X.Org Server Development Hits A Nearly Two Decade Low

[Guest]

I have always thought that Wayland is designed by GNOME, for GNOME.

...and that makes me feel bad since that isn't the only desktop.

Yes, you are really right.
I'm also been thinking to pass to PuppyLinux in my main powerful PC. That's because all the modern famous distros fill their Linux distribution with useless software because heavy (in term of MB) is always better. Money has not been invented for nothing.
The tearing problem. It's only a gtk2/3 bugs. It's not a Xorg issue.

[kpedersen]

From X11 to Xwayland+Mutter Besides a pack of X veterans you only need 5-10 additional hired developers and maintainers to have a sustainable Wayland desktop compositor. Mutter got that from Redhat, Endlessm and Canonical And a few enterprise releases helps as well

Drive-by hacking, short term contractors and weekly blogs won’t cut it in the Age of Wayland.

Basically the broken scope of Wayland has killed the era of small innovative window managers written by independent developers.
You are now stuck with the big fat broken stuff because you cannot write your own any more.

Nice work community!

[ssokolow]

That's exactly backwards. Gamers will continue using X for years for compatibility with old games. Game developers will continue targeting X for years because it will have more marketshare. Wayland will be used primarily by system administrators and back-end developers.

Wayland is for In-Vehicle Infotainment consoles, Jolla, and your grandma who runs Linux because you put it there to extend the lifetime of her aging PC.

Back-end developers prefer X11 because it allows them to write utilities which monkey-patch their desktop's runtime behaviour in whatever language they want, while Wayland's security model forces them to accomplish that by maintaining a patchset for their compositor of choice and hoping they don't introduce crash bugs, which cause data loss unless all their applications auto-save frequently.

[Britoid]

Gnome devs' refusal to implement protocols like idle-inhibit and xdg-decoration, both of which are part of wayland-protocols. Here's all the gory details regarding xdg-decoration if you're interested (warning - it's a long read): https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/issues/217

You've purposely forgot to mention that both are optional protocols.

The former, GNOME supports the org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver API which works on both X and Wayland and is easier to bind to a permission system. The latter would require large redesigns of Mutter for very little gain.

Besides, both of these will be taken care of by the toolkits, so it's not as if application developers really have to care either way.

[Britoid]

Wayland is for In-Vehicle Infotainment consoles, Jolla, and your grandma who runs Linux because you put it there to extend the lifetime of her aging PC.

Back-end developers prefer X11 because it allows them to write utilities which monkey-patch their desktop's runtime behaviour in whatever language they want, while Wayland's security model forces them to accomplish that by maintaining a patchset for their compositor of choice and hoping they don't introduce crash bugs, which cause data loss unless all their applications auto-save frequently.

I think you're severely over estimating how many people (ie normal desktop users) actually monkey patch their desktop.

[Britoid]

Basically the broken scope of Wayland has killed the era of small innovative window managers written by independent developers.
You are now stuck with the big fat broken stuff because you cannot write your own any more.

Nice work community!

Yeh. wlroots (or even Mir) doesn't exist or anything.

Technology changes and old things die, it's nothing new. Unfortunately X was around longer than it should but now we can finally move on to brighter pastures where supporting modern graphics setups isn't a massive hack.

[240Hz]

Xorg has its issues but Wayland is also a flawed protocol that is outdated before it was even adopted.

[kpedersen]

Wayland is vapourware. Being just a protocol, it is too tiny that it doesn't do anything.

The only things that "do stuff" are wlroots / mir which are absolutely tiny projects with very few developers working on them.

You really think the whole system should be based on very small flimsy projects?

[Lycanthropist]

I don't really have the feeling, that Wayland is developed for GNOME. I have been developing pure Wayland clients in C++ in the past (i.e. w/o toolkit) and the protocol seems pretty vendor neutral to me. Also, it's hosted at freedesktop.org and not at gnome.org. Just because GNOMEs Wayland implementation doesn't adhere to common standards, doesn't mean, Wayland is developed for GNOME.

And once the HiDPI issue is worked out in sway, I will say goodbye to X11 for good.

[ssokolow]

I think you're severely over estimating how many people (ie normal desktop users) actually monkey patch their desktop.

I'm currently reviving a tool I maintain named QuickTile which is a clone of a tool named WinSplit Revolution which monkey-patches the desktop to add intermediate window-tiling support to any WM. (More advanced than Aero Snap and its many clones, less advanced than a real tiling WM)

Likewise, there are various popular Windows and Linux tools which implement things like input macros which are at odds with any security model which attempts to preclude keylogging.

You don't have to be a programmer to want functionality that depends on monkey-patching under the hood.