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Comment by smosher | Hacker News Reader

You shouldn't believe everything you read. The tone of the article is very suspicious: the author will admit nothing bad about Wayland. In particular you might want to examine the claim that VNC style remoting is better than what X does, or that X remoting is a bad VNC.

In actuality VNC is equivalent to the worst-case option X has in terms of rendering. If you wanted something else it's just a bad joke.

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Any comment on the fact that now ALL modern X rendering is worst-case? Why bother having all that useless complexity (have you ever read how the SHAPES extension deals with window borders?)?

X's worst-case isn't ever the whole picture. Even if most applications do a lot of drawing in the worst-case mode that doesn't rob them of the richness of communicating more useful detail as well. Even when you're "just" getting a big picture you're still getting something much more than a picture; it's a real window and it's really connected to your X server in a meaningful way. VNC has a real window featuring real pictures of real windows that are really not connected to you.

X is by all means a Rube Goldberg machine and nobody's contesting that. That doesn't mean throwing the baby out with the bath water is the better way to solve the dirty baby problem, even if it is easier—who needs soap when you can just eliminate the baby?

The baby should be able to clean itself, all grown up, educated, gainfully employed, and well on the way to paying off its student loans by now.

I completely agree, but Wayland Jr. has none of that because the Waylands committed infanticide the first time the baby went dookie. They still keep a photo. (I don't think stretching the analogy will be very productive.)

The fact is Wayland is less capable in this area and the project refuses to admit to it. If all you want is VNC that's a win for you, but it's insulting to say it's objectively better when many of us find it strictly worse.

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