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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 o

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I think nobody really argues that X11 is outdated and should have had a successor by now, just that Wayland turned out to be a bad replacement.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.