The hotkey thing is big and it's annoying because it's another thing that might need to be implemented/fixed in each and every composer and environment (and it could be different in every environment).

I've seen the X11/Wayland talks and I agree Xorg has tons of old crufty garbage in it, and screen locking in Xorg is not very secure. But the Wayland team seems to have made little effort in addressing even the most basic things like hotkeys, screenshots, etc.

I'm not sure if "user hateful" is the right term, but they don't seem to be prioritizing the most basic things people are asking for.

- Handle rendering things to screen

- Handle user input

My issue is that while X has a LOT of other things it also happens to do, it just doesn't do those two primary things very well on modern hardware.

As an aside -

This reminds me of the systemd arguments all over again, but the same crowd that was ready to crucify systemd for all the things it does are now bemoaning all the things Wayland doesn't do.

But really, I think there are just a lot of folks who aren't willing to try something new, or to re-evaluate some of the toolchains they've made for themselves.

Now - I'm not going to blame them for that, having a working system change under you isn't fun, and it eats up time and resources some people don't have. But it also doesn't stop the new thing from replacing the old thing.

Particularly if the new things happens to be genuinely better in many respects.

And while I can certainly understand the pain point of missing features in Wayland, The way it gets user input and display output right are just delightful.

So delightful that I actually prefer it to my work macbook, which is not something I could ever say about X.

It might not be the same crowd. There are many crowds on Hacker News, and the voting mechanism tends to select for whichever crowd is angry at any given time.

Which is, like, super frustrating. I want to feel like I have a relationship with the people I'm talking to, but I don't really. It's always different people, and they're not consistent with each other.

I almost wrote out an aside in the above comment, because the person I was replying to certainly didn't mention systemd.

I do think there are some interesting echoes between the two conversations, though. Namely that the "angry" that happens to be getting selected for has nothing to do with the merits of either piece of software, and a lot more to do with the fear of having to learn something new to replace something familiar.

Systemd does offer some nice functionality, but in return it makes certain unreasonable demands (.ini files everywhere, binary logs, systemd-{resolved,homedir,consoled,all-the-things}. Wayland does offer some nice functionality, but it is not ready for prime time yet. It is nowhere near ready for prime time yet. It cannot replace X11, because it utterly fails to replace key X11 functionality today.

Next year, or the year after, it might be different. It probably will be. I genuinely look forward to adopting Wayland when it upgrades X11. But I would utterly resent being forced to use it today, and I am very worried that I may soon be.

Imagine world where there is no Wayland, how is it better? I fail to understand who forces you. Maybe default choice of distribution? Or that people don't want to maintain X.Org?

People maintained other init systems in Arch Linux, they are gone now. Too much work probably? People created Duvian [1]. If systemd is such an awful choice it should be amazingly popular.

[1] https://devuan.org/

You answered your own question. It starts with distros defaulting to Wayland, despite it completely missing features I currently rely on in X11. No big deal, I can always manually switch to X. It's only a small pain! Then more and more software starts being Wayland-only, because most people are using it by default. Not a huge deal, I can stick to older versions of software. Then drivers are only released for Wayland, because at this point the only people left running X are me and a few other folks like me. Meanwhile, the features I consider absolutely necessary are still missing, because the primary source of funding is no longer hobbyists but corporate vendors.

I have seen it happen before, with GNOME. A decade or more after the cascade of attention-deficit teenagers started stripping out features it is still missing plenty.

> People created Duvian. If systemd is such an awful choice it should be amazingly popular.

You miss the corrupting influence of money. Money means resources, and resources mean being able to extend tentacles into every project. Resources mean being able to present an offer to other projects that they can't refuse: patches that implement needed functionality and, oh yeah, also mandate systemWaylanD.

You and me (I use XOrg too, no xmonad on Wayland) enjoy status quo for free. We consume work that maintainers do not enjoy.

> and I am completely burnt out on that on its own merits [1]

[1] https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server...

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> attention-deficit teenagers

JWZ cliches are worn out, marking group you don't agree with disorder regresses discussion. Someone would call you old whiner and he would be right. I would recommend you join BSD camp.

> You miss the corrupting influence of money.

I missed nothing. Same money brought what we have today. A lot of people work on Open Source for free.

> mandate systemWaylanD.

Straight from ajaxnwnk:

> X11 clients are eternal, there's just way too many of them out there that are line-of-business and will never be ported to anything else [2].

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24925459

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I feel sick seeing such attitude. I would reply anymore.

What, you don't think people have legitimate criticisms of Systemd, or Wayland?

But fair criticisms aren't really the comments I tend to see in these threads. Instead I see fear/resentment/anger expressed in the form of "How dare you choose to use X, when it doesn't solve my problem Z? Good ol' Y never lets me down on Z, you should just keep using that. And no, I don't care that you have problems A, B, and C with Y".

Which... looking back at that sentence... I sure used a lot of letters, but I think it captures the point.

I try to address this with completely transparent and public voting, and also non-numerical voting, meaning every vote has to also be a "tag", like on Slashdot: insightful, interesting, troll, flamebait, offtopic, etc.

But not only that, you also get to see who tagged you, and this tells you whether it's someone you know or just some random.

I never got the impression that the tagging system is widely used, however.

If X would stop working this morning I'm afraid I'll have to go back to Windows, after 11 years, and use WSL2. Not a future I'm looking forward to and not something I'd thank the Wayland community for.

Some apps like AnyDesk just haven't invested in support for Wayland, while shovelware like Zoom tries to force you to install their client.

That they have to invest work for simple functionality to work is the problem. Until Xwayland can support this, Wayland is broken by design.

I haven't looked into iOS and Android.

I picked up on a completely different common theme: people are upset because major distros replaced a thing that worked with something else, and the new thing has a lot of problems that the old thing didn't.

I'm glad they're leaving all the "desktop" stuff out and letting desktops agree on dbus interfaces. I doubt people writing little CLI utilities want to have to create dummy Wayland surfaces to do interact with the display server which is how wl-clipboard works.

Now the compositor/screen manager isn’t doing that anymore because it never should have and it was a terrible division or responsibility in the first place. But we have devs pushing forward on multiple different fronts with different DEs and development is painfully slow.

It was fairly easy to find an example on stackoverflow that created a Window using Gtk, and reported it's position.

Once something like that is on the bug report things tend to get fixed pretty quickly.

Report the bug on the outer-most thing first, e.g. GNOME shell in this case.

There are strategic and tactical issues here.

Tactical issues are obvious. Wayland's problem with screenshots and all the bugs from not having a decades long lineage.

Strategic issues are less obvious. As this blog pos alludes to the standard X server is reaching a maintainability crisis where long term devs don't think the project is a good idea.

I think Wayland is a tactical mis-step myself for reasons you and GP mention, but I think now that the bad has been covered someone needs to mention the good:

The reference X server cannot practically be replaced. The reference Wayland compositor quite possibly isn't ever going to get established before being replaced. This is an excellent thing - it beings evolutionary pressure to the display system.

Wayland has problems, but unlike the current X ecosystem the problems can be fixed by replacing bits of software. The Wayland protocol seems light enough that Wayland+1 can implement it as a compatibility layer. When the dust settles, leaving X will have been a good idea.

Now they work all the time. Pipewire appears to be a better architecture than Pulseaudio. We have to hope it un-bugs faster than PA did.

Sadly I don't have time to work on that, which really sounds like a full time job for a team of at least 3 developers, and from the looks of it, the people in charge don't share my vision for integrated coexistence of old and new.