273
KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future
(www.phoronix.com)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
I don't see why we need convincing that Wayland's better. Most Linux users either use it currently or are possibly looking to switch in the future. The other people who are not are likely going to use X for eternity
I think real X11 fanboys are almost non-existent. Wayland wouldn't be so rejected if it wasn't that it still has a lot of compatibility issues, I think most people just want everything to work and don't care whose fault it is.
I remember some 10-15 years ago when I'd look at the y windows website every couple of months hoping for some news of progress, simply because I was sick of x11 being so crappy. I hated it, it was so fiddly, it didn't work right, I just wanted something that worked.
So you can imagine how happy I was when Wayland started taking off. Here was the promise of something better, something that just worked, it sounded amazing. And yet, today I'm still running xorg and I will be for the foreseeable future.
The reason is simply that in the time passed xorg just became usable, I don't have to think about it, it works reliability, it has all the features I need and I hardly ever have to touch it. Meanwhile, I log into my Wayland session and instantly 3 or 4 of the applications I use daily either don't work or act weird. I go and try and fix the issues and I'm told to just accept it, or that I actually don't exist because Wayland works perfectly for everyone. And I'm not even using an Nvidia card, just plain Radeon.
So I quit and go back to what works. Maybe in a couple of years, until then: no thanks.