Comment by fruitworks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fruitworks | Hacker News Reader

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At some point of development, the only way to progress without spiraling complexity is to break backwards compatibility. You might be interested in studying the internals of X11 and wayland to learn more.

In a commercial project like windows, this sort of project is a total no-go. However in a collaborative community project like linux userspace, developers have more freedom to make design decisions in spite of short-term consequences.

>The people that develop Linux desktop are deeply unserio

The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.

-Frank Herbert

Don't take yourself too seriously, it might ruin you!

In a commercial project like Windows this has been done many times - both Windows and MacOS switched to compositing window managers and have done deep surgery under the hood you never see. The difference is that internals can be mandated top down whereas in a bazaar model with lots of casual non interested observers throwing pot shots and no budget to support the work, relying on largely volunteer time, it’s much harder and takes longer to accomplish.

> on largely volunteer time

Are Linux desktop projects still run mostly by volunteers these days anymore?

The kernel itself is heavily funded by, contributed to by so many large companies. A lot of user space projects are all maintained by companies or maintainers who work for companies like Redhat, Canonical, Suse etc ...

Didn't Wayland itself get popular during Nokia/Intel Meego days? I remember there being automotive compositors, Jolla Phone all using wayland.

People do large rewrites that subtly break expectations and need to slowly add back features to get parity with the old thing at Microsoft all the time. Source: I worked there at the end of the 2000s.

Sometimes it's very visible, like they are pushing a new UI framework. Other times it's under the hood, like they changed how a lot of GDI works.

You got it backwards, once you have users, they are your "greatness", if you go to the path of self gratification, are are betraying your users. Of course some times sacrifices have to be made, but you have to understand the graveness of them. I don't like the current state of Windows, but Microsoft won't ever break such a huge portion of applications that run of Windows just for the sake of some refactoring.

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