In response to Wayland Breaks Your Bad Software

I say that the technical merits are irrelevant because I don’t believe that they’re a major factor any more in most people moving or not moving to Wayland.

With only a slight amount of generalization, none of these people will be moved by Wayland’s technical merits. The energetic people who could be persuaded by technical merits to go through switching desktop environments or in some cases replacing hardware (or accepting limited features) have mostly moved to Wayland already. The people who remain on X are there either because they don’t want to rebuild their desktop environment, they don’t want to do without features and performance they currently have, or their Linux distribution doesn’t think their desktop should switch to Wayland yet.

  • @[email protected]English
    10•1 year ago

    Wayland’s major “technical merits”, as far as I can tell, are a lack of screen tearing, slightly faster rendering under some circumstances and better handling of touchscreens. That’s it. If you don’t have a touchscreen and aren’t a gamer (few non-gamers care all that much about tearing or about framerates above 60Hz), Wayland has no real advantages to the user that I’m aware of.

    X is network-transparent, more widely compatible, and arguably more extensible. Most users don’t care about those things either.

    Wayland has an advantage in attracting developers because it has less accumulated technical debt and general code cruft. That doesn’t make it better for users, though. Most Wayland evangelists I run into seem to be devs who are more interested in the design of the graphics stack than whether it makes a difference in the real world.

    So, as with so many things, “merit” is in the eye of the beholder. People should use what works for them.

      • @[email protected]English
        6•1 year ago

        I’ll give you the multiple screens (not a use case I have myself, so I don’t pay attention to support quality). Isolation of applications is another thing that most users don’t really care that much about, I would say.

        • tal
          7•1 year ago

          It’s legitimately important if you want to be able to pull random software from places and not have your system compromised, a la smartphone OSes.

          It’s not the whole story – things still aren’t entirely sandboxed aside from that – but without it, the GUI is a big security hole.

      • @[email protected]
        3•1 year ago

        And don’t forget 1:1 gestures and the Crash-Resilient Wayland Compositing that keep the application alive even tho the “compositor” crash, so it does restart without any data loss.

        Edit: forgot to mention the lockscreen protocol, because on xorg if the lockscreen crash then you view the desktop and you have the device unlocked!