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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

Because X is not getting much development at this point (personally I still use i3, haven’t switched to Sway, the present works fine for me).

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This argument is actually backwards: one of the goals of the wayland project is to draw development away from X. If wayland didn't exist, people would have worked on X11 a lot more.

It's not an argument in the first place: it's describing the current situation. Wayland does exist, and did draw development away from X.

Not quite. Wayland was created in part to draw developers away from X. Seeking buy-in from Xorg developers specifically was a big part of it.

This seems to be implying that the creation of Wayland had some motivation that was essentially malicious toward X. Is that right?

This question sounds to me like you suspect some outright evil getting projected here. That would go too far. The wayland project tried to get the support of X developers early so that they could become a sort of "blessed" X successor early on. Plenty of earlier replacement attempts have failed because they couldn't get bigger community support, so this had to be part of a successful strategy. Any detrimental effects on X from that move were never a direct goal, as far as I am aware, just a consequence.

Yes, I do interpret your “draw development away from X” as suggesting an attempt to damage X (sorry if I misinterpreted your post, but I do think my interpretation was not really that unreasonable).

This “blessed successor” without and detrimental effects as a main goal: that’s pretty close to my understanding of the project. IIRC some X people were involved from the beginning, right?

This isn't quite right? Wayland was literally created by an X11 developer who got two more main X11 developers in. It's a second system, not a competitor as such.

Wanting developers to switch projects doesn't have to be malicious, in fact personally i doubt there were any bad intentions in place, the developers of Wayland most likely think they're doing the right thing.

Hmm? Seems to be getting plenty of development.

https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/activity

That’s a fork, which is fine. But for example, users from most mainstream distros will have to compile it themselves.

I guess we’ll see if that development is ever applied to the main branch, or if it supplants the main X branch. At the moment, though… if that’s the future of X, then it is fair to be a little bit unsure if it is going to stick, right?

the kind that introduces regressions?

there is a reason lead developer of X11Libre left Xorg project, they did not like broken code: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1760 (and many more if you search)

That's X.org, which is controlled by the Free Desktop Foundation.

The OpenBSD people are still working on Xenocara, and it introduces actual security via pledge system calls.

That seems pretty interesting. I guess it relies on BSD plumbing though?

Funny enough, the my first foray into these sort of operating systems was BSD, but it was right when I was getting started. So I don’t really know which of my troubles were caused by BSD being tricky (few probably), and which were caused by my incompetence at the time (most, probably). One of these days I’ll try it again…

Yup, "pledge" is one of my BSD envies. Namespaces and unshare are significantly more complex and we're still told not to use them as a security barrier (which is explicitly in scope for pledge).

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