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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

This just feels like the kind of thing the people who built Wayland should have focussed on for their first real release, as that would have allowed them to simply deprecate X11 immediately with a "better" architecture rather than go to war for a decade (and build up a ton of bad will in the process) forcing people to first try to make major adaptations to everything.

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To be clear, XWayland itself has been available since 2013. Rootful XWayland is more complex and generally not desirable because it's leaving a lot of potential improvements on the table, while requiring you to implement a bunch of quirks to support things that were already adequately replaced.

You also still don't get an easy solution to much of what users actually tend to complain about -- which are the lower level components and driver support that Xorg had that wasn't matched by Wayland until recently. There's a whole entire stack of low level stuff developed over decades that made "just install linux" possible on so many PCs. The higher level components that something like XWayland or Xephyr implements is only a miniscule fraction of the Xorg codebase, that has largely remained the same since the 1980s (but is surprisingly easy to maintain on its own).

I know about XWayland, but trying to go to war to modify an infinite number of random window managers and the ecosystem of tools that plugged into the X backend is, to me, the thing which should have been avoided by thinking about the project more as a massive rearchitecting of the stack. If you do build that -- even if it is kind of difficult, though frankly I can't imagine it is actually HARD and not merely BORING (which is a big problem with software developers where they conflate that: most of the job is, in fact, boring, and you have to embrace that) -- you could just delete the X codebase as you expanded hardware support, rather than being stuck in some weird limbo where a bunch of tooling out there is still having to be ported or even rebuilt for Wayland.

While many people desire this “total compatibility” with Xorg idea, the Wayland team sees this as an anti-feature.

Many things on X are done the way they are because all processes can see all pixels and all devices. Wayland does not want that. So, tools built to these requirements will not work. And, obviously, they cannot be “fixed”.

But Wayland is a better architecture, at least when it comes to 'here is my output, put it on the display plz' situations, it was always going to be a painful migration process because there's not a single toolkit.

That's not to say there's some non technical decisions which are making porting a lot harder *cough cough* mouse warping *cough cough*

I mean, does it? I was under the impression that it enforced double- or even triple- buffering, which is NOT what you want in "here is my output, put it on the display plz" situations. Maybe you are implying that they finally fixed that?... but, the fact that they tried to cram all this stuff down everyone's throats first before fixing obvious deficiencies--leading to a bunch of obsolete understandings over totally fair complaints about software a decade too early being constantly evangelized by asshats on forums saying you're dumb for still using X11 when Wayland was not even a half-baked solution--is extremely dumb.

The people that developed Wayland were the exact same people that developed X.Org. I'm sure they thought of all possible options because they are actually very smart people.

Well: 1) it isn't always the case that the people who develop a system in the center of an ecosystem are actually the people who know best how the entire ecosystem should work (and in fact there is an entire trope of second system effect destroying such a reboot); 2) it isn't at all obvious to me (and in fact it feels incredible to me) that the people who put most of the effort into X.Org decades ago are actually "the exact same people" who are in charge of maintaining it today; and 3) the specific thing we are talking about here has been discussed numerous times in the past decade by people developing low-latency and high-performance apps--such as games, which is where you really want to be able to get the display server out of the way--and was, in fact, known to introduce a ton of latency that they were going to figure out how to fix some day (a similar situation to how Wayland completely fucked up display scaling by forcing integer scaling, which required patching later and now is a wart in the architecture already).

Graphics-stack developers have known that in order to keep pace with Windows and macOS, X needed to be replaced, since the 90s at the latest. The only question was with what. The Xorg developers came up with a solution: Wayland. The hackers who wrote Xorg are in unanimous agreement that X is obsolete and you should be using Wayland instead. The next step, now ongoing, is to coordinate with DEs and distros to remove X support altogether.

You should use Wayland because it's what's supported. It's what all future Linux graphical software will be ported to. In a few years, it'll be impossible to get an X version of even a recent web browser. The best time to abandon X was 30 years ago. The second best time is now.

And yet, abandoning X for Wayland--not to start developing Wayland, but to actually stop using X and start using Wayland--is MUCH easier to do now than it was to do five years ago, despite all of the people (maybe including yourself) who were INSISTENT that you had to do it IMMEDIATELY or suffer some kind of consequence.

This is a similar situation to the people who were all screaming that you had to ditch Python 2 to upgrade to Python 3 immediately after it came out, and that if you didn't you were somehow dumb, even though they finally started to fix all of the upgrade deficiencies and regressions only with something around Python 3.5: there's a time to upgrade, and that time is never immediately upon introduction.

Wayland was written by the Xorg dev team.

What people do not seem to get is that Wayland is what they wanted Xorg to be. A lot of what Wayland could not do were things they did not think it should do.

In some cases, the Wayland team has been dragged kicking to implement things. In other cases, they have stood firm and we will be leaving them behind.

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