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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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