Good article about Wayland and Xorg

travis82 · 02-10-2017, 11:37 PM

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/f...d-vs-xorg.html

Quote:

Unfortunately, a large number of products today are being re-invented and re-developed for the sake of making it easier for software people and not for the users. To a large extent, Gnome 3, PulseAudio, Systemd, and Wayland, they all serve no higher user experience purpose. They are quite intrusive in that sense, and they do not contribute to the stability and simplicity of the Linux desktop ecosystem.

This is one of primary reasons why Linux desktop is a relatively immature product - it is designed to self-support the people developing it, almost like a living organism. It's not there to be the slave to the whims and wishes of the user. And that's how great things are done. You satisfy the primary need, and only then worry about the details. Great user experience does not depend - and should never depend - on the choice of programming language, compiler or any nonsense like that. If it does, that whoever designed the product has not done the abstraction piece well enough, and we have a failed thing that needs to be removed from existence.

And so, from my perspective, I don't care if it takes 10 liters of blood to compile one version of X or whatever. I'm a user. All I care is that my desktop works as robustly as did it yesterday or 5 years ago. If that's not happening, I'm not interested in macros, classes, variables, declarations, structs, or any other geeky CS technobabble. That's irrelevant. And a product that advertises itself as being created to be convenient for the people developing it is a paradox. Don't develop it, then. Makes things even easier.

Now, the reality is, Wayland is largely ok - but it is still not as good as X, and as such it should not be offered as a production-ready item on any desktop. Once it can replace the old technology so seamlessly no one ever knows about it, only then will it have succeeded in what it needs to achieve, and then, it can be written in C or D or K language, and it can have anything the developers want. Until then, it's a parasite that eats on the resources and peoples' nerves.

Don't get me wrong. We need progress. We need change. But it has to serve an evolutionary purpose. Does X handle the user needs well today? Can it do graphics support for 3rd party blobs? Can it support HD and UHD and DPI and whatnot? Can you play the latest games on it? Yes? No? If not, then it needs to be fixed. Those are the evolutionary drivers. Not the difficulty of writing and compiling code. Software developers are the coal miners of the digital industry, and they need to work hard to make users happy. As a phrase 'easier to develop' should be outlawed, and people who like it need to be electrocuted by old radio batteries and then exiled to Mars in non-A/C spaceships. If you can't write smart code, it's your problem. The user should not suffer because developers think they're princesses.

Karma Yogadog · 02-11-2017, 06:30 AM

Going over to take a look now. Thanks for posting this. I'm replying mostly to get my first post out of the way!

273 · 02-11-2017, 08:05 AM

erm...
as I understand it Wayland is being written by people who were involved in X11 and worked out that its architecture and coding were such that it cannot be sustained? That doesn't seem like change for the sake of change to me.

Myk267 · 02-11-2017, 12:57 PM

It didn't seem like a very good article to me.

It seems the author used a bleeding edge distro and didn't like the experience and wants the sympathy of the gnome/systemd/pulse/wayland haters. I don't know what "linux desktop ecosystem" needs, but I do think that "linux the community ecosystem" could use less of whatever this is.

ondoho · 02-11-2017, 03:24 PM

i couldn't have said it better than myk267.

@dedoimedo:
so fedora isn't quite there yet. we get it.
if you don't enjoy it, don't use it.
(personally i never understood the appeal of bleeding edge distros, and i use archlinux!)

but that's the thing with blogging, if you want do it on such a scale, you cannot simply use a stable distro and be happy.