Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate.
“In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!”
Railways are not a “replacement” for canals.
Duh. But you do understand what purpose the metaphor serves?
Yes. And it’s a bad analogy. Nobody is expecting you to be able to take a barge on railways. But existing linux applications are being expected to run on Wayland. As I said - railways didn’t replace canals - they’re different types of things.
Within the last 10 years and the next 5 years, software using old hacks instead of GUI toolkits are expected to switch, yes.
People can choose to continue to use X11 until KDE Plasma 6 hits Debian stable.
I don’t see a problem. Nobody forces Wayland onto anyone yet, except for bleeding edge distributions like Fedora. And unless you’ve been severely misled, you should know what you signed up for when you installed Fedora.
I didn’t say there was a problem. I’m saying it’s pretty disingenuous to act like Wayland isn’t intended as a replacement for X11. All of which you seem to agree with. As you say “nobody forces Wayland onto anyone yet” (emphasis mine).
Also - I just love how your comment is written like a politician would have written it. “Sure you can use the dirty old X11 if you really want to, or you can use the nice new God-fearing Wayland”.
If you bring the two parts of your comment together and dial back the assumptions of bad faith, you’ll get a consistent picture:
Wayland is a blank slate replacement for how to do window management on Linux. At some point it’ll become the standard for software that’s new or maintained. Unmaintained software that doesn’t talk to the internet and is therefore safe to run even with security holes will continue to be supported via XWayland. The giant scope and API surface is part of the reason why it’s deprecated. Maintainers are expected to target the new way to do things going forward, because there are people able and willing to maintain that support (many of those people former X11 maintainers who are looking forward to stop having to deal with that legacy behemoth)
That’s the state of things I wanted to express. Not my opinion, no agenda, just how I understand the situation.
Neat.
barges just haven’t been ported to railways yet
Lol. Learn your history.
In the UK railways very much were a replacement for canals.
Both being built to transport good accross the nation.
Don’t be shitty.
Yeah sorry. But when you look at the events building europeen railways. More so in the UK as we had a huge canal system built in a few decades. But most of Europe denser areas.
Railways were very much a replacement for the to slow canal system.
Canals built a huge industry allowing manufacturers to ship goods to cities while shipping resources from the mines and farms etc.
But industries like meat fish milk and strongly enough market gardening (fresh flowers) were very limited to local areas before the railways. Took off hugely when the railways intentionally set up in direct competition to the canals.
Canals survived for a while moving the slower stuff. But started needing to redesign to support bigger and more boats faster. Before finally closing down.
The UK and most of Europe rebuilt/renovated them as a leasure activity from the 1950s. But most of the late 1800 to early 1900s railways vcompanies actually worked to replace and put canal companies out of business.
Passenger rail really was not a big thing untill about the 1920s.
We’re getting well away from the topic now. It depends on what you mean by “replace”. Railways and canals exist side-by-side as different solutions to similar problems - sure. And some railways have replaced some canals. But the panama canal will not be replaced by a railroad for example. It couldn’t do the same job. The pros/cons of each option depends on many factors.
The analogy is poor for comparing software. Linux distros will likely replace X11 with Wayland over time. To do the same thing that X11 was doing. It will be replaced “in place”. The very same thing you were using with X11 will now need to work on Wayland. This would be like running your barges on the railroad? Maybe? Depending on how you squint?
I wouldn’t expect my barge to work on the railroad. I do expect that Firefox will run on Wayland after having used it on X11 for 20 years.