| I feel like the debate between Wayland and X always bring more a general discussion about technology refactoring and modularity. To me be, the big question is not why freedesktop.org or redhat is doing all of this, they're a company and they have their needs.
It is why distro maintainers have chosen to adopt those technologies(systemd,Wayland, others?), not that those options are especially bad but to me,but they really look like a clear bifurcation from the modularity and customization we used to see on the distro world. I remember the mid 2000 and early 2010, when computing was still cultivating this cool image from the animations of Mac os Leopard and the aero style of Vista and the leader above all in the form compiz crowning Linux from far. In the talks around Wayland vs X, the maneer Wayland proponent(not only its developer and also any linux user) dismisses critics of missing feature because 15 years later they're still not standardized or lack of composabilty between windowing and compositing is a stark contrast with the way we used to talk about free and open source software at the turn of the millennium. We used to defend customizability and a certain form of freedom.
Sure X11 lack security and should be replaced by something that works better.
The Wayland shortcoming are defended in the name of security is some kind PR speak I wouldn't think I'd see in the linux world years ago.
It comes as particularly bitter as other closed platform from wich we used to hear a lot corporate speak still allow apps to do more things with their own windows that Wayland does. The fact that the same organization hosts flatpack but has not vision of how to use the capability model for Wayland really poses questions on the vision. All in all, I wonder if things would have went more smoothly and in greater general agreement if those 15 years+ were spend make Linux work like plan 9. Edit: typoes/syntax |
> The fact that the same organization hosts flatpack but has not vision of how to use the capability model for Wayland really poses questions on the vision.
I disagree, and I'm a staunch GNOME skeptic myself. Flatpak and Wayland were both built as extensible systems from the start, and GNOME's implementation of both technologies is just one interpretation of the protocol. KDE is a good mirror example; their Wayland implementation exposes many features completely unavailable on x11, and their Flatpak permissions are integrated right in the Settings app.
Personally I don't like GNOME's approach to the desktop anymore, and I refuse to defend most of their more opinionated decisions. Those choices have a minimal impact on desktop Linux outside of GNOME though, and it more feels like Red Hat is displacing the amount of work put into keeping legacy systems alive.