Re: [dev] Wayland compositors

From: Страхиња Радић <contact_AT_strahinja.org>
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2021 13:54:25 +0200

On 21/09/16, 20:36, Kyryl Melekhin wrote:
>And remember, always follow unix philosophy - go for what works first, optimize
>it later.

This should read "programs should do one thing and do it well" (DOTADIW)[1],
with the added "and work together". Exactly what Wayland's monolithic,
opinionated concept doesn't. If a compositor crashes, the whole session goes
down. Comparatively in X.Org, you lose window transparency, shadows and
animations and can continue your work as normal. Wayland is in many ways
reminiscent of systemd.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy


On 21/09/17 06:33, Tobias Bengfort wrote:
>I think much of the hate for wayland is misdirected.

Although I cannot speak for everyone, criticism of Wayland is driven by facts,
not emotions. "Hate" or "love" don't have anything to do with it.

> Don't get me wrong, the state of wayland is bad. But IMHO that is not entirely
> the wayland people's fault.

It doesn't matter who is responsible. If Wayland is not finished, its developers
shouldn't act like it is and force it on users and programmers. Ideally, common
courtesy would be to dedicate part of their efforts towards the "long term
support" (fixing bugs, actual "finishing") of X.Org without introducing new
features. For example, they could address the well-known Xft color emoji crash,
a real example affecting suckless software. Instead, they deliberately choose
otherwise, while presenting Wayland as the new standard, using strong language
to tell off and even openly insult, resorting to petty name-calling, people who
suggest this or who present evidence on why their decisions are wrong. They
didn't even merge independently developed libxft-bgra patch so far! (Yes, it
doesn't solve the entire problem yet, but that's what git is for.)

>it's open source and I cannot force anyone do work on X if they don't want to.

Neither should Wayland be presented as the "be all, end all" of GUI under
GNU/Linux, even moreso since it "isn't in a good state" (fully agree). After
all those years, someone should begin to wonder if it's worth it at all. Maybe
the general direction should be reevaluated?

>We could absolutely have a full replacement for the X server based on wayland.
>The wayland people won't build it for us though. Neither will the gnome people.

To use an allegory: it is perfectly fine that they don't want to build our
bridges. But they shouldn't tear down the ones we have, no matter how worn out
or in need of repair they might be. The new ones have design flaws and aren't
even complete.

> You can decide for yourself whether you want to keep whining

Typical use of a strong language as a substitute for having real arguments.
Received on Fri Sep 17 2021 - 13:54:25 CEST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Sep 17 2021 - 14:00:08 CEST