this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Wayland development. Tons of folks yelling “X is good enough!” Where they just ignore that no one is actively developing XOrg which is pretty much the biggest X11 implementation.
Plenty maintaining XOrg but new things aren’t coming to XOrg, there’s just no one there the XOrg devs moved to Wayland.
So all these people shouting, they’re telling you keep a piece of software that’s very fragile, in a space that hardware makers are progressing at rapid pace, has decades of hot fixes, duct tape, and cruft, and nobody is actively developing for.
Like I just don’t understand the people yelling that Wayland is raping peoples wives and setting fire to their dogs. The yelling group is screaming for people to use something that nobody wants to work on and nobody is paying enough for people to work on. The code base is horrible and it easily causes burnout in three weeks or less. No one in their right mind is picking it up for shits and giggles.
So if everyone abandons Wayland, what’s the end goal? Keep riding XOrg till hardware outpaces it completely? Like I don’t understand what the Wayland haters are trying to get at. There’s so little going on in XOrg at this point and everyone seems to universally hate the code base. And a rewrite of the base sounds a whole lot like Wayland but artificially adding in X11 restrictions that make no sense since we all aren’t using PDP-11 to run the clients.
I get that Wayland has configurations that don’t work yet. All software has bugs, including X11 implementations. But Wayland is arguably a technology that is more in line with how modern hardware works than the X11 protocol will ever be. And Wayland is designed to be easy for devs to work with, not a cobble of archaic limitations due to a protocol that was designed for 1970s era computers.
That level of hate for Wayland is just this confusing Luddite cry for software that hardware that properly supports it no longer exists. The reason modern video cards do run on X at this point is because of a lot of hacks. I thought everyone understood this when we did the whole AIGLX vs XGL thing.
You're listening to loud asshats and assuming they're the majority. They're not.
One day Wayland will reach a tipping point where it will replace X. Until then, most users will just stick with whatever their distro installs. Most people don't care one way or another.
As for me, I'm probably gonna to stick with X until I have no choice because I actually use the network features that Wayland isn't replacing. That doesn't mean I hate Wayland - I've never used it - it just means it's not the best software for me at this time. Most people never do anything with X that Wayland can't do and won't notice when it becomes the default.
Frankly, the only reason I care is the end-user drawbacks that Wayland seems to have. There are tons of bugs and issues. On top of that, I use Nvidia proprietary drivers which also causes more drawbacks and issues. It feels like at this point a third option needs to be made available. It's been 15 years since Wayland was released and it still has a large amount of bugs and isn't ready for most distros to adopt it.
I've not touched the Wayland or Xorg code, and I've not looked into why Wayland is so broken, but the major issue I see is that it's taken them 15 years to still have a buggy display server. Display servers need to be the most stable you could possibly make them. They need to be made with desktop and fullscreen exclusive apps in mind. They need to be made modern and extendable while also ensuring those extensions aren't able to crash the entire display server. They need to be robust and that's just not what you are going to find with Wayland, or Xorg, or perhaps even Linux in general.
Wayland wasn't the first attempt at replacing X. It has made more traction than any other attempt, though. There's no real hurry - it's not like X eats your babies and runs over your dog.
As far as robustness goes, that's mostly the driver. I've yet to see a bulletproof display system, commercial or non-commercial. If you cut out driver issues, X is on par with or more stable than other systems. It had better be, given that it's had decades of bug fixes with few new features to cause new bugs.
Feels like this is entirely just blaming the driver which isn't the cause of 99% of Wayland issues. I know obs, another open sourced project, has caused a lot of issues with Wayland. It's not driver related.
As for xorg not being a problem, in the same regard why even bother with a display server at all. The point isn't that's it's bad it's that there are better ways of doing things.
I wasn't clear. I meant that the issues with X crashing were usually driver issues. I have no idea about Wayland - I don't use it since it doesn't do what I want by design.
X does the job well enough to be invisible to most people. Yes, we need a clean start in order to move forward efficiently (lots of assumptions about computer displays from the 80s no longer apply), but it's good enough for most people's needs.
Why bother with a display server? Some people - like myself - actually use that functionality. It's not part of the design for Wayland. Personally, I think that's a mistake - especially as things become more cloud-based - but I'm obviously in the minority.