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One of the big issues with Wayland is the (intentional) fragmentation. Each "Wayland compositor" is really its own window system, with its own peculiarities. Th

by nsajko 3y ago

One of the big issues with Wayland is the (intentional) fragmentation. Each "Wayland compositor" is really its own window system, with its own peculiarities. This forces applications that would have been trivial to implement on X to either limit support to only a single "compositor", or suffer explosion of compositor-interfacing code. IMO this, on its own, means that pushing Wayland is intentional sabotage of "desktop Linux", because the fragmentation could be deadly for the ecosystem. It's fine, if perhaps short-sighted, for the big corps and desktops that do the pushing, of course, because they're fine with supporting just a single "compositor".

phendrenad2 3y ago
It seems to me like this was Wayland's fatal mistake, honestly. They left window management as an "exercise for the reader" (so to speak) because they didn't think that window management was a "serious" domain, and didn't understand how issues could arise from fragmentation there. So we traded the decades of cruft and fragmentation within the X11 spec for baked-in fragmentation at the DE level. I expect that we'll never reach a Mac-like utopia where you can set global keyboard shortcuts for window management (such as next/previous tab) at the OS level, and have it work across Wayland apps, because of this.
dbeley 3y ago
> systemd "It removes fragmentation, could be deadly for the ecosystem" > wayland "It adds fragmentation, could be deadly for the ecosystem" Both are now the standard on the most of the biggest linux distributions, so maybe it's not that big of a deal?
kaba0 3y ago
Yeah, I’m sure desktop linux was looking so good before Wayland that it needed some expensive sabotage mission from an Apple-Microsoft-FBI collaboration. Come on, literally noone outside the 3% cares at all about linux desktop.
- joebiden2 3y ago
  > Come on, literally noone outside the 3% cares at all about linux desktop. I care. Wayland doesn't help.

by nsajko 3y ago

phendrenad2 3y ago

It seems to me like this was Wayland's fatal mistake, honestly. They left window management as an "exercise for the reader" (so to speak) because they didn't think that window management was a "serious" domain, and didn't understand how issues could arise from fragmentation there. So we traded the decades of cruft and fragmentation within the X11 spec for baked-in fragmentation at the DE level. I expect that we'll never reach a Mac-like utopia where you can set global keyboard shortcuts for window management (such as next/previous tab) at the OS level, and have it work across Wayland apps, because of this.

dbeley 3y ago

> systemd "It removes fragmentation, could be deadly for the ecosystem" > wayland "It adds fragmentation, could be deadly for the ecosystem" Both are now the standard on the most of the biggest linux distributions, so maybe it's not that big of a deal?

kaba0 3y ago

Yeah, I’m sure desktop linux was looking so good before Wayland that it needed some expensive sabotage mission from an Apple-Microsoft-FBI collaboration. Come on, literally noone outside the 3% cares at all about linux desktop.

joebiden2 3y ago
> Come on, literally noone outside the 3% cares at all about linux desktop. I care. Wayland doesn't help.