> Scream and holler about how terrible it is, yet nobody provides anything better.
Or rather, no one can to provide anything "better" because no one agrees on what exactly is better.
It's obvious that sometimes, in order to advance the status quo, you really need to exploit the free manpower that comes from the "chasing change for the sake of trying shiny new things" group. Every developer has been there once or twice: it's well known we prefer to write shiny new things rather than maintain old things, _even_ when the later is frequently the better option.
But it also obviously comes with negative consequences. In a couple weeks there is going to be yet another inevitable rant in HN about how Linux breaks the ABI for desktop applications every other week, which prevents Linux from taking over the desktop, and this type of unbridled shiny new thing chasing _is_ almost 100% to blame.
Certainly, you are not paying for it, so the inevitable cycle of useless rewrites just to keep (volunteer) developer interest is necessary. But at least one ought to also empathize with the people for whom their entire platform keeps moving under their feet for little apparent benefit.
There's core issues with the X11 protocol from my understanding, which means if anyone decided to take up the task of modernizing X.org there would be a big dust-up anyway.
X11 and X.org are ancient, and we certainly seem like we can do better. Maybe Wayland isn't the best, but if it's better than X.org then that is indeed progress - temporary pain or not.
There's a saying military folks use often - "suck it up buttercup". Since nobody seems willing to actually defend the merits of continuing to use X.org/X11, then we do need something better.
People seem to forget X.org is about 20 years old - and wasn't perfect when it was first released either.
Sorry but this is precisely the example of shiny chasing I was thinking of. If you think that a "core issue" that is so important (sarcasm) that apparently you don't even know what it is or what usecase it breaks then this is hardly a reason for claiming that "it's ancient and we can do better". "It's ancient" is also not generally something that can be used as a criticism. You could just put yet another patch on top of it. Everyone does it. Practically no one uses the core X API anymore, but you need to implement it if you want _your_ older programs to work.
Win32/the windows API is practically the same age, has a million more "core issues", it's a clusterfuck of patches at this point (see Wine), and yet it's going to become the de-facto ABI for Linux games in the near future, if it already isn't, just because at least it tries to be minimally stable. See the multiple HN articles about it....
As TFA says, people _are being forced_ to adopt Wayland. You yourself are saying that "you outsource your concerns to the distro maintainers, and some are choosing Wayland", which effectively implies that you are being forced to use Wayland.
I am also forced to support Wayland if I want to make Linux desktop software. Which means (again) the next application or game I would make is likely going to target Win32 only instead of Linux since it changes way too damn frequently for no reason. The argument "if you complain about Wayland, just improve X11!" goes both ways. The "shiny new thing" chasers are forcing me extra work to maintain my own software, and I am also not paid to do it.
Nobody is forced. Just like with systemd, there's plenty of distros that still don't use it if that's your thing. Today, they're mostly niche distros for people that just cannot adapt...
You can choose not to support Wayland in your app if you want. As market-share grows, your available reach will shrink. That's the same as with anything...
There's good reasons Wayland is being adopted in major distros - and it's not "the shiny" like you asserted.
> the next application or game I would make is likely going to target Win32 only instead of Linux since it changes way too damn frequently for no reason
That's ridiculous. We're talking about one major change in 20 years and you're acting like it changes every few months. Your game won't even exist in 20 years, so it doesn't matter. Nor do you have to even care about what protocol/compositor/lib is being used unless you're doing something strange - the engine will take care of that for you and probably make it a checkbox.
> Nobody is forced. [...] You can choose not to support Wayland in your app if you want. As market-share grows, your available reach will shrink.
What is the point of claiming "no one is forcing you to choose X" while at the same claiming "but if you choose Y you will face the consequences"? In this case the consequence is a million frustrated users not being able to say, take a screenshot, spamming my inbox like crazy, me abandoning Linux desktop development and everyone getting frustrated at the state of the Linux desktop yet again.
> There's good reasons Wayland is being adopted in major distros - and it's not "the shiny" like you asserted.
Even in your own messages you are throwing the argument that "at least Wayland is maintained and Xorg isn't", which is basically another way of saying that it has developer interest, and my claim is that it has developer interest because it's new.
> Your game won't even exist in 20 years
The software I am talking about is actually already older than that.
> Nor do you have to even care about what protocol/compositor/lib is being used unless you're doing something strange
As mentioned in TFA, there are several extremely common usecases which are broken by these changes. Certainly Wayland is just part of the problem, as it is pervasive to this world.
If you're software is older than 20 years, then you had to deal with this same issue ~20 years ago.
ie. it's a non-issue... do the work and update or don't. That's your choice.
Wayland is only slightly newer than X.org - and it's been on the horizon for years and years already. If you haven't updated by now, then you made that choice.
The folks maintaining X.org know there are issues that cannot be overcome without a major re-write and protocol change. The change has to happen even if it was a X.org v2... and you would still be complaining.
also the x12 protocol has the same wayland concept on mind, so wayland is x12, and xorg developers are the one working on wayland, who is better to know how hard is to maintaing the software than the same mainteiners?
It is not some magpies chasing the next shiny thing that are abandoning Xorg. It is the Xorg developers that are leaving it to rot, because they don't want to maintain it.
> It turns out... most people just don't like change.
Is this a surprise? Change almost always comes with some pain and loss. But people will accept it if the benefit of the change outweighs that cost.
The problem is really when change is forced on people, but it brings no benefit to them in excess of the cost of it. That's just a loss to people.
And it's something that our industry rarely understands.
Often, in our industry, we just see "oooh, shiny new!" and don't see that the change isn't really improving anything for ordinary people using the software in the big picture.
No, that's a really bad analogy: systemd offeres comparable features to SysV init and much more useful functionality outside of pid 0. It even had a program[1] to automatically convert old SysV init scripts to systemd unit.
In fact the main criticism is that systemd tries to do too much by trying to replace a lot of traditional UNIX software cron -> timers, sudo -> polkit, udev -> systemd-udev, consolekit -> systemd-logind, etc.
I've never seen a complaint that systemd breaks existing setups. Wayland, on the other hand...
No, we got systemd because it was better. Both theoretically and in practice. We can quibble about complexity and configuration quirks until the cows come home, but it is objectively better than InitV and the things like Upstart that were bumbling around trying to solve the same problems. It won on merit, not apathy.
And I think the same is true for Wayland. It's far more complex than just starting every system and user service so the teething issues are that much bigger, but when it works and you get a VRR desktop, it's just feels breathtakingly light and responsive.
I don't miss X. It wasn't just rotting, it was objectively worse. And all this is from a Nvidia users who's still battling XWayland sync issues.
A quote from Musk about why he doesn’t work on immortality, but I think the same principle applies here: those who made the noise will continue to be upset while the user group adds new users who are happy with the “way things are” until the noisy ones are replaced entirely.
Well, have you seen any community infighting about it?
There isn't any, because for wayland, as you said, nobody is providing any alternative, while that's false for systemd; there's no discussion about the capacity of the developers to work in a community, while that's still not clear at all about systemd; the change is being made for this piece of software alone, without interference of widely popular software pushing their dominance around and without redesigning the entire OS, none of what was true for systemd.
The situation is so dissimilar that I can't really understand how you one can honestly claim it's the same. It's either a completely naive observation made from somebody that didn't look at anything, or not honest.
It's similar in that people are complaining without doing anything about it... and in a few year's time people will forget what they were even complaining about. Nothing stops someone from developing something better.
There are alternatives to Wayland and X.org. People just don't use them for whatever the reasons may be. Wayland is not new either - Wikipedia says the initial release was 2008.
The distro maintainers and DE developers know a lot more about this stuff than random internet users that complain about any change... so much like the systemd fiasco, the professionals like it and the users complain for petty reasons.
Oh no, your GUI app has some new bug, what will you do? Tell the developer to update their stuff... pretty simple.
X.org was far from perfect when it was first widely adopted, and it's had 20+ years (well, ~40 years if you want to be pedantic) of patches and work-arounds applied while being "mainstream". Now, Wayland will enjoy the same treatment since all of the major distros are poised to adopt it.
An awful lot of what was relevant when the X spec was being dreamt up (in the 80's) is completely different today.
Even the maintainers of X.org openly talk about it largely being abandoned and full or issues that are un-fixable without major protocol and implementation changes. Which means... a v2 would be just as disruptive as moving to Wayland, but Wayland has decades of a head start.
People enjoy complaining about change. It's pretty simple.
People enjoy complaining, never step up to help, and when someone step up, they discover the shit show that is trying to fix xorg, that's why the development is so much more focused on wayland, the developers know, that why xorg is dead and the only improvements are for xwayland
Either the things continue to rot and get worse over time, or we get something modern like Wayland and deal with integration issues.
Fast forward a few years, and the noise will mostly be gone, just like with systemd.
It turns out... most people just don't like change.