If this is the attitude of Wayland developers, it goes a long way towards explaining Wayland's ten year road of non-adoption.
Attempting to run a project based on the opinions of a group of Nvidia devs who (1) don't care about your project and (2) don't care about your goals is technical madness. It took the kernel more than a decade of stubbornness before all the other device driver writers caved and supported decent design. As far as I recall Nvidia is literally the last major device driver who refuses to play ball with open source. If Nvidia users can't use Wayland for driver reasons that is because of Nvidia's choices and there isn't anything the Wayland devs can do without repeating all the mistakes of X.org.
If it takes another decade before Nvidia caves and behaves like a good corporate citizen then that is a decade well spent by the Wayland devs. Long term maintainability will eventually trump short term user issues; just like it did for wifi et al. It is unfortunate Nvidia is making their user's lives hard, but the writing has been on the wall since AMD started open sourcing their driver stack in the 2008 era.
My phone is running kernel 3.10 (the same as rhel7, except without backported fixes), and it isn't going to get anything newer.
The only reason Google and a few big players can ever ship updates is by playing hard with those vendors, and negotiating upgrade paths in advance. Nobody is interested in doing that for the desktop.
Game devs just want to put shinny pixels on the screen, no one cares if it is a blob or not.
AMD is open source and there is hardly any advantage, X routinely crashs, doesn't provide support for the GPUs that were dropped from the rebooted driver, being stuck with fewer capabilities than fxgl.
Hollywood studios are quite happy with NVidia drivers.
Compare to something like this:
"We need to provide potential users of Wayland with better information, both to better calibrate their expectations and ensure that anger is properly directed and to help them make more informed buying decisions in the future."
Of fucking course you have a communication problem when your relationship with your userbase is founded on logic like "doing anything other than calling them idiots and ignoring them is useless and we shouldn't surrender to idiocy".
If Wayland developers truly do not care about adoption of their software, then that’s fine. But it means that UI frameworks which do care about adoption will have to continue to support both X and Wayland as backends indefinitely, increasing complexity. That’s okay for now, since removing X support would be a long way off in any case. But if enough years go by without at least a plausible route towards being able to remove it in the future, they may eventually decide to address the complexity issue by dropping Wayland instead.
But maybe that's okay. With a viable alternative, we can be patient.
To illustrate with my own example, I bought a Linux-compatible laptop when I wanted to run Linux on a desktop. That rewarded the seller for effort they put in, reused the FOSS work already performed, and required no demands to be made of volunteers. These things are a two-way street. So, I met them in the middle. Did it again getting a Thinkpad cuz I wanted to try BSD's later this year. Supported all of them.
If trying to maximize adoption, you have to tolerate people's indifference and selfishness. They dont want to maximize sales for anti-FOSS company. So, they're telling that company's customers the issue, suggesting a switch, and having something waiting for AMD buyers.
Since when has FOSS meant that I _can't_ work with proprietary bits? As a user, this is my choice. If software is going to dictate where I spend my money, then I'm less inclined to adopt it. That's not freedom.
I didn't read any "holier-than-thou" sentiment in the parent comment. It's not unreasonable to expect users to think about the things they want to be compatible with when buying hardware.
"I want to be able to use the next version of Windows"... buy hardware that's known to be compatible with the next version of Windows. "I want to use this printer from my iPad"... buy a printer known to be compatible with that model of iPad. "I want to use this printer from GNU/Linux"... buy a printer known to be compatible with GNU/Linux. "I want to use OpenBSD"... buy hardware that's known to be compatible with OpenBSD. "I want to use Ubuntu 17.10"... buy hardware that's known to be compatible with Wayland.
People generally don't understand what linux is, or what a distribution is, or what versions of any of the above are new or upcoming. None of these problems apply to Microsoft, since there are many fewer versions, less fragmentation, and a marketing budget.
Firstly, it's refuting a different point than the one I was making. If the problem were "it's too difficult to determine if hardware is compatible with the distro I want to use," (which is a real problem) then the comment would at least be relevant. But the comment I was replying to said "If software is going to dictate where I spend my money [what hardware I buy], ..."; they were rejecting the validity the claim that they should consider which software they use when making a hardware purchase, which is true for no OS, and no reasonable user expects to be true.
Secondly, you are demanding an impossible task. Because GNU/Linux distros have less marketing budget, and not enough dominance, and can't convince hardware vendors to put a sticker on the box... they need to have better hardware compatibility than Microsoft, and just be compatible with all the hardware? Microsoft has vastly more resources to dedicate to hardware compatibly than just about any other organization, and hardware vendors themselves test their hardware with Windows. Expecting a less-popular desktop operating system to work with more arbitrary hardware than Windows does is unreasonable.
I get that "being able to try it out with the hardware I already own" is a hugely powerful thing. But most users who want to make any other switch accept that they might need to buy some new hardware when doing it. A user switching from a Windows laptop to an iPad as their daily-driver accepts that they may need to get a new printer that's compatible. They may even realize that they have an older iPad, and research the printer they want to make sure it's compatible with their model, and not blindly trust the AirPrint badge on the box. Few users would think that level of due-diligence is unreasonable. Saying "that research is difficult for GNU/Linux distros" is very different than saying "expecting any level of research at all is unreasonable".
Nvidia is going to do what Nvidia is going to do, for their own reasons. Unless you have some hidden inside information you shouldn’t assume they’re doing it in order to hurt Linux or Open Source.
They’ve probably done some evaluation of what they would get out of putting their drivers into the kernel tree versus keeping them to themselves, and decided that it wasn’t worth the work, expense, risk to their IP, etc.
He was saying they're getting plenty of action. They're just not supporting users on specific hardware whose vendor is trying to block such action. It still is freedom. It just doesn't support that specific hardware.
"Since when has FOSS meant that I _can't_ work with proprietary bits? As a user, this is my choice. "
It really isn't if you're just a user. It's the developers' choices that dictate what software you can run on which hardware. Once their choices are made, you choose between what each offers. In this case...
"If software is going to dictate where I spend my money, then I'm less inclined to adopt it."
Nvidia is spending money on software that tries to block you from using free software with it easily. The volunteers developing one of those free packages refuse to build support for an anti-FOSS company putting up obstacles. Instead, they're doing work on companies helping them a bit or not putting up obstacles to their work.
As a user, it would be weird for you to claim to want free software while buying a piece of hardware whose developers are working against that goal. They'll also use your dollars from that purchase to do more activity that reduces your freedom as a user. You're free to choose to buy that hardware but there's no reasons for volunteers, much less those maximizing free software, to be forced to do painful work to support your choice. It's reasonable to say you're on your own if your choices create unnecessary obstacles.