The uncertain possible futures of Unix graphical desktops | Hacker News Reader

The uncertain possible futures of Unix graphical desktops

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30 pointsrbanffy3 comments

Even just within linux it's not a great situation. Weston has basically abdicated the role of being a reference implementation by refusing to create standards for core functionality. So each wayland ends up implementing core features their own way. Which means if you want to have any control of window placement or keyboard/mouse inputs you have to hope your particular wayland supports whatever plugin that allows it (ie, libei for mouse/keyboard). It is completely fragmented. Except in one sense: even after 9 years of waylands there's still no screen reader for the visually impaired on any wayland.

The waylands are not really a future for linux either. The unixes are probably in the better situation at this point sticking with X11. Wayland is the linux desktop's Perl 6/Raku.

> Wayland is the linux desktop's Perl 6/Raku.

Except that distributions are switching to Wayland by default, and presumably nobody wants to maintain X11. I think X11 will live as long as NVIDIA/AMD wants to maintain their drivers for it. If they'll say "we're dropping X11", it will be the defacto death of it.

Also Wayland folks want to force the change and perform a violent migration by forcing us all to use Wayland. This means that it is to be expected that some stuff won't work. I don't agree with this on many levels, but at the same time I don't have any better idea of improving things to suggest.

Whatever is to be said about Wayland, ideologies and how distributions are handling migrations, one thing is for sure: Linux needs Wayland. On the other hand, nobody needs Perl6/Raku. Those things are not the same.

Your comment resonates with me! I'll stay on X with openbox for as long as I can, it works very well for me and I've collected a number of tools and scripts over the years which have no equivalent on Wayland. The most painful thing to miss would be openbox itself, that and fluxbox have been my window managers for more than 2 decades now...

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