For the life of me, I'll never understand how wayland got traction with the community.
'Hey guys, we decided to implement a display server from scratch! We broke a ton of existing functionality and made a ton of low level stuff that X used to handle the responsibility of WM/DE devs!'
Not a problem for obviously-correct changes of a couple of lines, but most PRs aren't like that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 find it quite funny that many of the same people that rag on systemd and say it does too many things, are big fans of Xorg doing a bunch of things that "display server" probably should not be handling.
Even if Wayland was a "display server", it would still "remove existing functionality" if it meant that in any principled sense, because "display server" is only half of what Xorg does.
But sure, the transition was difficult and took a long time.
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.
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.
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.
Can it do new things? Eh, probably not. Do I need it to do new things? Not really.
Sure Xwayland exists and mostly (not entirely) works, but that's a band-aid for what is essentially a "we broke it and don't care" approach.
This is a huge part of what "user/dev hostile" means in my book; with Wayland, getting a working desktop always someone else's responsibility, all features have to be reimplemented across DEs endlessly (with often-incompatible variations, of course), and they all blame each other and program authors for bugs while the Wayland project refuses to even acknowledge basic features like desktop automation or screen recording.
> But sure, the transition was difficult and took a long time.
And this irks me too, people are convinced they're done but I still don't have xmacro. And flameshot is broken, while the alternatives suck. And support for everything depends on the DE now. And java.awt.Robot is broken with no replacement. And the clipboard randomly misses copies. And OBS screen recording is broken for me. And there's no support for display resolution scaling. And ssh -X is gone, while waypipe doesn't work all programs.
But hey, at least there's HDR now or something! It was definitely worth replacing a functioning stack for this. I'm so glad that Plasma 6.8 removes X support!
Corporate drive. Originally sponsored by Intel followed by IBM (RedHat) and the rest followed suit.
> Kristian Høgsberg, I work at Intel in the graphics team in the Open Source Technology Center. I'm the founder and maintainer of the Wayland project.
You either pitch or bring it with you. Demonstrate a tech demo and you're granted an engineer or two. It's how Amiga came to be, Steve Jobs with NeXT.
And it appears you can no longer link anything from reddit without being asked to login and they've now nuked old.reddit
If you have an account this thread has some very insightful comments. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1m0ztn/how_is_waylan...
There were only a few people willing to work on an alternative, and they didn't have to take a vote, so they just did what they wanted. Corporations and projects adopted it because they wanted something different, and it was the only other option.
Now that we have AI, it will be much easier for genuine community alternatives to emerge, even if we have to battle over the legal ramifications. I for one am willing to go without "official support" to have software that doesn't suck.