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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

Glad to see this; the whole "shut up and use Wayland" attitude of many is offputting. Let's at least see what else is out there.

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On the contrary, seeing this shows that Wayland is the survivor among many competitors and not something major distributions suddenly pulled out of their asses.

If anything that gives Wayland even more weight as the replacement for Xorg.

There are plenty of examples throughout history where an inferior product won out over the alternatives, usually because of business or politics unrelated to merit.

Thank you, I feel like there's likely a more complex story going on with Wayland; and it feels like Gnome especially is far more interested in "cornering the market and being the only game in town" than "playing nice with everyone in the spirit of e.g. Free Software."

I get that no law requires them to "be nice," but we should definitely talk about it regardless.

And from what is out there, since 2009, how many of those are still relevant 14 years later?

How many of Wayland haters have put the effort to make them happen?

Of the 7 non-Wayland systems linked in the opening post, two still have a working web page.

KDrive gave me a TLS error (the certificate is misconfigured) but ignoring it brings me to a web page that states the information is obsolete and hasn't been updated in about 7 years according to the page info. Everybody online talks about KDrive in the past tense it seems.

Y-windows.org works, but the homepage only shows two entries written in 2004. It seems to be the product of a thesis that never received any development.

I think it's safe to say from the listed post, only Wayland survived. I think of all the other alternatives, Mir had the best change at succeeding, but that died half a decade ago.

It's not listed in the OP, but Arcan ( www.arcan-fe.com ) is alive and architecturally compares favorably to Wayland. Only problem is that letoram actively avoids bringing popular attention to the project to the point that he deliberately writes his blog posts on it in a very dense style. I think he's just doing it til 1.0 though.

I really hope Arcan takes off; it's a much more elegant system than Wayland's XML-based crap whose main defense is "just use a toolkit!".

Arcan has been around for a long time. At one time, it showed more promise than Wayland as a successor of X11. Is there a chance that it will come back and succeed? (I'm a Wayland fan. But I had high hopes for Arcan and still wish to see it succeed).

> Wayland's XML-based crap

What is that? Do you mean the protocol definition? Why is that a big issue?

The article was written a few years before Canonical announced that they were developing their own display server called Mir. Back then in 2013 it looked as if it could have become Wayland's biggest rival as a successor to X11.

Apparently, Mir is still being actively developed at Canonical, but with focus towards embedded systems. The original plan had been to base it on libraries borrowed from Android, but those have been replaced with parts of Wayland. It looks as if it can also be hosted on top of Wayland or X11.

Official site: https://mir-server.io/

There is a little bit more to that story. Canonical had initially chosen Wayland to be the successor of X11. Then they dropped that plan in favor of the in-house Mir project, citing problems with Wayland. The Wayland developers debunked all of those points, but Canonical just neglected the reply. As I remember it, it was this incident that irked a lot of people and gave Wayland the push to become what it is today. Wayland wasn't as popular before that.

Mir is a Wayland compositor these days

~100% of developer effort in the Linux graphical stack is going towards Wayland.

Shutting up and using Wayland is the sensible thing to do.

Before Wayland, 100% of the developer effort went towards X. Was shutting up and using X the sensible thing to do then?

For the end user, yes. What would be the alternative?

Wayland is developed by the same people that have spent their time implementing X.

So one either shuts up and accepts that the X developers know what they are doing, or comes up with an alternative that beats Wayland.

While "entitlement to open source" is a problem, I often think that this reverse idea -- i.e. "make your own or shut up" is just as much of a problem.

E.g. I can criticize a restaurant or a government or a building development.

None of these requires that I start my own restaurant, government, or building development.

Indeed, and when one doesn't like it, can eat at home, run for elections, do a building injunction, and so on.

Or accept what exists and that is it.

Or, you know, just talk about it and openly criticize.

I'm going to go with e.g. the framers of the Constitution and others who actually think this is a good thing.

The framers of the Constitution have put lots of work, suffering, blood and lost lives to make it happen in first place, they didn't just talk about it in newspapers and saloon tables.

And they did so to ensure that only people who did that had free speech, or so that everyone could? Come on now, be smarter.

They did it to free the slaves and unite the country.

If it were for anti-Wayland people mindset, nothing would have changed, they would only complain about it on newspaper readers section.

There is some credence to the "make your own or shut up" argument here on HN.

If we reconsider your "criticize a restaurant" analogy, we are not random folks walking into a restaurant. We are professional chefs criticizing the output of other professional chefs.

In that context, "go start your own restaurant" does actually make sense.

Not every chef has the means (e.g. money and time) and/or non-food experience to start a restaurant. Constructive criticisms, and not all criticism is constructive, should always be taken in earnest; that said, there is also a matter of taste: just because one chef puts in extra garlic and another doesn't like that doesn't mean either is "wrong" or "right".

Lol, that's exactly how you get e.g. "Stupid food/we want plates" on reddit.

One of the worst things in computing is this sort of gatekeeping; it's not only "professional chefs" here, it's people who want to democratize more of software building, not reintroduce more silos.

At a certain point if the restaurant or building developer (rarer and harder but still i think government would also apply with scope) isn't filling all my wants or needs, yes you do start your own with all of those things (or someone in the community does to fill the want/need if they recognize it)

A great deal of the things we use were at one time someone or some group wanting something the status quo wasn't providing.

And how do you begin to figure that out?

By openly talking about it with your community, which includes people who may not be the builders.

The pro-Wayland folks appear to believe that this -- talking about and being critical of software that a lot of people may use -- is a bad thing.

As I like to say, suck it up, use Wayland, file bug reports.

Criticizing Wayland is great if you do it with the intent of improving Wayland.

Encouraging people to fuck off back to X is counterproductive because X is a DEAD END. It's like Republican politics: all it does is obstruct useful progress, by design. The maintainers of Xorg have decided that Wayland is the way to go, as have the maintainers of the major toolkits, DEs, and distros. Spreading FUD about Wayland in an attempt to encourage people to stick with X generates more heat than light, and is ultimately useless because no one wants to maintain X or the X code paths; these will eventually break or go away. Wayland is the community-supported option going forward. You can't even count on kernel support for X: the Asahi Linux kernel display driver actively detects if it's being called from an X server, and fails if it is.

When it comes to alternatives to both X and Wayland... good luck attracting the developer expertise and mindshare that Wayland already has. It's like coming up with an alternative to Facebook.

Ha!

I teach college students; they mostly don't use Facebook because there are already literally lots of alternatives, and they didn't come about because of gatekeeping the commentary about the tech. Perfectly wrong example you gave there.

Interesting. Reminds me of what they were trying to do with MicroXWin, Y, DFB, Xynth and Fresco!

> ~100% of developer effort in the Linux graphical stack is going towards Wayland.

If this is true it's a testament to how poorly designed Wayland must be - for it to have such comprehensive support & still be as limited as it is today is quite the achievement.

> Shutting up and using Wayland is the sensible thing to do.

Sadly, you're probably right here. The network effect has indeed shifted toward Wayland - I'm putting up & shutting up with it in my current system; I should probably switch back to Xorg given how bad it is, but knowing I'll likely be going back to Wayland eventually the effort of two migrations seems futile.

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