this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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Look, the people over at Wayland made a solid protocol, sure. But for all the time and effort they've put into getting it to the state it's in today, it's going to take a long while for all the apps, DEs, and TWMs to be ready. It took so long for the Linux desktop to get to the state it is on X11, which, for all it's flaws, seems to be easier to develop for than Wayland.
Wacom Drivers, Nvidia Drivers, DE-Agnostic screensharing, screenshot, eyedropper tools are all in various states of not working/sort of working/working on wayland. This simply isn't the case with X11. They all just work. That's kind of a big win for X11 over Wayland.
It doesn't matter how light weight and more secure your protocol is if you can't use the tools you need to get the jobs you need done, whatever those jobs are. That is literally what computers are for at the end of the day, not to lord our superiority over others because our choice of tools are somehow better.
Yes Wayland is the future, but to say "Wayland is ready" while also saying "many of the apps for Wayland are not ready" ends up meaning that wayland is NOT ready.
Until the transition between X and Wayland is seamless (no adjusting environment variables), saying we should all just move to Wayland cuz ”is the future" are engaging in the same FOMO tactics that crytpo and AI bros have been doing for years. Fuck that noise.
You are not somehow better because you use Wayland. And yeah yeah, shots fired, down votes incoming. Come at me tech daddy.
GTK, Qt, Firefoxes XUL, Electron (Chromium), Iced, and more support Wayland. You dont develop apps for Wayland, you develop them with a GUI toolkit.
Fair enough. All I know is to get something as simple and necessary to my workflow as using KeePassXC, I had to adjust a few QT flags in my environment variables. No big deal as I actually enjoy configuring my system, but it's in my opinion Wayland will be "ready" when this sort of under the hood tweaking won't be necessary by the user.
Here, I'll pose a simple question that kind of gets at the heart of what I'm talking about. Libreoffice works great on Wayland right? Good, fantastic, kudos to Libreoffice, kudos to Wayland. Now, name me a 2nd office suite that works on Wayland. Just one. This is a genuine question and despite my decent google fu, I can't find a one. I got Open Office to open on Wayland, but it doesn't recognize the entire suite.
Now, this may seem like an unfair argument to make, as there were never many office suites available on Linux to begin with. And there's always been people in the Linux community who will call for more uniformity, but I, like many others, love Linux for it's extreme customizability (amongst other reasons). Wayland severely cuts down on my choices of what TWMs I can use, what DEs are available, and various widely used productivity tools like office suites.
The amount of knots Wayland enthusiasts tie themselves up in to say "but if you just configure this flag, if you just run this through xwayland/game scope, if you just don't use nvidia, then wayland is ready" is just pointing to the fact that it's straight up not.
And that's not the fault of any one entity. Writing a protocol like Wayland is a massive endeavor and is needed. But developers across the board who want to provide support for Linux, are now scrambling to rewrite parts of their applications to conform to this new protocol because yes, they see the writing on the wall (especially with the latest lines in the sand drawn by Red Hat). But isn't the fact that their scrambling to get this accomplished, and convert their apps to Wayland, an indicator that maybe, just maybe, that Wayland as a daily driver for, if not the majority, at least a reasonable part of the Linux community, not ready?
I'm not saying Wayland isn't the future. What I'm saying is until discussions like these are the outlier, not the norm, Wayland isn't ready.
the calligra suite works fine too. open office is basically dead and replaced by libreoffice. I don't know if any development is still happening. I can't name another office suite Wayland or otherwise though
xwayland does just work though. I don't even know how to explicitly run something under it
explicit flags are more of a problem, but they're going away slowly, and for the most part people can just let things run under xwayland instead of dealing with flags. there are some apps that just won't work, but for the most part it's not a widespread issue in my experience