alt Hacker NewsWayland is not a "display server", it's a display protocol.
A lot of the "existing functionality" that it broke has nothing to do with displays, it's stuff that got crammed into Xorg at some point whether it made sense or not.
I find it quite funny that many of the same people that rag on systemd and say it does too many things, are big fans of Xorg doing a bunch of things that "display server" probably should not be handling.
Even if Wayland was a "display server", it would still "remove existing functionality" if it meant that in any principled sense, because "display server" is only half of what Xorg does.
But sure, the transition was difficult and took a long time.
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And this transition is nowhere near done. Just look at Kicad and pretty much any DAW that loads audio plugins (to name two major usecases where Wayland simply doesn't cut it).
Sure Xwayland exists and mostly (not entirely) works, but that's a band-aid for what is essentially a "we broke it and don't care" approach.
> Wayland is not a "display server", it's a display protocol.
This is a huge part of what "user/dev hostile" means in my book; with Wayland, getting a working desktop always someone else's responsibility, all features have to be reimplemented across DEs endlessly (with often-incompatible variations, of course), and they all blame each other and program authors for bugs while the Wayland project refuses to even acknowledge basic features like desktop automation or screen recording.
> But sure, the transition was difficult and took a long time.
And this irks me too, people are convinced they're done but I still don't have xmacro. And flameshot is broken, while the alternatives suck. And support for everything depends on the DE now. And java.awt.Robot is broken with no replacement. And the clipboard randomly misses copies. And OBS screen recording is broken for me. And there's no support for display resolution scaling. And ssh -X is gone, while waypipe doesn't work all programs.
But hey, at least there's HDR now or something! It was definitely worth replacing a functioning stack for this. I'm so glad that Plasma 6.8 removes X support!
>Wayland is not a "display server", it's a display protocol.
I, as an end user, do NOT care.
>A lot of the "existing functionality" that it broke has nothing to do with displays, it's stuff that got crammed into Xorg at some point whether it made sense or not.
I also don't care about ivory tower ideals of what is within the dominion of 'display' and what is not. The fact of the matter is their changes broke a ton of functionality, and instead of even trying to provide feature parity, they basically dumped all that responsibility onto the WM/DE devs.
I have no idea why the community didn't take one look at their proposal and flatly ignore them.