On Mon, 9 Jun 2025, Robert Heller wrote:
At Mon, 9 Jun 2025 17:13:09 -0600 Felipe Contreras <felipe.contre...@gmail.com>
wrote:
On Mon, Jun 9, 2025 at 8:27??????AM Lyude Paul <ly...@redhat.com> wrote:
X wasn't "badly designed" per-say, for what it was I'll absolutely say it was a
wonderful piece of software and it did its job well. But it's also designed for an era of
computing that is much different than how most modern desktops work, so for a lot of the
functionality we wanted to see in Wayland the only way to have implemented it in X would
have required breaking people's setups. So, technically speaking splitting the
development off was kind of a given in some sense anyway. Even if we didn't move work to
Wayland it's more likely work would have been on an X server that didn't really resemble
X11 and wasn't 1:1 compatible.
You can list a million reasons why Wayland is superior, but people
still use Xorg, and my bet is that's going to continue to be the case
for at least a decade, and possibly much more.
The key part of what Lyude Paul wrote is "But it's also designed for an era of
computing that is much different than how most modern desktops work...". There
are some of "us" who have no use for "modern" desktop environments.
I think modern desktops work pretty much exactly the same way as the
original Xerox demo - you got rectangular windows that can be overlapped,
and you can click with the mouse and type with the keyboard.
Most of the user progress is the development of KDE that allows seemless
access using "fish://" and drag and drop, and customization that lets you
turn your KDE desktop in a Mac, NeXT or Windows, or a mixture of those.
(Yep, I know there was a lot of interesting work in other parts, but it
not that user visible.)
I think a lot of controversy will disappear if we view Wayland not as a
successor of X with carefull thought out protocol and lightweight clients,
but rather as "super-VNC", without the network part.
Though the networking might not be hard to implement on a fast connection
(40Gb/s?)
best
Vladimir Dergachev
Maybe we
actually prefer "old fashioned" desktop environments. So, we will continue to
use Xorg (X11). Unless/until Wayland develops some kind of whatever that fully
supports / mimics the "old fashioned" features of X11 in a compaticable way
(so "standard" X11 Window Managers, like FVWM can work), Wayland is just not
going to work for us, no matter how spiffy it is -- *I* don't need a spiffy
GUI subsystem, something that is boring that actually works the way *I* want
it to work is what I want.
It is worth noting that "Dark Mode" terminal windows look and feel just like
the 1970s vintage CRT terminals I used 50 years ago. To me *that* is seriously
"old fashioned" and is commonly the standard default terminal for many
"modern" desktops... Go figure.
So if there are some users that will keep using Xorg, I would expect
there to be some developers that will keep developing Xorg.
But for some reason no one other than Enrico Weigelt has raised their
hand and publicly stated so.
--
Robert Heller -- Cell: 413-658-7953 GV: 978-633-5364
Deepwoods Software -- Custom Software Services
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