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Comment by microtherion | Hacker News Reader

X is certainly overdue for replacement, and I can easily believe that the price it paid for high cross platform portability has exceeded the benefits.

However, relying as much on Linux specific features as the article describes strikes me as a step too far in the other direction. Are the benefits from these kernel specific features really awesome enough to outweigh the benefits of being portable to at least, say, the *BSDs, and maybe Mac OS X and Solaris?

Linux does not have a huge desktop presence. It has, of course, a huge cell phone presence, but Android does not seem likely to adopt a new window system.

[Disclaimer: I work for a non-Linux Unix vendor]

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It sounds to me like they wouldn't be against accepting patches that makes Wayland work on other platforms, just that they aren't going to do that work themselves. At least that's what I get from this quote,

> It's certainly possible to port Wayland to other operating systems, but they'll have to provide the same level of infrastructure as Linux does.

> It sounds to me like they wouldn't be against accepting patches that makes Wayland work on other platforms, just that they aren't going to do that work themselves. At least that's what I get from this quote,

As far as I can tell, they are not willing to add abstraction layers to accommodate other operating systems. (Or even GFX drivers that don't implement the KMS interface). If you wanted to port Wayland to BSD or OSX, you'd effectively have to implement most of the modern Linux graphics stack on them.

The way I read it is that they want other operating systems to adopt the same infrastructure, e.g. kernel mode setting, instead of implementing an abstraction layer in Wayland itself.

Isn't it part of Wayland's philosophy to get rid of as many abstraction layers as possible? X has too many of those.

But I guess they'll be forced to add some layers sooner or later. Having too few of those can be just as bad as having too many.

> But I guess they'll be forced to add some layers sooner or later. Having too few of those can be just as bad as having too many.

The main thesis of Wayland is that they won't add abstraction layers. If you want to support the Wayland protocol on another os without Linux facilities, or if there is new hardware or changes in the drivers that don't fit the Wayland model, Wayland will not expand to those needs, but instead a new display server should be built to serve them.

Small projects to specifically fit the needs of the users, instead of one large one that expands to serve all badly.

> Small projects to specifically fit the needs of the users, instead of one large one that expands to serve all badly.

For something at the bottom doesn't the opposite principal apply(not fully/all bad but to a certain extent)? Isn't this why linux is popular for so many embedded device instead of some proprietary embeded os for instance.

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