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by wwalexander 788 days ago
The people actually working on X11 decided it was worth starting from scratch.
1 comments

So fire them and hire people that want to work on X11.
Have you ever worked on a project when after several years it became clear that the initial assumptions were wrong and the current design is untenable? Like, users asking for simple features that you know could be implemented in just a few lines of code had the design been done differently but now require many weeks of months of clunky hacks? Because I did and in some cases the initial decisions were mine - I had to admit I was wrong and do what is logical to make it easier for both developers and users.
Are we talking about Wayland or X11 here? Because like the article mentioned, Wayland is now 15 years old and still sucks. Sure sounds like the Wayland design is untenable.
What's stopping you from using (and even developing) X11? It's an open competition.

Wayland might reach feature parity in 2, 5, 10, or 20 years, and I'm fine waiting, because while X11 can kinda work well now, its archaic design with 10 levels of hacks will likely make it extremely hard to support new needs (it already struggles with some existing use cases).

it don't support multi-monitor setup lmao
Wayland? Sure does. I have been using sway for a while with three monitors; two of them 1080p, one 1440p.
> 15 years old and still sucks

People dragged their feet on Wayland support for at least 10 years.

Yes, because it sucks.
The real problem was that Wayland was extremely bare-bones initially and needed many extensions to approach the usefulness of X11 for desktop use - it basically just supported dispatching input and blitting rectangles. And initially, getting extensions standardized was like pulling teeth. These days, "obvious" extensions get in in a matter of months (about one DE release cycle), not to mention that most already exist by now.
Maybe because no one bothered to improve it for over a decade? ;)

The Wayland developers have limited manpower. Obviously it would take a long them for them to get Wayland to reach a critical mass when there wasn't support from the community.

Sort of feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

> Experts agree. And if they don‘t, we‘ll find ones who do!
I want to speak to the manager of Unix!