> Staying on x11 forever is not a viable option.
"Staying on GTK2 forever is not a viable option."
"Staying on GTK3 forever is not a viable option."
"Using native packaging forever is not a viable option."
"Using Linux kernel v4.19 forever is not a viable option."
I wonder how many times I've heard this mantra repeated before...
Right now, native packaging isn't a viable option for a lot of things and it hasn't been for some time, have a look at the success of Docker.
Wayland is not that. People are welcome to defend it all they want, but this futuristic technology won't replace everyone's setup. It's not inevitable. They made that choice when they dropped support for hardware that x11 handles without issue. My point is that people have used outdated technology for more petty reasons than just "it doesn't work on my hardware" before. If Wayland wants to be minimal and petty about their featureset, fine. They'll have a minimal and petty community to go along with it. Nothing is inevitable on the Linux desktop though, I'd hope most people on HN of all places would know that by now.
I am not speaking of you personally, this is in terms of distros as a whole. It has definitely not failed there, they will drop these packages when they become stale and it becomes too burdensome to support them for little benefit. Like, I don't know any common non-niche distros that are still shipping a 2.6 kernel. You can attempt to fight them but it will probably be futile, few have any reason to maintain that.
>Wayland is not that. People are welcome to defend it all they want, but this futuristic technology won't replace everyone's setup. It's not inevitable.
>Nothing is inevitable on the Linux desktop though, I'd hope most people on HN of all places would know that by now.
Not true, death is inevitable. What is really inevitable is that x11 will fade away. Everything dies eventually. The question is what will replace it when that happens, if not Wayland then something else that probably has worse hardware support. We went through this already with the drama around Mir. Or maybe the Linux desktop will just die because it was always obscure, unpopular and fragmented with a severe lack of developers.
>My point is that people have used outdated technology for more petty reasons than just "it doesn't work on my hardware" before. If Wayland wants to be minimal and petty about their featureset, fine. They'll have a minimal and petty community to go along with it.
I don't see why this point is significant to anything. Using outdated technology for similarly petty reasons is just furthering the same problem and putting yourself in the same petty communities.
I certainly believe that this is more likely than everyone transitioning to Wayland. And, when it inevitably does, I don't think the majority of people are going to pick Wayland to run their legacy systems on. If both desktop servers stopped development today, I reckon they'd have to pick the most-finished option.
Those have started development. They're not done yet. Compare to X11 where no one is working on fixing those things.
>Wayland doesn't feature support for AppIndicators
App indicators are not a wayland or X thing, the API has been in dbus for some 10 odd years now.
>but rather to offer simple hooks in the code for the vast majority (eg. KDE, i3wm, Sway, Budgie, GNOME 3, MATE, LXDE, XFCE, etc.) of desktops that would want that functionality? It's another anti-cooperative move on the behalf of GNOME's development team, which is why it's no wonder that the rest of the community has abandoned the prospect of working with them.
I have absolutely no idea what you're trying to say here, all those other desktops do already have their own way they implemented app indicators. For GNOME it is available via an extension. There is nothing anti-cooperative about this and nothing was abandoned.
>Wayland simply isn't complete. The vast majority of desktop applications run worse on it. I despise x11 for being as crusty and stiff as it is, but I can run it on all of my systems without any problems. I can't do that with Wayland, and until I can, I have no reason to switch. x11 is superior for my workflow, full stop. There's no appeal to use it when only one or two of my computers actually run it well, and the rest have horrible showstopping bugs.
I don't think this matters much, most of them are very small niche projects in the already small Linux niche. If you found bugs then report them, there is no other way they get fixed. Staying on x11 forever is not a viable option. Wayland probably won't ever be complete, but x11 is both incomplete and abandoned.