My biggest problem with wayland was how it was basically forced on the community. It broke innumerable things for years, put all the responsibility for implementing things down on the DEs and WMs themselves.

All of this hassle, forcing so much more work on DE/WM devs, for the sake of 'better security' in scenarios that don't really apply to 99% of linux users, with the promise of 'better latency' which this very article proves is false.

I tried to be an early adopter of wayland ~ 5 years ago. Found all sorts of things broken, and I'm now using linux mint xfce edition, as hopefully by the time xfce drags itself to wayland, all the bugs and tooling will be a solved problem.

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bigcityslider 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know enough about this to have a favorite, just know the transition was rough. Like one day at work our DE had to get changed because of whatever reasons they couldn't use X anymore, and that affected more things like Chrome Remote Desktop. Years after I tried setting up Linux on an old PC and learned that Wayland is de facto default now, but not in Mint, even though Mint is supposed to be the easy one... and CRD was still finicky in either one.

Linux is about choice, but unless you're ready to write a lot of things yourself, it's outside your control how well parts of the ecosystem are supported. For an average user it's unacceptable for your entire GUI to suddenly change in a way that requires relearning, something that Mac and Windows have avoided doing at least since 2000. Even Win8 or Mac26 wasn't so disruptive. It's possibly worse for an average Linux user because they aren't just concerned with how it looks but also compatibility with advanced things like X forwarding or VNC or CRD.

	▲	michaelmrose an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think Linux is about choice some folks opinions notwithstanding. It's an ecosystem where many different devs have chosen to go about the same thing many different ways. You the user then get to pick from amongst those varied and interesting choices. It however isn't about all or indeed any of those devs being obligated to support any particular choice. You can only buy a place at the table with money or sweat and merely using something isn't contributing and doesn't get you a vote. Arguably the problem isn't the display server its the fact that general linux usage tends to require a little understanding of what's going on under the hood than is strictly speaking desirable for joe average user especially when something doesn't work. EG needing to understand that your choice of display server is making your zoom calls not work and then having to open that whole can of worms. The fix is honestly more labor. The trivial way to acquire more labor is with money which is hampered by the fact that so little is paid. If you want more polished stuff pay more.

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inigyou 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And the attitude of just refusing to make things work because haha fuck you that's why. I think it was Kicad or Gimp or Blender where you can drag windows onto other windows to merge them and they had to add a warning saying this will never work on Wayland because Wayland doesn't want it to work.

	▲	wing-_-nuts 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		By the time wayland becomes the default in xfce, maybe the wayland team will have added window positioning to the protocol...

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amlib 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I tried to be an early adopter of wayland ~ 5 years ago. Found all sorts of things broken

Yeah, because it wasn't ready. Pretty much no one recommended using it back them, if you thought it was ready you were either misguided or misled. It's time to put your skepticism aside and give it another try, there is a pretty good chance it's going to work great now.

Even Valve Steam OS is now adopting it. It's a pretty good sign wayland is a viable replacement for X11, while bringing it own things.

	▲	michaelmrose an hour ago \| parent [-]
		People were declaring it ready in 2016 10 years ago and talking about how people needed to switch off the working "obsolete" X and switch ASAP to the broken wayland. It is completely counterfactual that "pretty much no one" was recommending it in 2021

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uecker an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

And all the gaslighting. Using X forward basically every day but being told it is useless and broken and nobody needs it...

	▲	cwillu a minute ago \| parent [-]
		And don't forget the “this isn't a wayland problem” whenever a major missing feature provided by the X11 ecosystem is mentioned. Guess what: if you're going to replace the whole ecosystem, you're responsible for all the missing things regardless of your opinions of the matter.