As a systemd user but Wayland "hater", to me the big difference is that you can adopt systemd without losing functionality - e.g. you can configure systemd to run sysV init style init scripts if you insist and no functionality is lost. The "complaints" in the linked article, are minor and about options that can just be turned off and that are offering useful additional capabilities without taking away the old.

Whereas with Wayland the effort to transition is significant and most compositors still have limitations X doesn't (and yes, I realise some of those means X is more vulnerable) - especially for people with non-standard setups. Like me.

I use my own wm. I could start with ~40-50 lines of code and expand to add functionality. That made it viable. I was productively using my own wm within a few days, including to develop my wm.

With Wayland, even if I start with an existing compositor, the barrier is far larger, and everything changes. I'm not going to do that. Instead I'll stick with X. The day an app I actually depend on stops supporting X, I'll just wrap those apps in a Wayland compositor running under X.

And so I won't be writing blog posts about how much I hate Wayland, and hence the quotes around "hater" above. But maybe I will one day write some about how to avoid running Wayland system-wide.

If Wayland gave me something I cared about, I'd take the pain and switch. It doesn't. Systemd did, so even if I hadn't liked it better than SysVinit, I'd still have just accepted the switch.

If I one day give up Xorg, my expectation is that it'll be a passive-aggressive move to a custom franken-server that is enough-of-X to run modern X apps coupled to enough-of-Wayland to run the few non-X-apps I might care about directly (I suspect the first/only ones that will matter to me that might eventually drop X will be browsers), just because I'd get some of the more ardent Wayland proponents worked up.

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gerdesj 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I remember the good old days of xfree86. It was arse but mostly worked OK on a PC. Then this blasted Xorg thing rocked up and it was worse for a while! Nowadays I can barely remember the last time I had to create an xorg.conf.

Wayland has a few years to go yet and I'm sure it will be worth the wait. For me, it seems to work OK already.

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r14c 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

wayback has you covered https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback

the idea here is to make it easy for x-based wms to keep working like they always have!

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vidarh 9 hours ago | parent [-]

That's interesting, but I really would rather write something stripped down with X as the base, though. This might be a good intermediary step, though.

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r14c 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I mean unless you're going to commit to maintaining xlibre or something, wayback seems like the future for x-based desktops.

> [wayback] is intended to eventually replace the classic X.Org server, thus reducing maintenance burden of X11 applications, but a lot of work needs to be done first.

	▲	vidarh 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		As I said, I'd rather write something from scratch when the time comes that Xorg becomes a challenge.

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bsder 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wayback is really the only good step in the X11 space I've seen. They could use your help.

It also has the benefit that if it gets enough traction, then you can displace the backend off of Wayland and go directly to hardware.

Killing Wayland would just be a bonus...

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gf000 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> With Wayland, even if I start with an existing compositor, the barrier is far larger, and everything changes.

I mean, no one puts a gun against your head to use Wayland, X will be on life support for decades and will likely work without any issue.

But with this stance, no evolution could ever happen and every change would be automatically "bad". Sure, changes have a downside of course, but that shouldn't deter us in every case.

	▲	vidarh 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Plenty of evolution can happen. The problem with Wayland to me is that it's not evolution, but a step backward. It's forcing a tremendous amount of boilerplate and duplication of code. X can evolve both by extensions and by "pseudo extensions" that effectively tell the server it's okay to make breaking changes to the protocol. There are also plenty of changes you could just make and accept the breakage because the clients it's break are limited. I don't mind breaking changes if they actually bring me benefits I care about, but to me Wayland is all downside and no upsides that matter to me.