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Comment by margalabargala | Hacker News Reader

Presumably the designers of Wayland do not think that this philosophy and those abstractions are so fundamentally flawed.

Could you explain why these concepts are so flawed, for those of us to whom it is not immediately obvious?

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For some applications you want "every frame is recent" and can tolerate some glitches as trade off for not having perfect frames. Also displays have different pitch values, subpixel arrangements, color spaces, etc. A line from A to B might look completely different on different monitors. By offering only RGB arrays as abstraction Wayland pushes the the need for care of those differences down to clients which is a mistake.

Additionally a Desktop system in general is much more than a bunch of bitmaps blittet together. Applications need to interact and such functionality has to be tightly integrated into the compositor with standardized protocols otherwise it will be impossible to have such functionality. Taking screenshots, drawing to the root window or knowing about coordinates of windows from other programs are some examples.

> For some applications you want "every frame is recent" and can tolerate some glitches as trade off for not having perfect frames

Oh and what gives, wayland just has an extension for this use case!

HDR is work in progress, there is nothing unchangeable in Wayland that would disallow different buffer types.

It tried to come up with issues (out of gamut colors? other optical properties than opacity - turn a portion of the screen into a mirror? not correctly modelling color filter arrays?). Best I could come up with was that it's not VR-ready. Which might be an issue in 15+ years.

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