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Comment by wing-_-nuts | Hacker News Reader

>Wayland is not a "display server", it's a display protocol.

I, as an end user, do NOT care.

>A lot of the "existing functionality" that it broke has nothing to do with displays, it's stuff that got crammed into Xorg at some point whether it made sense or not.

I also don't care about ivory tower ideals of what is within the dominion of 'display' and what is not. The fact of the matter is their changes broke a ton of functionality, and instead of even trying to provide feature parity, they basically dumped all that responsibility onto the WM/DE devs.

I have no idea why the community didn't take one look at their proposal and flatly ignore them.

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> instead of even trying to provide feature parity, they basically dumped all that responsibility onto the WM/DE devs.

In other words, the Wayland people should perhaps have defined official protocol extensions early on to cover most of what X did, thus preventing all the initial interop issues when Gnome and KDE and Sway tried to reinvent them independently.

In hindsight, it's my opinion that wayland, if it had to exist at all, should have been implemented like this:

1. Add GBM to graphics drivers and start working it up the stack from the bottom, stopping at Xorg. That is, make rootful XWayland the standard Xorg before standalone even is a thing. This reduces maintenance work up front rather than belatedly.

2.a. Implement weston as a standalone compositor.

2.b. Actually make weston fully functional. Figure out everything needed to provide an actual working desktop environment with the features that users expect out of the box. Standardize all the protocols needed for at least a basic XFCE-ish environment rather than hoping someone else will do it.

3. Then, only after these things are done and working, announce to the world that wayland, a quiet project that has until now explicitly suggested nobody use it, is now the future of linux graphical systems and everyone should plan to migrate.

Yes and more fundamentally they should have acknowledged that not everyone needs to be treated with the security model of a mobile app.

This pretty much. Xorg got almost everything that I care about to have a functionning GUI. You only startx and the only thing you may need are utils programs like a wm, a compositor, a bar… now you have conflicting implementation from gnome, kde, wlroots,… each with its own set of features.

Yeah, instead of the wayland folks leading the effort to fix issues, it's often some individual DE / WM going off, fixing it the way they prefer, and wayland grudgingly adopting it as official because they know the ecosystem is fragmenting bad enough as it is.

The community doesn't really have a say because Xorg is effectively on life support and the Xorg devs are now working on Wayland. There aren't many people in this world who could keep Xorg going. Some distros are sticking to Xorg, but it will become more and more difficult in the coming years.

People keep saying Xorg will stop working, but it has yet to turn into a pumpkin, so I dunno man.

Can it do new things? Eh, probably not. Do I need it to do new things? Not really.

Not in the short-term, for sure, and probably not even in the mid-term. But hardware keeps changing, and at some point nobody will care enough (or be able) to implement proper support for it in X (or proper support of X in that hardware). Hopefully we still have at least a decade of X though.

I have no idea why the community didn't take one look at their proposal and flatly ignore them.

At the time, RedHat basically controlled Gnome via paid devs and donations. And the same for this Wayland nonsense. Oh, and systemd too!

Notice a pattern?

If nothing else this is a very strong commentary on just how challenging landing positive changes in Xorg felt to the community.

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