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by NobleExpress 815 days ago
Honestly, I was never convinced that concentrating all developer effort onto Wayland was the best idea. Wayland seemed like a massive over-correction from X11, where the protocol and core were "simple" in comparison to X11 which did everything. Being simple, by itself, is not a virtue -- Wayland basically forced all the essential complexity of the problem to the compositors (a la Waterbed theory of Complexity [1]). Given there are so many compositor implementations, they essentially end up reinventing the wheels all the time. This is a bit better now with wlroots, but unfortunately, the ecosystem is already fragmented. I'm not saying X11 is superior to Wayland or vice-versa, but frankly I would be surprised if we couldn't improve X11 if it got 0.1% of the amount of effort collectively gone into Wayland.

I would highly recommend reading through some of these blog posts who expound upon the problems of Wayland more eloquently than I can [2,3,4].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory

[2]: https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-x...

[3]: https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-thi...

[4]: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WaylandTechnic...
2 comments
roenxi 815 days ago
That captures it neatly. It remains the future, even though the dawn of the new day has been extremely slow. There was an amazing decade watching the Wayland community struggling with screenshots as a major engineering challenge. They tried to half-bake critical parts of the problem space and it led to a dead-on-arrival protocol that took a decade to be Frankensteined to life.

I get that Xorg is terrible, but Wayland has been around for 15 years at this point (the article's "Unless your workflow (and hardware) comes from 20+ years ago" jab falls a bit flat). It is closer to the X.org server's release than to the modern era. There were good people with big ambitions involved, but the Wayland protocol is an example of a mis-design that had to be made to work despite itself.

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sebtron 815 days ago
> [...] I would be surprised if we couldn't improve X11 if it got 0.1% of the amount of effort collectively gone into Wayland.

The problem here is that open source volunteers would rather work on the shiny new thing rather fix the old messy code, and I can't really balme them for that.

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