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Comment by tdewitt | Hacker News Reader

Wayland is nearly vaporware, gnome 3 is optional, kde plasma is optional, nvidia drivers are optional and have functional FOSS replacements, pulse I'll grant you (and hope you see the irony) and dbus I can't honestly comment on because the little direct interaction I've had with it was fine but mostly I don't think about it. The flaw with your list is that half of it is optional and anyone who doesn't like those things doesn't have to use them. My daily driver is xfce on xorg.

Two of the three components in your list that are mearly mandatory came from the same engineer. Why we do we keep accepting his code?

FWIW, the desktop world is less important and I run Linux as a desktop. The nightmares I get from systemd are all about my servers. If we could have left servers alone, people like me wouldn't even have cared. As it is, I have to get out the kid gloves when I'm dealing with my service platform because Bad Decisions are now system standard.

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Why do you think Wayland is vaporware? The concept, protocol, reference implementations are clear, done, the development of protocol extensions are chugging along nicely, and clients are shedding their legacy layers year-by-year (release-by-release). It was never going to be a quick and dirty hack.

Sure, you can use XWayland and just call it a day, but that doesn't really help.

The reality is that exactly due to the enormous legacy baggage of the "X ecosystem" it's not easy to just switch "to Wayland". GTK, Qt, and (again, due to the required hacks) all major apps (eg. Firefox) have to do serious work (as in finally implement something sane, now that it's an option) to work.

DBus is okay. Though bus1 might be an improvement, and having it in kernel would be a bit more efficient (zero copy, better security, etc).

> Wayland is nearly vaporware

Fedora has been defaulting to Wayland on fresh installs for at least two or three releases and generally it’s working okish. There’s still a lot of software lacking proper wayland support, though.

Does single window screen sharing work yet?

Perhaps it's just me but I haven't found an xorg problem in my life that's fixed in wayland but I've had a few problems in wayland that don't exist in xorg. My display needs are rudimentary though, so perhaps I'm not the target audience.

Putting wayland aside... is exactly what I've done. I don't need wayland, so I don't use it. With systemd, not only do many of us have problems but we don't really have a choice. I could run my world on Slackware but then I'd be a SPOF (much like systemd) and that's a bad way to build architecture.

Haven’t tried screen sharing, but wayland does fix problems. Mixing HiDPI screens and regular screens (think: laptop/desk screen) without having lego-block-sized pixels on at least one of them. Sadly apps without wayland support don’t support that properly yet.

I on the other hand have had good experiences on servers with systems. The services system has most of the basic needs for simple applications in a common way. Compared to init.d where everyone was rolling their own script in absurd ways.

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