Now, I really like Wayland, and it’s definitely better than the mess that is X11
BUT
I think the approach to Wayland is entirely wrong. There should be a unified backend/base for building compositors, something like universal wlroots, so that applications dealing with things like setting wallpapers don’t have to worry about supporting GNOME, Plasma, Wlroots, AND Smithay (when COSMIC comes out). How about a universal Wayland protocol implementation that compositors are built on? That way, the developers of, say, wayshot, a screenshot utility, can be sure their program works across all Wayland compositors.
Currently, the lower-level work for creating a compositor has been done by all four of the GNOME, KDE, Wlroots and Smithay projects. To me, that’s just replication of work and resources. Surely if all standalone compositors, as well as the XFCE desktop want to, and use wlroots, the GNOME and KDE teams could have done the same instead of replicating effort and wasting time and resources, causing useless separation in the process?
Am I missing something? Surely doing something like that would be better?
The issue with X11 is that it got big and bloated, and unmaintainable, containing useless code. None of these desktops use that useless code, still in X from the time where 20 machines were all connected to 1 mainframe. So why not just use the lean and maintainable wlroots, making things easier for some app developers? And if wlroots follows in the footsteps of X11, we can move to another implementation of the Wayland protocols. The advantage of Wayland is that it is a set of protocols on how to make a compositor that acts as a display server. If all the current Wayland implementations disappear, or if they become abandoned, unmaintained, or unmaintainable, all the Wayland apps like Calendars, file managers and other programs that don’t affect the compositor itself would keep on working on any Wayland implementation. That’s the advantage for the developers of such applications. But what about other programs? Theme changers, Wallpaper switchers etc? They would need to be remade for different Wayland implementations. With a unified framework, we could remove this issue. I think that for some things, the Linux desktop needs some unity, and this is one of these things. Another thing would be flatpak for desktop applications and eventually nix and similar projects for lower-level programs on immutable distros. But that’s a topic for another day. Anyways, do you agree with my opinion on Wayland or not? And why? Thank you for reading.
Normally projects like this address real needs. If X would actually fail to provide crucial functionality on modern desktop someone would develop alternative that would cover it and people would switch in a matter or years. Instead Wayland set out to build something complex and useless for most people and now is surprised it takes a lot of time for it to gain traction.
How it should be approached is that if people need some very specific setup (like multiple displays with fractional scaling and different refresh rates and they want to play games on it and need to get 100% of their configuration) Wayland should provide them a tool to do just that with dedicated server and DE. Most people wouldn’t need any of this and would stay with X, few people would use the new DE. If more and more people would require the functionality provided by the new DE it would grow, get forked and other DE would start supporting the standard. The approach of “we build something 1% of users need, spend a lot of effort to support us” is what’s silly.
X is bad code and to hard to maintain. You do know the people developing Wayland are the same ones who developed X11? I think their biggest issue is they should have called it X12 or something so people new it was the successor to X11.