Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kaba0 1135 days ago
That’s a bit of a misrepresentation, while Wayland indeed had quite a bit of development in the last few years (which is the order of things in the bazaar style of development - the more people use it, the more care it gets), it always supported every hardware linux supported, it only builds on that after all. X just had some hacky way of bundling proprietary drivers for better support for nvidia cards.

Also, scaling of wayland applications worked, that was a major factor of the whole protocol change.
2 comments
michaelmrose 1135 days ago
From my own post

> Inability to scale applications which required xwayland properly or at all

Scaling for wayland applications worked however scaling for xwayland apps absolutely did not. The actual reality is a blurry mess and as you go back further you see more and more apps that only run via xwayland.

Due to the scattered way different features are handled on Wayland nonblurry scaled xwayland apps became or will become available at different times. For instance KDE fixed this issue in 5.26 which became part of Kubuntu with 23.04 released last month. For Debian users this day has not yet come and for many who update their software only infrequently to major releases xwayland apps may take years to become a reality.

link
yjftsjthsd-h 1135 days ago
> it always supported every hardware linux supported

That’s more than a bit of a misrepresentation. In practice, people with NVIDIA cards could run Xorg, and could not run Wayland compositors. You can use whatever wordplay you want to pretend otherwise, but Wayland absolutely did not support all the hardware that Xorg on Linux supported.

link
kaba0 1135 days ago
As I mentioned, nvidia didn’t support Linux. That’s an objective fact, the kernel has an abstraction that allows managing buffers independently from the actual drivers. This was for a long time not supported by nvidia proprietary drivers, as they went their own way implementing a different abstraction.

Xorg was deemed a big enough target that nvidia hacked the driver so that it could be binary patched to make better use of their proprietary drivers, but that was never the proper way of the kernel.

Wayland has nothing to do with it, it builds on standard linux kernel systems.

link