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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

It is and you're free to use X if you want

IMO the issue is that the same group stewarding Wayland was also xorg, and intentionally stifled improvement on xorg even when the work just a matter of merging the PR.

Merging a PR by drive-by contributors is far from trivial. As the maintainer, you become responsible for the other person's code for all eternity; it's on you to read it, understand it, update it when stuff around it changes, and fix it when it breaks.

Not a problem for obviously-correct changes of a couple of lines, but most PRs aren't like that.

I understand and that's a fair point. I should have phrased that differently, in that the PRs for features were waiting to be merged. I'm sure merging into a codebase as... storied? as xorg is no small task.

>and intentionally stifled improvement on xorg

Open source developers are not required to spend their time prioritizing your priorities. You just have to look to Xlibre to see that a lot of contributions are quite bad quality, and in a C codebase of Xorg's complexity and security profile it's not a small job to review things.

Nothing I said in any way implied that freedesktop should be required to do anything. I can't speak to the quality of xlibre merges, only that if whatever is going on over there led to improvements in xorg after a drought, that's a good thing.

If wayland had been sold as a hardened display for those who needed that level of security, I would not have a problem with it.

As it is, the community got constantly browbeat with 'this is the future' and 'it's so much faster!' when recent benchmarks have proven that to be false.

Then go use X. Nobody's stopping you, you can just ignore any brow beating. /ignore is a useful IRC command.

You'll probably find it to be a not great experience, since almost all the people who spend their time actually working on graphics and GUIs in the Linux world prefer to work on Wayland. So X doesn't get much love these days (and you're not entitled to their efforts after all). But it's not like they erased all the old X code from existence.

> You'll probably find it to be a not great experience

I'm confused where I'm likely to be suffering. If I start using Wayland tomorrow would I even notice? Apart from having to switch DEs, of course.

Depends on a lot of context.

You may notice issues with some GPU drivers if you have hardware with new drivers, because older GPU drivers contain X-specific workarounds which new drivers may lack (I know this is an issue with the Apple M1 GPU, I suspect it might be an issue with Panthor as well). But that's not really relevant with typical consumer hardware.

Desktop environments have varying levels of X support these days. GNOME hasn't been adding new features to X for a while, and GNOME 50 completely drops X. So if you're a GNOME fan you may not like that. KDE ends X11 support in 6.8. But it's always possible to stay on GNOME 49 or KDE Plasma 6.7 forever, or use an X11 window manager.

The X11 back-end is deprecated in GTK 4, so don't expect a ton of improvements to it, but it'll remain supported for all of GTK 4's life so you probably won't notice anything there immediately. But it means GTK 5 will drop the X11 back-end entirely, so at some point in the coming decade, GTK applications will gradually stop working.

Regardless of GUI toolkit, applications are slowly moving towards the XDG Portal way of doing things instead of the X11 way; which is fine, there's no reason why X systems can't support the portal dbus APIs, but I suspect that there will be more issues there once applications start dropping their X11 implementations of things. This is an area under active development and I would expect X11 to not see much of that development. I have no idea if anyone has implemented a portal for X11. Maybe you'd have to do that yourself eventually to keep new versions of certain programs running, I don't know how the state of portals is on X.

There are other things too that software can do to break X11 support even when their toolkit supports X, and expect that this has started happening to some degree and will slowly continue.

> GTK 5 will drop the X11 back-end entirely, so at some point in the coming decade, GTK applications will gradually stop working.

Hopefully someone will come up with Wayland emulation layer for x11 then.

Not exactly what you're talking about but I use Weston for Waydroid in xorg on xfce. You just get a Weston window on your desktop.

That would be apt and hilarious, at the same time ...

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'll keep an eye out, but all seems fine so far.

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