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Comment by destructionator | Hacker News Reader

The recent push to Wayland in 2024 is an interesting choice, given how productive and usable X11 is.

I'm very glad people made the push! My configuration has been much nicer being based on Wayland for the last 4 years or so than it was on X. Screentearing and limited refresh rates on mixed Hz setups are now a thing of the past :)

By that measure we'd still be using DOS these days (which was also productive and usable... and indeed the initial backlash against this nrefangled "Windows 95" thing kept going for a while, not very dissimilar to the X11 vs Wayland debates)

I mean you're free to fork and continue developing X11; right now there is nobody with both the capability and the desire to do so.

I'd wager that once I get hardware made in 2024, Wayland may work well for me (though in its defense it does work fine on my one machine with an Intel integraded GPU), but for now none of my (very old) discrete GPUs work reliably with Wayland, with 2 GPUs and 3 drivers (nvidia vs nouveau for my old GeForce and "radeon" (not amdgpu) for my old AMD card) causing 3 symptoms:

1. Crashes immediately on login

2. Black Screen

3. Kind-of sort-of works, but sometimes the screen just freezes for no reason and sometimes switching VTs fixes it sometimes not.

> I mean you're free to fork and continue developing X11; right now there is nobody with both the capability and the desire to do so.

OpenBSD Xenocara

Last I heard, Xenocara was downstream of X11 rather than being a hard fork?

The era of a single machine is over. We need remote rendering for services on datacenter fleets without GPUs, so X11 is more often replaced by Javascript for a browser (with support for a user's local GPU) than by Wayland.

Have fun yelling at that cloud for the rest of time.

x11 is depreciated. It has no active maintainers and barely even qualifies for "maintenance mode" status; the push to remove Xorg can be justified by enumerating the security issues and nothing else.

Strictly speaking Linux is "productive and usable" with nothing but a terminal multiplexer and a shell to work with. With expectations as high as they are in 2024, I don't think former Windows or Mac users will feel at-home with an x11 session. Switching away from bazaar-style software development is a prerequisite for the Year of the Linux Desktop.

I really do like Gnome and Wayland. I use them every day. That being said,

Bazaar-style software development is the sole advantage free desktop has over macOS and Windows.

Cathedral-style development doesn't necessarily mean closed-source, but instead reflects the less-modular nature of Wayland in relation to x11. There aren't multiple desktops that are all using the same display server; instead each desktop implements it themselves around a common spec. Plug-and-play software has fewer and more restrictive interfaces to rely on. Modern desktop Linux is decidedly pared-back, which is a good thing when you consider how scarily open Linux is in the right hands.

"sole advantage" isn't correct either - there's a plethora of reasons to use Linux. In the enterprise, people pay companies money to keep their Linux away from bazaar-level patches and randomly packaged repos. More casually, a lot of people don't use desktop Linux for a particularly advanced purpose and just treat it like a Mac/Windows/Chrome machine with fewer advertisements. Some people do very much get a lot of value out of the bazaar-side of Linux, but the comparison between the two styles wouldn't exist at all if Linux didn't entertain both philosophies.

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