What they are talking about is that some of the Wayland compositors rely on things like libinput and libdrm which are Linux specific.
This is not “Wayland” really but, from the point of view of a regular user, it may as well be. As the OP points out, there is no /usr/bin/Wayland
It is not really a great criticism although it must be frustrating for the BSD folks and others. Of course, the answer like always is to contribute. Nothing stopping anybody from taking wlroots ( or whatever ) and adding abstractions that make it more portable.
Non-Linux operating systems have already added Wayland support ( like Haiku ). If I had the time, I would add it to SerenityOS myself.
Actually, if I had the time, I might write a WaylandServer for X. First, it would be funny. Second, the people that do not want to move could stay on X forever even when everything stops supporting it. I would have to make sure that my WaylandServer could run XWayland of course.
I have noticed that one of the groups that does not seem to be complaining about Wayland are the toolkit folks. GTK added support back in GTK3. Qt added it. Enlightenment added it. They must have jumped on it for a reason.
When you look at the Wayland readiness docs for things like XFCE, it stands out that all the apps are already ready ( because they are GTK based in this case ).
Not only is nobody forking X but many people are building Wayland compositors.
Listening to the detractors, you get the impression that Wayland is a failure and / or that X may still be the better choice.
Then you realize the only people still working on X are paid by enterprise distros with long-term support obligations. All the toolkit people have moved to Wayland. The major desktop environments have shifted to Wayland. All the “new” window managers are for Wayland.
Wayland is already supported on BSD ( FreeBSD at least ).
The actual developers have spoken and Wayland has won.
That said, everything you said about the Xorg server could be said about wlroots. Nobody has to “implement Wayland because they must” anymore. The X approach is available in Wayland as you can build your window manager on top of wlroots and many do.
Seems fairly apples to apples to me.
Or you can choose a competing compositor library as there are now quite a few available. I think XFCE is looking at using Wayfire. Or you can control more of the stack directly and write your own as GNOME and KDE are doing.
Not only do you not have to implement Wayland to make a window manager, because compositor libraries are available, but people are writing Wayland compositors even though they do not have to. Louvre is a compositor recently released that seems expressly designed to make writing new window managers super easy.
As for innovation, there seems to be lots in Wayland. Valve just added HDR. GTK is looking at using dmabuf. There are already Wayland window managers that are not ports from X. There seems to be innovation at every level.
You forgot the part where this is what is happening.
The Linux ecosystem is not the product of a giant corporation. It is highly distributed and both built and promoted by multiple players with many different goals and interests.
The people actually building the ecosystem have aligned almost completely on Wayland. The strong implication is that X was not working for them.
Distributions have been slower to move but that is happening now. You can look at this as forcing users to move. My guess is that it is more a case of pleasing some uses and frustrating others where more users want what Wayland provides than miss what it doesn’t.
It is always painful to be a laggard during a technology transition. There is usually a period where the new tech becomes common before it does what you want. That is just what technology transitions look like. When that happens, the problem is that the majority is perfectly happy and maybe happier than ever. That is why things happen when they do.
That is why I never switched to Linux. I mean, it is over 30 years now and it still doesn’t do everything. Sure it does some cool stuff—but not “everything” I could do before. What is taking them so long?
As I like to stay evidence driven, I should say that I use XFCE mostly and, as such, am not typically a Wayland user on most of my machines. I will let other readers decide how that impacts the indictment “Wayland’s worst enemy is its fans”.
I am not sure what the “sides” are here either. If I was to try to draw that line, it seems to be between people providing software and those using it. Because the people writing the software are moving to Wayland.
Which leads us to “at this rate”. GNOME and KDE will both be Wayland only next year. What percentage of the Linux Desktop population do we think that represents right there? Enlightenment has already moved. Ubuntu uses Wayland. Red Hat uses Wayland. The Steam Deck uses Wayland. XFCE and Cinnamon will move next year. Wayland only window managers are appearing and gaining in popularity. What percentage of the Linux Desktop universe are you expecting will still be using X at the end of 2025?
Some people may wait 5 years. Then again, Ref Hat will have stopped contribute to X by then and, as I said, nobody is rushing in to dev X. How long is running X going to stay viable?
I would say that BSD may take a little longer but they are starting to move too.
Liking Wayland or not has nothing to do with any of these facts.
Hi! I’m seeking some advice and sanity check on hopping from Ubuntu to Fedora on my personal PC. I’ve been using Ubuntu LTS for almost two years now, switched from Windows and never looked back. But I cannot say I know Linux well. I use my PC for browsing, some gaming with Steam (I have AMD GPU), occasional video editing,...
You better hope that Cinnamon migrates to Wayland before Red Hat stops supporting Xorg. Despite the deeply researched and evidence based opinion above, Red Hat is the the primary contributor to many of the technologies propping up Mint. Xorg is MIT licensed of course and Red Hat has no obligation to share their changes for Xorg with Mint but they do. Most of the original software Red Hat writes is released under the GPL and used by every other distro. The very first program that Debian runs when it boots was written and is maintained by Red Hat. Fedora was founded by Red Hat to explicitly be community based and they pay the salaries of many of the prominent contributors. Regardless of what you think of Red Hat’s behaviour, I am embarrassed for anybody that honestly believes Red Hat is closed source, even without the all caps.
Visual Studio for Mac is rebranded MonoDevelop which actually started on Linux. It is even deader though as MS stopped releasing code to MonoDevelop even before they killed Studio for Mac.
If you are doing C# on Linux though, check out Jet Brains Rider. You can try the Early Access Program for free. Some people ( like me ) consider Rider better than Visual Studio. It is certainly better than Visual Studio for Mac.
Colour spaces are ready. They are saying I may be hard to wire it up in all the right places in a month. Why not take two months and get it in? I mean, it has been over a decade already.
Many people have been waiting for 3.x for literally half their lives. To save a month, they are going to launch 3.x with the big change being the toolkit? Seems like a wasted opportunity.
If it were going to be 6 months or more I would agree with you. From the write-up though, they delay would only be a few weeks.
Calamares uses the QML / Qt toolkit. Most of the people involved in Calamares are also involved in the KDE Project.
XFCE use the GTK toolkit.
So, it is totally reasonable to say that KDE is “more native”.
While Wayland maybe a factor, KDE itself will not be fully Wayland compatible until Plasma 6 next year. So that does not really explain the timing of this move.
I use XFCE myself so I am a bit nervous about the change. We will see.
You are correct that EndeavourOS is a rolling release. In that sense, you never have to ( and never really do ) “upgrade” to these new “releases” since you are essentially always using the latest software.
The releases do two things:
1 - they provide updated install media that are closer to the current repo contents so that upgrading after install is a smaller and more reliable operation.
2 - they provide an opportunity to change the system defaults. For example, the move to dracut. If you installed a couple of years ago, you can upgrade all your packages but you will still not be using dracut ( unless you make that change yourself ). Everybody that installs EOS now will use dracut by default. That is true of other things, like this change to KDE for the offline install.
I thought this was an article talking about how Wayland makes it possible to perform deeply low-level optimizations to improve the performance of things like high-resolution video playback. Thank you for clearing it up for me.
The only benefit that OpenOffice had was the name. Given the momentum that LibreOffice had early on, OpenOffice should clearly have joined with them and maybe ceded the name.
I am glad that LibreOffice did not try to merge back with OpenOffice as clearly it remains a poorly managed project. The continued existence of OpenOffice is doing tremendous damage to the wider ecosystem. The fact that Apache continues to promote the project not only reflects badly in them but show what poor stewards they are. I would not have wanted their lead ship to have hampered the subsequent success of LibreOffice. The whole episode just proves that LibreOffice was right to break away and not just because of Oracle.
Since i see so much linux talk on lemmy i got curious and watched a video about the common distros. How true is the information in this video? The person hardly describes why debian and arch are just better than every other distro. At least i’m definitely now curious about Mint or something for gaming.
The basic GUI experience in X is provided by the window manager. It controls how your windows are placed ( eg. Tiling vs Stacking / Floating ), how they are decorated ( eg. Max / Min / Close buttons ), and how they behave ( eg. Click to focus ). In X, the window manager runs as an application on the X server. You can only use one at a time.
In Wayland, the “window manager” is the display-server too and is called a compositor. For smaller projects, there are compositor libraries that provide similar capabilities to what the X server did so that these projects can concentrate on the “window manager” part. You can think of a Wayland compositor as equivalent to an X window manager ).
A Desktop Environment comes with a window manager ( or compositor ) and adds other tools that run alongside ( or on top of ) the window manager to provide a full user experience. This may include panels ( eg. think Windows start button, icon bar, and status tray ), docks ( like MacOS ), global menus, notification applets, and the desktop surface itself ( eg. are there icons or other features on the desktop ). A DE usually comes with a standard set of basic applications like a file manager, image viewer, document viewer, media player, and the like.
If you start with a basic window manager then yes you have to add all this other stuff yourself. Of course you may not want some of it and so can have a much lighter experience. You can also just choose tools that you like. Of course, they may not match visually or work perfectly together.
If you use a DE, the experience is curated for you and everything is more likely to work well out of the box. That said, nothing stops you from swapping out whatever components you want. You can even use a different window manager than the DE default.
Hello, yesterday I officially released Louvre v1.0.0, a C++ library designed for building Wayland compositors with a primary focus on ease of development. It provides a default method for handling protocols, input events, and rendering, which you can selectively and progressively override as required, allowing you to see a...
I agree with your overall sentiment with the caveat that 20 years will be closer to 5. Early adopters are enjoying Wayland only benefits today. For example, the Steam Deck just launched with HDR and mainline support for Linux gamers in general will not be far behind.
Also, the list of window managers being left behind is starting to look less appealing than the list of window managers that are Wayland only. Hyperland is probably already more popular than WindowMkaer. As GNOME and KDE go Wayland only, they will continue to add features that regular users will want. I see more announcements for new Wayland compositors than I do for new X window managers.
Another factor that gets missed is that the main dev support for X comes from Red Hat. RHEL9 is already Wayland based. When RHEL8 comes off support in 5 years, Red Hat will abandon X. How long will X stay viable after that?
As the number of X users dwindle, we will see toolkits drop support for X. GTK5 for example. 5 years may be too soon for that but I cannot see it taking 20 years.
Wayland being “valuable to most users” will come faster than you think.
A response to the "Boycott Wayland" article
Link to article: gist.github.com/…/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f227…...
Preparing to move from Ubuntu to Fedora
Hi! I’m seeking some advice and sanity check on hopping from Ubuntu to Fedora on my personal PC. I’ve been using Ubuntu LTS for almost two years now, switched from Windows and never looked back. But I cannot say I know Linux well. I use my PC for browsing, some gaming with Steam (I have AMD GPU), occasional video editing,...
My first year using Linux: My experience
In the end of November 2022 (1 year ago), I switched from MacOs to Linux (Debian with KDE Plasma) on my MacBook....
GIMP 3.0 finally has a release schedule (librearts.org)
Wlroots 0.17.0 released (gitlab.freedesktop.org)
Release highlights:...
Open Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver NVK Reaches Vulkan 1.0 Conformance (9to5linux.com)
EndeavourOS Ditches Xfce for KDE Plasma with the Galileo Release (9to5linux.com)
Introducing graphics offload – GTK Development Blog (blog.gtk.org)
6 LibreOffice Alternatives for Linux (itsfoss.com)
Firefox Is Going To Try And Ship With Wayland Enabled By Default (www.phoronix.com)
What do you think about this? (www.youtube.com)
Since i see so much linux talk on lemmy i got curious and watched a video about the common distros. How true is the information in this video? The person hardly describes why debian and arch are just better than every other distro. At least i’m definitely now curious about Mint or something for gaming.
Louvre: C++ library for building Wayland compositors. (lemmy.world)
Hello, yesterday I officially released Louvre v1.0.0, a C++ library designed for building Wayland compositors with a primary focus on ease of development. It provides a default method for handling protocols, input events, and rendering, which you can selectively and progressively override as required, allowing you to see a...