Are there? I don't think anyone seriously thinks X is the way forward do they? They just don't like some of Wayland's poor choices, which I think is fair.
I think "forward" is the wrong mindset here. X works. Plenty of tooling is just done, lots of people have their workflow just perfect, the whole ecosystem is mature, and at worst the Wayland devs decided to uproot the whole thing in the name of "progress".
Wayland could be nice, but its compositors require 10x the code that a WM would (which is why there aren't that many Wayland "WMs") and its supposed benefits aren't better enough to justify the ambitious rewrite. I could imagine a universe where Wayland did the minimum to replace X's jank and make the thing maintainable, and nobody would have objected to that IMO.
Those goddamn Wayland devs and their individual free will. How dare they not continue to maintain this miserable, crusty old spec and continue to make their marketable skills less valuable.
> Wayland could be nice, but its compositors require 10x the code that a WM would (which is why there aren't that many Wayland "WMs"
Nah, this is an ecosystem maturity problem that is improving rapidly. There will always be a few hold outs for the old way, but people will and are moving on. It’s silly to compare the number of anything with a project that had a 30 year head start.
> Wayland did the minimum to replace X's jank and make the thing maintainable
That’s called Xorg. It still exists and you are free to do whatever you wish, even invest in its development, Wayland didn’t “uproot” anything.
One of the biggest pieces of “jank” replaced is the nonexistent security model. You can research why the proposed SECURITY extension was unworkable and smarter people decided it was better to start from scratch. This benefit alone is better enough for most people with a stake to justify a rewrite.
In pure economic terms there is certainly a price where Xorg can continue to remain viable - this isn’t some ancient artifact lost forever. In this lens it’s hard not to see these comments as anything but unproductive bitterness at not being able to provide or raise these funds. It doesn’t help that part of this price is a direct result of the qualities of the thing you’re trying to save.
That's not the problem. The problem is all the heckling for everyone to switch to Wayland, and to make it default. And also pretending that reversing the "mechanism, not policy" wasn't a fundamental change of philosophy and was just "progress".
And to be clear, by "at worst" I meant "this is the least-charitable interpretation".
>Nah, this is an ecosystem maturity problem that is improving rapidly.
TinyWM is 50LOC and wlroots's TinyWL is 900LOC. This hasn't changed. Writing Wayland compositors is a pain in the ass compared to WMs.
Wayland started in 2008 IIRC, so here in 2024 Wayland is 16 years old. It doesn't have teething issues, it just has issues.
Plenty of WM makers have just straight-up said they won't ever port their WM to Wayland (so talking about time and how "X is older" is irrelevant here), because Wayland's opinionation breaks too many things.
>One of the biggest pieces of “jank” replaced is the nonexistent security model.
You mean like how X clients can read keyboard inputs? There's so much FUD around this. /dev/keyboard does that already, you need to sandbox every app anyway - at which point your sandbox should just interdict the X interface. Security is the worst argument. Wayland isn't necessary for security, and for the longest time it's been locking the door and leaving the window open. Portals.
For instance it already supports mixing windows with different colour modes, which can be used for HDR.
"X11 seems to have fewer problems than the Wayland protocol" is too vague to be cogent so I will not address it. But the argument is more than just X11 vs Wayland, as Wayland isn't the only alternative display system nor is it the only answer to network transparent remote display technology either. "Wayland sucks" really is not a valid response to "X I don't really see the problems with it."
True, X11 the wire protocol isn't the most horrible thing in a world where SOAP exists, but in practice the latency story is overall bad. Yes you can pipeline with xcb and not with Xlib, so a few of the rehashed latency issues by the peanut gallery are false attribution, but the core protocol still makes many basic operations inherently synchronous and strictly ordered, many just a consequence of how the X server manages state. There are fundamental architectural issues.
X11 doesn't inherently require that many round trips. Xlib does, because Xlib is bad. But, for example, clients choose their own object IDs, so they don't need round trips to find the IDs of newly created objects. Of course it requires a few round trips to do anything, but that is also true of Wayland. The complaint was about excessive round trips, not a few.
A lot of people who don't work on X say this. I suppose that might not cross the line of "serious" though.
