2 ms·
You're missing the most obvious reason. Wayland adoption has been slow because nobody cares that much about the Linux desktop because it's not profitable, so it
by dralley 3y ago
You're missing the most obvious reason. Wayland adoption has been slow because nobody cares that much about the Linux desktop because it's not profitable, so it's at best a hobby project of a couple of dozen people. It's hard to make sweeping changes with such a group.
A lot of the work has actually been done by companies like Red Hat and Collabora and Igalia doing drive-by enablement work on a bunch of open source projects.
That manifests in a bunch of different ways. Lots of desktop software is still using the likes of Gtk 2 and obviously won't get Wayland support without being ported first. Desktop Environments like XFCE and Cinnamon are, again, basically hobby projects and re-architecting them for Wayland is a big ask for non-professional maintainers. And then you have stuff like Zoom and other Electron apps that take their time adopting Wayland simply because Linux was always an afterthought to them anyway.
- phone8675309 3y agoThis sort of thing makes Wayland less defensible to me then - why fragment the user and developer base even further?
- dralley 3y agoBecause Xorg is broken and Xwayland works well enough as a translation layer to tide everyone over even if it's not ideal.
- imtringued 3y agoYou are free to develop an X11 subset that is easier to maintain and convince existing Xorg users to switch to your subset.
- Qwertious 3y agoArcan ( arcan-fe.com ) looks like it could fill that niche, but its developer has gone out of his way to avoid attention and is primarily focused on getting the core protocol right, rather than trying to drive adoption. I'm personally hoping that, come ~2025, Arcan v1.0 is released, the WM crowd largely switches to Arcan-based systems, and Wayland becomes the new JACK (with X being the new ALSA, I guess?).