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by throwaway27448
87 days ago
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Why is Wayland so complicated? I thought half the reason for breaking with X11 was to produce a simpler window server. I was flabbergasted when I realized that there were competing compositors for seemingly no benefit to anyone. |
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It's not particularly complicated, and certainly a lot simpler and cleaner than X11 in almost every way.
The reality of the situation is that there's sort of a hateful half-knowledge mob dynamic around the topic, where people run into a bug, do some online search, run into the existing mob, copy over some of its "arguments" and the whole thing keeps rolling and snowballing.
Sometimes this innocent, like OP discovering that UIs are actually non-trivial and there's different types of windows for different things (like in really any production-grade windowing system). So they share their new-found knowledge in the form of a list. Then the mob comes along and goes "look at this! they have a list of things, and it's probably too long!" and then in the next discussion it's "Did you know that Wayland has a LONG LIST OF THINGS?!" and so on and so forth.
It's like politics, and it's cyclic. One day the narrative will shift again.
The mob will not believe me either, for that matter, but FWIW, I've worked on the Linux desktop for over 20 years, and as the lead developer of KDE Plasma's taskbar and a semi-regular contributor to its window manager, I'm exposed to the complexity of these systems in a way that only relatively few people in the world are. And I'd rather keep the Wayland code than the X11 one, which I wrote a lot of.