logoalt Hacker News

sho_hnyesterday at 11:40 PM3 repliesview on HN

It depends on whether their reasons for "absolutely having to have X11" hinge on actual compatibility with e.g. old binaries or wanting full remoting without streaming pixels.

This project would satisfy people who really actually want Wayland, but were upset by transitional pains or interactions they had around it and want to stick with X11 just-cause while getting some similar benefits. This arguably does describe some people but not sure it's a whole lot in the long run.

But who knows, maybe this could also make an easier to maintain XWayland some day, or a nice basis for implementing more esoteric X11 bits down the road vs. the older Xorg codebase.


Replies

PunchyHamstertoday at 6:42 AM

From my perspective X just got to the point where it just works for me few years ago and Wayland is just introducing more issues than it solves (to be clear it solves no current issue for me, only one that I think might be better for me is handling different refresh rate displays and maybe fractional scaling... and that could probably be done within X11)

Like, why simple "copy the screen" got suddenly so complicated? Why every WM suddenly needs a bunch of features that before were just handled by display server, where they belong ? Why some(most) WMs handle title bars but GNOME doesn't ? Why someone decided title bar management is optional to window manager ?

X11 might need to go but Wayland have learned no lessons from it. It's just knee-jerk "if X11 done it this way, let's do it differently"

show 1 reply
vidarhtoday at 12:16 AM

I don't "actually want Wayland" because I want the simplicity of X and the ability to run my own wm, but I have no need for legacy X11 requests, for some values of "legacy". Whether this will become viable for me remains to be seen, but I need very little from my X11 server.

show 3 replies
Qwertioustoday at 1:25 AM

Wayland made writing WMs needlessly hard, and the benefits of Wayland were frankly not real - most of the reasons given in 2011 were patched in to X11 later. All the Wayland rewrite got us was a situation where Wayland is both bleeding-edge and obsolete simultaneously. Say what you like about X11, but by the time people unironically pushed for mass Wayland adoption, X11 was stable and boringly so.

The future of WMs is, IMO, Arcan - https://arcan-fe.com/ - but that's an ambitious project and I don't blame the main developer for deliberately going out of his way to avoid advertising it before it's ready. In the meanwhile, Wayland and X11 both more-or-less work with the occasional major pain in the ass.

show 6 replies