or hands-fewer?) computer input methods.
So what’s going wrong here?
Talon requires deep integration with the window manager and compositor to carry out even the most basic of its duties, and Wayland offers… Absolutely no way to perform any of those actions.
[…]
Frustrated by the endless lack of progress towards a real set of solutions for the entire ecosystem, and inundated by an endless series of requests for Wayland support which he cannot provide, Aegis, the main (and only) developer of Talon, has made a declaration: Enough. Talon Voice will imminently remove ALL Linux support from the public release, as X11 continues to sunset and users are switched to an environment in which their system can no longer function, with no option to go back.
↫ Insane Rambles About Technology
So not only will Talon not gain Wayland support any time soon, its developers are even removing X11 support from it. What this means is that even if you decide to stick to X11 because Wayland doesn’t fulfill your needs, you’re eventually going to run into a brick wall. This is merely annoying if you need to use a different application for remote desktop or whatever, but it’s absolutely devastating when it involves the very input method you use to use your computer in the first place.
There is some important nuance here though that the article doesn’t mention. The article takes the word of Talon’s developers as gospel, but in my conversations with KDE developers, a different story emerges. What they tell me is that Wayland implements all the APIs needed for Talon to work, but that Talon’s developers are simply not interested in using them. Apparently, KDE developers and others have tried to contact Talon’s developers, but their offers to help are being ignored. They’re being told Talon is simply not interested in supporting Wayland, “end of story”.
So, the story here seems to be a lot more complex than just “Wayland bad”, and I’m getting a bit of a vibe that the Talon developers are, despite claims to the contrary in the article, indeed removing X11 support out of spite. Talon is entirely within their right to not want to work on Wayland support, but then just be honest with your users and say so, instead of pinning everything on “Wayland bad”, being dishonest about Wayland’s capabilities, and ignoring offers of help and support from some of the most knowledgeable and capable developers in the field.
Of course, that’s absolutely of no relevance to people like the author of this article who depend on these tools to use their computers. They’re caught in the middle of a transition and experiencing the worst byproducts, and that’s a huge failure on everybody’s end – Wayland, Talon, and desktop environments alike. I hope the parties involved can sort this out quickly, because everyone deserves equal access to computers, doubly so in the open source world.
Both sides are probably equally right and equally wrong.
Since one is working for free, that person may well just not like Wayland and decide not to work on it (another example, xscreensaver) and yes, too bad for all the people who really need it, but should you really be forced on something you don’t like?
Which was my main grievance with Wayland to begin with… yes, X11 is ancient, but something else probably could have been done instead of throwing it out of the window (don’t come tell me it would have been impossible), but hey, the maintainers DIDN’T WANT to do it so they started something new.
Or think systemd. No matter how many people dislike it (myself included – I just hate the binary logs and the bloat too much), it has been forced down everyone’s throats because that’s what the main maintainers of the ecosystem want to do.
So hey, that’s the downside of open source. When I want to operate my 20+ years old film scanner, Windows 11 still supports it because of Microsoft’s commitment to backwards compatibility. They chose to do things this way and I am happy I don’t need to keep a 20 years old machine running to operate my scanner. It was their choice. Apple makes different choices and the lack of backwards compatibility and very long term commitment got me out of their ecosystem (32 bit, firewire, Aperture, etc). Yes, firewire is old, but I am not in the mood to spend thousands of euros with new audio interfaces and redoing my whole studio. It was Apple’s choice. I made mine.
Or the person a few days ago who poisoned their own application with an anti-AI protest. Anyone is free to sit and code a replacement for that component of the stack.
Of course, it sucks for people who really need something, and it sucks for people without the technical skills to migrate their use cases and workflows across different ecosystems with ease, but I guess we can’t force anyone to do something they don’t want to do, especially when they are working for free under intense pressure.
I beg to differ : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRnno9VIZx0 (Microsoft revokes Office 2019 perpetual licenses)
Yea, they pulled the “beg I don’t alter the deal further” move. But it doesn’t mean the operating system wouldn’t support it. =)
Shiunbird,
Ironically, the “Stable Linux API” is none other than Win32:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46825493
They could not get something as simple as running desktop applications from a few year ago run on recent versions.
And open source is supposed to be not burdened by corporate dictates, turns out not only open source is happy to take marching orders from IBM/RedHat, Google/GCP, Amazon/AWS, but they are not even being “burdened” by small things like actually caring about the end users
Because, it turns out, devs need to eat, even though most of them love their craft. =(
And the greed is so great that none of the big corps are going to fork out a monthly paycheque for the souls maintaining core components.
Shiunbird,
I’m not against people working and having a paycheck. I would be a hypocrite otherwise.
That being said, it does not mean the open source community needed to pivot to being entirely steered by big corporations.
It has become a just shared infrastructure component.
We’re stuck with it now, but Wayland was such a mis-step in so many ways. It took well over 15 years of toil and corporate boot-stamping to get Wayland to a point where it could supplant X11, and even now it’s still missing some critical features…
And after all that, the sad truth is that any regular user comparing an X11 vs Wayland desktop today will struggle mightily to identify any significant differences between them, and even fewer that reflect well on Wayland. And Wayland’s “victory” is so pyrrhic that many or most of our desktop apps will continue to use the X11 API pretty much forever. So much time and energy were wasted that could have been avoided by evolving and streamlining X11.
Thankfully this is open source, a solution will be found. Eventually.
Kochise,
But this was the solution, and the current situation is a clear regression.
I’m not sure how to think about it, however how can open source make progress when they take a step forward, they also move back two.
Perhaps with a third GUI alternative would solve the issue yet increase Linux fragmentation ?
https://xkcd.com/927/
Kochise,
I know it is in jest, but as Microsoft painfully learned, and everyone eventually reaches this conclusion… maintaining “legacy” APIs is extremely valuable.
And migrations to clean “green field” implementations cost 10x more than original predictions.
“I never realized people actually used function Xyz in X11, Wayland is not designed to support that”
And now they have to re-engineer everything that breaks that clean implementation, or they are forever cut off from basic features like accessibility.
(I’m not sure how they will handle government regulations at this point. ADA is pretty much a must for a modern system)
So what if I fork that and ask Claude to slop code the Wayland support? Would I still be a bad person? If the answer was no, what if I made that a commercial, payable extension? Come on, there must be an option to render me an evil capitalist here — since never any LLM was useful to anyone in the whole universe, ever!
Actually, it does not seem to be open source? Has anyone been able to get to the Source Code? Also the license reads funny.
You seem to be right.
From their license
https://talonvoice.com/EULA.txt
This is basically shared source from old Microsoft days
So they removed X11 support and did not add Wayland? So it’s not working at all now? There are no other GUI options. What’s the point of Talon Voice now?
Windows and macOS
So I was curious as to why someone else couldn’t just fork the software and at the very least continue to support X11… and then I went to the website. It’s proprietary, closed source software! 🙁 The only stuff that is source available are some Python scripts to use with the software…
I also got that understanding and the whole thing made me shutter. Seems to be a bad example for many things.
As Talon Voice has been one of the constant examples given that “Wayland does not work”, I am happy to see it go myself. But this is a real problem for those that rely on it.
I am happy to see this article describe the situation honestly at least. When Talon says “Wayland provides no way for us to do what we need”, what they mostly mean is “Wayland does not provide a way for our existing X11 code to work”.
Wayland is more serious about accessibility than X11 was. However, X11 largely did not need an accessibility plan as the lack of security made it possible to build in the hooks required. This is largely what Talon did. But Wayland will not let Talon work in the same way. Wayland expects Talon to code against the APIs that have been created for that purpose. But Talon does not want to.
Talon is not obligated to do the work to properly support Wayland. But, if they choose not to, we should understand that for what it is and not blame Wayland for “not working”.
Hopefully an Open Source alternative emerges to fill the void. It seems like a good project for one of the “sovereignty” initiatives that governments have begun to fund. This is not likely to be Talon’s Bitkeeper moment but they may regret abandoning Linux at some point.
> Hopefully an Open Source alternative emerges to fill the void.
This thing got my interest and after some reading, it looks like Talon sits confident and uncontested in its own niche:
– uses its own Speech engine tuned for recognizing commands
– supports eye-tracking and noise recognition (click sounds)
– supports grammars and command chains
This is the kind of ingenious craft, that you don’t argue about — just use it or don’t.
I can only guess that Talon does not see any benefit of dealing w/ Wayland based on the actual user base and market share.
You are right, the EU could step forward but it would take some serious expertise to put something like this together and there is a big chance that big money will be wasted on achieving nothing.
Theres enough acessibility users that disagree to completely write off concerns and say that Wayland takes it more seriously. Clearly even if the KDE and Gnome devs want to make it more accessible there are so many problems that arent fixed and continue to not be fixed. Matt Campbell who got the Gnome foundation to fund him writing an accessibility framework even says that he didnt get that past the prototype phase due to problems that had cropped up and while he doesnt state what they are its also telling that no one stepped in to help or take over if Matt wasnt able to finish it
So it turns out that moving away from 40 years old protocol X11 to 20 years old protocol Wayland isn’t going according to the plan. One is supposedly a piece of garbage nobody wants to touch any more and another one is, well, a turd. And now we all should repeat on how bad Xorg really is and on how great the future looks with a bunch of fragmented compositors that don’t even support the basics. You used to have some sort of brain, being involved in FOSS, nowadays anything goes and it shows. But don’t worry, AI will sort it out. Rewrite Wayland in Rust.
I think the real tragedy here is that a group of users are relying on a tiny, i suspect single person, company with a closed source product to use their computer efficiently, seemingly filling a niche noone else does. If only it, or at least the integrations outside the core modules, had been open source someone could have helped with the porting. The business model is patreon subscribers, and as far as i can tell, no new release has been made for three years – would make me uneasy if this was super important to me.
I’m not convinced by the whole “X11 is ancient – lets start again”.
Some of the current MS Windows API dates back to the 80’s and still allows cross process access to windows. For example, GetWindowText() can be used to read from Win32 text-based controls in any (non-elevated) process.
Microsoft, for all its faults, does respect backwards compatibility.