Re: [dev] Wayland compositors

From: Nick <suckless-dev_AT_njw.me.uk>
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2021 17:06:55 +0100

Quoth Страхиња Радић:
> On 21/09/08 01:36, Nick wrote:
> > The fact that the Jitsi devs closed
> > the bug as "not much we can do on our side" doesn't mean "wayland
> > broke it and we can't fix it".
>
> It's exactly the same thing.

In this instance it isn't, maybe I should have been more verbose.
The issue was with web browser support for wayland screen sharing
stuff, so Jitsi couldn't fix it theirselves, but it is now well
integrated and supported in browsers, and therefore by extension
Jitsi.

> The issues listed show a pattern and the impact of breaking with a
> long-standing, time-tested tradition just for the sake of doing something "new"
> and "different". "New" doesn't automatically mean "good".

True, this is clearly a case where the majority of X developers
decided it was worth the pain of starting again with a fresh design.
There are pros and cons to that. In this case I think it sounds like
it's worth it, as the end result should be a cleaner system with
less code and more reliability, and I'm happy to pay the short term
cost of changing some programs I use and learning how to do things
differently in some cases. Obviously for some people the costs will
be different, and the benefits don't seem worth it.

It's frustrating to feel like you have so little agency over the
direction of such decisions - that's one of the things that attracts
lots of us to suckless - but to some extent that's inevitable with
large projects like this. As you say, I have little doubt that X
will continue to receive some attention and support for a long time
to come, even if not so much from the current core team.

> You haven't mentioned the other points, just some of the major ones being the
> issue of non-GNOME desktop environments, for example KDE. I'm not using KDE, but
> why just erase it in favor of GNOME monopoly? I'm using no desktop environment,
> I'm using dwm, but many of its key features are not supported by Wayland.

From what I could see on that list, the KDE and XFCE issues
mentioned are all things which are being worked on or have already
been addressed by those projects. I don't really see how Wayland is
leading to a GNOME monopoly, there are plenty of other compositors
out there with more on the way.

I'm going to bow out of this conversation now, lest it become even
more interminable for everyone else! But thanks for sharing your
opinions and thoughts about it, it's (almost) always good to be
challenged, even if it doesn't result in minds being changed :)

Nick
Received on Wed Sep 08 2021 - 18:06:55 CEST