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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I still have yet to try Wayland (Xfce user here, which I expect may never port), and I never really got the hype. I honestly just don't get all the gripe people have about X11. I think all the current problems (including the security issues) are solvable through new extensions, if someone wanted to take the time to work them out. Given that But no, it's better to throw everything out, start from scratch, create a ton of new work for people, and 12 years later still not have displaced X11.

Put another way: do we truly believe that in 12+ years, some motivated hackers couldn't evolve X11 into something better? I get that many of the people involved were burnt out on it, and sure, no one (myself included) stepped up to the plate, but it doesn't seem plausible to me that X11 and Xorg are lost causes.

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> Put another way: do we truly believe that in 12+ years, some motivated hackers couldn't evolve X11 into something better?

Yes. It is not just a random program that needs some fixing here and there, it is a program which has to evolve with all its accompanying user space, as almost anything can be a breaking change. Sometimes reinvention is the correct decision, and I am quite sure that the whole X11 team uniformly deciding on that gives it enough weight.

In 12 years they probably could have improved X a lot. But the impression I always got (years ago when this was a bigger topic) is it likely would have broken backwards comparability to do right. And if it’s not compatible, is it still X? And would the Wayland haters/holdouts accept it?

IDK. I understand the direction they decided to take.

The issue with screen recording is not due to backwards compatibility

There is no issue with screen recording.

There is. e.g. recording screen from Chromium doesn't work.

It does for close to a year now with pipewire.

Can confirm

i try to learn x11, is hell, i realy try im tech savvy but god sake. is this problem difficult hell yea, but heavens x11 makes 10x more complex that should be.

I mean, when your default use-case includes remote rendering of a GUI to clients, you're going to end up with a complex protocol. In the era of heavy servers and thin clients, it makes a lot of sense.

But when most (every?) computer includes some kind of GPU, local rendering makes the most sense -- especially when that's how your primary competitors work.

I don't know enough about Wayland vs X11 to make an informed statement, but I do appreciate that Wayland explicitly didn't try to include remote rendering. Let's just leave that up to other protocols (VNC/RDP/etc...). Now if we can just get one of those protocols to work on an individual application/window basis as opposed to the whole desktop.

That would be waypipe, https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe#:~:text=wayp....

I tried Wayland, back when. Then spent the evening repairing my newly broken Debian configuration. I had my X back, by the end.

Now I donate monthly to Xorg release engineering.

> Now I donate monthly to Xorg release engineering.

Could you spare a link, so I can follow your example?

Now that I am at my desk...

https://www.patreon.com/p12tic

on my bullseye machine I can have sway running on tty1 and Xorg/xfce running on tty2 (at the same time, same user)

(for when you very rarely need to use X)

Not being able to have multi-DPI in X is what moved me over. Scaling one display makes everything fuzzy and increased my idle load substantially, though maybe a different compositor might have given different results.

EDIT: I should also mention that my experience is overall positive, I use swaywm so config and setup is easier than with X (no xorg.conf to tinker with every driver update) with a small stability tradeoff. Sometimes sessions will crash out when doing things with the GPU dmabuffers, which for a lot of people isn't really acceptable, but also who's usually using dmabuffers?

Oh and mouse interactions can be really wrong when going between xwayland windows and native ones.

Looks like there is a plan to implement Wayland in Kfce: https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

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