After more than forty years, everyone knows that it’s time to retire the X Window System – X11 for short – on account of it being old and decrepit. Or at least that’s what t…
Here is an argument that some of the grumpy old men clinging to Xorg may understand.
It is 2003 and all the cool kids are moving to this new web browser called Firefox. But every time you try your favourite websites in it, you find stuff that breaks. So back to trusty old Internet Explorer 6 you go. Call me when it works you say.
Wayland is like HTML. Wayland compositors are web browsers. And yes, all these “modern” web standards are all implemented a little differently or maybe not at all in some browsers. And, annoyingly, a lot of real world websites still work better in Internet Explorer 6 than in any of these supposedly “modern” browsers.
But, as with the web, it will not be long until all websites (Linux desktop applications) will be written to use the modern standards and will work well, and pretty much the same, in all browsers (Wayland compositors).
And, while there will still be websites (Linux desktop apps) that work better in IE6 (Xorg), most people will consider those sites broken and will probably not use them. Alternatively, you can run your browser (compositor) in compatibility mode (Xwayland) for those sites.
You can keep using Internet Explorer if you want. Many people held on for a long time. Just know what your advocacy sounds like to people that have moved on to Firefox and Chrome. Pointing at your corporate website that looks wrong in Firefox will not impress them. And understand that you will not be able to hang on forever. Well, unless you want to be stuck in a tiny corner of the web that still works on your browser. Most websites will stop working on Internet Explorer at some point.
I’m not super informed on Wayland, and this analogy really helped, thanks!
I am a Mint fan, so one of the minority still running X11. As long as I can do what I need to on my PC, though, I am content to wait until the distro maintainers do the upgrade.
I guess using Mint in the first place means I don’t prioritize running all the cutting edge versions of everything, lol.
My big complaint with Wayland is that the ecosystem has not really developed an effective standardization process.
With web browsers, you would get browsers doing their own thing; then copying each other’s thing, then writing down a standard for that thing, then all switch to the standard.
With Wayland, you get: https://wayland.app/protocols/
For as old as Wayland is, there are 5 standard protocol extensions (plus some updates to the core protocol). A bunch sitting in the standardization pipeline. Then a whole bunch of redundant protocols because each compositor is just doing their own thing without even attempting to standardize.
It doesn’t help that one of the major compositor (Gnome/Mutter) has essentially abandoned Wayland for everything beyond the core capabilities in favor of offering additional functionality over a separate DBus interface.
Here is an argument that some of the grumpy old men clinging to Xorg may understand.
It is 2003 and all the cool kids are moving to this new web browser called Firefox. But every time you try your favourite websites in it, you find stuff that breaks. So back to trusty old Internet Explorer 6 you go. Call me when it works you say.
Wayland is like HTML. Wayland compositors are web browsers. And yes, all these “modern” web standards are all implemented a little differently or maybe not at all in some browsers. And, annoyingly, a lot of real world websites still work better in Internet Explorer 6 than in any of these supposedly “modern” browsers.
But, as with the web, it will not be long until all websites (Linux desktop applications) will be written to use the modern standards and will work well, and pretty much the same, in all browsers (Wayland compositors).
And, while there will still be websites (Linux desktop apps) that work better in IE6 (Xorg), most people will consider those sites broken and will probably not use them. Alternatively, you can run your browser (compositor) in compatibility mode (Xwayland) for those sites.
You can keep using Internet Explorer if you want. Many people held on for a long time. Just know what your advocacy sounds like to people that have moved on to Firefox and Chrome. Pointing at your corporate website that looks wrong in Firefox will not impress them. And understand that you will not be able to hang on forever. Well, unless you want to be stuck in a tiny corner of the web that still works on your browser. Most websites will stop working on Internet Explorer at some point.
I’m not super informed on Wayland, and this analogy really helped, thanks!
I am a Mint fan, so one of the minority still running X11. As long as I can do what I need to on my PC, though, I am content to wait until the distro maintainers do the upgrade.
I guess using Mint in the first place means I don’t prioritize running all the cutting edge versions of everything, lol.
My big complaint with Wayland is that the ecosystem has not really developed an effective standardization process.
With web browsers, you would get browsers doing their own thing; then copying each other’s thing, then writing down a standard for that thing, then all switch to the standard.
With Wayland, you get: https://wayland.app/protocols/ For as old as Wayland is, there are 5 standard protocol extensions (plus some updates to the core protocol). A bunch sitting in the standardization pipeline. Then a whole bunch of redundant protocols because each compositor is just doing their own thing without even attempting to standardize.
It doesn’t help that one of the major compositor (Gnome/Mutter) has essentially abandoned Wayland for everything beyond the core capabilities in favor of offering additional functionality over a separate DBus interface.