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by jauntywundrkind 213 days ago
There's so much hot debate about how bad Wayland is, how incorrect it is. But theres something I respect enormously about Wayland which is that: it is so so so much less than Xorg.

It uses the kernel's graphics buffers. It uses the kernel's mode setting. These alone are humongous differeniatiors.

There's so many other amazing glorious ways that Wayland is less. The protocol-centricity is vastly under rated, a massive win for the bazaar that can keep seeking truth versus the (imo utterly pathetic clining) absolutionist monolith style.

It's revolting to see such persistent bitter angry low user disdain, anger. Without any acknowledgement at all. That protocols allowing multiple implementations allows constant honing in, allows for dynamic change and evolution.

Reflecting on the Hindu Trimurti, a cycle of creation/newness, stasis/pattern, and decay & rot, it's amazing how the protest no-change/stasis-only voice has such a loud undying protest going. X is never getting better, has no room to improve, cursed by its own egocentric insanity which it has recursed into far far too far: which the core devs all agree.

It's not pleasant for everyone that Wayland allows a freedom of implementation. But generally most of the protest here has fallen away: support for major features is just here, on most implementations. That competitors can compete, don't have to keep using the same base is hugely advantageous to humanity. But the protest no-change anger-only voice is so loud. Doesn't know doesn't care.

Humanity should respect systems where competition and improvement are possible. X was a single consigned fate, with no growth or improvement. The competition of Wayland is an incredible breath of fresh air, and the growth of protocol competition here is telling, to not necessarily the "everything just works and is great" desire path of the low tech-ig orant beggar class, but which has enable so much Bazaar democratic figuring shit out, that still shares the ideas while allowing innovation within, in a way that few projects have ever enabled before. We are in a magic age of so so much, such cooperative competitive improvement, and it's just so unspoken, so missed, amid the squeaky wheels offering no actual technical critiques, unable to reflect upon the different (much better) age of possibility the bazaar model has opened us into.

1 comments

This is exactly backwards. Whenever some team that is maintaining a monolith will look at the possibility of splitting it up and going with this protocol idea, they will look at Wayland as a cautionary tail of just how badly that works out in practice.
What an utterly vacuous statement saying nothing. Making no refutable claims. Typical hot air, full of nothing. Boring as fuck, nothing here.

Further, your point is spoken from the perspective of a company, a single entity. Companies are utterly unable to bank on Bazaar practices, to embrace the multitudes way of finding answers. They lack the hackerly blood to try many approaches. They are not creative enough to do anything but build their one Cathedral.

As a company, no, you should not try to build interoperable protocols to foster internal completion on. Duh, no shit. But strong command and control-while it may be good for a company-is not going to be how a much broader ecosystem finds the best paths to take.

It's incredibly impressive how much Wayland compositors compete/cooperate for better. Sway/wlroots for one example has a new Vulkan backend. They could just go try and do new things. There's protocols to implement and they made new implementations, and now there's a half dozen Wayland compositors that have new cutting edge tech they are trying out. Innovation at the edge, but working together, is the shit. Yeah it's not a model that helps the corpo's but that's because open source is searching a much wider field of options, looking much better for wins, and the cathedral model isn't going to get you any of that.

I'm still impressed what vacuous say nothing piece of shit useless Fear Uncertainty and Doubt folks can spread. This era has such a virulent pox of hatred, built around such empty words. None of these bitter words actually say anything, this whole discussion is filled with rabid useless disdain. Piss on ye, say something contestable you villainous cowards. What does you are, saying nothing, but trying to dynamite it all. A pox.

The calculus of what some team does is totally different than what open source does.