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Comment by Asooka | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, surely if we break the entire world again, this year will be the year of the Linux desktop.

The Linux desktop experience is a bit like watching an alcoholic. You try to explain that drinking is making them sick and they should stop, but they just get violent and drink even more.

I think the success of Windows should be proof enough that you can keep compatibility for very old APIs and that it's required for an OS that is to be a platform for other people to build software on, as opposed to a walled garden (Apple) where you sometimes let people build part of it.

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The maintainers of X decided they didn't want to keep maintaining X since it has too much baggage. So they designed/implemented a replacement, Wayland, and have given notice that development on X is going to come to a halt. Unless a different group of maintainers steps forward, but that seems unlikely. So like always, open source is a do-acracy. The people doing the doing, get to make the decisions.

Regardless of "Year of the Linux Desktop" what these maintainers are trying to do in general is minimize their time involvement while making the desktop have the features and support (like for 4K monitors) that people want. Secondly, "the Linux Desktop" isn't a single organization like a commercial entity is. Its a bunch of different groups that all have their own priorities and schedules and use cases and so on. Expecting that process to produce output that is functionally identical to a single commercial entity, is unrealistic.

> The maintainers of X decided they didn't want to keep maintaining X since it has too much baggage. So they designed/implemented a replacement, Wayland...

> ...what these maintainers are trying to do in general is ... making the desktop have the features and support (like for 4K monitors) that people want.

Was there something about X that was incompatible with 4k monitors?

No. Even if there was something, Xorg is open source and can be made to work with anything, it isn't like code is set in stone.

But it kind of is, if the code is so ancient, crufty, and confusing that people don't want to maintain it, which is the case with the X code and a big reason for Wayland in the first place: Wayland was started by X maintainers for the purpose of not having to maintain X. Which they still have to do with Xwayland, but even that will stop as Xwayland was only ever supposed to be a stopgap for legacy applications.

> that *SOME* people don't want to maintain it

FTFY. There are people who want to keep using X and the only solution to that is to maintain it as code wont be maintained by itself. The entire point of open source/free software is that if anyone wants to fix/implement something they're free to do so, so for as long as someone wants to keep using X and has the necessary know-how (or the time and will to learn), X will be around.

> Was there something about X that was incompatible with 4k monitors?

The window scaling situation in X is shitty, and basically unsolvable in the framework of X. Wayland solves this problem.

> The window scaling situation in X is shitty, and basically unsolvable in the framework of X. Wayland solves this problem.

By that, do you mean it makes DPI assumptions that you'd want to break with a higher-resolution display?

I mean it's a royal bitch to get different DPI on a screen by screen basis, and impossible to do so in a standardized, consistent way on a window by window basis.

The problem with the state-of-the-art X11 is it (Xinerama or RandR) implements multi-monitor as a single logical monitor with each output stitched together. Getting multiple DPIs on each monitor is effectively impossible because you only actually have the one logical screen.

I believe it's possible with the older X multihead method, Zaphod mode, to have fully separate X11 screens, which could have different DPIs on each screen. The problem is there's no way to move windows from one screen to the next, and my understanding is that is an architectural limitation of X.

A counter argument, make and tabs because 20 users should not have to redo their makefiles once

It's estimated that more than 6000 people are working on Windows full time.

I don't think that Linux (kernel + DE) has half of that manpower.

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