[mdlug] Who Uses Wayland?

[Jonathan Billings]

On Jul 17, 2023, at 09:09, LAP <mail1 at lapiet.info> wrote:
> 
> The Wayland GUI is usually touted as being the newfangled,
> up-and-coming superior replacement for Xorg.
> 
> But I, and a lot of others, are not so enthused.
> 
> Here are some major problems with Wayland:
> 
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/233
> 
> https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277
> 
> The gist of it all seems to be in this statement:
> 
> "As it currently stands minor WMs and DEs do not even intend
> to support Wayland given the sheer complexity of writing all
> the code required to support the above features [in the first
> link]"
> 
> I consider the desktop paradigm to be a silly idea:
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_metaphor
> 
> Consequently I use only a window manager, namely FVWM3, for a GUI.
> FVWM3 is in active development and has no plans to adapt to Wayland
> (for the above mentioned reason).
> 
> What are the thoughts of others on this?
> 
> I would hope that Xorg and Wayland will be two stable options
> within the GNU/Linux environment, but as we have seen elsewhere,
> the trend is for less choice and more hegemony.

For what it’s worth, people are not really working on Xorg anymore.  Many of the Xorg developers are now Wayland developers. Many of the decisions about Wayland were made by people fed up with the terrible code in X.

I realize you’re still using fvwm3, and are unlikely to want change. Wayland intentionally breaks a lot of assumptions, and requires a lot of change. 

A lot of these changes are quite welcome.  App sandboxing, for example. I like the idea that Zoom, Slack, or Teams can’t sniff keystrokes in my terminal window (for example). I like that there are desktop portals to allow you to explicitly grant permission for screen sharing. It’s moving in the right direction.  Underlying toolkits are getting Wayland support so your desktop environment will eventually start working. New libraries like wlroots are allowing people to write new tools.

I got started in Linux using fvwm (I had a really great fvwm95 setup), so I understand where you are coming from. But I don’t think Xorg is the future and as time passes, I suspect more things will stop working with X.

-- 
Jonathan Billings