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X is almost 40yo, stable, reliable, difficult to maintain. Wayland is 15yo, barely usable. Any old timers remember 1999 when X was 15? Wayland is like IPv6 of d

X is almost 40yo, stable, reliable, difficult to maintain. Wayland is 15yo, barely usable. Any old timers remember 1999 when X was 15? Wayland is like IPv6 of desktops

bitwize 4y ago
More like the R6RS of desktops.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  Really? I thought that one of the complaints about R6RS was that it was too broad and overspecified, while Wayland is too small so every other compositor is reinventing half of X11 by itself. I'd say it's more like R7RS (hash tables? No. Procedural records? No. Enumerations? Nope). EDIT: This comment may age poorly when R7RS Large is complete.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    One of my problems with R6RS was it was a profound shift in philosophy. The consensus criterion was changed from unanimous to simple majority, for instance, and there was much more emphasis on building a practical software engineering language rather than a language core intended to be built upon. But it kind of failed at that because its standard library had only a small fraction of the features that "practical languages" like Python or Java had! ("> 1 line to send an email -- NON-STARTER!") So it was kind of a fuck you to the existing Scheme user base, in favor of new users that had yet to materialize, and yet it didn't deliver what those new users wanted! (R7RS Small was kind of a return to form for Scheme. I really appreciate the Small vs. Large profiles, akin to C's freestanding vs. hosted implementation profiles.) And Wayland is kinda the same. "Fuck everything about X11" is as significant a rationale for Wayland as any, but there's a lot of things X11 users need that it didn't do very well until fairly recently. But literally everyone with the know-how to work on X11 backs Wayland instead... so unlike the R6RS situation it's kind of a fait accompli. Enough Scheme implementers were assmad about R6RS that there had to be a compromise.
mnd999 4y ago
I think you’re being unfair to IPv6
- oleg_antonyan 4y ago
  In terms of usability - definitely. But it's built on top of similar unfulfilled promise: we're running out IPv4 addresses VS X11 is unmaintainable legacy full of security bugs. 20 years later IPv4 is still dominant, Wayland is still unusable and X11 just works.
  - minitech 4y ago
    > Wayland is still unusable Wait, what have I been doing my work on then? Someone should inform Ubuntu and Fedora, too. Who knew it hasn’t been possible to use the most popular Linux distro out of the box for two years?
    - oleg_antonyan 4y ago
      YMMV. When it reaches the level of X11 that "just works for everyone without preconditions" it will become usable in my coordinate system
      - throwawaylinux 4y ago
        X11 is not usable for everybody without preconditions though.
        rekoil 4y ago
        Exactly, there's hundreds of lines of illegible X configuration for every such "just works" setup. There's a difference between "the community has learned to deal with it" and "just works".
        kaba0 4y ago
        I honestly don’t get people, like were these people just extremely lucky and never had to tweak anything? Like, I remember times when I had to blindly log into my user and try to fix my setup from there, purely by muscle memory.
fsh 4y ago
Wayland is the default on Fedora, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Debian. The majority of desktop linux users is probably on Wayland by now.
- IceWreck 4y ago
  Conditionally default. Except the latest version of Fedora, all the others fallback to X on nvidia hardware.
- ddtaylor 4y ago
  The majority of graphics cards are Nvidia which don't play nicely at all with Wayland.
  - fsh 4y ago
    The average user has a laptop with an Intel or AMD iGPU. Gaming machine are niche.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - pauby 4y ago
      The average user isn't running a Linux desktop.
      - lproven 4y ago
        That may not be true any more. ChromeBooks were outselling Macs from 2017-2021, although the pandemic meant hundreds of millions of people suddenly needed new computers for remote working and the kids to use for remote schooling, so sales spiked and have since collapsed. But they sold ITRO 100 million units per year for several years. China's 5-3-2 program is also nearing its end: https://medium.com/technicity/chinese-3-5-2-policy-is-a-major-move-towards-tech-independence-48d178157b3f https://medium.com/technicity/chinese-3-5-2-policy-is-a-majo... That means hundreds of millions more Linux PCs in the PRoC. As such, that's somewhere around quarter to half a billion Linux desktops in the last few years, and maybe twice that. Windows PC sales are struggling: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3675895/pc-sales-fall-off-a-cliff.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3675895/pc-sales-fall-... Still hundreds of millions of units, but they're falling. More people are staring at Linux all day than you might think.
gpderetta 4y ago
X11 in '99 was stable, reliable and difficult to maintain :). Let's see where Wayland is in 25 years.
Jnr 4y ago
Wayland is usable. It is simply not fully used. Wayland is just a protocol and there are multiple implementations in different compositors. Instead of focusing on a single great implementation, there are multiple average and weak implementations. It puts quite a bit of pressure on desktop environment developers and it seems like they don't really care about many of the defined protocols. https://wayland.app/protocols/ https://wayland.app/protocols/ I wonder if Linux desktop would be in a better state now if Wayland also came with a new and advanced compositor used by new DE's and not just a reference example one.
- Jnr 4y ago
  I also want to point out that you will likely get a better Wayland experience on KDE. They are much more active in implementing Wayland protocols and overall it feels more solid. This makes me sad because I really like how Gnome looks like, but Gnome developers don't seem to care as much about Wayland stuff.
  - est31 4y ago
    I have been a KDE user since 2010. I've started this habit a few years ago that every time I upgrade my desktop distro's release, which is twice per year (first Kubuntu, now NixOS), I try out the wayland mode for a while, until I find the bugs to be too annoying. A few years ago I switched back after a couple of hours. The last time I tried I remained there for 3 months. So yes, a lot has improved, but I'm still back on X11.
  - BearOso 4y ago
    I'd also confirm this. Gnome started out ahead by virtue of being the target or idealization of most of Wayland's features, but it's stagnated. Nothing is ever improved and they refuse to fix the technical problems holding them back, like the lack of I/O being separated from drawing in Mutter. They claimed to have improved it several times, but it's just as bad as ever. Either they're hesitant, or they just don't have the time and resources to break and rebuild it properly. Meanwhile, KDE/Plasma's kwin finally stepped past them. And there's also the kwinft project that's rebasing kwin idiomatically as a wlroots compositor. We may finally get full Wayland adoption, but I don't think Gnome is going to be prominent in it anymore.
pjmlp 4y ago
Old timers remember when xmodconfig could be used to burn monitors.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  Not exactly burn them, just gently char the innards until the finest magic smoke was released.
mjg59 4y ago
Anyone who believes that XFree86 was stable in 1999 was apparently running a different XFree86 to me. The sysrq key was mostly useful at the time for using the SAK shortcut to kill all processes on the current terminal, which with luck included your wedged XFree86 which would then get respawned by xdm. I don't miss those times.
- adrianmsmith 4y ago
  XFree86 in 1999 might not have been, but in 1994 when I went to university in the UK and was using Sun computers which were solely X servers to display programs running on the "main" shared computer in the corner of the room, X and all the associated software was all stable and worked fine.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Solaris X Server wasn't the same.
  - vetinari 4y ago
    At our uni, we used DEC and had vxt2000 terminals. It worked fine, just like wayland does today. But it wasn't rock stable, or even remotely secure.
    - wkat4242 4y ago
      Secure no, lol. But in those days telnet was still the norm. At my college they didn't even have xauth implemented which was loads of fun embarrassing other users with xv and some cool pictures :P Or xblast
      - vetinari 4y ago
        We didn't have xauth either; our fun was xeyes.
- sprash 4y ago
  X11 became really stable in the late 00s. And since the introduction of DRI3 it is at the same technological level of Wayland concerning the efficient buffer swap mechanism. X11 is however still miles ahead on the architectural level. Parts of the system like window managers or compositors can fail or be replaced at runtime without affecting running clients. Wayland lacks the appropriate standardized interfaces for that and there are not plans if not outright refusal to actually implement them.
scrollaway 4y ago
Wayland is default on several distributions and has some pain points, much like X did in 1999 (it had many back then, and in fact still does today). But it’s definitely usable, it’s my daily driver here. The main difference is in 1999 X did not have real alternatives, so if you wanted a graphical desktop, you had to fix the X bugs period. Here if you don’t want to deal with wayland issues you can fall back to X. It makes for slower development…
sprash 4y ago
X11 is actually not really difficult to maintain. There is just no corporate funding anymore. Wayland is designed to be used in car entertainment systems. At least this is where most of the funding is coming from. As such it is completely unsuitable for any desktop use and has had zero community mind share in that space for a very long time.
kstenerud 4y ago
Wayland is the default on RHEL since 2019. Wayland is the default on Centos since 2019. Wayland is the default on Ubuntu and Debian since 2022. In Arch, Wayland is the default for GNOME installs. Wayland is far from "barely usable" And yes, I remember 1999. X was a pain to get working properly with many graphics cards. Some things never change...
- ravishi 4y ago
  Have you ever tried sharing your screen? Do your organization uses Microsoft Teams? It is barely usable for quite some people.
  - vetinari 4y ago
    Wayland screen sharing works fine (in Chrome, Webex...). It doesn't work in Teams, but that's Microsoft's issue, since they didn't bother with implementing it.
    - tutuca 4y ago
      If it's preventing your users to switch to your platform, it's your problem too...
      - vetinari 4y ago
        Microsoft releasing worse implementation for competing system? How surprising. /s The linux team client seems to be completely unmaintained and might be thrown away soon. If you need to use teams, use it in a browser.
        danogentili 4y ago
        This, teams works just fine in the browser.
        tcmart14 4y ago
        I use linux at home, but have to use Windows at work. Microsoft team's desktop app even runs like ass on Windows.
doctor_eval 4y ago
I don’t identify as an old timer but I was using NCD X-Terminals connected to Data General Aviion back in the mid 90s and they were solid as a rock. XF86 also worked quite well in the late 90s but it did require a lot of work and there were warnings that certain settings could blow the monitor. Fun times.
- lizknope 4y ago
  I remember creating a new modeline and adding it to the list. Then using ctrl+alt and +/- to cycle through the modes. I would get to the new mode and the monitor would start buzzing and clicking and the image would flicker. I would quickly toggle to the next mode that was "safe" then go back and edit the modeline and try again. I did manage to get my monitor to run at 1280x1024 @72Hz but couldn't make it go 75Hz
- jerrysievert 4y ago
  to be fair, we had Keith Packard working with us at NCD during the mid 90's. it helped to have someone innately connected to X11.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    That NCD terminal wasn't mine, but I had the use of it while I worked at a customer's site for 6 months or so. One of my all-time favourite devices. I wrote so much code on that thing. Thanks!
    - jerrysievert 4y ago
      I ended up leaving with a couple of generations of x terminals, my favorite which could pxe-boot and had a compactflash-like slot on it. the weirder was an Apollo we had for an internal auction, strangest unix system I've ever run. but the b&w screen was very high resolution for the time and quite crisp.
raydiatian 4y ago
> “barely usable” I run Hyprland just fine with Wayland, I seriously doubt it is barely usable. > IPv6 of desktops Dunno if you’ve looked at your ip link lately but you probably have an ipv6 address!
- csdvrx 4y ago
  > I run Hyprland just fine with Wayland, I seriously doubt it is barely usable. Same. I wasn't convinced about Wayland until I tried Hyprland. It's just great! The design of X11 meant many windows managers, which mostly were average. But that was ok, as the issues could be addressed by separate tools Wayland had 3 issues 1) not many tools (now there's wev, ydotools...) 2) they were limited in what they could do, as the keys to the kingdom are mostly given to the compositor, and 3) outside sway (with its own issues) the compositors were not so great. So if you didn't have a good one, or if it was missing essential options, you suffered until you went back to X: to prep my laptop for uni in the late 2010s I evaluated wayland but returned to X as it was simpler to get a better experience. Now with hyprland, I love wayland: I can script again very precise behaviors with hyprctl and wlrctl. The foot terminal emulator is great. Edge works fine with the right wayland options. Much has changed since I first discovered Wayland in 2016: I'd put 50% of that on hyprland (it's seriously wonderful) and the other half on the availability of more wayland-compatible tools. I'm eagerly waiting for the patches for wine on wayland: not just because I love Office, but because for a long time it was said to be impossible to have a good wine experience on wayland. Well, these patches prove it wasn't impossible, just a bit hard, and old people are stuck in their ways and hate change even for better tools. It's like how systemd was so unpopular at first, except it had most of everything ready. Wayland in comparison was missing many small tools that are only important for very few people (ex: for scripting) but about everyone had one thing they couldn't do on Wayland.
- cwillu 4y ago
  Having an ipv6 address is the easy part. Having ping6 actually able to ping something over ipv6 is another thing entirely.
  - raydiatian 4y ago
DonHopkins 4y ago
More like the aptly named "Duke Nukem Forever" of the desktop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Fore...
kzrdude 4y ago
It's basically imperceptible that I'm using wayland on ubuntu (from default config on install). It works, no problems.
messe 4y ago
> Wayland is 15yo, barely usable It's the default on several distros. I regularly play AAA games on my gentoo gaming PC, using proprietary NVIDIA drivers, on KDE Plasma, with little or no performance differences compared to X11. Even the Steam Deck, arguably the most popular linux PC, runs its default UI on Wayland.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago
  Gamescope is wayland while the desktop is x11
- kelnos 4y ago
  A little weird to classify the Steam Deck as a "personal computer". It's a special-purpose handheld gaming device that just happens to run Linux & Wayland under the hood. While I wouldn't call Android phones "personal computers" either, they're much closer to being the "most popular Linux PC" than a Steam Deck is.
  - messe 4y ago
    I did say "arguably". I mean more in the sense of the hardware it uses, i.e. it's PC-compatible (x86) hardware that runs a desktop linux distribution by default.
    - dormento 4y ago
      The Steam Deck is literally a PC, no doubts about that. It's even more "P" than many other "C"s, like most Apple hardware for instance. But I think that the notion that it somehow validates Wayland as mature tech is kinda weak. It appears that the justification for switching to Wayland in many distros (just like systemd before it) was so that the devs could actually abstract away work on these components and invest time into their flagship features (WM, filesystems, shells, look & feel, the works). For what its worth, looks like this was achieved.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    At least it's closest to a "Linux distro" software-wise. (Otherwise Android phones would be the most widespread Linux devices with a powerful GUI.)
earlyam 4y ago
As a user(!), Wayland is much more usable at 15 than X was at 25.
throw009 4y ago
[dead]
nine_k 4y ago
Easy. At the very least, IPv6 works well, and does not introduce new significant limitations.
NikkiA 4y ago
I remember in 1996 when we were told that X12 (Broadway?) would be viewable within a web browser as well as on our local display...
rez9x 4y ago
I'm not sure if it was 1999, but I remember Mir being the golden future of display servers and Wayland being a pipedream. That didn't work out very well.
ttfkam 4y ago
1999 had many people hitting Ctrl-Alt-Backspace on a semi-regular basis. It was not all puppies and unicorn farts back then.

X is almost 40yo, stable, reliable, difficult to maintain. Wayland is 15yo, barely usable. Any old timers remember 1999 when X was 15? Wayland is like IPv6 of desktops

bitwize 4y ago

More like the R6RS of desktops.

tmtvl 4y ago
Really? I thought that one of the complaints about R6RS was that it was too broad and overspecified, while Wayland is too small so every other compositor is reinventing half of X11 by itself. I'd say it's more like R7RS (hash tables? No. Procedural records? No. Enumerations? Nope). EDIT: This comment may age poorly when R7RS Large is complete.
- bitwize 4y ago
  One of my problems with R6RS was it was a profound shift in philosophy. The consensus criterion was changed from unanimous to simple majority, for instance, and there was much more emphasis on building a practical software engineering language rather than a language core intended to be built upon. But it kind of failed at that because its standard library had only a small fraction of the features that "practical languages" like Python or Java had! ("> 1 line to send an email -- NON-STARTER!") So it was kind of a fuck you to the existing Scheme user base, in favor of new users that had yet to materialize, and yet it didn't deliver what those new users wanted! (R7RS Small was kind of a return to form for Scheme. I really appreciate the Small vs. Large profiles, akin to C's freestanding vs. hosted implementation profiles.) And Wayland is kinda the same. "Fuck everything about X11" is as significant a rationale for Wayland as any, but there's a lot of things X11 users need that it didn't do very well until fairly recently. But literally everyone with the know-how to work on X11 backs Wayland instead... so unlike the R6RS situation it's kind of a fait accompli. Enough Scheme implementers were assmad about R6RS that there had to be a compromise.

mnd999 4y ago

I think you’re being unfair to IPv6

oleg_antonyan 4y ago
In terms of usability - definitely. But it's built on top of similar unfulfilled promise: we're running out IPv4 addresses VS X11 is unmaintainable legacy full of security bugs. 20 years later IPv4 is still dominant, Wayland is still unusable and X11 just works.
- minitech 4y ago
  > Wayland is still unusable Wait, what have I been doing my work on then? Someone should inform Ubuntu and Fedora, too. Who knew it hasn’t been possible to use the most popular Linux distro out of the box for two years?
  - oleg_antonyan 4y ago
    YMMV. When it reaches the level of X11 that "just works for everyone without preconditions" it will become usable in my coordinate system
    - throwawaylinux 4y ago
      X11 is not usable for everybody without preconditions though.
      - rekoil 4y ago
        Exactly, there's hundreds of lines of illegible X configuration for every such "just works" setup. There's a difference between "the community has learned to deal with it" and "just works".
      - kaba0 4y ago
        I honestly don’t get people, like were these people just extremely lucky and never had to tweak anything? Like, I remember times when I had to blindly log into my user and try to fix my setup from there, purely by muscle memory.

fsh 4y ago

Wayland is the default on Fedora, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Debian. The majority of desktop linux users is probably on Wayland by now.

IceWreck 4y ago
Conditionally default. Except the latest version of Fedora, all the others fallback to X on nvidia hardware.
ddtaylor 4y ago
The majority of graphics cards are Nvidia which don't play nicely at all with Wayland.
- fsh 4y ago
  The average user has a laptop with an Intel or AMD iGPU. Gaming machine are niche.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pauby 4y ago
    The average user isn't running a Linux desktop.
    - lproven 4y ago
      That may not be true any more. ChromeBooks were outselling Macs from 2017-2021, although the pandemic meant hundreds of millions of people suddenly needed new computers for remote working and the kids to use for remote schooling, so sales spiked and have since collapsed. But they sold ITRO 100 million units per year for several years. China's 5-3-2 program is also nearing its end: https://medium.com/technicity/chinese-3-5-2-policy-is-a-major-move-towards-tech-independence-48d178157b3f https://medium.com/technicity/chinese-3-5-2-policy-is-a-majo... That means hundreds of millions more Linux PCs in the PRoC. As such, that's somewhere around quarter to half a billion Linux desktops in the last few years, and maybe twice that. Windows PC sales are struggling: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3675895/pc-sales-fall-off-a-cliff.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3675895/pc-sales-fall-... Still hundreds of millions of units, but they're falling. More people are staring at Linux all day than you might think.

gpderetta 4y ago

X11 in '99 was stable, reliable and difficult to maintain :). Let's see where Wayland is in 25 years.

Jnr 4y ago

Wayland is usable. It is simply not fully used. Wayland is just a protocol and there are multiple implementations in different compositors. Instead of focusing on a single great implementation, there are multiple average and weak implementations. It puts quite a bit of pressure on desktop environment developers and it seems like they don't really care about many of the defined protocols. https://wayland.app/protocols/ https://wayland.app/protocols/ I wonder if Linux desktop would be in a better state now if Wayland also came with a new and advanced compositor used by new DE's and not just a reference example one.

Jnr 4y ago
I also want to point out that you will likely get a better Wayland experience on KDE. They are much more active in implementing Wayland protocols and overall it feels more solid. This makes me sad because I really like how Gnome looks like, but Gnome developers don't seem to care as much about Wayland stuff.
- est31 4y ago
  I have been a KDE user since 2010. I've started this habit a few years ago that every time I upgrade my desktop distro's release, which is twice per year (first Kubuntu, now NixOS), I try out the wayland mode for a while, until I find the bugs to be too annoying. A few years ago I switched back after a couple of hours. The last time I tried I remained there for 3 months. So yes, a lot has improved, but I'm still back on X11.
- BearOso 4y ago
  I'd also confirm this. Gnome started out ahead by virtue of being the target or idealization of most of Wayland's features, but it's stagnated. Nothing is ever improved and they refuse to fix the technical problems holding them back, like the lack of I/O being separated from drawing in Mutter. They claimed to have improved it several times, but it's just as bad as ever. Either they're hesitant, or they just don't have the time and resources to break and rebuild it properly. Meanwhile, KDE/Plasma's kwin finally stepped past them. And there's also the kwinft project that's rebasing kwin idiomatically as a wlroots compositor. We may finally get full Wayland adoption, but I don't think Gnome is going to be prominent in it anymore.

pjmlp 4y ago

Old timers remember when xmodconfig could be used to burn monitors.

actionfromafar 4y ago
Not exactly burn them, just gently char the innards until the finest magic smoke was released.

mjg59 4y ago

Anyone who believes that XFree86 was stable in 1999 was apparently running a different XFree86 to me. The sysrq key was mostly useful at the time for using the SAK shortcut to kill all processes on the current terminal, which with luck included your wedged XFree86 which would then get respawned by xdm. I don't miss those times.

adrianmsmith 4y ago
XFree86 in 1999 might not have been, but in 1994 when I went to university in the UK and was using Sun computers which were solely X servers to display programs running on the "main" shared computer in the corner of the room, X and all the associated software was all stable and worked fine.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Solaris X Server wasn't the same.
- vetinari 4y ago
  At our uni, we used DEC and had vxt2000 terminals. It worked fine, just like wayland does today. But it wasn't rock stable, or even remotely secure.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    Secure no, lol. But in those days telnet was still the norm. At my college they didn't even have xauth implemented which was loads of fun embarrassing other users with xv and some cool pictures :P Or xblast
    - vetinari 4y ago
      We didn't have xauth either; our fun was xeyes.
sprash 4y ago
X11 became really stable in the late 00s. And since the introduction of DRI3 it is at the same technological level of Wayland concerning the efficient buffer swap mechanism. X11 is however still miles ahead on the architectural level. Parts of the system like window managers or compositors can fail or be replaced at runtime without affecting running clients. Wayland lacks the appropriate standardized interfaces for that and there are not plans if not outright refusal to actually implement them.

scrollaway 4y ago

Wayland is default on several distributions and has some pain points, much like X did in 1999 (it had many back then, and in fact still does today). But it’s definitely usable, it’s my daily driver here. The main difference is in 1999 X did not have real alternatives, so if you wanted a graphical desktop, you had to fix the X bugs period. Here if you don’t want to deal with wayland issues you can fall back to X. It makes for slower development…

sprash 4y ago

X11 is actually not really difficult to maintain. There is just no corporate funding anymore. Wayland is designed to be used in car entertainment systems. At least this is where most of the funding is coming from. As such it is completely unsuitable for any desktop use and has had zero community mind share in that space for a very long time.

kstenerud 4y ago

Wayland is the default on RHEL since 2019. Wayland is the default on Centos since 2019. Wayland is the default on Ubuntu and Debian since 2022. In Arch, Wayland is the default for GNOME installs. Wayland is far from "barely usable" And yes, I remember 1999. X was a pain to get working properly with many graphics cards. Some things never change...

ravishi 4y ago
Have you ever tried sharing your screen? Do your organization uses Microsoft Teams? It is barely usable for quite some people.
- vetinari 4y ago
  Wayland screen sharing works fine (in Chrome, Webex...). It doesn't work in Teams, but that's Microsoft's issue, since they didn't bother with implementing it.
  - tutuca 4y ago
    If it's preventing your users to switch to your platform, it's your problem too...
    - vetinari 4y ago
      Microsoft releasing worse implementation for competing system? How surprising. /s The linux team client seems to be completely unmaintained and might be thrown away soon. If you need to use teams, use it in a browser.
      - danogentili 4y ago
        This, teams works just fine in the browser.
      - tcmart14 4y ago
        I use linux at home, but have to use Windows at work. Microsoft team's desktop app even runs like ass on Windows.

doctor_eval 4y ago

I don’t identify as an old timer but I was using NCD X-Terminals connected to Data General Aviion back in the mid 90s and they were solid as a rock. XF86 also worked quite well in the late 90s but it did require a lot of work and there were warnings that certain settings could blow the monitor. Fun times.

lizknope 4y ago
I remember creating a new modeline and adding it to the list. Then using ctrl+alt and +/- to cycle through the modes. I would get to the new mode and the monitor would start buzzing and clicking and the image would flicker. I would quickly toggle to the next mode that was "safe" then go back and edit the modeline and try again. I did manage to get my monitor to run at 1280x1024 @72Hz but couldn't make it go 75Hz
jerrysievert 4y ago
to be fair, we had Keith Packard working with us at NCD during the mid 90's. it helped to have someone innately connected to X11.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  That NCD terminal wasn't mine, but I had the use of it while I worked at a customer's site for 6 months or so. One of my all-time favourite devices. I wrote so much code on that thing. Thanks!
  - jerrysievert 4y ago
    I ended up leaving with a couple of generations of x terminals, my favorite which could pxe-boot and had a compactflash-like slot on it. the weirder was an Apollo we had for an internal auction, strangest unix system I've ever run. but the b&w screen was very high resolution for the time and quite crisp.

raydiatian 4y ago

> “barely usable” I run Hyprland just fine with Wayland, I seriously doubt it is barely usable. > IPv6 of desktops Dunno if you’ve looked at your ip link lately but you probably have an ipv6 address!

csdvrx 4y ago
> I run Hyprland just fine with Wayland, I seriously doubt it is barely usable. Same. I wasn't convinced about Wayland until I tried Hyprland. It's just great! The design of X11 meant many windows managers, which mostly were average. But that was ok, as the issues could be addressed by separate tools Wayland had 3 issues 1) not many tools (now there's wev, ydotools...) 2) they were limited in what they could do, as the keys to the kingdom are mostly given to the compositor, and 3) outside sway (with its own issues) the compositors were not so great. So if you didn't have a good one, or if it was missing essential options, you suffered until you went back to X: to prep my laptop for uni in the late 2010s I evaluated wayland but returned to X as it was simpler to get a better experience. Now with hyprland, I love wayland: I can script again very precise behaviors with hyprctl and wlrctl. The foot terminal emulator is great. Edge works fine with the right wayland options. Much has changed since I first discovered Wayland in 2016: I'd put 50% of that on hyprland (it's seriously wonderful) and the other half on the availability of more wayland-compatible tools. I'm eagerly waiting for the patches for wine on wayland: not just because I love Office, but because for a long time it was said to be impossible to have a good wine experience on wayland. Well, these patches prove it wasn't impossible, just a bit hard, and old people are stuck in their ways and hate change even for better tools. It's like how systemd was so unpopular at first, except it had most of everything ready. Wayland in comparison was missing many small tools that are only important for very few people (ex: for scripting) but about everyone had one thing they couldn't do on Wayland.
cwillu 4y ago
Having an ipv6 address is the easy part. Having ping6 actually able to ping something over ipv6 is another thing entirely.
- raydiatian 4y ago

DonHopkins 4y ago

More like the aptly named "Duke Nukem Forever" of the desktop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Fore...

kzrdude 4y ago

It's basically imperceptible that I'm using wayland on ubuntu (from default config on install). It works, no problems.

messe 4y ago

> Wayland is 15yo, barely usable It's the default on several distros. I regularly play AAA games on my gentoo gaming PC, using proprietary NVIDIA drivers, on KDE Plasma, with little or no performance differences compared to X11. Even the Steam Deck, arguably the most popular linux PC, runs its default UI on Wayland.

ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago
Gamescope is wayland while the desktop is x11
kelnos 4y ago
A little weird to classify the Steam Deck as a "personal computer". It's a special-purpose handheld gaming device that just happens to run Linux & Wayland under the hood. While I wouldn't call Android phones "personal computers" either, they're much closer to being the "most popular Linux PC" than a Steam Deck is.
- messe 4y ago
  I did say "arguably". I mean more in the sense of the hardware it uses, i.e. it's PC-compatible (x86) hardware that runs a desktop linux distribution by default.
  - dormento 4y ago
    The Steam Deck is literally a PC, no doubts about that. It's even more "P" than many other "C"s, like most Apple hardware for instance. But I think that the notion that it somehow validates Wayland as mature tech is kinda weak. It appears that the justification for switching to Wayland in many distros (just like systemd before it) was so that the devs could actually abstract away work on these components and invest time into their flagship features (WM, filesystems, shells, look & feel, the works). For what its worth, looks like this was achieved.
- nine_k 4y ago
  At least it's closest to a "Linux distro" software-wise. (Otherwise Android phones would be the most widespread Linux devices with a powerful GUI.)

earlyam 4y ago

As a user(!), Wayland is much more usable at 15 than X was at 25.

throw009 4y ago

[dead]

nine_k 4y ago

Easy. At the very least, IPv6 works well, and does not introduce new significant limitations.

NikkiA 4y ago

I remember in 1996 when we were told that X12 (Broadway?) would be viewable within a web browser as well as on our local display...

rez9x 4y ago

I'm not sure if it was 1999, but I remember Mir being the golden future of display servers and Wayland being a pipedream. That didn't work out very well.

ttfkam 4y ago

1999 had many people hitting Ctrl-Alt-Backspace on a semi-regular basis. It was not all puppies and unicorn farts back then.