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> and cutting off the users who disagree with them instead of Doing One Thing, and Doing It Well Your complaint is the opposite. You're complaining that Waylan

> and cutting off the users who disagree with them instead of Doing One Thing, and Doing It Well Your complaint is the opposite. You're complaining that Wayland is trying to do one thing & do it well instead of trying to be a kitchen sink. X11 is the antithesis of Unix philosophy. It tries to do a hundred unrelated things (compositing, clipboard, drawing, input, etc...) > Admittedly, there's not an elegant solution to any of this. However, in this specific example, I think the best course of action would have been to just outright plagiarize Apple's Quartz. Or Windows' DWM. Or Android's SurfaceFlinger. Android being Apache 2 would have been the more obvious one to take code/design from in this case, but desktop Linux seems to have a general disdain for anything coming from Android.

GhettoComputers 5y ago
>X11 is the antithesis of Unix philosophy. It tries to do a hundred unrelated things (compositing, clipboard, drawing, input, etc...) And it works. Do you avoid desktop environments since they do everything, emacs which might as well be an OS, or music players that can also rename music too? Is a messenger app something you will never use if you can call or send music or pictures on it? My file manager can rename files, show pictures, rename them, and even open compressed files. Why is the Unix philosophy relevant when most linux systems use systemd? Do you even follow "Unix philosophy"? Installing a bunch of plugins to make wayland do 100 unrelated things is the same result.
- pantalaimon 5y ago
  Actually Gnome 2 was really nice about that modularity. You could swap out the panel, the window manager or the file manager as you pleased. That's what really turned me off Gnome 3, they basically threw away an entire ecosystem of third party apps. MATE was able to pick of some of that, but especially when it comes to third party support, that level was never reached.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    XFCE still has that in it, and there are DE that are pick and choose, but I find it hilarious that having useful features means Unix philosophy is being violated and its and its bad that it has functionality that users enjoy.
AshamedCaptain 5y ago
> X11 is the antithesis of Unix philosophy. Well, curiously, X11 has no compositor, no definition of clipboard, and a drawing API that no one uses. It seems to me that precisely it is not trying to do any of these things, but rather providing the mechanism by which some other process (or processes) can do these things. E.g. if tomorrow I want to implement a toolkit that wants to have 3 clipboards, I can; even without changing the server or the compositor process.
badsectoracula 5y ago
> X11 is the antithesis of Unix philosophy. It tries to do a hundred unrelated things (compositing, clipboard, drawing, input, etc...) Not really, aside from input (which is also optional) all of what you mentioned are provided by separate applications, not X itself - these just work on top of X. But in general the Unix philosophy isn't some sort of dogma and it never really was. It is more of a guideline and it can be ignored whenever that makes sense - e.g. the Linux kernel itself. Also if there is any philosophy that X11 has is its "mechanism over policy" one, which is also why it has lasted for so long: it gives you the mechanism to do things but doesn't enforce any specific way to use these things and instead leaves things up to the clients. This is also why you can use a TON of different environments and UI approaches on the same X server, including stuff that the original X designers wouldn't even imagine.

GhettoComputers 5y ago

>X11 is the antithesis of Unix philosophy. It tries to do a hundred unrelated things (compositing, clipboard, drawing, input, etc...) And it works. Do you avoid desktop environments since they do everything, emacs which might as well be an OS, or music players that can also rename music too? Is a messenger app something you will never use if you can call or send music or pictures on it? My file manager can rename files, show pictures, rename them, and even open compressed files. Why is the Unix philosophy relevant when most linux systems use systemd? Do you even follow "Unix philosophy"? Installing a bunch of plugins to make wayland do 100 unrelated things is the same result.

pantalaimon 5y ago
Actually Gnome 2 was really nice about that modularity. You could swap out the panel, the window manager or the file manager as you pleased. That's what really turned me off Gnome 3, they basically threw away an entire ecosystem of third party apps. MATE was able to pick of some of that, but especially when it comes to third party support, that level was never reached.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  XFCE still has that in it, and there are DE that are pick and choose, but I find it hilarious that having useful features means Unix philosophy is being violated and its and its bad that it has functionality that users enjoy.

AshamedCaptain 5y ago

> X11 is the antithesis of Unix philosophy. Well, curiously, X11 has no compositor, no definition of clipboard, and a drawing API that no one uses. It seems to me that precisely it is not trying to do any of these things, but rather providing the mechanism by which some other process (or processes) can do these things. E.g. if tomorrow I want to implement a toolkit that wants to have 3 clipboards, I can; even without changing the server or the compositor process.

badsectoracula 5y ago

> X11 is the antithesis of Unix philosophy. It tries to do a hundred unrelated things (compositing, clipboard, drawing, input, etc...) Not really, aside from input (which is also optional) all of what you mentioned are provided by separate applications, not X itself - these just work on top of X. But in general the Unix philosophy isn't some sort of dogma and it never really was. It is more of a guideline and it can be ignored whenever that makes sense - e.g. the Linux kernel itself. Also if there is any philosophy that X11 has is its "mechanism over policy" one, which is also why it has lasted for so long: it gives you the mechanism to do things but doesn't enforce any specific way to use these things and instead leaves things up to the clients. This is also why you can use a TON of different environments and UI approaches on the same X server, including stuff that the original X designers wouldn't even imagine.