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Comment by v3ss0n | Hacker News Reader

After several attempt of trying it. It is still bad. Games works worse with it. So many quirks that will never be fixed because "This is by design" mindset is screwing desktop Linux's progress. They should as well give up and maintain X11 ,keep the same architecture and rewrite it with modern software development practices.

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The argument that it is ‘screwing desktop Linux’s progress’ doesn’t hold well in light of the success of the Steam deck- selling to millions- and running a Wayland compositor. Which ‘non-wayland’ efforts have been thwarted, that had any such numbers?

But the Steam Deck is hardly desktop Linux. The users there usually wouldn't care less that you can't use it for desktop-y things (like taking screenshots...).

E.g. Linux mobile devices also usually "successfully" utilized Wayland, but failed big time in market share against whatever Android uses. The only thing this may prove is that Android is more popular.

Sure, you wouldn’t call the Steam Deck a Desktop. However as you pick apart its software stack, you’d be hard pressed to find a few parts that don’t also benefit the Desktop usecase. Valve delivered a device that mostly just works for gaming, and the improvements they’ve invested in also benefit Desktop users. I don’t own a Steam Deck, but I am a decades-long Linux desktop user, and Valve‘s success thrills me.

Btw I take screenshots often w gnome+wayland, it just works so I don’t even know how it’s implemented. Not sure if you were making a Wayland jab.

Wayland works well on the Steam Deck because Valve controls the whole system. Because they have their own Wayland compositor (Gamescope), they're able to implement protocols to work around issues in Wayland without being delayed by the bureaucratic process of getting them approved. Here's an SDL pull request where a graphics developer at Valve discusses how two protocols necessary for good GPU performance haven't been added to Wayland yet so Valve added equivalent protocols to Gamescope as a workaround: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345

One thing to note is that the Steam Deck only uses Wayland for its fullscreen gaming mode. When you exit to its desktop mode (meant for running non-Steam software), it switches to X11.

The default will change to Wayland soon because Steam Deck runs Plasma. Plasma 6 defaults to a wayland session.

Wishful thinking: nobody is volunteering to maintain X, let alone rewriting it from scratch, along with its architectural deficiencies.

Wayland is what happened when the Xorg maintainers got sick and tired of maintainting Xorg. They're not going back. Xorg is being led behind the barn to be shot. Wayland is the future. Deal with it.

Nobody is maintaining X. Previous X developers are the developers of Wayland. Wayland is a X.org Foundation project.

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