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Comment by PunchyHamster | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem is that people wanting to build that and being in position to (being paid for by their employer), are fed up with X11.

It learned no lessons from X11. It made most things harder to write and pushed more things that really every WM needs and doesn't care much to implement differently to WMs making them harder.

For example, stuff like "WM need to manage raw inputs, so they can have more power over them" is cute on paper but in reality most of them don't want to because there is no benefit to reinventing that part. Sure, that part in X11 could be better, maybe it should have better interface for WMs to configure common options in common way without getting into input-driver-specific options, but that just required rework of the idea, not throwing it into the bin and replacing with near entirely worse framework that wastes everyone time.

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Tech is full of examples of 'successor' technologies, that were aiming to provide a clean rewrite without legacy, which then got bogged down with supporting a bunch of corner cases and accumulated their own share of cruft and could be no longer be considered a cleaner alternative. All the while the majority of the userbase being stuck on the old platform because the new one is buggy and doesn't offer anything tangibly better.

Vulkan, various node replacements come to mind.

Wayland at this point has existed almost as long as X11, longer if you only count the Linux years, yet its still not quite there.

Wayland and its various implementations like KDE plasma are 90% ready. Now they just need the other 90% to move from alpha to product. I expect it'll take another decade or two.

The way things are going there might be a third 90% needed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46382947

Read this including my response.

A lot of X features are actually Xorg features and they only work because there is a single implementation that everyone tried to integrate with.

Turns out the moment there are two implementations, which is hard on X and easy on Wayland, you can no longer rely on targeting a single implementation for direct integration anymore.

This means a lot of non-X but Xorg features need a protocol extension in Wayland, because things are being standardized that previously were exclusive to Xorg.

Are you saying that you can't get the title of the active window in X11 without using some features specific to the X.Org implementation?

It looks like the core X11 protocol spec [1] defines all that's needed, specifically the GetInputFocus, QueryTree and GetProperty messages. You might also want some things from the EWMH spec [2] (e.g. _NET_WM_NAME for UTF-8 or _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE to identify top-level application windows) but none of this seems like an implementation-specific X.Org feature.

[1] https://x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xproto/x11protocol.html

[2] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm/latest/

> I think the problem is that people wanting to build that and being in position to (being paid for by their employer), are fed up with X11.

I think one of the intrinsic problems with relying on developers being paid by their employers is they can easily become personally disinvested from the thing they're maintaining; they get paid well, the day-to-day grind gets stale, they get interests and hobbies other than computing but keep working on the thing because it's their job. Eventually they find that just buying a Mac is an easier lifestyle at home, and gradually maintaining X transforms from something they do out of passion for the project into something which is just a job. So they look for ways to make their job easier, hit on the classic "instead of maintaining old thing it'll be more fun to make our own", and because they are now untethered from the needs of real users they only need to make sure the new thing supports the bare minimum to keep their employer happy. They no longer care how real users feel, any use case that isn't required in the checklists approved by management get deliberately abandoned. So we end up with Wayland lacking common sense desktop features in demand by users for years because it's simply not convienent for the developers who are now dispassionate 9-5ers.

I prefer to take my chances with enthusiasts keeping X working on shoestring budgets. Maybe a few more years of development of coding models will make ongoing maintenance easier going forward and I'll never have to switch. I'm willing to make that bet. If it turns out that in 5 years I am forced to switch, at least by then Wayland will be five years more mature, and maybe my cynicism will even be proven wrong by then and Wayland will be good by then (but I'm not holding my breath for that.) Anyway, I have nothing to lose by using X as long as humanly possible.

Replace "X" with anything and this is why i generally try to avoid relying on open source projects where the majority of the development is driven by some company if there is an alternative, even if they're jankier (and often they are).

One example would be Free Pascal and Lazarus, while there is some commercial support, the overwhelming majority of the development is community-driven and ironically both have a much better history of preserving backwards compatibility than most open source projects backed by larger companies.

Of course exceptions exist for both situations, but as a general rule i find if some project makes a big deal about the company behind them (or even worse, there is a company with the same name as the project) then i tend to look for more community-driven alternatives.

Yes, but I think in the case of Wayland also management had other priorities, i.e. GUI for mobile and/or entertainment systems.

But this is all ok, I think the main problem is that somehow too many in Linux community did not see that the technical arguments for Wayland were not actually too convincing and that giving up decades of compatibility across UNIX systems and beyond is a mistake.

It's a tradeoff, to be honest – I think of Valve's involvement with Wine, where a consistent source of $$$ and developer-hours was (and still is) needed to whack away at the open-ended problem of compatibility.

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