Comment by longrod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by longrod | Hacker News Reader

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Just use Xorg if you want 1:1 compatibility. For Wayland to be 1:1 compatible it'd have to bend over backwards and do some ninja turtles kind of moves to create a mess nobody wants. The whole point is to be better and better is mostly always incompatible. Although Wayland isn't completely incompatible either but that difference doesn't matter.

However...

I am still shocked at the wonder Linux Desktop is. The world has entered into VR/AR, AI, and completely stupifying marvels of engineering but we still haven't gotten the Linux Desktop right. It's a downright fragmented mess. And if that wasn't enough, we had to build another windowing server! Now there's more fragmentation and apps that barely got the funding to work on X or get ported there will never see daylight on Wayland. Yay! Hurrah! We did it! Not to be so condescending but it's truly terrifying how horribly amateurish Linux Desktop is when the underlying system is so amazing.

It's almost like JavaScript developers got together and decided to build the desktop part of Linux. Every week they deprecated/overhauled/threw away last weeks changes and started a new in the name of engineering. The result? Nothing ever works predictably on anything. You open one app in X and the same app on Wayland...and there's no surety it'll work the same way on both. Now open the same app on Gnome and KDE (although that difference has slowly been fixed so it's now much better).

A lot of things don't work in Linux as they are supposed to. You have to tinker the guts out of them sometimes. Sometimes you may even have to recompile. Props to the way Linux is designed that makes all this possible and not locked down but..man it gets annoying sometimes.

I hope one day we'll have some solidity and stability in Linux with everyone building upon an agreed set of foundations so we can actually move forward instead of rebuilding the same wall over and over again.

I don't think the linux community replaces things on an unreasonable frequency. Apple and Google both swap out things that require breaking changes all the time. The only difference is their OSs has mass adoption and developers just have to do whatever it takes. While linux is largely an after thought.

What is the alternative? Leave linux distros on broken, substandard tech? Sometimes you do just have to break things to make progres. Fedora turned on CGroupsv2 despite Docker not supporting it after years. Very shortly after turning it on and breaking docker, docker updated to support it. It likely never would if no one made the first move to just break things if reasonable time has been given and still no movement occurs.

You are right but mind that you also can't compete on Google's scale. Linux Desktop is mostly volunteer work which means the risk of breaking the same things is higher because a) it'll take much longer to build something better b) you'll run out of resources/motivation c) you'll get distracted d) you won't be able to test it as rigorously.

I don't think it was a bad decision to go the Wayland way at all. But it accumulates because Linux is so fragmented. There's multiple distros, each with their own toolkits, own package managers, own cores etc. And then someone comes along and fragments it at an ever lower level by proposing Wayland. I am sure it fixed a bunch of core issues but look at the cost it will incur:

1. All GUI toolkits will have to support Wayland across the board. Some stuff will break, some stuff will have to be abandoned.

2. After that they'll have to maintain both because it'll take at least a decade or two for everyone to reasonably migrate.

3. The app developers will have to upgrade to this new version of the toolkit. Which they might not be able to do because the changes are too many and too big.

4. The toolkits might even have to backport the Wayland related stuff a few versions. Which would require insane amount of resources.

Is the end result worth it? I bet for a long while we'll be having a way poorer experience due to Wayland. The worst case would be developers ditching X too early when Wayland isn't properly stable. Oh man, it's a recipe for disaster.

Just because they get away with it doesn't mean it's good. Windows and Microsoft thankfully have not given into CADT.

Windows is the only OS I can’t stand using. It’s incredible to me that such a large company puts out an OS that feels broken and old. It’s like a patchwork of old crap from the 90 and stuff just plain not up to modern expectations. As a user I’m happy to use platforms that put the best future ahead of the smoothest now for developers.

> And if that wasn't enough, we had to build another windowing server

Strictly speaking, Wayland is just the protocol. Pedantry aside, X11 is from 1987, whereas Apple totally redid their display server in 2001 with OS X, and Microsoft in 2006 with Vista. Wayland brings the Linux desktop kicking and screaming into the 21st century. But bazzar development will always be very different than cathedral development, so inevitably Wayland has its problems and rough edges. X11 being longer in the tooth doesn’t help.

True but OSX & Microsoft didn't have to deal with the massive amount of fragmentation that exists in Linux. Moving to a better standard is no issue but when everyone is building their own ship at their own cost & labour, it's not such a great idea.

Soon enough all the Linux forums will be filled with workarounds to get X or Y or Z app to work on Wayland or X or something else. The result? Nothing will work as expected for a long time (until everyone has forgotten X).

> It's almost like JavaScript developers got together and decided to build the desktop part of Linux.

This part has been true for years actually. Gnome Shell UI and various other gnome apps are written in javascript now using gjs[1].

[1] https://gjs.guide/

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