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Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

That totally misses the point. How about running Wayland on systems that a non-negligible number of people use, like Macs? Or even an enormous number of people, like Windows?

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Why should be Windows or Mac support a concern for Wayland compositors? DWM or Quartz authors don't care about Linux either.

To be fair, X (VcXsrv) works on Windows and (XQuartz) pre-M1 macOS.

They do, yes. Nobody will prevent anyone trying to port Wayland compositors, either. If that's your itch, feel free to go for it.

But the Wayland compositor authors will steer their software to run effectively on Linux. If that means it is difficult to port to Windows or Mac (whether because they miss dma-buf, or demand something that the native platform won't provide to non-system process), so be it.

And Windows apparently has a Wayland compositor for WSL

They use RDP RAIL (RDP-for-a-single-window) on top of Weston, and then the resulting surfaces are managed by the DWM.

Which is actually an interesting approach; linux native compositors should "steal" that idea and implement it too. It could lead to RemoteApp-alike for Linux.

ChromeOS transports Wayland over virtio so windows opened from virtual machines are seamlessly part of the main desktop.

Waypipe proxies Wayland over SSH etc: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

Why when both systems have great window managers?

Since when did Windows or Macs ever have great window managers?

If you just ran a web browser directly on the hardware (or native window system in full screen mode) instead of bothering with non-great X11 or Wayland or Windows or Mac window systems, then you could write great window managers using open standards that ran identically across Linux, Mac, and Windows, plus mobile and VR devices too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38710127

Better than what most GNU/Linux folks use, many of whom apparently would be quite happy using twm.

Ah, twm is still better than Gnome.

For the folks which the only use of X Windows is to manage xterm sessions.

I was one of those people, in 1994.

I doubt that. Most of the WMs available for Linux are way more capable than their standard counterparts. There's a rich diversity of UXs available on the platform. Hopefully their ideas won't die with them if they get left behind by Wayland.

That fragmentation is one of the reasons why in the end you get an Electron app.

Most people don't want to spend hours tweaking Enlightenment themes, or keyboard shortcuts for tiled windows.

> That fragmentation is one of the reasons why in the end you get an Electron app.

How so? I run Electron apps all the time. They behave like any other app.

> Most people don't want to spend hours tweaking Enlightenment themes, or keyboard shortcuts for tiled windows.

Most people don't want to run Linux. And I don't want to waste my free time experimenting with a critical desktop component.

BTW, remember those people who actually make Linux work for the rest of us? Many of them do want to do those things. It's how they got to be Linux contributors in the first place.

Indeed, because packing a browser with the application makes up for the missing pieces across all bazillion of desktop configurations, for everyone that isn't running either GNOME or KDE.

Oh do I remember, Red-Hat, Mandrake, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Google, Linaro,....

Slackware 2.0 was my first distribution.

Maybe your knowledge is out of date? Afaict, most (if not all) of the differences between desktop environments have been fixed by XDG. I don't run Gnome or KDE and everything on my desktop works just fine.

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