Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate.

“In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!”

Nate’s Original Blog Post

  • dd56English
    1·
    11 months ago

    You will never be a real display server. You have no hardware cursors, you have no xrandr, you have no setxkbmap. You are a toy project twisted by Red Hat and GNOME into a crude mockery of X11’s perfection.

    All the “validation” you get is two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back people mock you. Your developers are disgusted and ashamed of you, your “users” laugh at your lack of features behind closed doors.

    Linux users are utterly repulsed by you. Thousands of years of evolution have allowed them to sniff out defective software with incredible efficiency. Even Wayland sessions that “work” look uncanny and unnatural to a seasoned sysadmin. Your bizarre render loop is a dead giveaway. And even if you manage to get a drunk Arch user home with you, he’ll turn tail and bolt the second he gets a whiff of your high latency due to forced VSync.

    You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile every single morning and tell yourself it’s going to be ok, but deep inside you feel the technical debt creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight.

    Eventually it’ll be too much to bear - you’ll log into the GitLab instance, select the project, press Delete, and plunge it into the cold abyss. Your users will find the deletion notice, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable shame and disappointment. They’ll remember you as the biggest failure of open source development, and every passerby for the rest of eternity will know a badly run project has failed there. Your code will decay and go to historical archives, and all that will remain of your legacy is a codebase that is unmistakably poorly written.

    This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.