Wayland - 10 years of development.

In my opinion this seems to me a sign. 10 years! Wayland can be evil as was SystemD. Why?

Because of an Unix programme shall be:
- small,
- compact,
and efficient.

Memory usage is important, efficiency, small code rules.

Creating a new graphical foundation from scratch that can meet everyone's needs takes time. How many of those ten years were volunteers coding in their spare time without corporate sponsorship?

But the monstrous GUIs and applications that are popular today do not follow that philosophy. So why hold Wayland to a different standard?

No you've said repeatedly that it was crap from conception. And by the way X predates CDE by over 10 years. It's an 80's product and that's probably half the problem in that it was pretty much completely designed for terminals, not for modern desktop or laptop x86 based personal computers. Like a lot of software, it's been adapted for something it was never really intended for and a large proportion of it's code base is pretty much unused today (think of all the drawing functions and primitives and bitmap fonts, etc).

I have a fairly pragmatic view - let all the cutting edge fanboi Linux distributions and Red Hat run with wayland first in production and we can see how it all pans out. For the majority of OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD users, there's no real urgency to jump on that particular bandwagon.
This works both ways - you're complaining, but like many have sat on your hands for years, not contributed anything. Like pretty much everyone else, you've waited for someone to come up with a replacement for you.
True.
Good software does, not and should not revolve around the needs of sysadmins and making it do so is poor design. I've learnt that the hard way over the years.

Dismissing as "resistance to change" once again weakens your main argument which was rather valid. You're just going back to "X being dated"...

And again, it's not about "X being dated"?
...

For me the funny thing is that early in this thread you threatened to "unsubscribe" if systemd was discussed, yet you've been happy enough to trash, what is at the very least, tried and tested software, if nothing else, which has served us for decades and made "desktop Linux" a reality. It hasn't cost "us" a thing either.

Despite criticisng others for not coming up with the code/answers, you've not explained how and who could have sorted out the X mess "20 years ago" and what should have been done and most importantly who would have paid for it all?

I'd also "unsubscribe" at this point, but I wasn't subscribed in the first place...

:hattip:

So far so good, different points with moderation.

I am glad that people have different points of view about X11, which makes this thread mega rich.

Moderation as always.

Happy that verve and motivation in UNIX still drive all of us among our UNIX community.

Yep... You must be omniscient! Nothing... nothing at all.

Things get old, technologies become obsolete. Part of what has made Unix-likes so adaptable is the modularity allows old technologies to be swapped out for new ones without completely replacing the system, or allow old and new to be used in parallel. X11 is old. It is a dead-end that needs to die and get out of the way so app developers can make better GUIs, and trying to run a modern computer entirely from the console is not a solution. As the person you were quoting said, Wayland will have a compatibility layer to support X11 applications. It might not support all of them, but it will support most.

As for changing the libraries in 10 to 20 years, that's longer than most software even lives--I tried to compile a text editor (Linux clone of MS-DOS EDIT with advanced features) and it depended on a toolchain with programs that themselves won't even compile on Xubuntu 17.04. The program just wasn't going to work, and it was only around eight years since its last update. And quite often, changing the libraries of your software allows you to make your software better--I do testing for the ECWolf source port of Wolfenstein 3D, and the move from SDL to SDL2 brought a lot of performance improvements and some entirely new features. Expecting people to stick with X11 or even the console because "Graphical applications are so unreliable to make and maintain" is silly. This is not 1983, my computer is not a PDP-11, GNU/Linux is not System V UNIX, and I am not using TWM or whatever garbage desktop existed at the time. Computers change, and software with them.

FreeBSD is conservative compared to most Linux distros, so they'll probably keep X11 around long after Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, etc. have all gone to Wayland (even Ubuntu, because Canonical gave up on Mir). But eventually they'll change too, either to Wayland or their own solution. That's life.

I hear ya, and agree. But the dyed-in-the-wool old school (often times wannbe so) Unix users are going to come in chiming about KISS philosophy. This is in spite of the fact that KISS has never applied to X11's ridiculous complex design. No amount of logic will do for these people. Arguments like explaining that X11 was designed before hardware accelerated graphics. Or, that attempting to modernize it further would break its core specification anyway, will not stop them from babbling the same old inapplicable arguments: KISS, Unix Philosophy blah, blah, and more blah. Come to think of it, if anyone who used "Unix Philosophy" in the same sentence with X11 back in the 1990's they'd be laughed out of the discussion.

X11 is not ls, grep, awk or sed. These things are mostly simple and still useful today. X11 however, is a Leviathan of over-complicated code not designed for modern hardware. And yet, some people will not allow themselves to see. And, those same people will continue to spout nonsense anywhere between developer philosophy to corporate conspiracies in an attempt to justify the ongoing maintenance of this long decrepit code base.

Since we're talking about old desktop/GUI stuff, what was using Motif really like, from people who were using *nix back when Motif was the standard? I kind of like the look of Motif from screenshots and I use Motif-style themes for GTK and Xfwm, but the 30 minutes or so of experience I had with CDE after compiling it was pretty unpleasant (especially with it being incompatible with icons, fonts, and basically everything related to a modern desktop environment, the nearly incomprehensible menus, and it throwing a fit if I tried to log into a CDE session through LightDM). Eric S. Raymond says it was terrible, and I have little reason to doubt him.

Even if "I_like_the_appearance_of_30-year-old_GUI's" (h/t Luridis, you're the best poster in this thread), I just like my GUI to look on the surface like an old GUI and use a traditional workflow, I don't want the actual UI itself to be a shambling mess of legacy code and hasty jury-rigged fixes. I kind of wish Microsoft would give Windows users back the Classic theme, but I don't want them to give us back "a fatal exception 0e has occurred at...". Motif is for 99.9% of users stone dead, X will die, but the look can just be wallpapered over a new technology with a theme. And maybe if the new technology isn't a raging garbage fire like GTK+ the theme will actually be consistent between applications!

Oh, I'd love to see a small simple Wayland widget library on the order of Tk, but in C or C++. Combine that with a window manager like OpenBox and a user configurable panel like LXDE, but simpler and it would be a nice basic setup for Wayland. Not to mention, those things, along with the Wayland libraries would be probably near a half million lines less than the existing X11 code base.