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> Approximately 99.999% of those complaints are uttered by people who 1) are not doing the work, 2) are not interested or capable of doing the work, and

Are you saying that Wayland is only for developers? Are people not allowed to complain when The New Thing turns out to be less good than the supposedly Obsolete Thing?

> 3) do not understand or refuse to acknowledge that the Wayland and X developers are _mostly the same folks_ and they _do not want to work on X11 anymore_.

I'm fully aware of that. I understand X11 has its limitations, and some of the goals of Wayland sound very appropriate for the modern PC environment, but if after 16 years, there are still many situations where Wayland does worse than X, that's not a great sign, and it will make people continue to use X.

I enjoy reading the whinging around Wayland by people who feel so entitled and so outraged. Every time they never fail to remind me of a previous coworker who was always using the same tactics: « this breaks my existing workflow, I will not adapt, I am all for trying new things but only if they are very exactly equal to what I already know and then what's the point, this is not how I have always worked the past ten years and I will not bulge ».

Not talking about the technical points of the whole X/Wayland considerations here, but a group of people in such debate is always as vocal as they'll do nothing and put unreasonably high expectations on other people to listen to them and have no choice but to agree. The fact that X.org's core team initiated Wayland and stopped X.org development is disregarded: these people Will Be Right against literally everything, they can't be reasoned.

My previous coworker was fired for gross incompetence in the end yet he never acknowledged anything wrong. He always knew better than literally the whole world that bash scripts run manually where superior to Terraform for the whole company's infrastructure. Yes, he was that stupid. I guess this is why he ended lying like hell on his LinkedIn profile, concealing he had had four employers in four years.

Seeing technical debates with such poor quality is worrying. If people with quantitative minds fail to entertain a fact-based discussion, how can we expect our political life to acknowledge there is only one reality and stop lying?

Before you voice your outrage, here are some facts that won't dis-exist just because you disagree with them:

- https://www.phoronix.com/review/x_wayland_situation

- https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server...

The core Wayland and X.org don't exist in a vacuum. I have written a lot of code over the years that works only on X, as have many others. I have not directly contributed to the X.org server, but have to the "wider X ecosystem". I will have to rewrite some of that. This is the case for many people.

"I have not directly contributed to the X.org server, but have to the "wider X ecosystem". I will have to rewrite some of that. This is the case for many people."

This is a fair point, but the quality of Wayland isn't really at issue for this -- Wayland could be much better than X by all accounts and it would still require you to rewrite software for it. (Assuming XWayland doesn't suit your needs, anyway.)

Yes, but motivation and enthusiasm are important when it comes to spare time projects done by hobbyists.

You're far more likely to get people to expend the requisite time and effort if it's indisputable that the end result will be worth it.

Strongly disagree. For operating system components backwards compatibility should always be a primary and non-negotiable goal. If the backwards compatibility isn't 100% transparent that's a quality issue.

    > it would still require you to rewrite software for it

As I understand, most complex apps in the 2020s are using something like Gtk or Qt. These already have Wayland rendering backends. (I assume other widget toolkits have done the same.) Unless your GUI directly uses Xt or Xlib, I don't think that any rewrite is required. Do I misunderstand your point?

A good part of why so may of us are cautious about Wayland is precisely that one or more of the things we rely on doesn’t support it. For example, my window manager doesn’t. I use that window manager every single day, and there is nothing out there which works the way it does. It’s a vital part of my workflow.

Does Wayland support the entire Xcompose system or an equally powerful alternative?

Wayland does genuinely sound interesting, if flaky and half-baked (it reminds me of systemd in that way). Certainly, the world doesn’t owe me a port of my window manager. But if the Wayland transition forces me to use GNOME then my life will be worse.

    > if flaky and half-baked (it reminds me of systemd in that way)

In 2025, is systemd still considered "flaky and half-baked"? As I understand, the "init.d war" was lost; systemd is the clear winner on Linux and continues to improve. That said, lots of good developers died on that hill.

> what they often mean is "Wayland doesn't support $very_specific_feature"

My primary complaint with Wayland is that it is a textbook example of Brooks’s second-system effect. It forsook backwards compatibility (yes, there’s an X11 server but to my knowledge there is no way to just run Wayland and one’s X11 desktop environment).

> Strangely -- even though X is open source and eminently forkable (we know this, because XFree86 -> X.org) it gathers dust and none of its proponents are doing anything towards its upkeep.

I suspect that is because the X/Wayland guys have sucked all the oxygen out of that particular room. A newbie shows up and is told that X.org is legacy and he shouldn’t work on it, so … he doesn’t.

And of course X.org really is a bit of a disaster due to being written in C.

> There are enough Wayland whiners that, by now, they could've banded together and started maintaining / improving X and (if their complaints and theories were correct) left Wayland behind.

They already have. X is already more full-featured and stable than Wayland (yes it is missing certain niche features that Wayland has). Sometimes the most important thing you can do with a piece of software is not screw around with it.

And yet, X is as flawed as it can be. There's a problem with global shortcuts, that Xorg only fires an event on keyup/key release, rather than on first match on keypress. That is a protocol limitation, and fixing it means breaking a bunch of stuff. The complains about wayland are of that nature, but at least they are fixable.

Are they fixable? One of my beefs with Wayland is that every compositor handles things differently. How GNOME's does some setting is different from how KDE's is different from Sway's. There's no guarantee they've even implemented the setting either. In X11 you can always globally configure something for any WM the same way. Wayland by design you can't. It's not fixable. I think it was a really poor decision to do a protocol and just made an OS where things are often too fragmented even more fragmented.

> The complains about wayland are of that nature, but at least they are fixable.

Eh maybe. Ultimately you can never be sure something is possible without doing it.

I'm pragmatic here, if and when Wayland offers me a better experience than X then I'll use it. I just resent distros etc. pushing me towards it when it's currently a downgrade.

> When people complain about Wayland being mediocre or "as good as X was" what they often mean is "Wayland doesn't support $very_specific_feature" or "my video card vendor's proprietary drivers aren't well-tested with Wayland and it makes me sad".

...Yes? Wayland being a regression in terms of features and bugginess is kinda a sticking point.

> Approximately 99.999% of those complaints are uttered by people who 1) are not doing the work, 2) are not interested or capable of doing the work, and 3) do not understand or refuse to acknowledge that the Wayland and X developers are _mostly the same folks_ and they _do not want to work on X11 anymore_.

If X works for someone and Wayland doesn't, none of that matters. It doesn't matter how much you insult X users, it won't make their usecases invalid or make Wayland good enough.

> I don't really have a stake in this argument, except I'm bone-tired of seeing people whine about Wayland when they're using software somebody else gave them for free.

It cuts both ways: Users aren't entitled to free work, and developers aren't entitled to their work being well-regarded. Giving software away for free has never meant that people can't point out its problems.

X also isn't wrking for some. If you care about tearing for instance x doesn't work.

From my standpoint as a software packager I have trouble believing that upending the entire video ecosystem on Linux was worth fixing this alleged "tearing" problem which is the main thing people bring up as the reason we all spent a decade doing this. (Along with some honestly fantastical worries about screen scraping -- the answer for that is open source.)

Honestly Wim did this right on the audio side. If it was so important to bring what Wayland has brought someone should have written a display server that talked to display clients just like the old server did and upgraded gracefully if the client had the new capabilities. You didn't even have to recompile software to use pipewire, let alone rewrite it.

Tearing is the easiest issue to demonstrate to people. Security is something you don't realize you care about until it is too late.

The real reason wayland was done is to put proprietary applications on the desktop. That's it.

Which is ironic since it's the proprietary stuff I have to use that is least likely to work on Wayland at this point...

More precisely, to put proprietary "apps" on an appliance. Windows desktop works fine for proprietary programs without any of the "security" features that Wayland-proponents want to push.

How so? Proprietary apps work fine on X. Or do you mean the security angle where flatpak wants to be able to isolate untrusted (including proprietary) apps?

untrusted are only the proprietary apps… if you can review the code they aren't untrusted :)

I generally trust FOSS to not be malicious. I don't trust it to be bug free when processing untrusted input. So no, I really do want to sandbox plenty of apps regardless.

Sandboxing is still a solution in search of a problem. The only actual valuable data on my computer is the personal stuff that even sandboxed apps are meant to manipulate anyways. Everything else in the system I can download from the Internet for free, but my web browser still has to interact with my passwords and my spreadsheet with my finances, and sandboxing can't fix that.

> my web browser still has to interact with my passwords and my spreadsheet with my finances, and sandboxing can't fix that

True, but sandboxing can fix your browser being able to read your spreadsheets without asking, or your spreadsheet having network access. Just because you have to work with programs and data doesn't mean they're all in the same security domain.

True; also various scaling problems, and its security situation. We're in an unfortunate situation where no option has everything. If you want to say "Wayland is better for what I need", or "Xorg is better for what I need", or even "Arcan is better for what I need", then that is 100% legitimate. I'm also cool with "the current problems with (X|Wayland|Arcan) are..." because that's constructive and useful for trying to improve them. It's only pretending that one doesn't have faults or insulting its users/proponents that I mind.

I haven't seen any tearing in X in at least 5 years - with nvidia, nouveau and intel drivers. I don't think I'm doing anything special to achieve this, so your comment seems like a strange assertion to me?

I agree that X11 has some faults, and I really want Wayland to work, but everytime I try it, something ends up being broken.

I do see heavy tearing when watching videos under i3 on Ubuntu LTS and a 60 Hz monitor. So what? I just don't care. Tearing in videos does not hinder me from getting my work done. Watching videos is just wasting time most of the cases anyway.

> So what? I just don't care. Tearing in videos does not hinder me from getting my work done. Watching videos is just wasting time most of the cases anyway.

It's fine for you to not care about that usecase, but other people do care and that's also valid. There even exist devices that mostly exist to watch video and we'd really like Linux and some standard graphics stack to work on them.

Sure, I have no problem with people wanting to fix it.

My datapoint was just in reply to someone writing that tearing under X has not occurred for 5 years.

No tearing on my X.Org-based desktop for literally a decade.

Tiling window managers don’t tear.

Tiling window managers tend to tear more than any other desktop out there. Especially on x11, where you're expected to composite your own desktop without any (!!!) synchronization primitives, it's extremely common to get halfscan output from your windows or status bar. dwm, awesome and i3wm will all tear by default because there is no dispatcher, internal clock or even adaptive sync support.

Now, you might not notice the tearing if you've got V-sync properly configured. But V-Sync doesn't stop screen tearing, it just drops torn frames and decreases your refresh rate until your system can keep up with demand. It's an ugly hack on laptop hardware and an even uglier one on the desktop.

Well, I guess ‘window tearing’ doesn’t mean what I thought it did — or rather that it’s more than I thought. I always thought that it meant the artifact when dragging a changing window, which of course doesn’t happen if one doesn’t drag.

I don’t believe that I’ve ever noticed or been bothered by static tearing, but maybe I’m just used to it because I’m old and displays have always had it?

> It cuts both ways: Users aren't entitled to free work, and developers aren't entitled to their work being well-regarded. Giving software away for free has never meant that people can't point out its problems.

While true, this statement is also useless. On a meta level, what you're essentially saying is that users' rights to feel resentful, is more valuable than achieving an outcome.

> While true, this statement is also useless. On a meta level, what you're essentially saying is that users' rights to feel resentful, is more valuable than achieving an outcome.

It's more useful than calling X users "whiners" while ignoring their complaints. And no, I'm pointing out that the users are resentful because they're being pushed to an outcome that's worse and therefore not desirable to achieve.

You miss the point. See my reply here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42870194

Sometimes that outcome is not the outcome that those users want. For example I'd stay on X11 forever because none of its problems are relevant to me.

The only relevant problem with X11 to me is that all of its developers are stopping to work on it and it won't run on any new hardware soon (and probably on old hardware too.)

You both miss the point completely. What I mean is that just by being resentful, you don't achieve the outcome that you want to achieve (not the outcome that they want to achieve).

The only way to achieve the outcome you want, is for someone to do the work. They're not going to do it. If you'd rather keep being resentful rather than do the work towards your own claimed desired outcome, then apparently you don't really value the outcome you so claim to desire; you value being resentful more.

> Approximately 99.999% of those complaints are uttered by people who 1) are not doing the work, 2) are not interested or capable of doing the work, and 3) do not understand or refuse to acknowledge that the Wayland and X developers are _mostly the same folks_ and they _do not want to work on X11 anymore_.

It's clarifying if you simply say "users."

People complain about the things they care about.

Wayland made some huge design changes, and those changes all have pros and cons. How do we tend to communicate about pros and cons? By complaining.

It sucks that Xorg's accessibility features are so baked-in that you must be compatible with them; because that demand can become a wall of assumptions. It sucks that Wayland leaves 100% of accessibility to the compositor; because that creates a lot of redundant work, and the best implementations get siloed into plasma or gnome, creating multiple smaller instances of the tight integration that made UX less flexible to begin with.

Using Xorg, you can run an incredibly lightweight window manager that never even thought about managing keymaps, adjusting mouse acceleration, setting the display resolution, etc., because that's not it's job. I can get absolutely everything I want from i3wm on Xorg... except fractional scaling. So far, it looks like plasma is the only one that has really figured that one out, and I still get a tiny pointer sometimes.

The best thing about free software is that we can choose how it works. The more tightly integrated the pieces are, the fewer choices are available. Fewer choices results in more complaining. Wayland may be the most significant instance of this pattern in Linux history. The second most significant instance was already present: Desktop Environments.

The biggest source of complaints I have is that the best aspects of plasma are trapped inside KDE. If you want the best Wayland compositor out there, you have to have it wrapped in an entire full-featured Desktop Environment.

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Complaining is the best thing about Linux, so long as it's able to drive real change. The more stubborn and inflexible a system (and whoever designs it) is, the more disconnected complaints become. That's the real problem that deserves our attention.