• lemmyvore@feddit.nl
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    I remember reading through that thread when it came out and those are extremely worrying points. Wayland has extremely deep core issues. #2 there alone is horrible.

    There are and were alarm bells ringing all around btw with Wayland. From a software developing perspective the approach is terrible. You cannot solve super complex problems by throwing away 30 years worth of code and redoing everything from scratch. You'll just run into the exact same issues again. Which no, haven't gone away as the technology advanced as many people would like to believe, we're still using displays and networking and keyboards and mice.

    There is a lot of legacy in X but there's also a lot of accumulated experience and battle-hardened code. The obvious path would have been to keep the good and remove the bad.

    Wayland will eventually since those issues but it will take just as long as it took X, because that's what happens when you start everything from scratch again.

    This is filling me with deja vu because it's exactly what some of us went through with X, trying to piece together a working desktop out of dozens of pieces. But when you point that out you get "ha ha grandpa that's old stuff, this new stuff won't have that problem because [insert magic here]!"

    Keep in mind that when Wayland started it was supposed to be a mini-server, to be used for the login screen only. Then the idea came to make it usable for stable, controlled and simple devices where there isn't a lot of user configuration or hardware variation.

    How it got from there to "let's use it for everything on the Linux desktop and ditch X" I'll never understand.

    • frankfurt_schoolgirl [she/her]
      ·
      11 months ago

      I mean xwayland is the best supported X implementation today, and will only get better. You're not ditching everything when you maintain backwards compatibility.

    • AMDIsOurLord@lemmy.ml
      ·
      11 months ago

      Which no, haven’t gone away as the technology advanced as many people would like to believe, we’re still using displays and networking and keyboards and mice.

      Which X.Org was not designed to support.

      • Muehe@lemmy.ml
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        Do you mean not initially designed to support? Because at least for displays and networking (in the sense of being able to send X events over the network) that seems wrong, a network capable display server is basically X's entire purpose? And for keyboards and mice there are extensions now, so x.org as a standard now very much supports those by design. Actually to my knowledge Wayland basically just forked their keyboard standard, the X Keyboard Extension.

        • AMDIsOurLord@lemmy.ml
          ·
          11 months ago

          XOrg is designed so a central server (mainframe) sends and receives data from smaller terminals, and that not only includes a heap of devices that haven't been in use since the 90s it also has a ton of features that nobody uses. (See: X native fonts, X native widgets, X driver model...)

          X's way of handling events and sending draws to clients as such is somewhat convoluted. Once you start to really dig into it, it's amazing how much people managed to stack on top of it until today.

          Besides, modern day X over Network is a somewhat niche and possibly broken function