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On the contrary, who's willing to work on it isn't what matters either. What matters is whether the code actually does what people need it to do. Now you might

On the contrary, who's willing to work on it isn't what matters either. What matters is whether the code actually does what people need it to do. Now you might very reasonably assume that having devs willing to work on Wayland would lead to that, and that nobody wanting to work on Xorg would cause it to stop working, but in reality that's just not true; Wayland has been preferred by the devs for 16 years and in 2024 is still behind Xorg in meaningful ways. They're finally close, but as someone who keeps looking for ways to make Wayland work it just isn't there. > Forking X11 and assuming Vulkan while throwing out everything else is probably pretty doable and would result in a 90% codebase reduction. However, nobody is willing to sling the code to make it happen. The easy way is to move to just using rootful XWayland, which lets you use the fancy new backend while keeping everything else the same. IMHO they really should have implemented that first, moved everyone to the new backend, and then if they really had to push pure Wayland do that after.

bsder 2y ago
> On the contrary, who's willing to work on it isn't what matters either. What matters is whether the code actually does what people need it to do. That code doesn't write itself. It needs someone motivated to write it. As someone who reverse engineered a video card and wrote an entire X11 driver almost 3 decades ago, I get this painfully. If I wanted it done, I had to do it myself. Both X11 and Wayland have some fundamentally wrong architectural choices. The problem is that both X11 and Wayland are sufficiently "good enough" that the activation energy to get traction above either of them is huge. It's a gigantic pile of grunt work until you get to the fun stuff, and nobody who isn't paid money by a company can muster the motivation to overcome it. And people paid by companies are going to solve the problems they are being paid to solve and not much else. Open source, in general, is having a problem with being stuck in "local minima". Lots of things are good enough to gain sufficient social traction that replacing them with something better is ferociously difficult. (package managers, git, dynamic libraries ... I can go on and on and on ...) It's part of the reason why I don't try to interfere with the "Rewrite It In Rust(tm)" brigade even when I think it's a silly idea. It is now a bigger problem to corral the motivation to do something in open source than gaining the technical skill to do it.
jrm4 2y ago
Right. So I'm probably unique in that I'm a very long time Linux user who doesn't do much coding myself. And as such, the Wayland project is the ONLY one that ends up reliably generating the usual e.g. "WELL YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE AN OPINION BECAUSE YOU DONT WORK ON IT YOURSELF" type of retorts. They're really weird because -- on one hand they're technically true. But on the other, they don't really explain why SO MUCH OTHER free/open source software doesn't have the extreme backwards compatibility breakage that this does. Why do we get the free magic of people making great backward compatible code with other projects and so painfully not with this one? To me, THATS the interesting question, and cutting it off with WELL, YOURE NOT DOING IT SO YOUR OPINION DOESNT COUNT just is weirdly unhelpful.
- bsder 2y ago
  > Why do we get the free magic of people making great backward compatible code with other projects and so painfully not with this one? To me, THATS the interesting question, and cutting it off with WELL, YOURE NOT DOING IT SO YOUR OPINION DOESNT COUNT just is weirdly unhelpful. I can invert your question to: "Why is it that so many people complain so loudly about the X11/Wayland thing and yet so few step in to sling code?" These projects are relatively old. People know what is broken in X11/Wayland; pointing that out doesn't help very much. What isn't always obvious is how to fix what is broken. What's left to do is hard. The easy stuff has been done. The grindy but straightforward stuff has also mostly been done. So, what's left is the stuff that is both a lot of work and not at all straightforward. Given that, what value is there is anyone that isn't bringing code? If the problem needs a mass of work, the only thing valuable to be brought to the table is code. Alternatively, if somehow a brilliant insight got missed by a ton of experienced people, the only thing that can break the logjam and demonstrate superiority is code. I'm no fan of Wayland and think it is very much the wrong direction. However, if I'm not willing to commit time, people or money to fix the situation, how much weight does my opinion really carry at the end of the day?
  - jrm4 2y ago
    You literally just did nothing but further my point.

bsder 2y ago

> On the contrary, who's willing to work on it isn't what matters either. What matters is whether the code actually does what people need it to do. That code doesn't write itself. It needs someone motivated to write it. As someone who reverse engineered a video card and wrote an entire X11 driver almost 3 decades ago, I get this painfully. If I wanted it done, I had to do it myself. Both X11 and Wayland have some fundamentally wrong architectural choices. The problem is that both X11 and Wayland are sufficiently "good enough" that the activation energy to get traction above either of them is huge. It's a gigantic pile of grunt work until you get to the fun stuff, and nobody who isn't paid money by a company can muster the motivation to overcome it. And people paid by companies are going to solve the problems they are being paid to solve and not much else. Open source, in general, is having a problem with being stuck in "local minima". Lots of things are good enough to gain sufficient social traction that replacing them with something better is ferociously difficult. (package managers, git, dynamic libraries ... I can go on and on and on ...) It's part of the reason why I don't try to interfere with the "Rewrite It In Rust(tm)" brigade even when I think it's a silly idea. It is now a bigger problem to corral the motivation to do something in open source than gaining the technical skill to do it.

jrm4 2y ago

Right. So I'm probably unique in that I'm a very long time Linux user who doesn't do much coding myself. And as such, the Wayland project is the ONLY one that ends up reliably generating the usual e.g. "WELL YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE AN OPINION BECAUSE YOU DONT WORK ON IT YOURSELF" type of retorts. They're really weird because -- on one hand they're technically true. But on the other, they don't really explain why SO MUCH OTHER free/open source software doesn't have the extreme backwards compatibility breakage that this does. Why do we get the free magic of people making great backward compatible code with other projects and so painfully not with this one? To me, THATS the interesting question, and cutting it off with WELL, YOURE NOT DOING IT SO YOUR OPINION DOESNT COUNT just is weirdly unhelpful.

bsder 2y ago
> Why do we get the free magic of people making great backward compatible code with other projects and so painfully not with this one? To me, THATS the interesting question, and cutting it off with WELL, YOURE NOT DOING IT SO YOUR OPINION DOESNT COUNT just is weirdly unhelpful. I can invert your question to: "Why is it that so many people complain so loudly about the X11/Wayland thing and yet so few step in to sling code?" These projects are relatively old. People know what is broken in X11/Wayland; pointing that out doesn't help very much. What isn't always obvious is how to fix what is broken. What's left to do is hard. The easy stuff has been done. The grindy but straightforward stuff has also mostly been done. So, what's left is the stuff that is both a lot of work and not at all straightforward. Given that, what value is there is anyone that isn't bringing code? If the problem needs a mass of work, the only thing valuable to be brought to the table is code. Alternatively, if somehow a brilliant insight got missed by a ton of experienced people, the only thing that can break the logjam and demonstrate superiority is code. I'm no fan of Wayland and think it is very much the wrong direction. However, if I'm not willing to commit time, people or money to fix the situation, how much weight does my opinion really carry at the end of the day?
- jrm4 2y ago
  You literally just did nothing but further my point.