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X is almost 40yo, stable, reliable, difficult to maintain. Wayland is 15yo, barely usable. Any old timers remember 1999 when X was 15? Wayland is like IPv6 of desktops
Wayland is the default on Fedora, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Debian. The majority of desktop linux users is probably on Wayland by now.
X is almost 40yo, stable, reliable, difficult to maintain. Wayland is 15yo, barely usable. Any old timers remember 1999 when X was 15? Wayland is like IPv6 of desktops
Mind that the page describes a hypothetical update to X. In practical terms, Wayland is X12.
I don't know why people get so hung up about this. People including its creators may have been over-optimistic about Wayland, but it was never going to be a case of a weekend hacking binge producing something useful out of the gate (X11 had that distinction because it was entering a very small and very green field). X11 has been used for so long because it is very well supported, robust, and has been extended and improved for decades and most of the remaining problems it has are very hard to solve. And that's exactly why we also didn't see something called X12 happen overnight either.
The fact that Wayland has been created and worked on and blessed by a number of X11 alumni did lend it a good amount of credence early on, and one might say gives it the right to be spiritual successor to X11. But really if you censor the names and look at the practical reality rather than sentimentality, Wayland creators and developers have been going down the long difficult road of coming up with something better and nobody else did, so that is really why it is the next X11. Progress may seem slow but it does not stop. Features continue to be added, implementations continue to improve, support continues to expand and its takeover seems almost inevitable at this point.
Someone might mention "network transparency" at this point. As far as I've seen from the outside looking in that was never the fundamental requirement of the protocol as far as I can tell. Non-transparent protocol like DRI were never not considered to be X11 by the X11 architects and developers who wrote and merged them, showing they have always been quite willing to step out of rigid dogma and embrace practical application. The original X announcement never said the project was a network transparent window system, it said it was a good-but-not-perfect window system and if a good windows system today does not require network transparent protocol (because users don't care as much as they did back then or because networking can be achieved at other layers) then there is no reason it couldn't be X12. The X12 page linked here enumerates some other X11 features that could be dropped too, I've never seen a reasonable argument for why a network transparent protocol is the be-all and end-all of X.
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I think you’re being unfair to IPv6
In terms of usability - definitely. But it's built on top of similar unfulfilled promise: we're running out IPv4 addresses VS X11 is unmaintainable legacy full of security bugs. 20 years later IPv4 is still dominant, Wayland is still unusable and X11 just works.
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In terms of usability - definitely. But it's built on top of similar unfulfilled promise: we're running out IPv4 addresses VS X11 is unmaintainable legacy full of security bugs. 20 years later IPv4 is still dominant, Wayland is still unusable and X11 just works.
> But it's built on top of similar unfulfilled promise: we're running out IPv4 addresses. It’s not an unfulfilled promise. We’re out of IPv4 addresses and have been for almost a decade. NAT444444444444444444444 is not the solution.
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Wayland is the default on Fedora, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Debian. The majority of desktop linux users is probably on Wayland by now.
The majority of graphics cards are Nvidia which don't play nicely at all with Wayland.
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Wayland is usable. It is simply not fully used. Wayland is just a protocol and there are multiple implementations in different compositors. Instead of focusing on a single great implementation, there are multiple average and weak implementations. It puts quite a bit of pressure on desktop environment developers and it seems like they don't really care about many of the defined protocols. https://wayland.app/protocols…
I also want to point out that you will likely get a better Wayland experience on KDE. They are much more active in implementing Wayland protocols and overall it feels more solid. This makes me sad because I really like how Gnome looks like, but Gnome developers don't seem to care as much about Wayland stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In terms of usability - definitely. But it's built on top of similar unfulfilled promise: we're running out IPv4 addresses VS X11 is unmaintainable legacy full of security bugs. 20 years later IPv4 is still dominant, Wayland is still unusable and X11 just works.
> But it's built on top of similar unfulfilled promise: we're running out IPv4 addresses. It’s not an unfulfilled promise. We’re out of IPv4 addresses and have been for almost a decade. NAT444444444444444444444 is not the solution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In terms of usability - definitely. But it's built on top of similar unfulfilled promise: we're running out IPv4 addresses VS X11 is unmaintainable legacy full of security bugs. 20 years later IPv4 is still dominant, Wayland is still unusable and X11 just works.
> But it's built on top of similar unfulfilled promise: we're running out IPv4 addresses. It’s not an unfulfilled promise. We’re out of IPv4 addresses and have been for almost a decade. NAT444444444444444444444 is not the solution.
X is almost 40yo, stable, reliable, difficult to maintain. Wayland is 15yo, barely usable. Any old timers remember 1999 when X was 15? Wayland is like IPv6 of desktops