I’m curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I’m afraid that at some point, we’ll realize there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite.
Are there any instances of this happening? Where something is designed with a flaw that doesn’t get realized until much later, necessitating scrapping the whole thing and starting from scratch?
It’s slowly happening. KDE can now do global Xwayland shortcuts, they also implemented XWaylandVideoBridge and compositor restart crash recovery for apps. We’re getting proper HDR, we have proper per-monitor refresh rates and VRR, I can even hotplug GPUs. Some of that stuff works better in XWayland because we can just run multiple instances with different settings. For the particularly stubborn cases, there’s rootful XWayland. X12 would have to break things too, and I doubt an Xorg rewrite would be all that much further than Wayland is. Canonical had a go at it too with Mir which was much less ambitious.
NVIDIA was right on that one indeed, but Wayland also predates Vulkan and was designed for GLES, pretty much at the tail end of big drivers and the beginning of explicit and low level APIs like Vulkan. They could very well have been right with EGLStream too, but graphics on Linux back then was, erm, bad. But in the end they’re all still better than the kludge that is 3D in Xorg.
It’s getting a lot of momentum and a lot of things are getting fixed lately. It went from unusable to “I can’t believe it’s not Xorg!” just this year for me. It’s very nice when it works well. We’ll get there.
At this point they could make it the best thing in the world. Won’t ever fix the resentment they earned against us NVidia users, might fix some of the resentment from x11 folks… but that it needs a separate XWayland will always be a pain point. That’s a kluge.