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Comment by dyingkneepad | Hacker News Reader

You are right. The compositor crashing is equivalent to X crashing: everything goes boom. In the X world, if gnome-session dies another one gets automatically started and you may not even realize what happened.

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So KDE will have same issues ? I am wondering if they can architect it somehow where you put minimal code in the compositor and move the window management, and the complex effects (like zoom and animation) into a different process.

If Linux would have decided to use Mir would have at least shared same "server" code and probably also get around this issues but is hard to promote quality when Gnome and RedHat has a different idea.

In fact, KDE might have entirely different issues that cause the same problems. The frustrating thing about Wayland's design is that every single WM/DE now gets to have its own, unique set of "crash the world" stability bugs.

(I'm not denying that possibility, and I'm only one datapoint, but) In practice I have only ever seen one DE (GNOME) with these "crash the world" stability bugs, and they also happen on X, which makes me think the problems are not with Wayland.

GNOME crashes a lot probably because of how people are forced to patch the DE with extensions or maybe even the bad quality of their code, but I have crashes of KWin or Plasma hangs sometimes on X , so KDE is not perfect and if I would use wayland on my NVIDIA system I would be hit with work losing crashes. KWin and Plasma are pretty complex so there will always be bugs , this is why I am wondering if there can be soem kind of refactoring to a safer architecture.

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