[benrutter]

I think then big part is maintenance, xorg doesn't look likely to be maintained long into the future in the way Wayland will be. And a lot of the Xorg maintainers are now working in Wayland.

So good or bad idea, Wayland is slowly shifting to being the default in virtue of being the most maintained up to date compositor.

[franga2000]

Wayland is not a compositor. Being more maintaned than Xorg doesn't mean anything because wayland doesn't do a tenth of the things Xorg did.

What used to be maintained in one codebase by Xorg devs is now duplicated in at least three major compositors, each with their own portal implementation and who knows what else. And those are primarily maintaned by desktop environment devs who also have the whole rest of the DE to worry about.

[safety1st]

There's actually a very active fork of Xorg called Xlibre, started by a former Xorg contributor, which seeks to "revitalize and modernize" X: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver?tab=readme-ov-file

[Hendrikto]

This guy started that Xlibre fork over throwing a fit because he was told not to break Xorg with his contributions, and he ranted that he just wants to be able to merge whatever he wants. I would not trust the stability of that fork at all.

[safety1st]

Looks to me like he's a belligerent personality, but probably not wrong when he says Redhat has an agenda that involves suppressing progress on Xorg and forcing Wayland on users instead.

I was open minded toward Wayland when the project was started... in 2008. We are 18 years down the road now. It has failed to deliver a usable piece of software for the desktop. That's long enough for me to consider it a failed project. If it still exists, it's probably for the wrong reasons (or at the least, reasons unrelated to any version of desktop Linux I want to run, like perhaps it has use in the embedded space).

[GCUMstlyHarmls]

Taking the proposition as true, what goal does Redhat have in "forcing wayland on users"? I am asking this in good faith, I literally naively do not understand what the "bad" bit is.

Like, ok, its 2030 and X11 is dead, no one works on it anymore and 90% of Linux users use Wayland, what did they gain? I know they did employ Pottering but not anymore, and AFAIK they contribute a non-trivial amount of code up stream to, Linux, Gnome? KDE? If more users are on wayland they can pressure Gnome to ... what?

I sort of get an argument around systemd and this, in that they can push I guess their target feature sets into systemd and force the rest of the eco-system to follow them, but, well I guess I don't get that argument either, cause they can already put any special sauce they want in Redhat's shipped systemd implementation and if its good it will be picked up, if its bad it wont be?

I guess, if Redhat maintains systemd & wayland, then they could choke out community contributions by ignoring them or whatever, but wouldn't we just see forks? Arch would just ship with cooler-systemd or whatever?

[safety1st]

Redhat gains at least a few things...

- Maintaining X requires a lot of time, expertise and cost, it's a hard codebase to work with, deprecating X saves them money

- Wayland is simpler and achieves greater security by eliminating features of the desktop that most users value, but perhaps Redhat's clients in security-conscious fields like healthcare, finance and government are willing to live without

So I suspect it comes down to saving money and delivering something they have more control of which is more tailored to their most lucrative enterprise scenarios; whereas X is an old mess of cranky unix guys and their belligerent libre cruft.

There are some parallels to systemd I guess, in that its design rejected the Unix philosophy, and this was a source of concern for a lot of people. Moreover at the time systemd was under development, my impression of Poettering was that he was as incompetent as he was misguided and belligerent - he was also advocating for abandoning POSIX compatibility, and PulseAudio was the glitchiest shit on my desktop back then. But in the end systemd simply appeared on my computer one day and nothing got worse, and that is the ultimate standard. If they forced wayland on me tomorrow something on my machine would break (this is the main point of the OP), and they've had almost 20 years to fix that but it may arguably never get fixed due to Wayland's design. So Wayland can go the way of the dodo as far as I'm concerned.

[vrighter]

The statements "Rejecting the unix philosophy by being a huge monolith which does too many things", and "systemd is actually 69 different binaries, only one of which runs as pid 1" are mutually exclusive. The latter is provably true, so the former must not be.

[simoncion]

> ...what goal does Redhat have in "forcing wayland on users"?

The same goal any group of savvy corporate employees has when their marquee project has proved to be far more difficult, taken way longer, and required far more resources than anticipated to get within artillery distance of its originally-stated goal?

I've personally seen this sort of thing play out several times during my tenure in the corporate environment.

[GCUMstlyHarmls]

I honestly dont know what that means, I've never worked in a big company/corporation. Try and disown it? How does that fit with xlibres anti-corporate control stance? I guess it they push wayland then drop it, we're left with X11 ignored and a non-financially supported alternative?

I guess I just don't get how the third E in EEE plays out in an open source environment.

[GCUMstlyHarmls]

Cant Edit: I mention Pottering above because I remember similar arguments against his stuff (that I also never really fully understood in terms of "end game"), not because I have personal animosity against him or his projects or want to hold him up as "example of what can go wrong".

[safety1st]

There is a massive class of things in open source you can look at from the perspective of "Suppose a megacorp or private equity owns this entity and wants to cut costs as much as possible while contributing as little back to the community/ecosystem as possible... what happens next?" And boom you can suddenly see the Matrix. So in the case of Redhat it's likely just IBM being IBM at the financial level and all these little decisions trend a certain way in the long run because of that

[redeeman]

ridiculous, wayland all in all provides a far better experience than X11, and wayland projects like plasma, hyprland, sway etc are very much not failed

[hulitu]

> wayland all in all provides a far better experience than X11,

if all your programs are KDE or GNOME programs. BTW, can you run GNOME programs in KDE in Wayland or do you have to switch to GNOME ?

[sylware]

I build my own distro, I build myself Xorg: I did witness his Xorg breakage all over the place.

I did welcome happily the revert of all his code.

[jeltz]

There is also Phoenix: https://git.dec05eba.com/phoenix/about/

[hulitu]

Current state Phoenix is not ready to be used yet.