Why replacing X11 with Wayland?
 

Hello,

After Systemd to replace System V, Wayland will replace soon X11.

Why breaking everything and inventing another X11 if we already have X11? Is Linux development is really stable?

Maybe you may have time to visit the free software fundation, and think to get more news about the meaning of free software, you could for instance just visit here the videos and try to get the point:
http://audio-video.gnu.org/video/
https://www.gnu.org/education/education.html

Thanks for supporting your free software fundation and your freedom.

Best regards

A web search for "why wayland" will turn up a number of articles. The thumbnail is that many persons think that X has become laden with cruft and barnacles and something new is needed.

There is some precedent. Present X was forked from XFree86 when XFree86's development stagnated.

I would rather see the effort being put into Wayland and Mir be put in updating and streamlining X for the reasons to which you alluded, but there will always be folks that think that "new" is always better than "improved."

i think it's still a long while til that happens across distros (and yes i know fedora is already using it).
otoh, i'm not paying much attention to wayland-related topics.
as an archlinux user, i think it will stay a choice (and not something that will be forced upon me "from above") for many years to come.
but i might be wrong.

Why not Wayland?
my understanding is that Wayland is the product of keen X11 developers finding something new is needed.
Are there articles by existing X11 developers who think Wayland should be dropped and X11 develppment continued?
Does Linus dislike X11?
Are there specific things in Wayland which are issues?

For what it's worth I'm using Gnome on Waykland on my laptop and I don't find Wayland makes Gnome any less of a PITA but it's certainly not getting in the way.

I've seen concerns about Wayland and backwards compatibility. Have you run into any issues of that sort?

I suspect that almost everything is running on XWayland rather than natively (if I've got my terminology right?) but I really don't see anything to tell me that I'm running anything different apart from when I choose the session in GDM3 I'm choosing a Wayland session and when I check I see that I'm running Wayland.
That's not to say others won't have issues and I can't yet even run Wayland on my
desktop machine running NVIDIA (this laptops just built-in Intel).
Oh, sorry, I tell a lie. I have come across one program which doesn't work and that's Redshift (for changing the colour temperature to make it more "natural" in the evening an at night. Apparently it is possible to get it to run but does take some messing around.

Some programs that use specific X functions directly are broken. That's not waylands fault.
I have found a few, redshift amongst them, but none that I can't live without or work around.

Could you give some examples of such "broken" programs? That would help indicate whether this is an inconvenience or an issue.

Thanks.

Wasn't that due to licensing issues?

That's how I recall it, but the end result was the same with most developers jumping ship, leaving XFree86 dead in the water.

Well as frankbell has said, X11 is old now, so I guess it's a similar question to "Why develop another Linux distro?" or "Why replace the Pentium 4 with Core i3/i5/i7 ?". Progress is the answer there ;)

As ondoho has said, Wayland will not be replacing X11 anytime in the near future. But one day down the track it will.

Linux is one of (if the) fastest growing OS's out. So yes I think you can call that stable (but cannot say the same for KDE4, when it first come out).

I think also that one of the contributing factors is that video hardware (as well as approaches to "video" in general) have evolved both considerably and rapidly.

Sometimes, it just makes sense to "go deep" in changes to the underlying software, and to go for some amount of compatibility with the past. "Compatibility" might be much easier to achieve than continuing to whack-a-mole on old source code, especially if the hardware has been evolving out from underneath you.

You might find this recent article by Dedoimedo interesting: http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/f...d-vs-xorg.html

In the article, Dedoimedo compared Wayland to Xorg on Fedora 25 and concluded that Wayland is less than fully ready and, in this case, had caused reduced usability, performance and program support.

The mention of gparted reminds me that GKSU doesn't appear to work so it's possible that no root GUI programs will run yet. The key word, of course, being "yet" and I feel that the annoyance in the article should be directed towards the Fedora developers if they've made Wayland the default not the Wayland developers because it's not done yet.
Edit: Perhaps another way of putting it is that it appears that what is supposed to work in Wayland works. That doesn't mean it's ready to use for everything right now but it does mean that, so far, it's doing its intended job.