Some might not see how much work it was to maintain xorg server

Enjoy

What he said was, a couple of weeks of QA, per stack, per hardware enablement.

Given that new hardware is constantly being released every couple of months, that adds up to a lot of QA. And as they said in a followup, that's "a couple of weeks" for a team of people and not just one or two.

So yeah, "two (additional) weeks of QA" wouldn't be that bad, but really it's more like "two (additional) weeks of QA, multiple times a year, for a team of multiple people". And that's not insubstantial given the meager revenue opportunities in the desktop linux market.

The tl;dr is that the comment on one engineer's tasks and the QA that one of the chores takes weren't intended to communicate that the team was 1 person big (or, presumably, that there's only one QA chore).

FWIW, my read of the wording around QA was that when a each new hardware platform is enabled, it takes 2 weeks for the whole team to work through their test cases. I assume, though I don't know, there's a lot of other QA done, such as when a new feature is added or something.

Creating Wayland made it possible to do some very radical changes. When rewriting software you are much more careful to not break anything.

Apart from that the discussion is pretty much settled. Most distros and major desktop environments have commited to wayland. You'd have to have a very compelling argument to move things back to Xorg.

The big difference really comes down too that X was designed to connect applications, input devices, and displays (including printers!!) across a network in a time when the concept of a untrusted network didn't really exist. Neither was there a concept of a GPU as they exist now.

Conversely Wayland was designed to connect those items (sans printers) within a computer and to default to providing the minimum amount of trust to those things, particularly applications.

1) The nature of the hardware changed completely. The core X protocol [0] was designed around 2D shapes and is prepared to do things like FillPoly or PutImage. This means it was largely caught unaware by the move to shader-based graphics and the absurd amount of processing power we have todaty in graphics cards. Wayland from what I understand just manages buffers which is better design. Things like OpenGL were tacked on to X as an extension, and now pretty much everything wants to be handled through OpenGal, but the X design wasn't prepared for that.

2) That would have been enough to kill X from what I've seen, but ... the major vendors had horrible binary drivers that only supported X, so every fork or new project died. The big change was AMD buying ATI and taking the drivers open source from 2007, since then there have been the sound of plate tectonics as the Linux graphic stack has reformed because now it is possible to develop deep in the graphics stack independently of AMD/Nvidia support. Note that if Wayland needed to work well on Nvidia it would have likely died a decade ago.

So the positive things are Wayland probably won't be hit by the same level of hardware change, and if it is it is much easier to replace. Really what has changed is that the majority of vendors have open source drivers, and Nvidia is eventually going to fold and join the club. Not that it matters, anyone who cares in the Linux ecosystem buys AMD - this deep learning thing has been an unfortunate stumbling block but that looks like it will be transient to me.

[0] https://x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xproto/x11protocol.html

wayland have the issues of today. So they are not the same as the issues of yesterday like x11. guaranteed a different state!

In ten years you will probably be crying that opening a window on wayland requires you to enter a hostname which is long gone into your etc hosts file, pointing to a local server, so it can download the window theme on the fly, as root, or something. You know, today's problems.

However, the fundamental problem is that Linux is the only OS with more than one GUI toolkit. This means that you have to insert extra layers of abstractions that other OSes don't deal with.

Every other OS has a native toolkit which is integrated with native drivers. The GUI and compositor and OS go together. And even those have lots of issues.

When you try to sidestep that integration, you get lots of jank and problems (see: Flutter, for example).

Wayland and Co. are wrangling a bear that other companies struggle with with way less resource and way less control over the interlocking layers.

Meanwhile, I understand that Wayland in 2023 still doesn’t support what X11 supported in 2000. If true, then it’s simply not fit for purpose.

That's what the sponsor of Wayland development is saying, yes.

> Is there an official announcement of the death of xorg or something?

No, because after fifteen fucking years of development, it still isn't good enough to work everywhere that xorg does. (Over those years it has also lost many of the much-touted "xorg server developers" that abandoned working on xorg to start on another project that was less awful to work on.

Well... guess what Wayland turned into? XD

xorg works, and -at least for me- most of the things that people seem to say doesn't work on it actually do [0]. Contrary to popular belief, you don't need a billion-dollar company to fund development on a piece of software that runs your application software just fine. And this isn't the fucking webdev world, so you don't need a team of twenty just to keep up with unending churn-for-churn's sake.

[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38455077>

Someone can of course take up the mantle, but no one is interested and most of the Xorg team has moved on to Wayland.

Doesn't quite save you if one of your work programs secretly siphons all your clipboard contents away to a third party. This is why we can't have nice things.

But I would like to run native Wayland clients too, and have them behave in such an environment. Can a compositor be made in such a fashion that it would cooperate with XWayland and manage native clients?

jwz must be so happy...

Of course W was only a couple years old before being replaced by X. So maybe we'll see Waylands replacement much sooner. I wonder if people were debating W vs X the way we debate X vs Wayland?