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by ajross 1923 days ago
Major distros have been shipping wayland as the default backend for almost five years! I mean, yes, it's a lot of work. But it was wildly premature, and the community support for this stuff has been nothing short of a disaster of apathy and ignorance.

Which is to say: what you say is true, but there's no excuse for breaking screenshots (!) for half a decade in the name of "progress".

(And I say that as someone who genuinely thinks Wayland itself is great software. But the desktop projects and distros have a job to do too, and they didn't.)
2 comments
dleslie 1923 days ago
> Which is to say: what you say is true, but there's no excuse for breaking screenshots (!) for half a decade in the name of "progress".

Breaking, or wholly removing, loved and important features because the developers believe they know better is sort of the modus operandi of the Gnome team; and don't you dare file a bug report. They don't accept criticism graciously.

See also: file picker icons, desktop icons, task tray, et cetera.

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ajsnigrutin 1923 days ago
This is sadly spreading... you have a thing, that is old, well tested, and works (and had worked for years).... but someone wants to reimplement this same thing in Rust, or whatever language of the day, because it's "safer" than (eg.) C... so you get something that has 40% of the features of the old software, 20% of the features that were done with another standard software, and one or two really important features missing.... but developer and distro-makers don't care, because it's "modern" and written in Rust (or whatever).
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dleslie 1923 days ago
> A _modern_ tool for blah blah.

I generally parse this as half-baked, not battle-tested, and difficult to use.

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jgillich 1923 days ago
Really only Fedora has shipped Wayland by default for five years, and they do this with a lot of other tech as well (GNOME 3 and Cgroups v2 to name some more). If there is no user demand, nobody wants to do the work of supporting new technology, which is why Fedora releases things before they are ready. Anyone using Fedora should know this.
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ajross 1922 days ago
Well, yeah, but... FIVE YEARS. I mean, sure, Fedora ships bleeding edge stuff. But can you imagine a world where, I dunno, LTO or ASLR or C++ ABI changes or whatever took FIVE YEARS to stabilize and were still missing core features that the previous technology offered?

I mean, no one was surprised in 2016 when Wayland landed that there would be bumps in the road. It's 2021 now!

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