The point of Wayland isn't doing new things that weren't poissible before, it's doing things in a better and more efficient way. Less lines of code, dropping support ancient unused stuff, etc. In other words, reducing technical debt.
Perhaps , but that doesn't change that as of this moment, Wayland lacks many feature that users have come to rely on.
Certainly you can see the problem with the situation that developers of one project abandon it and start a new project that lacks many of the features of the old and claim that users should use the new one.
It's not an issue of what will win in the long run; it's an issue of a replacement product being pushed for adoption long ere it be ready.
This is one of those reasons why I hope Wayland doesn't take over too fast. I know it is awesome, and new, and has tons of benefits, but there are a few things that I couldn't live without that it doesn't have :(
Thankfully I have few compelling reasons to upgrade for the sake of upgrading, so that will take a long time. Maybe by then Wayland will be a viable choice. At this stage I'm not convinced it won't be superseded by something else before then.
Put another way: I've seen similar new things come and disappear several times.
I get the feeling that as soon as Wayland gets significant uptake and starts being less than broken for most users, it will instantly be replaced with something even more bizarre and inexplicable. The OSS community seems to view constant change -- and churn -- as an inherent good.
I am not looking forward to wayland upgrade time. At the moment it's fine, and I'm sure it will all be figured out eventually, but the transition will be a hassle and I have my doubts about whether some features will make it or not.
I know it is very immature (basically unusable in most cases), but my understanding was that it would be easier to fix these issues moving forward because of the design decisions taken in Wayland. You response seems like a tentative affirmation of that, which is encouraging to me (for whenever I can actually used it).
I agree with this. Wayland had taken so long and is still lacking in a few areas, while Xorg somehow managed to reach a point where it actually "just works" first try, with some minor problem every other year. I don't need Wayland anymore.
It looks like thanks to Wayland being more modular, there is even more room for fragmentation. X had its fair share of extensions, but somehow most WMs and DMs managed to agree on things.
And in my opinion the whole isolation and security concept is hot garbage. It hinders so many useful things. My Linux desktop is not a smartphone where I download random, badly screened closed source apps from a play store. I'm downloading open source tools via my distro's package manager. If one of these got backdoored, Wayland preventing it from taking a screenshot of another Wayland app won't exactly save the day anyways.
Instead we're now getting clumsy, overly complicated solutions for all these simple use cases. Ultimately I don't care. If people enjoy creating these needlessly complicated monstrosities, fine. It's just that we need to wait ten times as long until we get something usable that way. I guess X needs to keep chugging along a couple more years....
I think Wayland is a nice way forward from X, right now it's still not a replacement because of how central X is and how much stuff interfaces with it specifically or make assumptions about X features. (and so indeed, Wayland kind of breaks "everything")
But I also think that they (Wayland) took a way too heavy napalm approach to the solution, almost like they totally ignored how painful such a transition would have been. I still don't get it...
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