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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

The largest issue with Wayland is it has "Linuxisms". That means no work was done by the Wayland people to make it portable to other UN*X. So the BSD folks (and other UNIX people) have a lot of work to get it going.

And there still seems to be confusion if or will Wayland require systemd, from what I have seen, no 100% clear direction from anyone.

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Linux just adopting something BSD did - "look at them, we were there YEARS before them"

Linux just doing their thing - why you don't include us ?

This used to be true, but not anymore. We have upstream support for FreeBSD in libwayland now. Other BSDs have MRs which are only waiting for CI support.

Wayland itself has nothing to do with systemd, many users are running Wayland without systemd.

Yes I can confirm that Wayland runs fine without systemd!

I am on Gentoo and using openrc and sway runs fine. The only thing that might kind of rely on systemd is sway-idle which wants logind (or to run as root iirc).

I know you know this, being the sway and wlroots maintainer and all but I figured I would show a concrete example of this working fine.

FWIW, swayidle only has an optional dependency on logind. It can be built without. In fact, we're even discussing removing the logind-related features from swayidle. (swayidle never required running as root though.)

Whoops! The Gentoo use flag on swayidle says

    elogind : Enable support for rootless session via elogind

I think this is just a generic description shared between all packages with this flag though!

Maybe I can suggest that this be fixed to reduce confusion.

Yes Wayland runs on FreeBSD but KDE still doesn't start with it unfortunately

I mean, is it really wrong for linux people to focus on linux? What's the point of these different OS's if they all support the same software and software has to be made for lowest common denominator?

Not wrong, but if further chips away some pieces of the common open-source Unix ecosystem.

Few people run *BSD on desktops though (if you don't count all the macOS folks, but they don't care about Wayland anyway).

Since 99% of users are on Linux anyway, that can't be the largest issue.

What a typical Linux user mindset! That IS one of the largest issues for non-Linux users. Linux is by large margin a niche OS in desktop market share. So it is no issue if all programs are developed only for Windows and/or Macintosh. Right?

I admit that appealing to capitalism isn't likely to advance the Unix desktop but the "we're all in this together" excessive portability attitude didn't produce good software either.

...what would wayland on windows even do ? Windows already does what wayland does, it would be entirely unnecesary layer

And windows / mac are now minor players compared to android / IOS, and everything is a minor players vs web pages.

Relevant:

Aquarela do Linux!

> https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#52

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