4 ms·
Don't assume that new=complex. Wayland is smaller and follows the Unix philosophy much better than X. X has gotten insanely complex with all the workarounds ne
by cultus 8y ago
Don't assume that new=complex.
Wayland is smaller and follows the Unix philosophy much better than X. X has gotten insanely complex with all the workarounds necessary for a modern desktop. It tries to do far too much, and not well, so all the other parts replicate much of X's functionality. Wayland was actually started by X devs who felt it needed a reboot.
- captainmuon 8y agoWayland and X11 are complex in different ways. Wayland is a simpler spec without years of cruft, but it is much more complex to write a Wayland compositor than a X11 Window Manager. There are libraries like wlroots, but they are opinionated. And it will still take years for Wayland to match X11 feature wise (screenshots, eyedropper tools, a remoting option, restarting the window manager or compositor independently of the desktop, and so on). I fear that the switch to Wayland will slow down experimentation in the field of window management, because it makes it hard to quickly do something different. Which would be ironic given the goals of it.