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0 pointshapless1y ago0 comments

I doubt it

I really, truly suspect Wayland is the future

We have had like one hundred X11 replacements between 1990 and now, and at least half a dozen have caught on with the open source community

What makes Wayland different is that it has attracted multiple vendors supporting it. Most notably IBM/Redhat, Intel, AMD, and, to a lesser extent, nVidia.

I am posting this message from an X11 environment, because I need X11 for a lot of things, home and work both, but, I can at least imagine a world where Wayland is the new default. That is not something I could say about the last hundred attempts to replace X11.

Edit: Again, this is just a suspicion. A notion. I neither hope for Wayland's success nor failure. I just keep my finger to the wind.

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j16sdiz1y ago

I hope not.

The core wayland protocol have so many missing piece and many extension are not standardized nor well defined. This is basically killing the interoperability between UI toolkit for non-trivial cases.

postepowanieadm1y ago

Good enough for Gnome.

yjftsjthsd-h1y ago

Well.... yeah? GNOME doesn't care about interoperability; they're the ones known for ex. suggesting that applications remove features for other desktops because GNOME doesn't use them ( https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 ).

Kwpolska1y ago

Wayland might be the future (though I'm personally a bit skeptical). It is already the default on many distros. At the same time, X11 is very unlikely to just stop working or disappear, since there's really no good reason to kill it.

eternityforest1y ago

X11 will stop working if things stop supporting it.

Stuff might eventually decide to render directly to Wayland only APIs or something.

I'm actually not a very big Wayland fan, I prefer the single implementation model rather than all the different implementations of Wayland.

But I'd rather have just only the Wayland fragmentation mess, instead of the Wayland mess plus also X11, so I'm glad Pi OS and Ubuntu(Right now the only distros I pay much attention to) have switched.

haplessOP1y ago

My skepticism should be quite obvious: I am still posting through an X11 system.

But, Wayland is far and away the best and most serious attempt to replace X, ever, in thirty years and more.

If there is gonna be an X11 replacement, ever, Wayland is the most credible attempt in decades

vundercind1y ago

Agreed that it’s made the best show of attempting, but Wayland’s only got about nine years before it’s as old as x11 (the protocol) was when the Wayland showed up.

If it’s gonna mostly displace x11… man, it’s sure taking its time.

It’s older than xfree86 was when the xorg fork occurred.

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arp2421y ago

Tons of X11 infra will have to remain for a long time to support X11-only "legacy" apps that can't easily be updated. There's a long tail of that from games to scientific software to just unmaintained software that still works and is used.

The major bit will be when and if toolkits like GTK, Qt, SDL, etc. drop X11 support and applications update to X11-less versions. AFAIK there are no plans for that and is still years away (there was some talk about GTK 5, but nothing firm and no one even started work on GTK 5).

I also think Wayland will eventually replace all of X11, in the same way as IPv6 will eventually replace all of IPv4.

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raffraffraff1y ago

I'm also using X11, even though I've attempted to switch to Warplanes twice and had to switch back due to screen sharing and remote desktop being trash or just breaking after some update or other (most recently, browser). It's a work machine and I simply can't waste an hour fucking around with it. Aside from those issues which are deal-breakers in work, there's a bunch of minor annoyances I won't go into, thrust not deal brakes but they're "there". With X11 everything I need just works. I'm on a bleeding edge distro (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed) so I'll probably try it out on a weekend every few months to see if it's better. But in fairness I did that before, made the switch and then lost screen sharing after some random update...

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skriticos21y ago

Well, the main reason why Wayland even exists is, that the X11 maintainers got fed up with a design from a time when graphics cards were not even a thing yet and decades of patchwork. They wanted to move on to something that has way less technical debt. Sure, X11 won't go away anytime soon, but finding people who actually want to work and maintain that codebase will be more than a little difficult.

bandrami1y ago

This article is literally about a team that is actively maintaining the codebase

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legulere1y ago

Security is a good reason to kill it.

guappa1y ago

wayland's main purpose is to isolate ~~malware~~ proprietary software running in a container, which Xorg doesn't allow (unless of course you run nested servers).

It wouldn't be too bad of a goal if it had feature parity, which it still doesn't have.

shrubble1y ago

Wayland was started in 2008; the same year that Sun was already shipping Trusted Extensions for X11 that allowed per-window security controls.

Trusted Solaris 7 had shipped in 1999; 9 years BEFORE Wayland ever existed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Trusted_Extensions

welterde1y ago

X11 does have various ways to restrict access (one of which ssh does use for instance) and some more advanced security extensions. But as far as I can tell there has never been that much motivation to widely deploy any of it.

nolist_policy1y ago

Eh even if you secure the X11 API itself, the Xorg server still is a 33 year old (!) c codebase.

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j16sdiz1y ago

I hope not.

The core wayland protocol have so many missing piece and many extension are not standardized nor well defined. This is basically killing the interoperability between UI toolkit for non-trivial cases.

postepowanieadm1y ago

Good enough for Gnome.

yjftsjthsd-h1y ago

Kwpolska1y ago

eternityforest1y ago

X11 will stop working if things stop supporting it.

Stuff might eventually decide to render directly to Wayland only APIs or something.

I'm actually not a very big Wayland fan, I prefer the single implementation model rather than all the different implementations of Wayland.

haplessOP1y ago

My skepticism should be quite obvious: I am still posting through an X11 system.

But, Wayland is far and away the best and most serious attempt to replace X, ever, in thirty years and more.

If there is gonna be an X11 replacement, ever, Wayland is the most credible attempt in decades

vundercind1y ago

Agreed that it’s made the best show of attempting, but Wayland’s only got about nine years before it’s as old as x11 (the protocol) was when the Wayland showed up.

If it’s gonna mostly displace x11… man, it’s sure taking its time.

It’s older than xfree86 was when the xorg fork occurred.

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arp2421y ago

I also think Wayland will eventually replace all of X11, in the same way as IPv6 will eventually replace all of IPv4.

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raffraffraff1y ago

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skriticos21y ago

bandrami1y ago

This article is literally about a team that is actively maintaining the codebase

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legulere1y ago

Security is a good reason to kill it.

guappa1y ago

wayland's main purpose is to isolate ~~malware~~ proprietary software running in a container, which Xorg doesn't allow (unless of course you run nested servers).

It wouldn't be too bad of a goal if it had feature parity, which it still doesn't have.

shrubble1y ago

Wayland was started in 2008; the same year that Sun was already shipping Trusted Extensions for X11 that allowed per-window security controls.

Trusted Solaris 7 had shipped in 1999; 9 years BEFORE Wayland ever existed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Trusted_Extensions

welterde1y ago

nolist_policy1y ago

Eh even if you secure the X11 API itself, the Xorg server still is a 33 year old (!) c codebase.

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j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse