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by gjsman-1000 779 days ago
If you ask an Xorg contributor, Xorg is anything but "stable" or "settled." A more correct analogy would be "collapsing under its own technical debt."

"Programming X is like reading one of those French philosophers where afterwards you start wondering whether you really know anything for sure." - Thomas Thurman (GNOME developer)

"Wayland wasn’t designed to be a drop-in replacement for X11 any more than Linux was designed to replace Windows. Expectations need to be adjusted to reflect the fact that some changes might be required when transitioning from one to the other." - Nate Graham (KDE developer)

"Three people on this earth understand X input, and I wish I wasn't one of them." - Daniel Stone (Freedesktop Project)

"Let me summarize every wayland discussion on the internet: I'VE SEEN A WINDOW SYSTEM SO I KNOW HOW THEY SHOULD WORK PAY ATTENTION TO MEEEEEE" - Adam Jackson (former Xorg project owner, Red Hat)

And the classic 1994 criticism:

"If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles -- but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that." - Marus J. Ranum, Digital Equipment Corporation

1 comments

Sounds like X11 needs its own equivalent of LibreSSL, but it looks like the will is there (many supporters of X continuation), but not the manpower.

In days of yore (when Windows 3 was young), there were even commercial X servers (Hummingbird I think it was), so there's plenty of other people implemented the protocol.