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"Xorg has no business being the display server" in much the same way as sysvinit had no business being an init system: Sure, they're both old and clunky, but they both also work, and allow me to get stuff done. Nobody is saying that Xorg isn't old and crap, or that it shouldn't be replaced: I remember being pretty excited when I first heard about weyland - it sounded like it was going to solve a bunch of problems. I was excited, so I jumped on my triceratops and went over to see my friend Ug. I didn't hang out in Ug's cave very often because it was kind of messy and his sabretooth wasn't very friendly, but I'd read a thing about weyland and I was all excited. Ug was less excited than I, he pointed out that X has been a thing for a long time, and there will be a billion assumptions about its architecture in all kinds of weird places, and switching to an entirely new thing that isn't really backwards compatible will likely cause a bunch of issues, and that there's some software out there that's targeting X, unmaintained, and still in use by people, and a bunch of this software will break. And that these wayland people will have to do a lot of thinking about all kinds of weird edge cases, like remote X sessions, multi-window applications, screensavers / lockers, windows with transparency or non-rectangular shapes, etc etc etc. He pointed out that even if you do spend a lot of time being super diligent about something like this, such a large fundamental change is still very likely to cause a bunch of weird edge cases in the real world that will break people's workflow. My concern is more around timelines and the issues it will cause when it is forced on people, not "this is bad/unnecessary". I don't think I've ever seen anyone make that argument about X. Some of us just want to have working systems, get stuff done, and keep using the great software we've been using for decades without problems. I mostly just hope redhat have learned from the experiences we had with things like pulseaudio, and that they've checked whether the replacement actually works in real-world scenarios before forcing it on people this time. |