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Comment by progman | Hacker News Reader

The wayland project exposes what marvelous piece of software X11 really is since Wayland is still not able to compete, otherwise the whole Linux community would use it already.

I respect the intention and efforts of the Wayland community to make things better. However, I wished the community would have focused on making X11 better (easier to maintain with modularity etc.) instead of following the mainstream which is focused on eye candy and other sensual features to attract customers.

The unfortunate developments of KDE3/4, Gnome2/3 and Win7/8 exposed that boring usable functionality is much more important than exciting sensual functionality.

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> I respect the intention and efforts of the Wayland community to make things better.

My understanding is that Wayland was started by a few core developers of Xorg who just couldn't stand maintaining Xorg anymore.

It is, including the author of this post. Unlike other controversial things like systemd or pulseaudio, Wayland was started by major Xorg contributors. I've watched some of their talks and can see why they went down this route.

I've tired Wayland a few times and whenever I do, I give it an honest shot for a few weeks, but tend to run into issues (Sway being pretty buggy or oddities with old X apps or Steam, etc.) I've heard Sway has gotten a lot better and I should really try it out again; probably the next time I setup a laptop.

I do wonder what plans FreeBSD and OpenBSD have for the future. Currently they main their own Xorg trees, but I wonder if we'll ever see Wayland implemented on other platforms.

I used Sway during the 0.14 cycle and ran into some issues e.g. with pointer warping in X-based games, so I decided to wait until 1.x. I just switched to Sway again, with 1.1.2 AFAIR, and mostly everything is working smoothly for me this time around, including Minecraft. :)

Things that don't work for me:

- mirroring (i.e. two displays showing the same windows at once), but AFAIK this is being worked on

- KDE Connect (not Sway's fault, but not having this working really hurts sometimes and might just make me go back to Plasma)

> Win7/8

Windows 8 was a major improvement saddled with an untested UI that someone was using to make their political mark. The internals of Windows 8 and Windows 10 are a major, major step forward from 7.

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