His response was: "LOL! Yeah you can't even imagine how much worse it's gonna get. Pretty soon the Linux desktop will just be a little hammer that pops up and smashes your knuckles at random."
X11 has some fundamental problems. It's not fun using a modern desktop where it is impossible to sandbox individual applications. Firefox frequently processes untrusted data and is run with a dedicated uid, but it is also an interactive application and can suddenly listen in on all my passwords entered in other applications. Virtualized appliations are referred to using dumber protocols like VNC and SPICE which isn't always ideal.
Wayland has some interesting design issues on its own but that doesn't make the developers ignorant. XWayland will stick around for the foreseeable future.
Amusingly, I often hear this argument from Wayland proponents. Do they realize, that those very same developers have failed at maintaining Xorg code base and fixing it's bugs in backward compatible way?
To run a project into the ground and wash one's hands of it... is not worthy of endorsement.
This may be a matter of different perspective, but from my point of view the Xorg maintainers did a monumental work modularizing and cleaning up the codebase. They kept integrating modern extensions and have kept X11 relevant all this time. Try something pre-Xorg to compare.
But to run a project into the ground and not wash one's hands of it is an even worse endorsement.
You might not trust the Xorg devs to develop you a new window system, but at least you'd trust them to know if their own, existing code has fundamental problems.
* this does not always work for other programs, and for Firefox you need to turn off bell events in about:config to avoid random crashes;
* (this may be upside depending on what your expectations are) X clipboard is still shared in the host->client direction.
It's time for something new. This isn't attention-deficit developers at play. People have spent a lot of time on the Wayland ecosystem. This isn't just some kids hacking away in their basements ignorant of better development practices.
You argument holds up for many Linux components, but not for X/Wayland. It's preposterous to take the stance that no component in the entire Linux ecosystem ever needs to be replaced.
It sucks, I know. Decades of hard work "gone". But think of it this way, isn't it often said you shouldn't be afraid to throw away old prototype code? X is a decades-long foray into graphical computing, but perhaps it's time to throw away the prototype and start over with what we've learned from the process.
I hear this all the time. But so far there was not even one incident where major hack was done via X11.
The reason for that is that people who use X also exclusively use trusted apps. The Wayland security model makes many generic tasks insanely complicated. The real world security gains will be zero. Security through obscurity never worked.
> The reason for that is that people who use X also exclusively use trusted apps.
Well that's just not true. What does trusted mean? Most of the software on our desktops is unaudited. We don't have insight into the entire chain of deployment for more than a handful of applications we feel like keeping up with.
On a side note, that would be a wonderful service; A man-like utility which simply displays change-logs coupled with relevant source-code diffs. Reduces the surface of trust down to one party. Something like that would require financial backing, however.
While I definitely agree with the CADT issue; despite it, the Linux desktop experience still beats the Windows or OSX one. If the Linux desktop is "a little hammer that pops up and smashes your knuckles at random", the Windows and Mac desktops are big hammers that smash various body parts at random.
It's actually possible (and was demonstrated) to upgrade from 1985 Windows 1.01 all the way up to 32bit Windows 10 and run windows 1.01 application without changes.
Arguably backward compatibility is the true reason how MS got to dominate OS market - you had good chance your software was just going to work on new OS version.
I don’t get the animosity HN sometimes revives.
I don’t really care for startup stuff and I just ignore it, but the average level of discussion here is extremely high. One of the best in the web.
Compare HN to Twitter or Reddit and it’s night and day, and it has been for years.
Cannot link to his site:
JWZ dot org /doc/cadt.html
A complete teardown and rebuild of the whole ecosystem (because X succccckkks) is fun! Making something backwards-compatible, or standardized, or polished that "last 90%" so it works on everybody's environment... is not.