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It's unreasonable to expect an X window manager developer to both maintain their WM and invest in writing a compositor a MUCH larger project. It's vastly easier

It's unreasonable to expect an X window manager developer to both maintain their WM and invest in writing a compositor a MUCH larger project. It's vastly easier for everyone involved to just keep using X. The age of the original X protocol is completely irrelevant to the discussion. Unlike OS/2 it's a living feature complete project. It doesn't spoil like cabbage.

mort96 3y ago
Writing a Wayland compositor on top of wlroots is probably a larger project than writing a window manager for X. But it's not orders of magnitude, wlroots handles a whole lot of the dirty work for you. > The X protocol [...] doesn't spoil like cabbage. It actually does. The protocol doesn't handle things we expect from modern hardware and software. And the implementation certainly rots away as the rest of the software ecosystem changes in ways which will slowly make Xorg more and more broken. Drivers will change in ways which expose Xorg bugs. GUI toolkits will introduce bugs in their X backends and introduce new features which don't work on their X backend. Nobody maintains X anymore, and something like a display server in a rapidly changing software and hardware ecosystem requires maintenance to keep functioning. None of this is to say the Xmonad developer should spend time rewriting their project to use wlroots instead of X. But as long as it requires X, it's living om borrowed time.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  There is not one singular meaningful app or feature that doesn't work on X at this point.
  - mort96 3y ago
    Screen tearing is more or less unavoidable on X. I've had tearing issues on Nvidia, Intel and AMD. Avoiding jank is also more or less impossible on X. There is no substitute for Wayland's "every frame is perfect" model. Oh, and you can't connect a high DPI screen and a low DPI screen at the same time with X; to the degree that DPI scaling works at all, it's one global setting so you get to choose whether stuff should be absurdly big on your low DPI monitor or absurdly small on your high DPI monitor.
    - michaelmrose 3y ago
      I didn't have that problem is 2003 nor today.
      - mort96 3y ago
        Good for you! Doesn't make them not problems.

mort96 3y ago

Writing a Wayland compositor on top of wlroots is probably a larger project than writing a window manager for X. But it's not orders of magnitude, wlroots handles a whole lot of the dirty work for you. > The X protocol [...] doesn't spoil like cabbage. It actually does. The protocol doesn't handle things we expect from modern hardware and software. And the implementation certainly rots away as the rest of the software ecosystem changes in ways which will slowly make Xorg more and more broken. Drivers will change in ways which expose Xorg bugs. GUI toolkits will introduce bugs in their X backends and introduce new features which don't work on their X backend. Nobody maintains X anymore, and something like a display server in a rapidly changing software and hardware ecosystem requires maintenance to keep functioning. None of this is to say the Xmonad developer should spend time rewriting their project to use wlroots instead of X. But as long as it requires X, it's living om borrowed time.

michaelmrose 3y ago
There is not one singular meaningful app or feature that doesn't work on X at this point.
- mort96 3y ago
  Screen tearing is more or less unavoidable on X. I've had tearing issues on Nvidia, Intel and AMD. Avoiding jank is also more or less impossible on X. There is no substitute for Wayland's "every frame is perfect" model. Oh, and you can't connect a high DPI screen and a low DPI screen at the same time with X; to the degree that DPI scaling works at all, it's one global setting so you get to choose whether stuff should be absurdly big on your low DPI monitor or absurdly small on your high DPI monitor.
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    I didn't have that problem is 2003 nor today.
    - mort96 3y ago
      Good for you! Doesn't make them not problems.