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.

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grim_io 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I disagree. The choices in the Linux ecosystem lead to unnecessary fragmentation and development/packaging nightmares.

I say let X11 die, bury it, and never let it rise again.

Then we can all focus on making just one display server as good as possible.

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ori_b 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

Yay.

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roenxi 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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grim_io 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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		[deleted]

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esjeon 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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nish__ 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is the worst argument ever. The choices in the Linux community is what's made it the best OS in the world today.

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grim_io 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	kesor 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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yjftsjthsd-h 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.