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Comment by listennexttime | Hacker News Reader

It's okay, neither does the blog author. Despite their only value-add being a PM-role, they aren't doing a good job of that either.

As evidenced by the fact that they've basically just resorted to doing tons of retrofit to bring benefits that already exist in Wayland to a legacy, deprecated, aging stack. (literally every single change listed). Also, it's no longer just about improving the touchpad (since libinput is already pushing the envelope there), and instead ... X11 Gestures? Okay? (Good luck to those brave enough to install a patched X11 from a PPA!)

I feel sorry for the people who thought there was enough substance to donate. How this project progresses with increasingly less clarity and continues to be celebrated here deeply confuses me.

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Povilas from the linked blog post here.

The reasons why we chose the current path were explained in detail in the blog posts.

Touchpad gestures was the most popular feature to implement. In order to do that we needed a good reason why all the other project maintainers would want to spend time discussing a feature with us. Wayland is the future, yes, but currently a lot of users are still on X which makes our argument much less convincing. Now we can say that touchpad gestures will soon be available everywhere and get their attention this way.

I agree that X is legacy platform. Unfortunately it may still be used for quite some time. Core functionality such as screenshots and input record/replay is not universally available on Wayland. So X will still be used for significant amount of time.

Please tell me what else I could explain to increase the transparency of the project and I'll try my best to do so. Thanks!

> Core functionality such as screenshots and input record/replay is not universally available on Wayland. So X will still be used for significant amount of time.

This is exactly my case. For me it's the difference between earning money or not working: I do some screen sharing with my customers every day. Wayland is not an option for me yet.

Did you actually talk to other project maintainers and get feedback that they would only be interested if it were also available for X before starting down this path?

I haven't asked this question unfortunately. Adding touchpad gestures needs changes in every GUI toolkit library except GTK and every application we would like to support. So I trusted my own experience of seeing the amount of effort needed to contribute an improvement for niche use cases. To make matters worse, an initial OK from a maintainer often does not really mean a lot. What matters is the actual time commitment to discuss design and review patches. Issues that increase the amount of effort needed for long-term maintenance and end-user support tend to decrease maintainer engagement a lot. Wayland-only touchpad gestures splits the user-base long term and thus fits this criteria very well.

At this moment I'm not really sure if I would go the same path had I knew all the information I know now. Having said that, we've only spent around a single man-month of effort working on this. In the grand scheme of things this detour is tiny.

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