I'd be very disappointed by this because I'm in a mixed DPI environment and I need its support.
Seriously though, I find hostility toward Wayland so weird. I could kind of understand it with systemd, but X seems perpetually stuck in 2005.
I felt the same way until I tried to get Chromium working without turning into a blurry pixelated XWayland mess. I still run Sway, but the hours I've spent pouring over smug "It's working as intended! X is soooo 2005 anyway" posts while troubleshooting my Wayland config has been absolutely infuriating.
I've also had to pause updates from Visual Studio Code, while they have contributed a lot to Wayland support in Electron they sure do break it with regularity.
chromium —enable-features=UseOzonePlatform —ozone-platform=wayland
The Xorg we use today is miles ahead of the XFree86 days that I find it rather humorous people are still complaining. Sure, I can see from a dev point of view it still sucks to work with. But from a user point of view? It does everything I need it to, and more. I can run remote apps. I can run headless X (how I was doing headless Chrome way before anyone else). I can run multiple X servers on one machine and switch between them (one for multi-monitor productivity, and a second for single-monitor gaming since most games don't work great with multiple monitors). xrandr is a thing today. I can dynamically change just about anything on the fly. I haven't touched the Xorg config and modelines in about a decade now. Getting a GPU to work has never been easier. There is just insane flexibility in what you can actually do with X11 that the warts kind of just fade away.
Autoconfiguration is table stakes as well.
While I understand that it's probably my fault for not discovering the same combination of software components and configuration that you did through brute force... Xorg no longer makes me do these sorts of things. Probably because it's not in a hurricane of development where every wheel is reimplemented monthly. You want people to switch to Wayland? Restart development on Xorg and introduce lots of breakage until it's just as much of a pain in the ass as Wayland.
I've tried it as recently as this year. The deal breaker? Toolbar popups in LibreOffice would not show. While I could submit bug reports to hundreds of different projects wait for them to be a duplicate of a closed won't-fix-not-our-bug-good-luck-figuring-out-who's-bug-it-is-becasue-they-sent-you-back-here, I just don't have the patience I used to have for that. I got to get something done. So, back to xorg until some update discards my preference and loads Wayland again.
Yeah, why should I be mad? Just be patient another 13 years for the pain points (which simultaneously don't exist) to get worked out.
But the converse is also true. Just because it doesn't work for you, it doesn't mean that it's in and of itself bad. Why would you be mad at Wayland if Xorg works for you? In that case it seems like there's really nothing at all to comment on.
However, the fact that there is so much discussion around this leads me to believe that X doesn't work for many people and that seems to be the fault of Xorg, not Wayland, so I don't understand why Wayland comes in for so much of the criticism. Wayland devs identified some problems and set out to fix them, this shouldn't really have any impact on Xorg at all, right? Just continue to use X.
EDIT: And to be clear on a point, it's not that I think Wayland should be immune from criticism. It's missing features and there are probably things that are broken. But the tone of the discussion (and of other comments in this thread) is that Wayland is bad for the community. That its very existence is somehow an affront. That's what I don't really get.
I think the hostility towards Wayland is pretty justified. It's a backdoor power-grab by the GNOME foundation and Red Hat, much like Flatpak, Libadwaita, and to a limited extent, systemd. I, like many others, am totally exhausted of GNOME trying to be the center of the desktop universe. Every couple years, they decide to redouble their development efforts on some useless, stopgap tool that ultimately ends up being underdeveloped and redundant. Making matters worse, they announce $PROGRAM to be the next big feature of Linux, and anyone who's refusing to embrace it is a luddite. In reality, most people can't switch to these alternatives because they're niche, and don't provide the same degree of functionality as their favorite Window Manager.
Furthermore, people don't hate the idea of something replacing X, people hate the fact that Wayland has been in development for more than a decade and is still considerably worse than Xorg with objectively less features and functionality. Adding insult to injury, a majority of these omissions are deliberately removed by the maintainers because the GNOME desktop doesn't need it, therefore everyone else doesn't. Take AppIndicator support, for example. Everyone has statusbar icons: Mac and Windows users alike deal with them daily. When developing Wayland though, AppIndicators were deliberately removed because GNOME didn't intend to use them. Worse yet, the maintainers refused to even support it in wlroots, their pittance of a cross-platform desktop library.
> I could kind of understand it with systemd, but X seems perpetually stuck in 2005.
X is indeed terrible software, and it's functionality is stuck not just in 2005, but rather the mid-90s. I really hate Xorg, which makes it even more infuriating that Wayland:
a. Doesn't support my hardware
b. Doesn't support my desktop environment
c. Makes it harder for me to stream my display, take screengrabs, and use my webcam
d. Deliberately removed functionality that I use on a daily basis, forcing everyone adopting Wayland to write their own implementation of a basic feature.
If I didn't know any better, I'd accuse Wayland of being a project deliberately designed to sabotage desktop Linux. It's a project with less ambition than Quartz, and less hardware/software support than x11. It has a weaker security model than the compositor in MacOS, and manages to have less features than even the compositor in Windows. How is that closer to "the future" than a feature-complete desktop from 30 years ago?
The only truly excellent thing to come out of Wayland was PipeWire. But PipeWire works just fine on Xorg machines too, so I guess we're at an impasse. Wayland fractured the Linux desktop for good, there is no "way forward" anymore.
It's a bit like complaining about factory conditions in China. I'd sure like to buy a computer from somewhere else, but I'm sort of left without a bunch of options so I shrug my shoulders and hold my nose and hope the market sorts it out. Ironically, this is one of the issues that puts me off upgrading to another HiDPI display, thus necessitating my need for Wayland...
Linux display servers need a lot of work. HDR content is right around the corner, and nobody in the Linux video stack is prepared. Wayland spends too much time twiddling their thumbs and making life hard on the rest of the Linux community, and Xorg's maintainers are gone. If you're going to use Linux, then by all means, use what works for you. That's the benefit of modular OSes! But we still need to push for more active development in this space. If Xorg is dead, then a lot of work needs to be done on Wayland to get them up to speed. If Xorg is not dead, then we need to find someone to fix it's longstanding issues.
> It's a bit like complaining about factory conditions in China.
Not really. It's more like complaining about a missing feature, say, thumbnails in the filepicker. At first it seems like such an egregious omission that it had to be a bug. But then people defend it, saying "it's not that big of a deal!" When you try to get people to corroborate your claims, people label it as hate speech. When users contribute code, fixes, patches and solutions, you see them all get turned down.
The goals of commercial interests, Linux software developers and Linux desktop users have never been more at-odds. Without a clear path forwards, we can't expect anything to get done. I think it's okay to beat a drum about this stuff online, because it's completely germane on a subject like this.
But Wayland's definitely a big one, touching really old assumptions around Linux desktops. There is plenty to start fights over. I still can't quite use it for all my apps because some stylus apps behave poorly. So I think I'll be in the latecomer camp. This is not a bad thing for me: it just means I've organized my life around using the tech to get a good result now, rather than putting my energy into developing the tech. I was on Windows for the longest time for the same reason.
I believe you, but personally buying my monitors in matched sets is easier than giving up network transparency, and I don't think that's an outrageous position worthy of the scorn that the Wayland folks seem to have for it.
> A quick environmental scan reveals two serious contenders: Xorg and Wayland. Open source precludes the idea of a grand conspiracy, so I'm not sure why no one's working on an alternative if it's as bad as you say.
There's no money in it and it needs a lot of boring grunt work. RedHat may be half-assing Wayland but that's still 0.5 more asses than anyone else is putting into anything.