4 ms·

I'm getting so tired of the "X11 is so horrible it had to be replaced (with something less capable but conceptionally cleaner)" spin by the Wayland hipsters. I

I'm getting so tired of the "X11 is so horrible it had to be replaced (with something less capable but conceptionally cleaner)" spin by the Wayland hipsters. I remember using an SGI workstation around 1992 which had a perfectly usable and complete X11 desktop environment, which according to Wikipedia was 5 years after X11 was released (1987), and 8 years after the X Window System was invented (1984). Wayland has been in development for 15(!) years, has a much smaller scope than X11, and it's still a hot mess. I doubt that the 1980's programmers were so much better or more productive than the programmers working today on Wayland, which in turn means there must be something fundamentally wrong with the basic idea or design of Wayland? Basically, moving on to an X11 successor should be a no-brainer for all Linux desktop users and not require one justification blog post after another why some things don't work anymore as they used to.

eliaspro 3y ago
The computing world has changed since the 80s, when X11 was a prescription acceptance solution. Networks could be trusted as a security perimeter, the handful of sources for the software running on your system could be more easily trusted, there was no level of malware as we see it today, not everything was connected and talking to each other... Times change, requirements change, thereby software has to change.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  I think nobody really argues that X11 is outdated and should have had a successor by now, just that Wayland turned out to be a bad replacement. There is actually a really good point in the article that "(desktop) Linux isn't a platform", but instead a fragmented mess of individual frameworks and systems (which after the Wayland transition may or may not eventually reach feature parity with X11 again). This fragmentation in the Linux desktop world is indeed the core of the problem which Wayland should have helped fixing instead of making it worse by spreading functionality that was centralized before over even more unrelated systems (meaning just more things that can individually break). Compare that to non-desktop Linux, which actually is a platform (and because of the simple "Don't Break Userspace" rule has wiped the floor with other operating systems in data centers).
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    The non-desktop Linux has successed, because it is basically a free beer POSIX implementation, back when BSD future was still uncertain. So it is kind of frozen set of POSIX stuff, good enough to have OS agnostic programming language runtimes on top, and that is it. It is no accident that the new wave of FOSS IoT OSes aren't based on Linux, rather on MIT/Apache/BSD based kernels.
brightmood 3y ago
Yea they should stop forcing it down our throat by making wayland default before fixing actual issues
astine 3y ago
You can lay a foundation for a building in a couple of days and then spend however long you want building the whole rest of your house on top of that. If later you find out that the foundation has cracks or is otherwise compromised and you want to replace it without replacing the whole building, it's going to take a lot more than a few days to fix it.

eliaspro 3y ago

The computing world has changed since the 80s, when X11 was a prescription acceptance solution. Networks could be trusted as a security perimeter, the handful of sources for the software running on your system could be more easily trusted, there was no level of malware as we see it today, not everything was connected and talking to each other... Times change, requirements change, thereby software has to change.

flohofwoe 3y ago
I think nobody really argues that X11 is outdated and should have had a successor by now, just that Wayland turned out to be a bad replacement. There is actually a really good point in the article that "(desktop) Linux isn't a platform", but instead a fragmented mess of individual frameworks and systems (which after the Wayland transition may or may not eventually reach feature parity with X11 again). This fragmentation in the Linux desktop world is indeed the core of the problem which Wayland should have helped fixing instead of making it worse by spreading functionality that was centralized before over even more unrelated systems (meaning just more things that can individually break). Compare that to non-desktop Linux, which actually is a platform (and because of the simple "Don't Break Userspace" rule has wiped the floor with other operating systems in data centers).
- pjmlp 3y ago
  The non-desktop Linux has successed, because it is basically a free beer POSIX implementation, back when BSD future was still uncertain. So it is kind of frozen set of POSIX stuff, good enough to have OS agnostic programming language runtimes on top, and that is it. It is no accident that the new wave of FOSS IoT OSes aren't based on Linux, rather on MIT/Apache/BSD based kernels.

brightmood 3y ago

Yea they should stop forcing it down our throat by making wayland default before fixing actual issues

astine 3y ago

You can lay a foundation for a building in a couple of days and then spend however long you want building the whole rest of your house on top of that. If later you find out that the foundation has cracks or is otherwise compromised and you want to replace it without replacing the whole building, it's going to take a lot more than a few days to fix it.