Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate.

“In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!”

Nate’s Original Blog Post

  • CriticalMiss@lemmy.world
    51·
    11 months ago

    Every change will bring it’s fair share of complainers, not much we can do about that. LILO to GRUB, SysV to systemd and now X11 to Wayland. No one is forcing your hand (unless you use a pre-packaged distro like Ubuntu/Fedora, in which case you go with whatever the distro provides), keep using X11 if you want stability, if you wanna dip your toes in bleeding-edge software and increase it’s userbase to show hardware manufacturers that their drivers need to be updated (I’m looking at you, NVIDIA) then feel free to mess around.

    Eventually the day will come when Wayland apps will simply not launch on X11 and you’ll migrate too.

    • chaorace@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      15·
      11 months ago

      I’d say that’s already becoming the case in a few places. Hyprland isn’t just “Wayland good”, it’s “You should use Wayland good”.

      Yes, I know the devs behind it act like pissants. That’s bad and I’m sorry for liking their software. I use Emacs too and RMS was kind of an asshole. Hell, I use Lemmy even though one of the devs has slighted me on more than one occasion.

        • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml
          13·
          11 months ago

          … has gotten some help and is now a pretty well-adjusted human being, who still tells right wing trolls to go suck it, and still tells paid professionals that they should have known better when they should have known better, but in language that isn’t abusive.

          So I don’t know why you bring him up.

      • CriticalMiss@lemmy.world
        2·
        11 months ago

        I daily drive Hyprland too, there are some shortcomings with how the mouse behaves with XWayland but I don’t think it’s a Hyprland issue and Gamescope remedies that problem so overall, it’s a great experience.

    • AnneBonny@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      English
      10·
      11 months ago

      Every change will bring it’s fair share of complainers

      sometimes the complainers are right and sometimes they aren’t

        • S410@kbin.social
          8·
          11 months ago

          In case of Gnome it was addressed, just by different people. Gnome 2 continues to live on as MATE, so anyone who doesn’t like Gnome 3 can use it instead.

          • Troy@lemmy.ca
            8·
            11 months ago

            Likewise, KDE3 got forked to Trinity. But KDE kept producing (largely) quality software, so Trinity is pretty much an anecdote now.

            • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml
              1·
              11 months ago

              I don’t understand why anyone ever expects a different outcome. They fork something that has quite some investment into the original version. How do they expect to keep up?

    • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
      8·
      11 months ago

      AFAIK, Fedora is the only distro that’s getting rid of X11 support, the other distros are still packaging it AFAIK.

        • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
          2·
          11 months ago

          Go tell Fedora that then lol. They want it gone to the point where Nate is telling users who want X to stay away on that post. Xwayland I believe will still be around though.

          • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
            3·
            11 months ago

            They’ll recant after their usage drops to a fraction. This move makes zero sense no matter how you look at it. As a generalist distro it’s too early to drop X.

            If they want to become a niche distro whose only claim to fame is “we only pack Plasma 6”, big whoop, like there’s any shortage of that. What kind of distro defines itself by what it does not offer? And is that the kind of distro that Fedora aims to be?

            • AMDIsOurLord@lemmy.ml
              9·
              11 months ago

              Hell, GNOME has been wayland-default since twenty-fucking-sixteen if I remember my dates right. You’re overestimating the value X.Org provides.

            • Jordan_U@lemmy.ml
              7·
              11 months ago

              This is the kind of distro Fedora has always been, both for better and for worse.

              I don’t see this decision driving users away from Fedora any more than other decisions they’ve made in the past and will surely make in the future.

      • CriticalMiss@lemmy.world
        1·
        11 months ago

        There were news about Ubuntu doing it too some time ago, maybe they realized it’s not feasible yet. I don’t follow their development as I don’t use those distros

    • gens@programming.dev
      2·
      11 months ago

      You are right in spirit.

      It was not sysv to systemD, and it was forced (by making udev not work without it).

      Other then nvidia, wayland is still missing some protocols (example: what virtual desktop you want your window to be on). But those protocols are (still) being worked on. And you will always be able to run x11 programs on wayland.

      The advantages of wayland are a more direct path to hardware, and trowing away lots of code.