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by McWobbleston 1694 days ago
Yes, it's weird seeing the X is dead sentiment considering some of the most popular distros are still using X, and Wayland has only recently caught up with comparability for workflows like screen capture. I'm unfortunately stuck on X because of my NVIDIA system, but I hadn't been all that interested in Wayland until recently. AFAIK there is also some work to be done on the gaming side no?
2 comments
oynqr 1694 days ago
Good news, Nvidia has granted upon thee a driver that might actually work with Wayland
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bitwize 1694 days ago
The most popular distros are Ubuntu and Red Hat/Fedora. Both use Wayland by default. Everybody else is part of the long tail.
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zbuf 1694 days ago
That is to confuse "long tail" with "doesn't matter", though.

If a supermarket doesn't stock goods in the long tail, its customers shop elsewhere.

Dismiss the "long tail" and we wouldn't have champagne in the supermarket, or classical music on the radio.

The idea that somehow the ever-changing nature of Linux is going to stablise into something that satisfies _everyone_ seems misguided. Open source code means diverse groups can, and will decide themselves what's deprecated, and take on maintenance of the things they want to exist.

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bitwize 1694 days ago
If it costs just as much money to support the long tail as it does to support 95% of your user base, guess what? That long tail will go unsupported. This is why the only relevant web standard is "does it work on WebKit (formerly IE)?" And why the only relevant firmware standard is "does it boot Windows?" The major distros ship with Wayland. The major toolkits support Wayland. That's where all the development and maintenance energy is right now. X is still around, but eventually support for it will go away. Once it becomes niche enough that the costs of maintaining an X code path outweigh the benefits of supporting the few users still on X, they will take the X code path out. That's how things go in software.
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marginalia_nu 1694 days ago
Well Linux itself is part of the long tail, so by this logic, why bother maintaining such an old fashioned and irrelevant operating system based on POSIX standards from the past?
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