this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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269
KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 11 months ago by pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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!"

Nate's Original Blog Post

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[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I don’t see a problem.

I didn't say there was a problem. I'm saying it's pretty disingenuous to act like Wayland isn't intended as a replacement for X11. All of which you seem to agree with. As you say "nobody forces Wayland onto anyone yet" (emphasis mine).

Also - I just love how your comment is written like a politician would have written it. "Sure you can use the dirty old X11 if you really want to, or you can use the nice new God-fearing Wayland".

[–] flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If you bring the two parts of your comment together and dial back the assumptions of bad faith, you'll get a consistent picture:

Wayland is a blank slate replacement for how to do window management on Linux. At some point it'll become the standard for software that's new or maintained. Unmaintained software that doesn't talk to the internet and is therefore safe to run even with security holes will continue to be supported via XWayland. The giant scope and API surface is part of the reason why it's deprecated. Maintainers are expected to target the new way to do things going forward, because there are people able and willing to maintain that support (many of those people former X11 maintainers who are looking forward to stop having to deal with that legacy behemoth)

That's the state of things I wanted to express. Not my opinion, no agenda, just how I understand the situation.