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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

Not much constructive here...

I'm of the opposite opinion. Think twice before doing anything with X as the experience and knowledge you gain will soon be useless.

Instead invest in wayland, it works great and will only get better and X will only get worse at this point.

The pain points are few but yes, if you must have screen sharing with a particular app that doesn't work with wayland that might be a dealbreaker. If not, no reason to stay with X, pick a time when you are configuring a new computer or whenever it is a good time to make the switch and try it out.

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> soon

That's been the sentiment for the past 12 years and X11 still works great and wayland implementations are a buggy, slow, featureless mess.

They aren't though. And X is pretty deprecated by now.

> They aren't though.

Remote desktop, game screen recording, screenshots, how do those work?

As I said, there are pain points. If you need application X to do Y and it doesn't work in wayland that might be a dealbreaker for you.

I'm having no issues with screen recording and screenshots. Haven't attempted nor need remote desktop but know people that do it. Obviously don't have the same breadth of alternatives such as X.

X is not deprecated by the global community at all, only by the few who push Wayland.

... and those developing X.

You can honestly say it has less features than you would like, but saying that it's buggy, slow and a mess is simply dishonest.

For instance, Wayland handle my multi dpi displays like a champ. Whereas xorg is a no end nightmare with no acceptable outcome;

In wayland, I have tearfree scrolling by default. Whereas on xorg I have to access some old magic knowledge hidden in the archwiki.

So, in a sense, wayland have more features (For me) than xorg, whereas xorg is the featureless mess (For me).

Something that isn't particularly good 12 years in will likely never be so. At 12 years in some really basic stuff is just now rolling in. In general the idea of natural progress is completely imaginary. The general nature of things is to get worse not better entropy always wins.

X isn't particularly good either, and even older ...

It night not be great but it does many things Effectively and doesn't require each graphical environment to individually handle low level hardware details.

Yes, and it is about to die.

Wayland could have been executed better to ease adoption, no doubt. More than anything momentum is required, which we arguable are beginning to see.

The question today isn't X vs. Wayland. It is Wayland vs. Y. Whatever Y is.

The people who would greatly benefit from not needing to maintain it shout from the rooftops that it is dead because they wish it was already so. In fact its probably be mainstream for another 10-15 years and existing for another 25. Look how long it took to sort of but not really kill python 2.

Thus the choice today is actually X vs Wayland because those are the 2 choices that can provide a functional desktop at this point in time.

As for possible Ys I see SurfaceFlinger from android which doesn't look like its suitable for a desktop

Arcan a one man band that doesn't look apt to replace X soon

https://arcan-fe.com/videos/

Whatever Redox uses. I don't quite understand from a casual inspection how graphics works there.

I would bet money that the choice over the next 10 years will STILL be X vs Wayland with more stuff wedged in until wayland is more functional but as kludgy as X wherein someone will have the brilliant idea to replace it with something more "modern"

And the developers have already left.

When using gnome wayland is already the default in most major distributions already or have been announced for the next major version (such as ubuntu 21.04).

I don't know about KDE more than that they are making progress. If they within a few years make the same transition then pretty much every single default installation will be on wayland. A few moments after that XWayland will become the leading X-server. X will surely live on for decades to come inside wayland, and that is fine. And X will surely be an option for an eternity in some distros. But it will quickly become quite niche, similar to the way systemd has become the mainstream init system.

Maybe so but being the most popular option made Microsoft some money it never actually made it very good. In all honesty Gnome + Fedora + Wayland is a mediocre work compared to windows. At that point the only reason to use linux is cost and given the cost of a license it really isn't a very good one.

I wont feel bad about running a niche distro or even a different OS any more than I feel bad about picking Linux over windows in 2003. There is no accounting for taste and there are probably more people listening to Britney Spears than Beethoven. Its OK if you want to be involved with pop music there is money in it and it still requires the same skills to produce good sound regardless of the artist.

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