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Comment by reisse | Hacker News Reader

I have a harsh opinion - the real problem with Wayland is that its authors and/or maintainers are *nix geeks, who never used anything more complex than X11 on an IBM Thinkpad with a maybe second 4:3 monitor attached. And they daily drive a few dozen terminal windows, Firefox and maybe Thunderbird.

I really have no other plausible explanation how they could miss so many potential usecases while rebuilding the display management ground-up: screen sharing, fractional scaling, different scaling factor for different screens, color profiles, HDR, toolbars and docking, window positions, and whatever else.

In the Wayland GitLab, there are comments in the spirit of "who would ever want to use this?" for a feature requests of something present in literally any sane WM...

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> I really have no other plausible explanation...

I have a better one: They designed for embedded devices first, desktops second or not at all. The first users of Wayland were things like vehicle infotainment systems, which operate under a limited mobile-like "one app at a time" system. Back then Ubuntu Touch (using Canonical's Mir) also looked like a prospective usecase for a new display system.

As far as I remember, the Wayland devs' approach to desktop support was "we made the basic protocol, now you desktop people either integrate functionality into the compositor (what GNOME did) or make your own extensions (what wlroots, KDE did), we don't care". With that kind of "leadership", no wonder it took years to reach even basic consensus.

> we don't care

That, unfortunately, seems to be Wayland's mantra.

Even if they did (which is questionable for me, because although a lot of embedded did jump to Wayland pretty fast, the maintaners never stated their goal is any less than replacing the whole X), they had a lot of time to pivot and rethink the design. I believe the general consensus that Wayland is the future of Linux on desktop was formed in 2013-2014, yet the feature gaps are still being patched.

Yeah I don’t know any of the details but KiCad is a pretty serious engineering gui tool and I find it easy to believe that the Wayland devs would exclude those uses cases from their designs

Quite the opposite. Wayland&Gnome are designed for tablets, phones, and barely laptops. Any usability on Desktop/Workstations is pure accident. Consider even the login screen-- it does nothing unless you do a completely inexplicable (on a mouse) click and swipe up.

As your theoretical "*nix geek" who mostly uses terminal windows, wayland and gnome provide an inferior experience to the daily driver software of 20 years ago.

At least some of them were people trying to hack X.Org to deliver an 'iPhone-like' experience on Nokia Maemo/MeeGo devices. The Jolla phone ended up being the first consumer device to ship with Wayland afaik.

> he real problem with Wayland is that its authors and/or maintainers are *nix geeks

They also, in typical Unix geek style, don't give two fucks about what the market wants / needs.

See TUI revival as well, for the kinds of applications I was using in 1992.

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