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Comment by m45t3r | Hacker News Reader

This is kind the objective I think. Wayland in most cases (Gnome and KDE) is simply an implementation detail, and Gnome and KDE runs in both X11 and Wayland.

The end result is, hopefully, less bugs, more security and more performance, however most people wouldn't care anyway (and I think most people doesn't care, for example Fedora uses Wayland by default).

For us using window managers like i3wm the history is different. However in i3wm I am very close to the X11 so there is almost no abstraction, this is why the transition is more painful.

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Nobody replying to you seems to catch on that i3 is not the only environment other than KDE and Gnome.

i3 users have sway. Good for them. Now what about every other window manager?

It's worse than that... WM's that people care about will be ported/rewritten (I know I will probably do one). But the "wm" now needs to have much more infrastructure functionality which doesn't really need to be different.

A lot of that is abstracted out od Sway, which aiui is supposed to help alleviate that issue: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots

yeah, it's weird, a lot of people seem to think Wayland is some back end that you switch out like you would a SQL database. there were people on this site saying switching would take a weekend.

the xmonad dev for example has stated it's flatly not possible to "refactor" the project to use wayland... which means i'm not using wayland.

Indeed; I've used wmii for around 10 years now, and its developers have openly stated they will never support Wayland.

wmii has not been developed in the last five years, no wonder it's not going to be ported.

I use some other WMs that aren't actively developed anymore either, for longer than 5 years. Some software doesn't need constant rewrites.

They might want to consider revising that decision because X is going away. If they don't, wmii will go away with it.

X has been going away for longer that the careers of most people on this site.

At this point maybe even longer than a substantial chunk has been alive.

Says who? X.org will be supported for at least the next 10 years as part of RHEL 8. Not to mention the possibility that someone other than Red Hat could continue supporting it after that time.

It'll be in "hard maintenance mode" meaning bug/security fixes only. Anything new and interesting in the graphics space will be Wayland only. I also believe they intend to deprecate and then remove Xwayland from the graphics stack, at least in releases newer than some flag day in the near future, as Xorg itself is only being maintained for the sake of legacy applications.

I can't help but think that this X deprecation talk from RH is just some chest beating to rally the troops behind Wayland, same as we used to hear from Ubuntu about Mir.

That's how you get people to use your stuff when they would otherwise dig in their heels because "what I have is fine", "muh Unix philosophy", etc. It worked for systemd.

Excuse me sir or madam. Firstly, X11 even in its heyday was often criticized as not being very Unix-philsophy-ish. But I don't think you make a very sophisticated argument when you mock criticism by imitating flawed speech.

I'll continue to use X because I don't find it very broken. That's a problem for you?

I do however have a problem when open source introduces dependencies on buggy software written by aggressive narcissists, so yeah, I'm in the anti-systemd camp, or, put myself there when it started hanging a bunch of my Debian machines at boot when they made the switch. Pulseaudio was similarly garbage.

"What I have is fine" is a perfectly valid reason not to go changing things, IMO.

Ok, this is all true, but none of it is the same as "X is going away".

Most DEs are either already ported to Wayland (Cinnamon, Enlightment), have a porting in progress or plan to port it eventually.

For WMs, it is more uncommon since they're so coupled with X11 specifics that this makes porting harder. However I don't really think it is a problem, if you want to continue using your WM it is fine, it is not that X11 is going away either way.

It isn't just window managers, there are also applications that are close to X11, and many of these don't even work in XWayland, because they break wayland's security model. For example screen shot and screen sharing apps. And even if the developers took the large amount of work to refactor to work with wayland, there isn't any kind of standard for privileged access in wayland, so they would need to use different protocols to implement the functionality for each compositor.

I realize no one reads TFA, but TFA is very relevant since it's all about i3 and sway...

I don't know why people assumed that I never heard or used Sway (or that I didn't read the article). I did all three, and this is why I am saying that the transition from i3wm to Sway is kind painful (ok, my fault for not citing Sway in my phrase, however I did think it was implicit that I used it).

I have tons of scripts that does specific things and are heavily coupled on how X11 works. I need to port them to Sway first.

I know; I replied to the parent because I couldn't reply to multiple comments about sway at once. Sorry for the confusion

Have you tried sway? It's about as close to a drop-in replacement to i3 as we'll get, I think, and my experience with it has been pretty positive.

https://swaywm.org/

it wasn't exactly a drop-in replacement for me, but with a bit of modification I was overall pretty pleased with it, and subjectively it did feel faster.

Unsure if you've seen it before, but I've been using sway [0] as a Wayland-based replacement for i3. Switching the configs took about 15 minutes (and could probably be replaced by a few sed commands). It's been very nice to use all around--snappy, no major issues even with multiple monitors, etc.

[0]: https://github.com/swaywm/sway

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