KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future
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!"
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Nvidia on Wayland moment
Gaming on wayland moment
Battery/Usage on wayland moment
KDE devs making gestures only available on wayland because memes (there is literally a 3rd party github script to achieve the same thing on X11)
X11 being reliable because Xorg devs aren't stupid
My real issue with Wayland is that it took like 15 years to become acceptably usable. I'll switch once XFCE moves over in several years, but until then, there is no incentive for worse performance and non exitestent support.
X11 being reliable because Xorg devs aren't stupid
Not gonna disagree with the rest of what you said, but the Xorg devs and Wayland devs are mostly the same people
They've been working on the same software for 20+ years?
Woah.
X11 being reliable because Xorg devs aren't stupid
xorg devs are wayland devs. nowadays, most of the people that used to work on xorg now work on wayland. they're not stupid, they realised that x11 is too dated for modern systems (see asahi linux) and now are working on a replacement
It's not about reliability though, X11 is hard to maintain and the devs themselves feel burned out. Wayland at least offloads some of that burden to the desktops
Exactly. For 10 years the groupthink was that Wayland doesn't offer anything interesting and X is just fine. Now suddenly everyone who's still using X is stupid. Amazing what couple of memes can do.
it's that wayland wasn't ready, and now is ready. it took a long time, because building a new protocol like that takes a while if you want to do it well, and lots of coordination between many people. it still has issues, but they're being adressed. slowly, because x11 was full of half-assed solutions done quickly, and they don't want that to happen again