Wayland lacks several important features still, so I get why people are fearful of modern desktop environments planning to abandon X11 in the surprisingly near future. Until there is feature parity for all the important features in major desktop environments (colour management is currently A Thing) and all the protocols that have been described to implement these features actually land in code, I’m a bit hesitant to agree with the decision to drop Wayland entirely.
There’s also Nvidia. Just today, I tried running Wayland on my Ubuntu desktop again, and somehow it crashed Nvidia’s shitty firmware. Not just the driver, it froze during some kind of animation and wouldn’t POST after a forced reset. I had to physically cut the power and hold the power button for the machine to get it to work again. I’m gonna be honest: I don’t expect Nvidia to come out with new firmware for my GPU, and I don’t expect Wayland devs to spend too much time fixing Nvidia’s fuckups. Best I can hope for is that the next Nvidia driver will finally do what the last four major versions promised to do and work with Wayland right.
In the end, Wayland is a superior design, and except for a few holdouts, it’ll win the battle. The same thing happened with systemd, there was rage and anger and some actual threats because someone came up with a much better configuration+daemon system that a minority didn’t like, and even today you’ll find irrationally angry people cursing on systemd because their favourite distro didn’t stick with their preferred daemon system.
A lot of Wayland criticism seems to match IPv6 criticism; "why couldn’t they just take X11 and only add ". Gather enough people who say that and you’ll probably come up with something not too dissimilar to the replacement, but each individual wants the thing that existed with their preferred features booted to the side.
Wayland lacks several important features still, so I get why people are fearful of modern desktop environments planning to abandon X11 in the surprisingly near future. Until there is feature parity for all the important features in major desktop environments (colour management is currently A Thing) and all the protocols that have been described to implement these features actually land in code, I’m a bit hesitant to agree with the decision to drop Wayland entirely.
There’s also Nvidia. Just today, I tried running Wayland on my Ubuntu desktop again, and somehow it crashed Nvidia’s shitty firmware. Not just the driver, it froze during some kind of animation and wouldn’t POST after a forced reset. I had to physically cut the power and hold the power button for the machine to get it to work again. I’m gonna be honest: I don’t expect Nvidia to come out with new firmware for my GPU, and I don’t expect Wayland devs to spend too much time fixing Nvidia’s fuckups. Best I can hope for is that the next Nvidia driver will finally do what the last four major versions promised to do and work with Wayland right.
In the end, Wayland is a superior design, and except for a few holdouts, it’ll win the battle. The same thing happened with systemd, there was rage and anger and some actual threats because someone came up with a much better configuration+daemon system that a minority didn’t like, and even today you’ll find irrationally angry people cursing on systemd because their favourite distro didn’t stick with their preferred daemon system.
A lot of Wayland criticism seems to match IPv6 criticism; "why couldn’t they just take X11 and only add ". Gather enough people who say that and you’ll probably come up with something not too dissimilar to the replacement, but each individual wants the thing that existed with their preferred features booted to the side.