Wayland is a good image of the main issue a company can have with developers.<p>From the point of view of the Dev, the product that was created is perfect, satisfying in term of design/technical specs.<p>But the dev does not care about the users experience. He does not realize that the most important is not how it is done or to be conceptually perfect but to reply to user needs. To do the job.<p>No one cares about the thing being changed/reworked, to use x, wayload or whatever but everyone expect basic features (available for decades everywhere) of Desktop to work easily out of the box.
Like screenshots.
If you can do less things than what you can do on windows, that is a huge failure.
A big problem for me is that wayland promotes a vision of computing that is basically a hellscape.<p>Wayland supports apps that are basically untrustworthy. Apps can talk to wayland, but not too much to each others, certainly not in ways not envisioned by wayland. The desktop is a huge melee of backstabbing bastards, each shovelling as much user data as possible to their vendor.<p>The X view of the world is one of trustworthy cooperation. A bit naive, a festival for crapware, but also a way to unlock unexpected possibilities.<p>I'd rather see a cooperative, creative future where bad apples are weeded out by social mechanisms, even if it means an occasional malware victim. But understandably the IBMs of this world would rather see rows and rows of easily swappable locked down minions for their workstations, and they are the ones paying.<p>I fear the bureaucratic stagnation that will unavoidably follow from wayland as it is now.
I get where they're coming from but I still think Wayland's broken by design. It's been 10+ (maybe even more) and it still feels like someone didn't think things true. If the answer to basic desktop capabilities are that it's not present and that's 'As designed', then the design's broken<p>I ran Wayland for sometime but went back to x11. Key gripes<p>1. Screen sharing
2. Automated keystroke entry(keepassxc)
3. Many more niggles<p>Get x11 out of my cold, dead fingers.
The pertinent question is whether the user sees <i>anything</i> valuable in exchange for what Wayland does break. If users are to accept breakage, it has to be in a tradeoff for something they want. That incentive has not appeared. That means that the market for Wayland is actually not users but distro builders (c.f. systemd).
I think the difference is that Windows is proprietary, parasitic hate-ware that warrants changing at any cost.. and x11 is libre software that works; with well supported workflows that aren't even on the agenda for wayland development.<p>Also I feel like I've been waiting a decade and I still can't do fractional scaling on wayland last I checked.
Am I wrong in thinking Xorg is still being maintained, although slowly? There was a major release in 2021, and minor releases are occurring regularly<p><a href="https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2023-December/thread.html" rel="nofollow">https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2023-December/thr...</a>
The key thrust of the article is that Wayland isn’t broken because it was designed to behave this way. But, that’s exactly what’s broken about Wayland.
Most of that Github post is straight up incorrect. I don't understand why it hasn't been removed, or why people keep parroting it, or even giving it a mention.
The issue with Wayland is that we now need a new re-implementation of tools foreach compositor. Yes, compositor - previously in X11 known as Window Manager. You will end up with tools being scarcely available.
I'm getting so tired of the "X11 is so horrible it had to be replaced (with something less capable but conceptionally cleaner)" spin by the Wayland hipsters.<p>I remember using an SGI workstation around 1992 which had a perfectly usable and complete X11 desktop environment, which according to Wikipedia was 5 years after X11 was released (1987), and 8 years after the X Window System was invented (1984).<p>Wayland has been in development for 15(!) years, has a much smaller scope than X11, and it's still a hot mess. I doubt that the 1980's programmers were so much better or more productive than the programmers working today on Wayland, which in turn means there must be something fundamentally wrong with the basic idea or design of Wayland?<p>Basically, moving on to an X11 successor should be a no-brainer for all Linux desktop users and not require one justification blog post after another why some things don't work anymore as they used to.