[dodomodo]

[flagged]

[dang]

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[dodomodo]

I was wrong to word myself the way I did, but my comment is simple not shallow, what I'm trying to say is that the amount of work done is not worth the architectural advantages of Wayland. It's a simple argument that people in the replies didn't fail to understand, but did fail to have a good response too. My real violation of the guidelines is this in my opinion: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."

[temp0826]

Wayland has been around for 15+ years now and I've been using it daily for probably 10. At this point I have to assume comments like this are unserious.

[hodgehog11]

Good for you. Meanwhile, many other people have been encountering _serious_ issues for much of those 10 years. This is well documented. Downplaying the issues of other users is a great way to make people dislike the product.

[gen2brain]

Protocol, maybe, and there was no "Wayland"; there was Gnome and KDE. I was only recently able to try Labwc with LxQt, and I occasionally try to see if there are some improvements because it is not usable currently. The biggest issue is that every implementation is different; there is not even a shared common library. If Xorg developers are now working exclusively on Wayland, when are they going to start programming?

[dodomodo]

You have to understand that I don't really care about the internals of my DE. The same of true for 95% of Linux users and 99.999% of general computer users, so when I see a huge amount of effort goes into basically seemingly pointless refactoring, instead of tackling issues that are actually important to users, it is disappointing to me. I just installed KDE Manjaro and guess what? It stills uses X, and no one has an answer to what benefit Wayland has for me.

[blurbleblurble]

It's probably a distro thing. I'm on a rolling release distro (arch) and I've been using wayland on arch and it's worked great. There are still some things I struggle with, but for ~7 years I've been using wayland without major issue. Things iron themselves out pretty quickly these days when you're using a rolling release distro. This is not so for popos/ubuntu/debian etc.

[yyyk]

X withering away was inevitable once you consider the 'economic' situation - very few people worked on it once the commercial Unix vendors went down. There was little practical enthusiasm for a common layer. Even before Wayland, its role was reduced more and more. Wayland is natural evolution of this where most of the work is offloaded to more resourced Desktop environments and the org mostly sets standards.

[slackfan]

X wasn't withering away, it was pointedly being poisoned.

[o11c]

And X11 is all the better now that fewer people are working on it. I don't need new features in my windowing system, I just need it to stay out of my way.

[fruitworks]

At some point of development, the only way to progress without spiraling complexity is to break backwards compatibility. You might be interested in studying the internals of X11 and wayland to learn more.

In a commercial project like windows, this sort of project is a total no-go. However in a collaborative community project like linux userspace, developers have more freedom to make design decisions in spite of short-term consequences.

>The people that develop Linux desktop are deeply unserio

The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.

-Frank Herbert

Don't take yourself too seriously, it might ruin you!

[vlovich123]

In a commercial project like Windows this has been done many times - both Windows and MacOS switched to compositing window managers and have done deep surgery under the hood you never see. The difference is that internals can be mandated top down whereas in a bazaar model with lots of casual non interested observers throwing pot shots and no budget to support the work, relying on largely volunteer time, it’s much harder and takes longer to accomplish.

[asveikau]

People do large rewrites that subtly break expectations and need to slowly add back features to get parity with the old thing at Microsoft all the time. Source: I worked there at the end of the 2000s.

Sometimes it's very visible, like they are pushing a new UI framework. Other times it's under the hood, like they changed how a lot of GDI works.

[dodomodo]

You got it backwards, once you have users, they are your "greatness", if you go to the path of self gratification, are are betraying your users. Of course some times sacrifices have to be made, but you have to understand the graveness of them. I don't like the current state of Windows, but Microsoft won't ever break such a huge portion of applications that run of Windows just for the sake of some refactoring.

[ongy]

The core devs were all paid to work on it when I was still active.

Not sure how many of the gnome (mutter) people are paid. Last I checked, the nvidia support was donated by nvidia (paid) for both KDE and Gnome.

I think KDE got some work sponsored by valve (before gamescope), though I'm not quite sure on that.

Overall, outside the sway/wlroots group I was a part of at the time, people generally worked adjacent or directly on wayland for day jobs.