Comment by talldayo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by talldayo | Hacker News Reader

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> Yet, sometimes I like to type something, it’s usually short so I just use and on screen keyboard program which I’ve still wait to find one that works for Wayland.

KDE Connect does: https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

You can turn your phone into a trackpad/remote keyboard, as long as your desktop is running the host software. Works just fine on Wayland, in my experience.

Overall I think people are right to blame Wayland for asking developers to reinvent the wheel, but wrong to defend the first-draft nature of x11. In a truly reductive sense, Linux never really had a desktop that worked. It was a desktop server that got hacked into usability by a lot of contributors, who ended up building a big unusable monolith. Naturally, a solution that is neither big nor monolithic is bound to make people angry.

But, I think we're past the point of lamenting x11's death. It was meant to be this way, Microsoft built Desktop Window Manager and Apple rolled out Quartz; sticking with x11 just didn't make competitive sense. Wayland's "big problem" is that it asks desktop developers to go the extra mile, and I don't really think that's a bad thing to ask. Linux didn't need taller, more fragile software stacks; it needs more thoughtful integration and actual diversity in implementation. It's not a coincidence that modern applications like the Steam Deck practically rely on Wayland to deliver such a customized experience.

Thanks for the tip, I’ve already used KDE connect even for iOS-Windows communication, it’s just great.

I think people resort back to X11 because it’s only think that worked for a broad sets of features.Sure we can have Wayland making progress but it seems there’s little resource targeted it, not even implementation but even standardizing some things and we’re 15 years past. Linux kernel itself was already at infamous 2.6 version by then.

Sure proprietary desktops have kind of shown the way. One side, it’s good to have standards clear/clean enough that it can be easily implemented, on the other side, it can just be especially resource taking to redevelop things that are the core difference of the desktop environnement you might be developing.

I can wonder and worry, if we would have and will still ever see something like compiz fusion, the diagonal screen tick seen this year or anything else. Design standards api, inter app communication and make it customizable is no way easy and I feel like Wayland has absolutely not find how to articulate all of those things.

It's going to be a pain-point for a while. I invite you to look on the bright side, though; the past 10 years of Wayland was as bad as it will ever get. We live in wonderful times, where Nvidia/Wayland setups are actually stable; this is stuff people thought would never get fixed 10 years ago, but now we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. There's still work to do, but I think we're passing the point where Wayland has more features than it lacks.

x11 has a place in my heart, I loved many of it's apps (shoutouts to xsnow) and cherished the wildly bloated featureset. But damn, it was broken. MacOS had a pretty terrible compositor for a while, but once you booted up Quartz with double-buffer V-sync (imagine, back in 2005) you would already know x11 was finished. Wayland was the inevitably long-winded response from the Open Source community, and while it languished for a long time it's finally quite usable.

Nobody is going to stop you from using x11, or maintaining it yourself if it comes down to it. The philosophy of the matter is decided, though; smaller featuresets are more secure and easier to implement. Especially since the advent of smartphones, I feel like the idea of an x11-native desktop metaphor has been nonsense. Yes, the GNOME pundits push this point pretty extremely, but there's a kernel of truth to it. We really do need more flexible desktop architectures if we want Linux to be a commercial-quality product. x11 is holding it back.

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