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!”
Undoubtedly Wayland is the way forward and I think it’s a good thing. However I wouldn’t piss all over X because it served us well for many years. My LMDE 6 still runs X and probably will for the next 2 years at least because both the Mint Team and Debian team don’t rush into things. They are taking it slow, testing Wayland to make sure no-one’s system breaks when they switch to Wayland.
This is the best approach. Eventually it will all be Wayland but I never understood why this is such an issue. Like any tech it’s progress, no need for heated debates. It’s just a windowing system after all.
Eh, I always discredit people when they say X is bad.
It’s been around for over 20 years. That kind of longevity should be praised.
I love Wayland until I don’t. I honestly don’t think about it, it gets out of my way and my system is stable, until I go to use something like scrcpy that just doesn’t work at all. Luckily, the amount of things that straight up don’t work is shrinking.
It’s super impressive to see Wayland having its big breakthrough moment. I remember reading about Wayland 10 years ago and worrying it was going to end up as a dead project.
