[throwaway7486]

> Some gamers certainly believed nonsense such as "all X programs are forced to use ancient drawing primitives and so programs will be much faster with Wayland".

This is incorrect. Kristian Høgsberg has explicitly stated that a primary motivation for Wayland is the reduced need for a central X server, as many programs already bypass it.

[uecker]

A Wayland compositor is even more centralized as it combines compositor, Window manager, and server while in X these could be separate components. I also do not know any program that bypasses the X server. Are you talking about programs that you can start from the text console and which then do graphics directly? Those are very rare.

[throwaway7486]

There are reasons for those architecture differences.

Wayland is an evolution of the previous design. X11's architecture had clients sending drawing commands to the X server, a method that became limited and required extensions over time. Wayland's approach is: applications perform their own rendering into their own separate buffers, then tell the compositor when they are ready. The compositor takes those buffers to produce the final image.

Because those buffers are separate, enhanced security is a direct side effect. Wayland is the result of decades of experience and represents the current way of doing things.

[uecker]

Sorry, no modern X clients sends drawing commands. This is the nonsense I am talking about.

[throwaway7489]

Posting from another account.

I'm aware that extensions exist now, like present, which make it possible to send buffers, similar to how Wayland operates, so you don't have to do things the primitive way.

However, to claim to speak the X protocol, you still need to support the older functionality, that's what I mean by a tremendous amount of functionality to support. The moment you get rid of that old functionality, you've essentially created a new protocol, which is what Wayland is.

How is that point nonsense? I don't want to see X go, but I don't think it's reasonable to prevent progress.

[uecker]

If you know these extension exist (for a long time), why spread the misinformation about "drawing commands" in the first place? A client does not need to support old functionality. A server does for backwards compatibility and this is a good thing! In fact, breaking decades of compatibility is the worst blunder of Wayland. The idea that this is a "tremendous amount of functionality" or a huge burden to maintain is also misleading, first because some drawing commands from the 80s are not a lot of functionality to support from a modern point of view, and also because all this is still being maintained anyway, just much worse because the resources redirected to Wayland. And even if one had deprecated some stuff eventually, this would not have broken compatibility and many other features at the same time as Wayland did.

[throwaway7489]

It's not misinformation, that's how X still works. Clients do all kinds of things. New programs aren't like 80s ones but your X server still must support every operation clients expect.

Wayland doesn't break anything, it's a completely new protocol. Claiming Wayland breaks your use case is like saying systemd broke old init scripts. It did because it's a different system.

Wayland isn't trying to be Xorg 2. It's a protocol. At its core it's only a compositor protocol. Everything built on top is up to the implementation developers.

[gnabgib]

You're aware of the guideline about throwaway accounts? This isn't good for community (or discussion).

[throwaway7489]

Thanks for pointing that out. I just learned about the policy, my bad.