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Comment by shinjitsu | Hacker News Reader

Wayland has struck me for years as being the new IPv6, the tech that the deep technical people tell me needs to come and replace the old thing that "doesn't work any more" and yet never quite takes over.

maybe the year of critical mass switchover will be soon?

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Every major distribution has been using Wayland by default with GNOME desktops for years. KDE is finally reaching a state where Wayland can be the default presently, though it took a little longer.

Other desktops are either lagging way behind or are essentially unmaintained and not trying to upgrade.

This is more like Python 2 vs Python 3... Wayland will win because "new is better" to the mob. After it takes over, it'll be worse performance for 4-5 major releases, and you'll never get back all the features.

All the old apps will hobble along with a compatibility layer, because for some reason it's better to remove all the clutter from X11 to write a new clean Wayland, and then re-introduce all the X11 clutter into a shim so that old apps can run.

It really is better though. Keeps old apps working. Allows new apps to target the superior system directly.

Don't kid yourself about "superior" - only Wayland developers and fanboys care about the simplicity or cleanliness of Wayland's implementation. Wayland's killer feature for an app developer is "vertical sync"? The majority of new apps will just use a web interface or stick to X11 because it runs on the old Xorg and the new Wayland shim.

As a user and programmer, I care about the implementation of the software I use. I might want to hack on it someday.

I mean, insert any "year of linux on the desktop joke here"

In terms of usage numbers, X is very, very dead. Android uses something that looks a lot more like Wayland than X (or arguably Wayland looks a lot more like Android's SurfaceFlinger than X, but whatever), and ChromeOS is Wayland as well. I'm pretty sure Steam Deck is also Wayland.

steam deck is indeed wayland with their own compositor called gamescope[1] for low-latency gaming (they target the fewest buffer copies as possible). Another nice side-effect it has is hdr support on AMD GPUs.

1: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

> In terms of usage numbers, X is very, very dead

Thats wishful thinking. Citation needed.

Citation was in my post if you read it more carefully. Android+ChromeOS is easily the 90%+ of the "Linux" market that cares about having a GUI, and even omitting Android then ChromeOS is still more market share than desktop linux is ( https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide )

How that is supposed to prove your point? You could argue using similar numbers that GNU coreutils is dead.

My company is doing commercial linux and i spent most of my worktime today debugging some XRDP related issue. Everything still Xorg. No idea what you are talking of.

Personally, I'm holding out until I can restart GNOME without logging out/losing my running applications. Previously, there were issues with it and nvidia drivers, but I think that's fixed now.

I'm running it by default on a laptop, and other than it being tricky to set global keyboard shortcuts, it works perfectly fine.

Major graphical distributions are now using wayland by default. So the time has indeed come.

To switch I just need to know one thing: what is the i3 of Wayland? Tiling window managers changed the way I use my computer forever and I can't go back to anything else.

Sway I believe is the one I see most recommended when coming feom i3

Sway or hyprland

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