X11, Wayland
Rob Pike was right.
X.org is elderly and morbidly obese. The solution? Wayland, I guess.
The Good
- we are not stuck with a single slop implementation
- the window manager is the display server. Yes, this has always been the better way to do it (see: rio)
- significantly less code to get the same general thing done
The Bad
- wlroots
- dbus
The Ugly
- half of the entire protocol, as well as extensions, are specified in XML and generated from that XML with a Python script (what the actual fuck?)
see: wayland.xml, How does wayland work?
Wayland could be better than X11 in every way, but this is the real world. Stability is on Wayland is a mixed bag; much of the ecosystem in Wayland is simply better than X11’s (all X terminal emulators are terrible), but a lot of it is still beta-quality crap. “Legacy” programs, i.e. the programs everyone still runs daily, are especially not consistent.
X11 sucks!
X was never a good idea. The UNIX world figured future GUIs would work very different from how they turned out to. We are long overdue for a course correction.
>b-but what about my X forwarding???
waypipe. quit whining.
>wayland is freedesktop/redhat/(minority group)’s conspiracy to control linux!
The X.Org foundation is a member of Freedesktop, who also hosts their development repositories.
If their goal really was to “embrace, extend, extinguish” the Linux desktop, they’d be doing everything in their power to keep people on Xorg, which was already suffocating the Linux world with its pathological complexity. Focusing on Wayland actually means relinquishing a great deal of power and giving it to compositor developers, who (at least partially) maintain their own Wayland server implementations.
>but they’re woke!
Recommended Reading
- wayland.fyi minimalist wayland special interest group [sic]