This is the kind of initiative I’d prefer to see from X preservationists. Great job, I hope it succeeds. I prefer Wayland, but there’s still a place in the world for X; it just needs new dev teams to shoulder the burden.
Which one? The Gnome Wayland, the KDE Wayland, the xroots wayland, Weston, or one of the others? Each one is an independent implementation of a Wayland compositor, with a differing, incompatible set of extensions.
X11 was a single, pretty janky implementation. Wayland is the worst of both worlds -- it's cleaned up a little, but it's still kinda janky. In exchange for a little bit of cleanup, mainly around bitmap fonts, it's no longer a unified protocol.
And to top it off -- it kept the worst part of the X11 protocol, the XKB extension, but got rid of input handling entirely, which means that every platform needs to reach for platform specific code to implement reading from the mouse and keyboard.
If we're hypothesising a perfect world, ideally they standardise some way of sharing framebuffers between programs into Wayland. I suppose maybe they already have I gave up on the ecosystem in the early 2020s. That seems like it should be long enough ago now that they've got even advanced features like screenshots under control and rolled out.
Sure, but I don't see a world where keeping X11 alive, in addition to all of this, makes anything better or easier, for anyone in the medium to long term.
If, as an application developer, you target X11, you have a program that will work on Linux and BSD with all desktop environments. It'd even work on Wayland via Xwayland. If you want to use it on other OSes, it's less smooth, but also working on MacOS via Xquartz, and Windows via Xming. There's even an X11 compatibility layer for Haiku (Xlibe).
With Wayland, you don't even get compatibility with Gnome and KDE. You need conditional compilation to get mouse events if you port to FreeBSD Wayland.
For the medium term, if your goal is to reduce fragmentation, X11 is the portable target, even if you use Wayland.
It makes things a lot better for me, for one, and clearly there are more of us. You may not think it matters, and that's fine, but X11 won't go away because there are enough of us that won't let it.
> The choices in the Linux ecosystem lead to unnecessary fragmentation and development/packaging nightmares.
You cannot possibly use this as an argument in Wayland's favor. X11 sucked because it baked everything, including multiple outdated kitchen sinks, into a single Xorg monolith. Wayland sucks because it factors out everything, including really important features, into optional extensions, ensuring that anything more interesting than "draw pixels to a window" will always be different on every single compositor.
The *original* X11 should die, but the modern Linux GUI stack has long abandoned most of its features anyway. X11 was already reduced to a bit-blitter protocol long before Wayland.
So, in theory, we can embrace a rather-minimal X11 implementation that can run the modern UI, including some desktop features missing in Wayland.
Linux on the desktop only took of because Ubuntu, with mixed results and a lot of controversy, decided to standardize and polish the experience for "normies".
The distribution sprawl I largely see as a detriment to the ecosystem.
I would argue that Desktop Linux finally took off because of Steam Proton, and because of Windows 10/11 and macOS starting version fartascular or whatever their versions are named.
I remember seeing Linux gaining some traction 15 year ago, and Ubuntu focusing on polishing the user experience (with initiatives such as fixing "One hundred paper cuts"), but then this changed instead of keeping this stable the great rewriting began. Seeing Wayland (which is just one example) users having a problem with screen sharing just convinces me how much of a self-own this was from the Linux community.
Yeah but Ubuntu screwed up switching from Gnome to Unity back then, which sent tons of users elsewhere. You can't just rug-pull the entire GUI people were used to, which was also similar to Windows.
There isn't a successful Linux desktop OS. The Linux kernel is successful on servers and appliances, but only the kernel. And there aren't many even-split choices on your typical server. Like yeah zsh has a bit of a following, but everyone assumes you use bash, which is a good thing.
> I say let X11 die, bury it, and never let it rise again.
totally awesome! And once we are done with X11, lets put pulseaudio to the grave! We can all focus on having an audio stack that does realiably stream to many sinks!
> And once we are done with X11, lets put pulseaudio to the grave!
That'll happen first, I think. The trick is that pipewire is actually a fully functional replacement, instead of trying to declare everything out of scope, so with only minor effort people can just switch and everything works.
