Re: Wayland Is Coming

On Sun, 12 May 2024 02:23:32 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Fri, 10 May 2024 08:34:15 -0000 (UTC), Muttley wrote:

If tha[’]s all it was it wouldn't still be in development after 15 years
except for low level driver updates.

>
So do you think that “thin layer above the framebuffer level”, which
supposedly is “all that’s needed”, is still not ready for prime-time?

Its all wayland seems to do. Provide a low level buffer and let the
clients generate the pixels.

You
think maybe it turned out to be harder to come up with than you thought?

No, it turned out the Wayland design was a poorly thought out dogs dinner
and now they're trying to get it to work properly.

You mean the X11 graphics API has been stagnant for decades. It’s just
useless baggage by this point.

 
Or possibly it[’]s stagnant because it works.

>
No, it’s stagnant because it’s been overtaken by other, far superior
graphics APIs. Like Display PostScript, OpenGL, Cairo, Vulkan ...

OpenGL was running on X back in the 90s FFS.

Basically, the X11 developers gave up on enhancing their graphics API
years, decades ago. And since then, most proper GUIs have been using their
X windows as little more than compositing framebuffers anyway, with all
the non-trivial rendering happening through those other APIs.

So? Plenty of programs still use Xlib and having the compositing side as
an X extension means you don't have to swap out the entire server if you
want to upgrade it. Perhaps you think all kernels should be monolithic?

Change for changes sake is a waste of everyones time and effort. Pity no
one tells this to the Windows GUI team.

>
This is why, on Linux, you have a choice.

Until the zeolots decide X is for the bin just like they did init and
replaced it with the bug ridden POS called systemd.