[split] On the future of X

[flexibeast]

Admin Edit: Split from worth switching to wayland? If missed something that should have been left in the wayland thread, let me know. --pjp

[pingtoo]

[flexibeast]

[dmpogo]

[lars_the_bear]

[metapsyborg]

[metapsyborg]

[Anon-E-moose]

If you want to stick with X, then stick with it, no one is forcing anyone to go to wayland.

Wayland is getting lots of development, while X is basically in maintenance mode.
Don't expect things like HDR, vrr, etc to be added to X.

I've been around long enough to see X go from from servers w/attached X-terminals to X on a pc.
I also remember when X wasn't that stable/usable, X from 2000+ isn't the same as X-1995, or X-1985.

This biggest problem with X is that over time it's become a code nightmare.
Like messing with a bunch of pickup sticks. Touch one thing and something happens somewhere else you didn't expect.
No one person really understands the whole of X and how the parts interact, thus part of the reason that wayland exists.

There are some things that X does better than wayland, at the moment.
Wayland offers some things that X doesn't have or is likely to implement.

Time moves on, adjust or not, it's each individuals choice.

While X was nice in it's day, so was my 8088 pc or 80286 pc, but I don't cling to them shaking my fist at modern stuff.
_________________
UM780, 6.1 zen kernel, gcc 13, profile 17.0 (custom bare multilib), openrc, wayland

[stefantalpalaru]

[Anon-E-moose]

[flexibeast]

"Hubris." Well, if anyone in this discussion is themselves an Xorg dev - not only like Daniel Stone was, but also like OpenBSD dev Matthieu Herrb is, whose 2023 presentation (linked above) says "X11 is fading away / Wayland is the way to go for graphical desktops" - please let me know. Because i think it would be hubris for people who haven't actually worked on maintaining Xorg to talk as though they're in a position to have a sense of the costs and benefits of continuing to try to maintain and further develop Xorg - including in terms of the personal time and energy involved in such efforts. Just because a project will almost inevitably become large and complex and difficult to maintain in the future, doesn't mean the removal of significant pain points in the immediate future aren't of benefit - including to the people actually working on the systems in the shorter term. ("I'm an engineer, and I've seen this pattern again and again. Although I don't actually maintain aircraft myself, i know that aircraft propellers have been working fine for years; these 'turbofans' are just going to bring new problems, and propellers have advantages that 'turbofans' don't.")

i also feel there's entitlement involved in expecting that the people actually working on the systems keep working on something they're finding frustrating and increasingly difficult to adapt to the increasing diversity of use-cases people are using it for. (Such as wanting to develop a kiosk application: choose the Wayland protocols you need for that, and come up with something like Cage, a Wayland kiosk, i.e. a non-desktop environment.) And i feel it's disingenuous to use Weston - which is basically just a Proof-of-Concept implementation showing the fundamentals of how Wayland works, not intended as a daily driver - to make claims about the state of Wayland overall, rather than considering mainstream compositors like KWin and Sway. And as for ignoring an Xorg dev talking about the shenanigans they've had to keep pulling in order to keep Xorg surviving for 35 years .... Well, i scarcely know what to say.

i'm not pro-Wayland per se, but i am pro "respecting the opinions of people who have spent a non-negligible amount of time wrestling with the devilish details of a system". i'm not a systemd person - i moved to Void in order to avoid having to keep dealing with systemd on Debian, and i've spent a considerable amount of time and energy porting s6 ecosystem documentation to man pages - but i feel one of the reasons we ended up with systemd was a whole bunch of people insisting that the way things were working was just fine, despite the volunteers actually doing the work involved in maintaining service-providing packages feeling that things weren't "just fine". systemd addressed their concerns; we might have ended up with something different if more people had been more willing to acknowledge the genuine problems with the existing way of doing things, and saying "But here's a non-systemd way of addressing those problems" (OpenRC, s6, dinit, etc.)

i'm out.
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https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Flexibeast

[Yamakuzure]

[logrusx]

[lars_the_bear]

[logrusx]

[szatox]

logrusx, do you use SSH?
You do, don't you?

[eschwartz]

[logrusx]

@szatox, I'm not addressing your ridiculous analogies. If you have something well reasoned to say, I'll be glad to respond. I don't like exaggerations and putting words in my mouth.

@eschwartz, please don't buy into his exaggerations. That's not what I said.

Best Regards,
Georgi

[szatox]

Yes, that's the thing. Xorg may not be perfect, but it's been working for a long time, there is a whole ecosystem around it, we know how to use it etc. Moving away from it to a radically different solution means all our experience gained so far suddenly becomes irrelevant, so we need to retrain, then we have to deal with young-age diseases like things being not quite ready yet, and evolving ideas breaking stuff, and so on; there's also the issue of big changes to already installed systems...

Big changes are always an inconvenience and additional effort, it's only natural to be reluctant when there are no obvious benefits. Just because it's a new, shiny thing is not really a benefit, and then someone points to an old feature I happen to like, and tells me that it's useless and calls dropping it a "progress".
Well, good to know there is another way to access gui apps remotely now. Still, I remember dropping it being used as one of the selling points of wayland. Obviously, I didn't buy it.

It kinda reminds me that time when really well polished KDE-3.5 got abandoned in favor of redesigned and also completely unusable KDE-4. I'd rather wait a few years.

@logrusx, it wasn't an exaggeration. X-forwarding is to gui apps what ssh is to cli apps. And let me tell you, I've seen my share of corporate cloud-hosted virtual desktops.
_________________
Make Computing Fun Again

[Anon-E-moose]

If you want to use X, then use X. If you want to use wayland then use it.

All this whining and hand wringing will not change others minds.
I'm not ditching wayland in favor of X, because joe blow still prefers X.

I use wayland because it works for me, if it didn't I'd still be using X or xwayland.
And yes remote networking is possible in wayland.

But to answer the OP/topic title, "is it worth swiching to wayland"?
The answer is a big maybe. Many things work well in wayland, to some it's a better experience.
Not everything works well in wayland (though over time, I've said that about many X apps also) thus xwayland to keep those things usable.

For those who don't want to change (whatever the reason) then stick with what works for you.
You will never convince me that your way is perfect, especially when you've not even honestly tried something different.
_________________
UM780, 6.1 zen kernel, gcc 13, profile 17.0 (custom bare multilib), openrc, wayland

[lars_the_bear]

[metapsyborg]

[logrusx]

[sdauth]

I'm waiting for xfce to be fully compatible and also be able to set -X system-wide.
See you in a few years I guess

[logrusx]