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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Yea, more and more with computing, when I hear I should switch to something because it is "the future" or "modern," I am instantly suspicious. Maybe I'm just getting elderly and cranky, but "newness" itself is not a compelling sales pitch. I am more interested in things that have been already working in more than the happy-path case for 20 years, and have all their edge cases battle tested, and from the other replies to this article, it looks like there is still tons of work to do to cover every case. I think I'll be waiting another 10 years at least, and I hope distributions at least keep X.org as an option for at least that long.

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Many years ago I used to look forward to every new software release. That was when software got better with each version. Nowadays things just get worse with each release, when it comes to user-interfaces and desktop apps. Time to move on to something else.

> Nowadays things just get worse with each release, when it comes to user-interfaces and desktop apps.

This is spot on and it makes me sad. We have hardware and programming languages available to us that people could only dream of 30 years ago and so much of the software we produce with it is objectively worse. I don't think Wayland (or X) is really salvageable at this point.

I wouldn't say that things necessarily get worse with each update. I think new features get gradually added which make the software less accessible and/or harder to learn for beginners and/or impact performance.

I know, all of the things I said can be said to be the worsening of the software. But what many people think when they read that sentence is that just the simple act of updating software is detrimental to the user's needs. Which I don't think is true all the time.

The modern design trends, removal of color from the user interface, increasing the amount of white space everywhere. And the gradual dumbing down of everything. I think those are each a real step back, compared to the old versions. So it slowly kept getting worse, bit by bit, until we got to where we are now.

> Yea, more and more with computing, when I hear I should switch to something because it is "the future" or "modern," I am instantly suspicious.

Same, but I'd take a step further. If the most common argument in favor of application X or Platform Y is that it's "more modern" or "the future", I make a mental note to avoid using that tech if at all possible - it's almost always guaranteed to be garbage. It's the tech equivalent of being set up on a blind date and being told the other person is "Nice".

It'd probably help if most new things didn't also bolt on a bunch of anti-features and come with vague promises of reaching feature parity with the thing they say they're going to replace.

It is not being elderly. It is experience. We’ve seen more stuff becoming older. And we see similarities.

That being said. Wayland is good and it shall have replaced X11 years ago! It is made by the same people which maintain X11. Same applies to Systemd, implemented in C, unified interface and simple configs. Nothing is perfect and things need to mature. As usual :)

And? Tactile keyboards, switches and knobs are much better than touch screens. Mechanical keyboards are the counter reaction to bad input devices. I love TUIs because they are more efficient than GUIs and easier than CLIs. GUI won? Notcurses (C++) and Rust bring many new TUIs.

But also?

I’ve seen Electron and from the first moment I wondered why it resembles Flash. With a built-in huge web browser. Eating resources and fitting nowhere. Same for touch screens in cars. And VR-Headsets…bruh…are that 3D-Shutter Glasses?!

Vice versa - I hope for lightweight AR-Glasses. But only with a standard VESA-Protocol or a BLE-Profile.

What is good about Wayland? I only see a really idiotic, badly designed API and a very over-complicated ecosystem that requires lots of bloat, parallel infrastructure and duplicated effort to do even the simplest tasks due to lack of standardization of essential functionality.

Personally I can't wait until everybody comes to their senses and drops this pile of garbage API and goes back to X11.

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