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Comment by poulpy123 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the switch from X11 to Wayland the most painful switch that happened in the linux world ? Even going from python 2 to 3 was not as bad

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The move from kernel 2.4.x to 2.6.x was pretty painful. The absolute slog from 2.6 to 3.0 and a development model that a least somewhat resembles the model used today was exhausting.

In case you weren't there, the "even" kernels (e.g. 2.0, 2.2, 2.4, and 2.6) were the stable series while the "odd" kernels (e.g. 2.1, 2.3, 2.5) were the development series, the development model was absolutely mental and development moved at a glacial pace compared to today's breakneck speed.

The pre-git days were less than ideal. The BitKepper years were... interesting, politically and philosophically speaking.

Also, KDE4 was a dark, dark period.

To me the most painful switch was Gnome 2 to Gnome 3. I still miss Gnome 2.

I left Gnome 3 for other WMs (eventually settled on cinnamon), but every once in a while I decided to give Gnome 3 a try, just to be disappointed again. I felt like those people in abusive romantic relationships that keep coming back and divorcing over and over again. "Oh, Gnome has really changed now, he won't beat me again this time!".

Kde 3 to 4 for me. I still miss you amarok 1.4.10.

But don't you love plasma applets in your media player that now requires a MySQL server instance and randomly deletes your collection metadata???

Just wait. In 8 years, Wayland will be as old as X11 was when Wayland was created.

Then we'll make Wayland 2.

X11 was basically used everywhere when it was released

X11 to Wayland was painless for me. I guess it depends on what you need from it.

What about systemd?

Systemd was easy for me. All things worked in transition and have the big advantage that don't need shell scripts for create services. Wayland..., is slow, buggy, applications close without reason...

How on earth would Wayland be slow? Like it's literally an IPC on top of the lowest level Linux kernel API (DRM), displaying buffers.

It was partially made for car infotainment systems that are knowingly weak hardware.

Fully-featured DEs like Gnome and KDE work a lot worse when doing everything in software rendering. If you're working on a device with subpar/nonexistent GPU driver support (i.e. Nvidia hardware for years on end), the experience is absolutely awful.

Nvidia's driver do something weird on Wayland when my laptop is connected to HDMI, probably something funky with the iGPU<->dGPU communication. Everything works, but at the whims of Nvidia an update reduces the maximum FPS I can achieve over HDMI to about 30-45fps. Jittery and painful, even on a monitor that supposedly supports VRR.

That's not really Wayland's fault of course, but in the same way Linux is broken because Photoshop doesn't work on it, Wayland is broken for many users because their desktop is weird on it.

I still want my /var/log/messages back. The new system just doesn't seem to work correctly.

I haven't had a single issue with Systemd and the transition was measured in years, not decades.

systemd was a problem for early adopters (e.g., Fedora). Distros like Debian joined the party later and, as a result, got things way more stable. I never had any systemd-related problem in Debian, while for Fedora (some years earlier) I had some bugs affecting my ability to work. They all seem to work very fine now. Things took a while to mature, but it just works now.

It was a similar story with Pulseaudio - it caused pain for early adopters but, by the time that Debian stable switched to it by default, almost all of the issues and corner cases had long since been worked out and it was almost completely trouble-free.

Mind you, the libc5 -> glibc2 upgrade was pretty horrible in Debian land, so they didn't always get it right in the early days...

I still have a choice to not use systemd. The systemd people didn't inhabit and then try to kill sysvinit or runit or any of the other competing technologies.

> I still have a choice to not use systemd.

Depending on your DE, you have a choice not to use Wayland. Like, yes, if you use GNOME then you don't get choices but that's their whole ethos, and unfortunately I've heard about KDE dropping X, but there are other options and as I type this comment in i3 I can assure you Xorg still works.

The X people are the Wayland people, it's not an external occupying force.

The Wayland people are not the people that created X, those are for the most part retired.

Does that matter?

Cries in KDE3 -> KDE4

I think Python 2 to 3 was the by far worst.

Not really, /lib -> /usr/lib was worse for me

How? At worst the user can just add their own symlink or the developer may need to recompile the app.

This is nothing like wayland where the APIs to do what you want may not even exist, or may not exist in some random compositor a user is using.

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