KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future
Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of "Wayland breaking everything" isn't really accurate.
"In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!"
Every change will bring it's fair share of complainers, not much we can do about that. LILO to GRUB, SysV to systemd and now X11 to Wayland. No one is forcing your hand (unless you use a pre-packaged distro like Ubuntu/Fedora, in which case you go with whatever the distro provides), keep using X11 if you want stability, if you wanna dip your toes in bleeding-edge software and increase it's userbase to show hardware manufacturers that their drivers need to be updated (I'm looking at you, NVIDIA) then feel free to mess around.
Eventually the day will come when Wayland apps will simply not launch on X11 and you'll migrate too.
I'd say that's already becoming the case in a few places. Hyprland isn't just "Wayland good", it's "You should use Wayland good".
Yes, I know the devs behind it act like pissants. That's bad and I'm sorry for liking their software. I use Emacs too and RMS was kind of an asshole. Hell, I use Lemmy even though one of the devs has slighted me on more than one occasion.
I daily drive Hyprland too, there are some shortcomings with how the mouse behaves with XWayland but I don’t think it’s a Hyprland issue and Gamescope remedies that problem so overall, it’s a great experience.
sometimes the complainers are right and sometimes they aren't
And when they're right, it's usually addressed. I say usually because GNOME exists.
In case of Gnome it was addressed, just by different people. Gnome 2 continues to live on as MATE, so anyone who doesn't like Gnome 3 can use it instead.
Likewise, KDE3 got forked to Trinity. But KDE kept producing (largely) quality software, so Trinity is pretty much an anecdote now.
I don't understand why anyone ever expects a different outcome. They fork something that has quite some investment into the original version. How do they expect to keep up?
I seem to remember a lot of people upset about GPL V3 I don't remember how that was resolved.
It was resolved by people not using it if they didn’t want to. Linux Kernel is still GPLv2
AFAIK, Fedora is the only distro that's getting rid of X11 support, the other distros are still packaging it AFAIK.
Nobody's getting rid of X support. Not for several years.
Go tell Fedora that then lol. They want it gone to the point where Nate is telling users who want X to stay away on that post. Xwayland I believe will still be around though.
They'll recant after their usage drops to a fraction. This move makes zero sense no matter how you look at it. As a generalist distro it's too early to drop X.
If they want to become a niche distro whose only claim to fame is "we only pack Plasma 6", big whoop, like there's any shortage of that. What kind of distro defines itself by what it does not offer? And is that the kind of distro that Fedora aims to be?
Hell, GNOME has been wayland-default since twenty-fucking-sixteen if I remember my dates right. You're overestimating the value X.Org provides.
Yeah its about time gnome drop support to encourage developers to switch to wayland.
This is the kind of distro Fedora has always been, both for better and for worse.
I don't see this decision driving users away from Fedora any more than other decisions they've made in the past and will surely make in the future.
There were news about Ubuntu doing it too some time ago, maybe they realized it’s not feasible yet. I don’t follow their development as I don’t use those distros
You are right in spirit.
It was not sysv to systemD, and it was forced (by making udev not work without it).
Other then nvidia, wayland is still missing some protocols (example: what virtual desktop you want your window to be on). But those protocols are (still) being worked on. And you will always be able to run x11 programs on wayland.
The advantages of wayland are a more direct path to hardware, and trowing away lots of code.