Comment by sprash 3 days ago
There is no X11 bitrot. Just a lack of funding. If funding for Wayland stopped today, Wayland would die much quicker than X11 because there is essentially zero community involvement whereas for X11 there are enough people that care to keep it alive for free.
The only real Wayland community effort is Hyprland. The author of that has been banned from contributing to Wayland by the corporate sponsors of Wayland.
Hence there is no community.
Also the whole "there is no Wayland" "it's just a protocol" spiel has been played so often that I believe Wayland apologists are mostly bots.
Desktop Linux is more of a love project, it has basically no real support. Compared to the kernel it's more like YouTube $5 comments.
And given that Wayland has less moving pieces (it properly sits on top of kernel abstractions), your take is even less likely to be true.
> Desktop Linux is more of a love project, it has basically no real support.
Ubuntu and RHEL exist, but you're right that they're outliers. This is potentially the next killer app if someone wants to take this on.
Desktop Linux needs standardized and stable infrastructure. X11 delivers on that perfectly.
Wayland despite receiving huge amounts funding has actually far more moving pieces. Even for the simplest tasks you have to deal with a dbus infested portal maze, many parallel infrastructure effects and high fragmentation. The API is atrociously stupid and cumbersome.
Besides that the modesetting driver of xorg also sits "properly on top of kernel abstractions". How is this in any ways a relevant criterion. What matters is that Wayland clearly makes the wrong abstractions for Desktop applications and the vast amount of parallel infrastructure required to do even the simplest tasks shows that.
> Wayland despite receiving huge amounts funding
Citation needed
> Even for the simplest tasks you have to deal with a dbus infested portal maze
The simplest task is displaying a buffer, or changing a buffer, or handling events, and absolutely none of them have anything to do with dbus whatsoever. Also, have you seen an X11 desktop environment like KDE or Gnome? I recommend looking at all the dbus messages that are in flight there at any time.
> perfectly
For a very strange definition of "perfect".
Dbus does suck, I'll give you that.
Tell that to Havoc Pennington. Dbus was the solution he came up with based on requirements and constraints set by the DEs. A lot of people have claimed we need something better, but nobody has actually created something better. Till someone does, Dbus is the standard for client communication with Wayland compositors outside the core protocol. Sure beats piping stuff over X ClientMessage events.
Wayland is nothing but community involvement, arguably to its detriment, because it is implemented independently by community projects.
There is no "Wayland" that can stop being developed. It is a protocol and a consensus, nothing more.