Xfce's Wayland Roadmap Updated

[timofonic]

I'm all for wayland, but this is a terrible argument. X.org is only 19 years old. X11 (The X Window System) was only 24 years old when it was deemed ancient technology and needed to be replaced. If we follow the same timeline, Wayland only has 10 more years before it's also deemed "outdated" and people start building a competitor, except we don't have 20 years of actually using the product under our belt. We have 10 at beast.

Age of core infrastructure is an important piece of information. I bet the people designing X11 also thought that it was going to solve a ton of issues going forever into the future.

There's Arcan...

[Errinwright]

I'm all for wayland, but this is a terrible argument. X.org is only 19 years old. X11 (The X Window System) was only 24 years old when it was deemed ancient technology and needed to be replaced. If we follow the same timeline, Wayland only has 10 more years before it's also deemed "outdated" and people start building a competitor, except we don't have 20 years of actually using the product under our belt. We have 10 at beast.

Age of core infrastructure is an important piece of information. I bet the people designing X11 also thought that it was going to solve a ton of issues going forever into the future.

The premise that Wayland and Xorg are developed on equivalent principles is simply false. Just as one song becomes a generic summer hit piece and another deemed a cultural 'classic', the lifecycles of software depends on the intricacies. Wayland is unlikely to become 'outdated' in a similar manner, however, unmaintained compositors might: the GPU landscape has changed since Xorg and it may do so once more.
The primary question we should be asking is why Xorg was patched, stiched, and subsequently restiched for as long as it had been; there is no tread left on those tyres.

[fahrenheit]

I wonder what current Xfce users are going to use instead. The GTK3 port was already controversial, but a lot of people still using Xfce don't want Wayland either.

(Not an Xfce user myself, btw.)

It wasn't really the migration to gtk3, it was more whether or not to use CSD and more specifically header bars (which were one design change of gnome and associated apps that wasn't very well received). The xfce people tried some stuff, went back on some, offered customization to users on others and in the end with 4.18 I think we have a good compromise on gtk3.

Regarding wayland, I'm fine waiting for 4.20 or 4.22 until it's deemed ready, X works fine for my use.

[Quackdoc]

the largest issue I currently have with wayland personally is lack of bits and bobs, no good docks (RIP latte dock) that work across compositors really sucks for me, but there are a lot of small issues that really add up

[Democrab]

Wayland is built for this model, there's nothing to "be outdated" because it's effectively a wrapper on how GPUs these days are built to work (passing around buffers/surfaces). Where as X had all the legacy baggage (drawing, fonts, 2d apis, printing etc) and was built for a different hardware model.

Yup, Wayland is built for the current model of how GPUs work...Just like the X11 protocol itself was when it was new. See the issue?

If not, it's that the current model can change quite a lot over the years which is the whole reason X11 got so out of touch with where computer graphics was going in the first place. Wayland is quite a bit more flexible than X11 is for future-proofing, but give it a long enough time and the way we do graphics could have changed enough that we need some foundational-level rethinks of Wayland or something similarly new and different to Wayland as Wayland is to X11.

...Not that it's really a point against Wayland, that's just how these kinda things progress over time.

[rmfx]

Wow, even XFCE it's getting Wayland support, congrats to them for working on it!
Again, I wonder WTF is Linux Mint doing with their flagship Cinnamon and with all those money from donations?
By now, after Gnome and KDE Plasma, Cinnamon should've already had Wayland support.
At this rate even the one that Pop OS is developing will get Wayland support before Cinnamon.

Cosmic might actually be the first DE that works flawlessly under wayland even, since it's designed for it from the ground up..

[curfew]

X was designed for when applications asked the display server to draw 2d widgets for them, print for them etc, as it was considered that the user at the time would remote into a more powerful computer and stream a session.

This is not how things ultimately turned out, we use 3D APIs to render widgets into textures and then composite them onto the display. Every other modern operating system does this (Mac, iOS, Android etc). Windows is a weird one but simplified it does this.

Wayland is built for this model, there's nothing to "be outdated" because it's effectively a wrapper on how GPUs these days are built to work (passing around buffers/surfaces). Where as X had all the legacy baggage (drawing, fonts, 2d apis, printing etc) and was built for a different hardware model.

When the arguments are like this, it makes it appear as if neither side understands Wayland. Rendering is a tiny minuscule part of the desktop experience anyway, and Wayland covers all of the desktop experience, including how apps communicate with the compositor and even with each other.

And yeah, the current low-level approach to adopting Wayland, that is everyone writing most of the same code separately, will be outdated very soon. I could bet my house on there being a point in time where devs start planning for a single implementation that can be adopted by everyone, effectively re-creating the Xorg Server on top of the Wayland paradigms.

[NeoMorpheus]

I'm all for wayland, but this is a terrible argument. X.org is only 19 years old. X11 (The X Window System) was only 24 years old when it was deemed ancient technology and needed to be replaced. If we follow the same timeline, Wayland only has 10 more years before it's also deemed "outdated" and people start building a competitor, except we don't have 20 years of actually using the product under our belt. We have 10 at beast.

Age of core infrastructure is an important piece of information. I bet the people designing X11 also thought that it was going to solve a ton of issues going forever into the future.

It boggles my mind how we are talking of these things in terms of decades and still call it the future.

some of us FOSS fans have already died and werent able to see these things finished.

I think after 10 years we can call them failures

[ClosedSource]

I'm all for wayland, but this is a terrible argument. X.org is only 19 years old. X11 (The X Window System) was only 24 years old when it was deemed ancient technology and needed to be replaced. If we follow the same timeline, Wayland only has 10 more years before it's also deemed "outdated" and people start building a competitor, except we don't have 20 years of actually using the product under our belt. We have 10 at beast.

Age of core infrastructure is an important piece of information. I bet the people designing X11 also thought that it was going to solve a ton of issues going forever into the future.

They won't make the same mistake twice. Wayland will just be jotted down as what today's graphics processing hardware and libraries need. Wayland will actually be very nice when desktops are fully mature. X11 was abandoned because people don't know how to use it and because it had bugs that caused irrational fear. This was all a mistake. It won't happen again. The open source desktop world is too small to afford going through this again. There is simply not enough manpower to move everything to wayland in even as large as an entire year Coming up with a successor to Wayland is not going to happen. At most, some parts of x11 protocol might get forward ported.

[braiam]

There's not too much to celebrate, XFWM4's Wayland port appears to be abandoned or completely dormant: https://github.com/adlocode/xfwm4/tree/wayland

Wayland continues to prove it's appropriate only for major projects such as Gnome and KDE.

Why are you using a third party repository to say anything about XFCE? Their twitter literally says "not an xfce developer". Someone else already posted the correct repository that resides on https://gitlab.xfce.org