4 ms·

It's a development model that worked reasonably well for the X protocol. Wayland isn't great now but it's not much worse than X was in 1994, after 10 years of d

by alxlaz 7y ago

It's a development model that worked reasonably well for the X protocol. Wayland isn't great now but it's not much worse than X was in 1994, after 10 years of development (and the first version of X11, which saw the light of day in 1987 or so, was pretty different from the early drafts of the X protocol). There was no ICCCM back then (ok, there was ICCCM 1.0 but that wasn't anywhere near great or universal), no session management, no xkb, no xdamage, no Xinerama, no hotplug, no glx, no randr... It helped that there were a bunch of big players sinking lots of money into it, and the documentation was good enough that it was easy to get started -- way easier than it is with Wayland. So after 1993 or so things really started picking up speed. But Xfree cca. 1994 wasn't great.

sprash 7y ago
> It's a development model that worked reasonably well for the X protocol. The development of early X11 didn't work very well at all. Even Keith Packard himself says so [1]. 1.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ
- alxlaz 7y ago
  Most of the bad parts that Keith Packards covers are about the pre-X11 days. But yeah, Wayland is developed more or less like X11 was developed after the mid '90s or so. The difference is that there isn't much commercial involvement on the desktop side. SGI, DEC, HP, Sun, IBM, and later Red Hat & friends, sank quite some money into X's development, and a non-zero amount of that money ended up going into a particular implementation (XFree, later Xorg) and in developing desktop solutions on top of it. Most of that money stream is flowing towards other things than desktops now. Desktop Wayland development is largely a hobby effort (there are some exceptions, but nowhere near as many as in the heyday of X11, and not all of these efforts apply throughout the Wayland "universe"). That may eventually change as Xorg's maintenance will eventually stop, since no one really wants to do that anymore...

by alxlaz 7y ago

sprash 7y ago

> It's a development model that worked reasonably well for the X protocol. The development of early X11 didn't work very well at all. Even Keith Packard himself says so [1]. 1.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ

alxlaz 7y ago
Most of the bad parts that Keith Packards covers are about the pre-X11 days. But yeah, Wayland is developed more or less like X11 was developed after the mid '90s or so. The difference is that there isn't much commercial involvement on the desktop side. SGI, DEC, HP, Sun, IBM, and later Red Hat & friends, sank quite some money into X's development, and a non-zero amount of that money ended up going into a particular implementation (XFree, later Xorg) and in developing desktop solutions on top of it. Most of that money stream is flowing towards other things than desktops now. Desktop Wayland development is largely a hobby effort (there are some exceptions, but nowhere near as many as in the heyday of X11, and not all of these efforts apply throughout the Wayland "universe"). That may eventually change as Xorg's maintenance will eventually stop, since no one really wants to do that anymore...