[stonogo]

Nothing. You can use wayland, if you have the same hardware configuration as a wayland developer. Wayland's developers have decided it is feature complete, so if it doesn't do something you need it's apparetly your fault now.

I don't know what the future is of OpenBSD's X Window fork, but it looks like I'd better find out. Wayland won't handle multiple GPUs driving a single monitor.

[KryDos]

It sounds like wayland devs are bad guys. Is there a story behind it?

[melvyn2]

Wayland is a more versatile protocol. OP is misrepresenting a little bit, the base protocol v1 is finalized but desktop use will need and already does use many standard extensions.

Nothing about being assholes, just a bureaucratic design.

[magicalhippo]

My understanding is that Wayland is more versatile in the sense of how a LEGO set is more versatile than a molded toy. Yes you can do a lot with LEGO, but a LEGO brick is just a LEGO brick at the end of the day. Similarly, Wayland lets almost all the "interesting" bits be up to the extension protocols[1].

[1]: https://wayland.app/protocols/

[bzzzt]

Just like X11 uses Xexts and/or toolkit libraries for about anything.

[kaba0]

Wayland devs are the X devs, so there is that.

Also, wayland builds only on the pure kernel abstractions for video drivers (DRM+KMS), which is (was) not supported by nvidia (which instead patched your xorg binary with their proprietary code). No sane person wanted to support nvidia’s way for a completely different render path, so it wasn’t initially supported, until nvidia came to their senses and also implemented the necessary linux subsystems in some of their drivers. So pretty much the same old “Linus middle finger” story, nothing specific with wayland.

[michaelmrose]

Nobody is a "bad guy," even if we may disagree emphatically with their design decisions. Ultimately, however, we may feel we aren't entitled to those providing free labor to do so in such a fashion that their work product meets our specific needs or aligns with our expectations.

That said, having a bare-bones protocol that fails to include standard features, forcing each implementation to meet users' needs differently, is somewhat disappointing. Anything that reduces functionality for the sake of ease of maintainability is going to be unpopular with end users who have everything to lose and nothing much to gain directly.

[kaba0]

The core is bare-bones, there are numerous standard protocols since, and many other are in standardization. Here is a site to review their state: https://wayland.app/protocols/

[michaelmrose]

Don't you think it more reasonable that features that will definitely be implemented by every desktop environment ought to be core rather than not fully standardizing on it 14 years later?

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/32

Attentive designers would have standardized this in the incredibly obvious way of allowing the user to white list specific apps, logically at install time and screenshot apps would then implement a singular standard that works in version 0.1. Instead we force users to confront and understand the difference between x11 xwayland and wayland in order to figure out why their screenshot app doesn't work or doesn't work well.

This doesn't enhance the case for "regular" people to use Linux.

[kaba0]

You can’t push through a new protocol that’s already huge. Wayland was deliberately made extensible, programs can properly query about its capabilities, it is actually quite great design.

It’s just the negatives of the bazaar style development, it’s not like we ever had a unified approach to desktops (remember a few years ago how tray icons and whatnot were all different between KDE and Gnome?). There is no entity like apple that can just work on the details in the background and release it overnight and say that from now on this is the supported API. An open source one has to live in the open from day 1. Mind you, the standardization will speed up considerably, the first year of that 14 is very different in pace from the last ones.

Also, screenshots are not a trivial task to get right, sure, here is its buffer is easy. But then will you also implement a screen sharing API separately? Will it just repeatedly take screenshots for like 20 FPS? That was the reason for it taking longer time, but it works very well now.

[funcDropShadow]

> remember a few years ago how tray icons and whatnot were all different between KDE and Gnome?

Yes, and then tray icons worked across desktop environments for a few years until Gnome decided that this standard should be thrown out and replaced it with nothing.

I think what many people annoys with Gnome and Wayland is that they control the overall trend in Linux desktops and yet couldn't care less about most advanced and experienced Linux users. But what other Linux desktops are there?

[kelipso]

It seems like one of those politics things. Focus on PR to get the randoms behind it and get people to switch, doesn't matter the quality, how you talk about it is what matters.

[yamtaddle]

Do we have a name for this yet? We had "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" for MS' playbook, but Red Hat's run theirs enough times that it seems like we ought to have a name for it (and it's definitely different from Microsoft's EEE)

[imran-iq]

The wayland devs ARE the Xorg devs. They all decided that Xorg wasn't worth maintaining because it has too much legacy baggage[0]. The rest is just a bunch of entitled whining users that dont like change.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(protocol)

[slondr]

Correct, I don't like changes that break my workflows or (at times) my entire system.

I don't believe I, and the many users who share my preference, deserve insults for that.

[kaba0]

Feel free to use xorg for the upcoming 10 years at least.

[michaelmrose]

It's entirely normal for users not to like change less yet when the benefits are nebulous even if justifiable and accrue to the developers while the users bear costs in terms of decreased stability, increased complexity, and fewer features.