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Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

I used XFCE for a long time and I very much agree. it just works, and is lightweight. I use KDE these days but XFCE would be my second choice.

> The X11 diehards will go the way of the SysV-init diehard

I hope you are not conflating anti-systemD people with SysV init diehards? As far as I can see very few people want to keep Sysv init, but there are lots who think SystemD init is the wrong replacement, and those primarily because its a lot more than an init system.

In many ways the objects are opposite. People hate system D for being more than init, people hate Wayland for doing less than X.

Edit: corrected "Wayland" to "XFCE" in first sentence!

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It is refreshing to see somebody else notice that the complaints about systemd and Wayland are philosophically incompatible.

Systemd is creating the same kind of monolith monoculture that Xorg represented. Wayland is far more modular.

Regardless of your engineering preferences, rejecting change is the main reason to object to both.

I do not have a strong opinion about Xorg vs Wayland. My only real concern is that it might make it harder for the BSDs but that seems to be being dealt with. I do like being able to use X over the nextwork but that is a problem that can be solved.

I do dislike System D for two reasons. One is exactly because it s a monolith and, in effect, an extension of the OS. The other is the attitude of the developers which becomes very evident if you browser the issues.

> My only real concern is that it might make it harder for the BSDs

Our OpenBSD packager has already said in our Matrix channel that he'll be testing here and there in order to keep me honest ;)

> I do like being able to use X over the nextwork but that is a problem that can be solved.

And in fact has been: https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs

> Wayland is far more modular.

Not sure I agree here, assuming you mean "... than X11". With Wayland, you put your display code, input-handling code, compositor code, session-handling code, and window-management code all in the same process. (Though there is a Wayland protocol being worked on to allow moving the WM bits out-of-process.)

With X11, display and input-handling are in the X server, and all those other functions can be in other processes, communicating over standard interfaces.

> you put your display code, input-handling code, compositor code, session-handling code, and window-management code all in the same process

That's an implementation detail. You can absolutely separate one out from the other and do IPC - it just doesn't make much sense to do so for most of these.

The only one where I see it making sense is the window manager, which can simply be an extension/plugin either in a scripting language or in wasm or whatever.

It's not an implementation detail that X11 specifies interfaces between those separate components and Wayland does not - X11 is designed for for the window manager being separate from the display server, Wayland is designed for them being the same.

Wayland simply leaves it up to the implementor - ergo, an implementation detail.

Sure if you want to water down the meaning of words to uselessness then you do you.

How is Wayland more modular? It conflates the window manager, the compositor, and the display server, all into a single component that must be replaced as a single unit. This kind of new conflation is exactly what people dislike about systemd.

It's less monolithic in the sense that instead of one creaky unmaintainable ancient mass of software doing the actual rendering gruntwork there are now five (and counting) somewhat incompatible slick untested new masses of software doing it in slightly different ways that application developers have to worry about. It's kind of a pick your poison situation.

IME it's always best to read any claims of "unmaintainable" as "not as fun as designing something new". Nothing is truly unmaintainable if the will is there.

I know OpenBSD's fork of it is being maintained just fine even though they've declared it feature-complete (which for some reason is anathema to a lot of people).

> It is refreshing to see somebody else notice that the complaints about systemd and Wayland are philosophically incompatible.

Only in reductio ad absurdum.

Nitpick, it's "systemd" not "SystemD"

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