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.
I’m aware of the overlap, but some people take any criticism of X11 as some kind of insult to the X project and the people behind it.
Sure but the people behind X11 are the same ones behind Wayland so when the develpers didn’t think it was worth the time to fix X11 and it would be better to start a new project to fix the issues. How can end users think we should just fix X11 make anysense? I think their biggest mistake is they should have called Wayland X12 or something like that.
I think it’s a consequence of Wayland still lacking important features. Nvidias’s bullshit doesn’t help either.
X11 has decades of tooling that doesn’t work on Wayland anymore. If you’re one of those people who scripted their entire OS together with xdotool, you’ll probably want X11 bugs to be fixed rather than try to learn how to do the same things in Wayland (and failing, because Wayland doesn’t do a lot of things X11 does).
To be honest, I don’t think anyone things of X11 as something that needs to be fixed. It works, it doesn’t have any problems, it’s just there. Crashes and such may need looking after but the core X11 tools are very stable. I think it’s the systemd situation all over again, where the mere suggestion of change is enough to set people off.
Wayland 1.0 was released in 2012, though.
Yes, but Wayland just doesn’t implement some features that X11 supports. Virtual pointer/keyboard events for example, you’ll need to go through system wide inputs with elevated permissions. Global hotkeys are also a challenge for third party tooling.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does break some workflows.
11 years after Wayland 1.0 and 7 years after Gnome 3.22 were released.
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All major distributions default to Gnome Wayland since years and since last year’s Steam Deck release, even millions of super casual gamers use Wayland without even knowing what a display server is.