Just forget about this “article”. It’s the same old “hate on something I have no idea about, but if I write a blog post than it will sound authentic”… Which is unfortunately very common with the cargo hating on some linux technologies like Wayland, anything even looked at by Poettering and the like, or even firefox.

But just to add a bit of content on why does the article hold no water:

> Even on the supported platforms it comes with a substantial burden on build requirements, calling for 10× to 100× or more RAM, CPU time, and power usage.

Completely false. While there is the old but true “wayland is a protocol not an implementation” adage, the protocol itself imposes very few requirements, in effect making wayland implementations more efficient than X. Did the “author” check the actual requirements of the x server process plus the window manager? Like, the window manager under X barely does any work. And it is not an accident that Wayland is used in embedded software instead of X — eg. some car displays do use Wayland with great success.

Also, the whole part about climate change and throwing away computers that I guess tries to build on the false statement that Wayland is more resource hungry is just pure emotional cry for some technical content the author fails to provide.

Re the security “claims”: xcb is yet again not a complete compositor written from scratch. Compare apples to oranges. And no, X is fundamentally insecure. It is possible to achieve security in x by nesting instances but there were other technical problems already with x making it unsuitable as a base for anything display related. And Wayland doesn’t solve security itself, it is a required, but not sufficient part of it (namely client isolation). And XWayland exists for a very good reason: it is exactly what is needed, a backward compatible and secure shim for using the litany of existing software on top of an actually performant and secure base.

EDIT: it is a verbatim copy of one of Drew’s articles, just with Rust replaced with Wayland. Now I see at least why it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.