Hacker News Reader

Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

It's just early. It's fast to make little scripts and glue it together yourself, and until folks really enumerate use cases and build to meet them, it's going to feel unfinished. It takes years to build out a big project like this.

If you want "just works", stick to X and a mature desktop environment like KDE or Gnome for now (especially if you do any gaming).

View on HN

> It's just early.

Have we hit the two decade mark yet?

This stuff “just worked” in the late 90’s (and probably earlier, assuming access to unix workstation hardware) with X11, when it was roughly the age Wayland is now.

I have two displays on my computer, one is 4k and the other is 1080p. One has HDR. One is 400 nits brightness, the other is not. Games are built across several engines with an amazing collection of rendering technologies. We have apps that embedded web browsers.

I'm sure if you restricted yourself to strictly first party native applications and a single display within one or two resolutions and no DPI scaling, Wayland probably meets most of your needs now.

This is the problem with making a wholesale rewrite and not including good (and complete!) backwards compatibility for the duration of the transition.

What’s not good and incomplete about xwayland?

XWayland doesn't really help you with things that are part of the desktop environment. You can't run a desktop background/icons manager or a dock/panel in XWayland, as it won't have access to the kind of information it needs to implement all its features.

I had a very different '90s than you did, it seems.

> This stuff “just worked” in the late 90’s

I see you have repressed the memories of editing modelines in xfree86.conf :P

That’s not something the comment I was responding to mentioned.

Besides, the anti-aliasing on the type 1 fonts would have been glorious whether or not the capacitors in the back of the monitor started smoking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com