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Comment by imiric | Hacker News Reader

X11 today works better for more users than Wayland. No user will want to switch to something that provides a worse experience.

Until these issues are ironed out, it's delusional to think that making Wayland the default will make users happy. Keep it as an experimental feature, and once it provides an objectively better experience for everyone, make it the default.

These technical discussions by folks in the trenches often miss the forest for the trees. Users don't care that X11 is difficult to support, develop and maintain. They just want a working system. By the looks of it from this GH issue, Wayland is also a pain for developers. What a sad state of affairs for Linux.

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I guess I'm just hoping for some user that will be bugged enough by problems in Wayland that they decide to fix them. The chance of that increases with user count.

I understand that the bulk "forest" of Linux users don't care about their window manager / desktop environment, but it's a higher number than in other operating systems. This approach wouldn't work in Windows or MacOS, in Linux it might.

Why learn about wayland and figure out how to fix things (and then probably have gnome developers never ever accept your fix) when you can just switch to Xorg in 3 seconds?

There are good reasons to switch to Wayland. Features, security Standards and it being in active development are some of them.

Of course no one has to use / switch to anything, but reaching a critical mass of users would be helpful in the long term.

You CAN use multiple sub-instances of Xorg for security… Nobody does it but firejail supports it.

Because nobody maintains Xorg anymore. Wayland was started because the Xorg developers thought Xorg had come to the end of the road and was unfixable. You can think of Wayland as X12, except without copyright/trademark concerns.

> Because nobody maintains Xorg anymore

Latest release in June… https://www.x.org/wiki/Releases/

Doesn't seem extremely abandoned.

Sure, X11 "better", as long as you don't have high or mixed DPI screens, appreciate variable refresh rates, arbitrary scale factors, don't mind inconsistent tearing, aren't bothered by using a openly unmaintained, abandoned critical piece of desktop infra, etc.

Otoh, if you're willing to buy a GPU from a vendor that doesn't snub Linux, or maybe god forbid change screenshot programs (doubt you even need to nowadays), you get plenty of benefits with Wayland.

Edit: athe kind of person that downvotes comments like this are some of the least respectable, laughable, on the planet. Shove your fingers in your ears harder and make that tantrum louder. I'm sure it will convince X11 devs to abandon Wayland and return to the project they declared on life support, yup. That's how these things work.

I have never seen tearing on Xorg.

I know in theory it might happen… but it's a non-issue since it doesn't happen.

You’re a very lucky guy. I have seen it in pretty much every X system I’ve used.

> Sure, X11 "better", as long as you don't have high or mixed DPI screens, appreciate variable refresh rates ...

Tell that to the PCSX2 users who experience issues on Wayland, but not on Xorg.

This is what I mean by missing the forest for the trees. There's no doubt that Wayland is technically superior to Xorg in many ways. But technical superiority means squat if applications are misbehaving and crashing. While developers are arguing about who should be in charge of window placement (FFS, how is _this_ still a discussion after *15 years*!?), the only thing users get is a poor experience.

> Shove your fingers in your ears harder and make that tantrum louder.

I didn't downvote you, but maybe you should follow your own advice and realize that Wayland does not work great for everyone. Your type of dismissals are the equivalent of "works on my machine".

The “oh, just don’t buy a GPU from NVidia” point is one I see made a lot when discussing Wayland’s failures, but it completely misses the fact that CUDA is currently the only viable option for GPU compute in many situations. If any significant part of your desktop usage involves such compute, that’s not a solution - or rather it’s a solution that renders your system less capable than it was before.

Though in a sense that’s consistent with Wayland’s general “you’re holding it wrong” approach of shifting blame for any problems onto the person reporting them and concluding that anything that doesn’t work well isn’t a valid use-case anyway.

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