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Red Hat have been funding Wayland since its birth. Its main goal was not to be "more polished", but rather to ditch 30 years of backwards compatibility (which s
by amiga386 11mo ago
Red Hat have been funding Wayland since its birth. Its main goal was not to be "more polished", but rather to ditch 30 years of backwards compatibility (which some might see as cruft), re-architect for a "modern system" (i.e. Linux-specific features), and assume it should offer better performance -- which I accept does matter, especially if you're selling OSes for laptops or tablets running on batteries. If Red Hat succeed in getting Wayland to displace X11, they gain another moat (as they already did with systemd vs initd, PulseAudio vs ALSA, and so on)
Initially, Wayland was an option, unsupported. Next step was offering Wayland as a supported option alongside X11. This is the expensive part, where their release testing and support has to cover both systems simultaneously! The sooner they ditch X11 and start saying WONTFIX to bugs and glitches, the sooner they save money!
I'm sure they're aware of just how much of the software they ship does / doesn't work with Wayland, because users file bug reports. At some point, they've decided that _this_ release is the cutover, Wayland is sufficient, e.g. there's only 20,000 open bugs against it compared to 80,000. I don't know the actual number or metrics they're using, but it worries me given how many things I know don't work for me, today which is why I use Xorg (not that I'm a paying Red Hat customer); they are not waiting for zero bugs and perfect compatibility with existing software before making it your only choice.
- mort96 11mo agoWhat do you mean by a "moat"? Surely Wayland works on non-RedHat operating systems? Either your conspiracy theory makes absolutely no sense, or you're completely incapable of expressing it.
- amiga386 11mo agoSnap and AppArmour work on non-Ubuntu operating systems but it's Canonical who pay for their continued development and derive the most benefit from them. If Red Hat directly employ the main developers of Wayland and/or its most popular compositors and/or KDE/GNOME developers, they can then win customers for having better support for, and for having more access to land changes into these softwares, even if they're F/OSS adopted by other distros too.
- mort96 11mo agoIs your definition of "Red Hat's moat" just "things Red Hat has spent money on and made freely available to everyone"? How does that fit into any definition of a "moat"? Who are the "main developers of Wayland"? It's a set of protocols that plenty of people contribute to; people paid by Red Hat to work on GNOME, people paid by Canonical go work on GNOME, unaffiliated people who work on GNOME, unaffiliated people who work on KDE, unaffiliated people who work on wlroots and sway, people paid by various companies to work on various graphics drivers, people paid by Valve to work on SteamOS, etc etc etc. It's a process driven by consensus among implementers, not a project "developed by Red Hat".