Hacker News Reader

Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

> Wayland happened mainly because they could get to 90% of Xorg functionality easily

We're at 12 years of Wayland and counting and the thing still isn't really usable outside a very narrow use-case. I still run X11 myself and will for a long time. As far as I'm concerned, Wayland has set free software windowing back by a decade. After all this time, Wayland still isn't at parity with X11 even for use cases that Wayland intends to support --- and some things that X11 can do are non-goals for Wayland and will never be supported. What exactly is so compelling in Wayland that it was worth putting progress on hold since 2008?

Yeah, yeah, I get that Wayland has a nice buffer-based composition system. So what? Whatever Wayland does, it could have done over an X11 extension.

View on HN

Wayland was the default in Ubuntu 17 and is still the default in Fedora. I like it because dealing with multiple displays and tearing under X annoys me more than dealing with screen capture under Wayland. “Not really usable outside a very narrow use-case” overstates the problem.

While I totally agree with you in a desktop-like scenario, please note that X is totally inadequate and bloated for other domains (e.g. automotive).

As the other poster mentioned, X11 used to run on really old resource-constrained systems. Nothing about it precludes using it for embedded automotive applications. A tiny MCU could manage it. The MCUs used for current automotive stuff are powerful enough to run Linux with Vulkan for crying out loud.

Though I think for many of these embedded applications both X11 and Wayland are overkill when EGL direct works just fine. A full windowing system is massive overkill.

Why? X originally ran on machines far less powerful than even the shittiest automotive head units around today.

Because the problem isn't with X, it's that all the toolkits people want to use were written basically to use X as a glorified framebuffer. Wayland is a reorienting of the underlying stack to accomodate this. You could absolutely make an automotive stack with something like X and Motif, but nobody in the industry really wants to use those tools.

Nokia n900 had a touch screen smartphone UI based on gtk with X, with a 600mhz arm core and 256mb ram. I had one. It was pretty good.

I turned my N810 on recently and played a bit, so I can compare it directly to modern devices. "Pretty good" is a big understatement.

Most embedded graphical Linux applications don't use X (X Windows System), instead they use framebuffer directly or any library such as Qt Widgets or QtQuick/Qml that draws on top of the framebuffer device file. So, there is no need for developing a new Window system that can work on both Desktop or embedded systems.

Back in the day, I used to run XFree86 on a Pentium 150 with 64MB of RAM and an S3 Virge graphics card.

Don't tell me that X is bloated.

I ran it on a 386/25MHz, 8MB of RAM. It was much faster than Windows on the same machine.

Enlightenment was fast on that machine. The desktop switcher in the panel had old-school desk lamps pointing at the active desktop.

I miss that theme, and I can’t find any screenshots.

Before that, 8 MB was iffy, 16 MB good in the early Linux days.

Making life easier for Ford sounds like a low priority goal.

> We're at 12 years of Wayland and counting and the thing still isn't really usable outside a very narrow use-case.

Must be a wide narrow you're talking about. I've been using it as my default session across two different distros and the only problem I can recall having was strange mouse-grabbing behavior in Firefox, and I don't even think that was Wayland's fault.

I also still use Xorg and can't really think of a scenario where I'd switch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com