Hacker News Reader

Comment by _jal | Hacker News Reader

I find it personally a bit hilarious - Wayland has been Going To Be Great Soon for over a decade.

I've never even had a reason to want to run it.

But I'm sure it'll be great, any day now.

I find Wayland is great already for my usage, and has been for the last two years. If Xorg works for you and Wayland doesn't, that's perfectly fine too.

Don't get me wrong - I would love to not deal with certain X warts. (I see substantially fewer warts than other people do, but that's just me.)

It just seems Wayland's combination of technical requirements and political entanglements make it a sort of Zeno's Project, doomed to asymptotically approach peoples' expectations and desires, but never reach them.

>I find it personally a bit hilarious - Wayland has been Going To Be Great Soon for over a decade.

So? The same has been the case for desktop Linux in general, for 2 decades.

> So? The same has been the case for desktop Linux in general, for 2 decades.

Some of us have been running Linux desktops for over two decades. Nothing more fun than setting Modelines manually for your VESA card:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86_Modeline

My Gentoo/Xfce multiple monitors with Nvidia has been great for at least 10 years.

Linux Desktop is Great. Wayland is still in the process of becoming great (I think it's making good progress too)

Linux desktop has been perfectly fine for at least 1.5 of those decades.

Desktop linux actually worked pretty well in 2003 for my purposes. I started on Fedora Core 1. I burned a dvd hit the magic key to select a boot target booted it up told the installer what time zone I was in and what disks it could use and such details and rebooted after a while.

Wine sucked and there was less software existed but it was perfectly possible to do the normal tasks one did with a computer.

Back on my IBM 386/75MHz (yes, really), linux could only boot at 25MHz, yet its desktop environment was faster, prettier and more featureful than Windows @75MHz

Edit: I guess it was a 486 in a 386 motherboard. Windows was definitely slower at 75MHz than Linux at 25MHz though:

http://ps-2.kev009.com/sandy55/Interposer/386_upgrade.html#R...

From what I gather its a chicken and egg issue. Wayland would get more attention and development if it had more users. It would have more users if it had more feature development. Although a lot of the bigger gaps are closed or closing now. OBS now works on Wayland as of 03/30/2021 and Fedora plans to ship Wayland as the default.

Fedora Workstation (i.e. GNOME) has already been shipping with Wayland by default. What's new is that Fedora KDE is also going to ship with Wayland by default.

Reference: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/WaylandByDefaultForPl...

Maybe actually trying it and adding something to the discussion would be better?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com