this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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You know you can run XWayland and have clients connect via network?
There's still some development going on in Xorg and it's pretty much all XWayland, it's going to stay alive as a compatibility layer for the forseeable future and beyond. And as a network layer until someone thinks of something better (no, sending video isn't better, the strength of X as a network protocol is that it doesn't need much bandwidth). It's the hardware interface stuff, actually throwing pixels on screen, that's thoroughly dead.
That's cool and all, but why would I want to? Display systems are invisible when they work right, and X has worked right for me (save for some pre-EDID config issues) since the 90s. I run a program, it pops up on my screen and I interact with it. That's all I ask of it.
None of the issues I've had with X (drivers, mostly) will be resolved with Wayland. For me, it's a solution in search of a problem. The only reason I have even a passing interest is that it's (theoretically) easier to maintain and change as computing changes.
I'll move to Wayland when I have to, but right now there's no reason to not use X.
You're welcome to continue to develop and maintain X, wrapping even more duct tape around all that duct tape, noone is stopping you. Or, alternatively, you simply never had a look at the X source code -- I cannot fathom a developer who would be masochistic enough to actually maintain that codebase. It was unsalvageable when the devs started to abandon it for Wayland, fifteen years ago, it's not any more salvageable now.
And if you want to "Fix X" -- that, precisely, is wayland: X is a buggy mess of fundamentally insecure software, developed before "buffer overflow" was a thing people acknowledged as security issue. It's software from the age of
strlen. It cannot be fixed while keeping it compatible and if you have used X "since the 90s" you know very well how much of a shitshow it is, and it does not just "pop things up on your screen and lets you interact with them". Random thing: In wayland, programs can't focus fight.Yes, there is: Making the transition faster. All this griping people are doing right now and during the last what five years could've been avoided if DEs, window managers, toolkits, etc, had actually paid attention to what the X devs were doing. All those screen sharing and global shortcut protocols could have been ready ten years ago.
Why do I care about the state of the code? It works. Perhaps all these people complaining are really just sick of your proselytization.
To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, "You only get one life. You can pick up five causes on any street corner."