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Comment by yeetaccount | Hacker News Reader

X is like trying to fly modern rockets with Apollo-era computers. The computers will work, until they don’t. In which case the only people able to fix them are retired and you have to salvage parts from aerospace museums. Over the years the cruft of replacement parts has accumulated and no one person can really understand the whole thing anymore, and entire sections are not understood and nobody remembers why they’re there or really what they do (but if you get too close to it the lights go off in certain important corner cases).

Wayland is the shiny new SpaceX module that brings a lot of improvements but needs to have its toilet fixed.

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> X is like trying to fly modern rockets with Apollo-era computers. The computers will work, until they don’t. In which case the only people able to fix them are retired and you have to salvage parts from aerospace museums. Over the years the cruft of replacement parts has accumulated and no one person can really understand the whole thing anymore, and entire sections are not understood and nobody remembers why they’re there or really what they do (but if you get too close to it the lights go off in certain important corner cases).

And often the response to that it to rewrite it in something "modern," like Electron.

I feel the appropriate response to a situation like you describe is put in the work to figure the existing thing out rather throw it away and put the work to building and debugging a replacement. It's less sexy, but it's the right thing to do.

Now it would be an entirely different matter if the old system could not longer provide adequate performance, etc. I'm only addressing the "it's old and only understood by olds, therefore replace" thought process.

Nah, you figure it out, then throw it out and rebuild a better alternative.

X11 has had too much piled on it already; it needs to go.

The problem is that X was created over decades for very different eras of computers and it doesn’t really make sense to keep modifying it — there are design limitations to it, and the accumulated complexity has made it unmaintainable. X maintainers have abandoned it and told people to migrate to Wayland. Sometimes you just need a clean slate.

Most people who criticise X like you have no idea what they're talking about. The parallels you're drawing are childish and indicate an extremely shallow understanding of the issues at hand.

Well you don’t have to listen to me, the X maintainers have said Wayland is the way forward and they’ve stopped developing X as of several years ago. It’s silly this is still an issue.

They themselves also said there's no technical reason why they couldn't easily keep using X. They just didn't want to. <https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_5>

So it is putting their own selfish desire for fun and personal glory above the good of the linux community and ecosystem. This deserves zero respect.

That’s just bullshit. X is architecturally bad, which makes sense considering that it came from a time when there were no goddamn GPUs at all!

Wayland is closer to the hardware what we actually use, so an implementation can actually be more lightweight, and it cuts out all the legacy shit from X and starts from a sane abstraction.

As an actual X maintainer put it: “ You can only apply so much thrust to the pig before you question why you're trying to make it fly at all”

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