Comment by bigcityslider | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigcityslider | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know enough about this to have a favorite, just know the transition was rough. Like one day at work our DE had to get changed because of whatever reasons they couldn't use X anymore, and that affected more things like Chrome Remote Desktop. Years after I tried setting up Linux on an old PC and learned that Wayland is de facto default now, but not in Mint, even though Mint is supposed to be the easy one... and CRD was still finicky in either one.

Linux is about choice, but unless you're ready to write a lot of things yourself, it's outside your control how well parts of the ecosystem are supported. For an average user it's unacceptable for your entire GUI to suddenly change in a way that requires relearning, something that Mac and Windows have avoided doing at least since 2000. Even Win8 or Mac26 wasn't so disruptive. It's possibly worse for an average Linux user because they aren't just concerned with how it looks but also compatibility with advanced things like X forwarding or VNC or CRD.

I think Linux is about choice some folks opinions notwithstanding. It's an ecosystem where many different devs have chosen to go about the same thing many different ways. You the user then get to pick from amongst those varied and interesting choices.

It however isn't about all or indeed any of those devs being obligated to support any particular choice. You can only buy a place at the table with money or sweat and merely using something isn't contributing and doesn't get you a vote.

Arguably the problem isn't the display server its the fact that general linux usage tends to require a little understanding of what's going on under the hood than is strictly speaking desirable for joe average user especially when something doesn't work. EG needing to understand that your choice of display server is making your zoom calls not work and then having to open that whole can of worms.

The fix is honestly more labor. The trivial way to acquire more labor is with money which is hampered by the fact that so little is paid. If you want more polished stuff pay more.

>Arguably the problem isn't the display server

No. If you tell users they should switch to a new display server, you shouldn't be surprised if no one takes you up on it if you don't provide basic feature parity.

If you tell DE/WM devs they should use your new protocol, but say it's now their responsibility to do all these things that the old display server did for them, don't be surprised if it doesn't get much traction.

I don't for the life of me understand why wayland took off. It's provided no benefit to the average user, or DE/WM dev, and a whole lot of hassle.

Was there some other reason distros switched to Wayland? I've always heard X11 was just not maintained well and had too much tech debt, not so much about the security.

From what I remember, Wayland is a thinner layer than X11, basically handing clients pointers to shared buffers for them to write into, which seems better than X11's server approach. Thought maybe people were eager to switch for latency reasons, but this benchmark is showing otherwise. And would think Wayland is more efficient too, but I haven't noticed or heard of a difference.

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