My # 1 issue with wayland is it is Linux Specific, not protable.
I am hoping the *BSDs get together and keep Xorg maintained instead of having to port Linux crazyness into their systems.
I am hoping the *BSDs get together and keep Xorg maintained instead of having to port Linux crazyness into their systems.
Personally my #1 is just that stuff still don't work properly in a out-of-the-box Gnome+Wayland setup (on Arch). I still see weird things like a Firefox extension for making websites darker has a white line rendering through the pages when in use (probably something regarding aspect ratio?), some Electron apps like Obsidian sometimes have individual lines jittering up/down by 1-2 pixels (like it can't find the right/stable position), running nvidia-smi somehow introduces a 0.1 lag to seemingly my entire desktop, running it in a loop introduces that every run, and so on.
None of those issues happens with Xorg, and it just works without having set extra env vars for specific applications, or having to change the configuration just for Wayland to be used properly.
It seems to be less resource intensive, and smoother overall drawing, but all these issues make it kind of hard to start using daily over Xorg.
Although I'm not sure how Gnome affects how Firefox Extensions work, or how Electron applications render, I also don't know enough about the internals to say that's because of Gnome or Wayland.
Of course it's portable. Your complaint that it hasn't been ported a lot of places may be well-placed, but it's a different complaint.
> I am hoping the *BSDs get together and keep Xorg maintained instead of having to port Linux crazyness into their systems.
"Foo is crazy and isn't ported – I therefore hope that people don't port crazy foo". What?
https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html
>Input is more complex to get working since Wayland applications expect Linux input model with udev, evdev and libinput.
>seatd and libseat provide support for non-systemd based systems. A basic port to OpenBSD/wscons is needed
So Wayland requires Linux specific items to be ported to BSD. Maybe FreeBSD did all that work themselves. Was that work accepted into upstream ? Based on how Linux works these days, I doubt it. So maybe each new Wayland Release will need to be patched for FreeBSD.
I don't think udev is ported though. Some linuxisms are, like dbus because several desktops need it. But FreeBSD has its own udev alternative called devd. Wayland is probably configured to just use that.
Its been ported to FreeBSD.
Would it be more true to say Wayland on *BSDs lags Wayland on Linux? Its not tied to Linux the way systemd is, right?
I've always felt like from a purely user perspective desktop BSD doesn't really distinguish itself from Linux. The software stack is essentially the same, and they're both FLOSS so that's not a reason to switch either. Maybe I'm wrong, but the Linux/BSD choice looks a lot less relevant than the Windows/Linux choice.
So if people use desktop BSD because it essentially gives them slightly fuzzier feelings, and they are essentially a rounding error in their user base, is it really fair to criticize Linux developers for not focusing on portability? You can only spend your time once, so do you use it to work on something benefiting your tens of millions of existing Linux users, or something benefiting your thousands of potential BSD users?
The question was if anyone uses BSD as a desktop and the answer is yes people do.
> You can only spend your time once, so do you use it to work on something benefiting your tens of millions of existing Linux users, or something benefiting your thousands of potential BSD users?
I couldn’t care less how the Wayland devs decided to prioritise their time. But it is worth pointing out that Wayland was architected from the ground up to be agnostic. That’s why it’s the polar opposite to the the “batteries included” design of X.
And as others have pointed out, Wayland is available for some BSD already.