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wing-_-nutsyesterday at 4:44 PM6 repliesview on HN

With a project as user/dev hostile as wayland, it's much better to be a 'last mover' than first.

For the life of me, I'll never understand how wayland got traction with the community.

'Hey guys, we decided to implement a display server from scratch! We broke a ton of existing functionality and made a ton of low level stuff that X used to handle the responsibility of WM/DE devs!'


Replies

rasculyesterday at 11:03 PM

They've been working on Wayland support for awhile now.

https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

M95Dyesterday at 5:12 PM

I think it was the "security" argument. Some magic words like "security" and "protect the children" make most people go insane, abandon all reason.

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dralleyyesterday at 5:09 PM

Wayland is not a "display server", it's a display protocol.

A lot of the "existing functionality" that it broke has nothing to do with displays, it's stuff that got crammed into Xorg at some point whether it made sense or not.

I find it quite funny that many of the same people that rag on systemd and say it does too many things, are big fans of Xorg doing a bunch of things that "display server" probably should not be handling.

Even if Wayland was a "display server", it would still "remove existing functionality" if it meant that in any principled sense, because "display server" is only half of what Xorg does.

But sure, the transition was difficult and took a long time.

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doublerabbityesterday at 6:31 PM

> For the life of me, I'll never understand how wayland got traction with the community.

Corporate drive. Originally sponsored by Intel followed by IBM (RedHat) and the rest followed suit.

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0xbadcafebeeyesterday at 7:18 PM

> I'll never understand how wayland got traction with the community

There were only a few people willing to work on an alternative, and they didn't have to take a vote, so they just did what they wanted. Corporations and projects adopted it because they wanted something different, and it was the only other option.

Now that we have AI, it will be much easier for genuine community alternatives to emerge, even if we have to battle over the legal ramifications. I for one am willing to go without "official support" to have software that doesn't suck.

naikrovekyesterday at 4:57 PM

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