That's really no reason to build an entirely new system, and then half-ass it the way Wayland did. The Wayland gang should have started with a new, modernized, cleaned up window system API running as a layer on top of X11 and then start replacing the cruft piece by piece while keeping both the original X11 API and the new API working all the time, basically build the whole project from the user perspective (both 'regular' Linux users and programmers who need to build Linux apps).
I guess though the main problem is that feature parity with X11 wasn't even a design goal, they intentionally threw out the baby with the bathwater, and also intentionally fragmented the Linux desktop even more. It almost smells like sabotage (at least self-sabotage).
Also, it's been 17 years since Wayland was released, that's as if X11 would have barely started to become usable by around 2005.
See also: Ubuntu Unity, Gnome 3, KDE 4... all widely panned by their most loyal users. 2010s were the lost decade of Linux.
Just compare this to Windows and how they made this rearchitecture of making their compositor more modern without splitting into 10s of compositors and breaking a ton of apps.
Short term this might be a far slower and worse approach. It's not clear that's the case long term though, making things easier to try out different ideas and then finding a winning compositor project could be better than being stuck with one.
This is the industry standard, putting the compositor and window manager in separate processes.
Android separates SurfaceFlinger and WindowManagerService.
iOS separates quartz compositor and springboard.
Windows separates dwm and explore.
MacOS separates WindowServer and Dock.
Why not just make a display server (which handles everything rendering related, compositing included), and then add a window manager as a plugin/extension on top? Window managers are not that complicated.
We are way past the short term with Wayland!
Wayland is 17 year old.
It does not matter if the devs alone worked on it in isolation but at what point there was public use and how it has evolved. The earliest you could argue it was being used by user on a distro would be 2016 in fedora. Actual mainstream use in ubuntu around 2021 but optional and default literally only just this year.
If development for X is ceasing now, there isn't time to experiment on finding the true successor.
Bazaar-style development seems to work for command-line tools, but I don't think it works well for a coherent desktop experience. We've had so much fragmentation, from KDE/Qt vs GNOME/GTK, to now X11 vs Wayland. Even X11 itself didn't come from the bazaar, but rather from MIT, DEC, and IBM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System).
Perhaps...
> Open source development should take some lessons if they want to be successful
A lot of people who write the gui stuff for Linux do it because they want to. Success is not necessarily the same metric as a company making a product.
There are companies working within the space and I doubt the licensing really makes much difference to the outcome (i.e. your Google example)
> If development for X is ceasing now, there isn't time to experiment on finding the true successor.
Why? Again, the people working on it because they want to don't need to do anything, they can experiment. Someone can still fix up issues in X. Some companies will fund the development of things that are important to them. You make it sound like the oss community should be acting like one entity to achieve something, but there is no overarching goal nor a reason for there to be one. People will continue pulling in different directions.
Think about how many people might want to write for it if it had a compelling ui stack, tho
But even if there's only one cook, it could be worse (if that cook is the gnome team). At least with multiple cooks we can pick kde instead of gnome.
Phones are a different market from computers, even though they're technically the same thing. A large segment of people own "phones" but not a computer. Linux runs a large chunk of the internet. I think it's used quite well at scale.
Certainly not in a high-productivity environment. Google has to swap out most of the runtime components with distributed alternatives to make it compelling in a corporate (distributed) environment.
I can't say i've ever wanted a second compositor to choose from. Ideally it would just be part of the window server.
Apple/Microsoft can do whatever they want, just break compatibility at any point and everyone else wanting to have their programs supported on their platform will adapt.
Meanwhile for Linux network effect has a much bigger role to play, you can't tell anyone else what to do, but protocols can only emerge from working together.
Also, I wouldn't bring up Microsoft's display stack as a positive example at all.
Those two are worlds apart when it comes to backward compatibility.
> Also, I wouldn't bring up Microsoft's display stack as a positive example at all.
Why not? It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, and has been since the late 90s. There's tons of fundamental improvements since then, but they're all under the hood without affecting user-facing features. I'd say the Windows display stack modernization is an excellent example of how it should be done (a real shame though that Microsoft is actively ruining Windows by adding user-hostile features on top of the pretty good technical base).
>This is not a technical difference at all.
Which is why I said it was a problem with leadership than with the technical merrits.
macOS is the same way, except Carbon (a light modification to the procedural Toolbox API) and Cocoa (the Mac's first OOP toolkit) were "toll-free bridged" to each other rather than, say, writing Cocoa in terms of Carbon.
In contrast, X11 is a protocol anyone can implement and speak. There is no blessed library that you must use. No, Xlib doesn't count. Servers have to take their clients as they come. And Wayland, while very much deliberately stripped down from X, still retains this property of "the demarc point is a protocol" while every proprietary OS (and Android) went with "the demarc point is a library".
This is a lot different than say OSS vs ALSA. OSS really could have worked (and still does on FreeBSD afaik), but ALSA fully replaced OSS. I think pipewire seems likely to replace PulseAudio, even if it may not have PulseAudio's key functionality of ruining audio when things used to work just fine.
ALSA is an absolute nightmare to work with infinitely worse than Wayland. At best 10% of it is ‘documented’ through Doxygen. For the rest the only reference is the source code. This is one reason applications don’t tend to support ALSA anymore.
They just decided X11 did everything wrong and did it differently rather than pick up the pieces (if in spirit of idea, not code) that work and fix parts that don't
This is partly due to the fact that everything you can do with Wayland is defined in protocols that are straightforward to use whereas in X11 you have atoms and messages with arcane name and structures for everything, a lackluster documentation and terrible error handling.
Q: if they had that much experience why they chose to structure wayland in a way that's such PITA to write for ?
A: Because they were reacting to Xorg, so they wrote the exact opposite of that.
And for bonus points, because one of the problems they wanted to solve was "Xorg is hard to maintain", they made sure that the replacement was much much easier to maintain and develop... for them. Not for application devs, not for users, but for the folks making wayland, I have no doubt it's very well streamlined and easy to work on.
Tbh, if that were the case I would expect much faster progress.
There are people opposed to things like a allowing windows to specify their own bounds, and unless all the stakeholders agree to implement such protocols in their respective projects, the ecosystem will remain fragmented. Multiply this against every feature that people want.
Xorg put everything - way too many features - into one single display server (Xorg). Wayland put everything in the hands of the compositor, and then spawned an endless array of them (most of them implementing only a fraction of needed features).
X11 de jure and de facto required all those features to be present. In theory you could have an X server missing new features, but there was no way to get rid of really old features, and in practice you really needed all the new ones or apps would break. Wayland made essentially everything optional, to the point of fracturing the ecosystem.
Xorg was a monolithic reference implementation. Wayland ships a reference implementation in the form of weston, and it's so feature poor as to be useless.
X11 has, in practice, really poor security. (There were/are attempts to improve this, but it's not been terribly successful.) Wayland is really big on security. So much so that they refused to implement little things like screen shots and a11y features because they could be abused.
IMHO, with hindsight, they should have done this in 2 stages: First, do the backend refactoring to get the nice driver-facing parts (GBM, AIUI). Essentially, make rootful XWayland the only Xorg, but in a way that is completely invisible to users. (Or, put differently, ship https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback in 2010 instead of 2025.) Second, after you've done that and vastly simplified a huge chunk of code and made upkeep and refactoring easier, start working on X12. For the sake of argument, this can still be basically the same protocol as the wayland we actually got. However, don't actually ship that at first. Instead, go build/port an actual complete desktop environment to it, including all the features people actually want - clipboard, screen sharing, a11y and automation tools, remote desktop, etc. - and actually implement all the protocols needed for those. By all means make them optional add-ons to the core protocol, but make them up front. Also, I really recommend making one of those a window management protocol, so that 90% of window managers don't have to be a compositor, though some will. Then, after the thing is actually functional, start trying to get people to switch over. Don't start pushing people to adopt something half-baked and mess about for years on basic protocols that should have shipped day one (last I checked, in 2025 there are still 3 different incompatible wayland screenshot protocols). Make it an improvement, not a regression that only benefits you the Xorg developers.
FWIW, it was also obvious to many people--certainly anyone who had ever been part of one of these big refactors before, whether as the platform or the user--that this is how it should have been done when they started... they just didn't care, and then they spent a decade both directly and indirectly (by condoning the behavior) bullying people who were concerned about the process and insisting that people who even still today have perfectly working systems were/are committing some kind of cardinal sin by not embracing the one true path of Wayland, despite regressions. It is extremely difficult to find any sympathy for the people involved :/.
a11y = accessibility
There's some irony here, I think. =]
This is the fourth incarnation of x11 and the people working on it now have nothing to do with the people who developed it.
Xorg is the castodian group who started life as a fork, of a fork, of a fork of an spinout from mit.
Them trying to kill X11 is laughable to anyone who knows anything about its history.
Wayland on the other hand is now 18 years old and we've been told it will be good any day now for 18 years.
I've never seen this documented.
> It is a 400K LOC behemoth of a project and it has a ridiculous amount of technical debt.
So we have people who want to create features but do not want to pay for technical debt. So.. they create more technical debt? Is there some indication that the wisdom of the crowd is particularly valuable here?
> I would have to imagine that if the Xorg developers thought they could fix Xorg, they would do that instead of making a new thing.
It seems like all the paid developers are working on Wayland while many of the volunteers are working hard to continue Xorg despite all the sponsored efforts to artificially shutter the project.
The article authors main complaint seems to be that distributions forced users to choose between one or the other when, at this point in history, there are zero good reasons to have done that.
Open source used to be about choice. Now it's about paid interests bullying you out of that choice. And Hacker News readily defends this in the name of modernity for it's own sake. It's truly a bizarre outcome to me.
> I've never seen this documented.
What do you mean you can look at the history of wayland on Wikipedia (it was started by Kristian Høgsberg) the person who wrote the DRI2 implementation for xorg. Other major xorg contributors like Hutterer have also been major wayland contributors.
I think the misconception is that people thought there are lots of xorg developers. That's just false, around the time when wayland was started there were maybe 10. And now there are even less.
> > It is a 400K LOC behemoth of a project and it has a ridiculous amount of technical debt.
> So we have people who want to create features but do not want to pay for technical debt. So.. they create more technical debt? Is there some indication that the wisdom of the crowd is particularly valuable here?
But that's not what they did?
> > I would have to imagine that if the Xorg developers thought they could fix Xorg, they would do that instead of making a new thing.
> It seems like all the paid developers are working on Wayland while many of the volunteers are working hard to continue Xorg despite all the sponsored efforts to artificially shutter the project.
Who? Looking at xorgs git there is essentially 1 developer making changes that are not related to xwayland?
> The article authors main complaint seems to be that distributions forced users to choose between one or the other when, at this point in history, there are zero good reasons to have done that.
> Open source used to be about choice. Now it's about paid interests bullying you out of that choice. And Hacker News readily defends this in the name of modernity for it's own sake. It's truly a bizarre outcome to me.
You mean the choice not to work on xorg? You're welcome to use X, but you can't bully others into keeping it going for you.
The reoccurring theme in these comments is that the people complaining have little knowledge of X internals, have usually not done any work programming a WM, a compositor or X or wayland libraries. Listening to the people who have done that (e.g. Rasterman, deVault...) are widely positive about wayland over xorg. It's also an indication that most recent interesting desktop experiments/projects (niri, sway, hyprland...) have been happening under wayland. And AFAIK none were corporate sponsored.
CADT.
It uses the kernel's graphics buffers. It uses the kernel's mode setting. These alone are humongous differeniatiors.
There's so many other amazing glorious ways that Wayland is less. The protocol-centricity is vastly under rated, a massive win for the bazaar that can keep seeking truth versus the (imo utterly pathetic clining) absolutionist monolith style.
It's revolting to see such persistent bitter angry low user disdain, anger. Without any acknowledgement at all. That protocols allowing multiple implementations allows constant honing in, allows for dynamic change and evolution.
Reflecting on the Hindu Trimurti, a cycle of creation/newness, stasis/pattern, and decay & rot, it's amazing how the protest no-change/stasis-only voice has such a loud undying protest going. X is never getting better, has no room to improve, cursed by its own egocentric insanity which it has recursed into far far too far: which the core devs all agree.
It's not pleasant for everyone that Wayland allows a freedom of implementation. But generally most of the protest here has fallen away: support for major features is just here, on most implementations. That competitors can compete, don't have to keep using the same base is hugely advantageous to humanity. But the protest no-change anger-only voice is so loud. Doesn't know doesn't care.
Humanity should respect systems where competition and improvement are possible. X was a single consigned fate, with no growth or improvement. The competition of Wayland is an incredible breath of fresh air, and the growth of protocol competition here is telling, to not necessarily the "everything just works and is great" desire path of the low tech-ig orant beggar class, but which has enable so much Bazaar democratic figuring shit out, that still shares the ideas while allowing innovation within, in a way that few projects have ever enabled before. We are in a magic age of so so much, such cooperative competitive improvement, and it's just so unspoken, so missed, amid the squeaky wheels offering no actual technical critiques, unable to reflect upon the different (much better) age of possibility the bazaar model has opened us into.
Further, your point is spoken from the perspective of a company, a single entity. Companies are utterly unable to bank on Bazaar practices, to embrace the multitudes way of finding answers. They lack the hackerly blood to try many approaches. They are not creative enough to do anything but build their one Cathedral.
As a company, no, you should not try to build interoperable protocols to foster internal completion on. Duh, no shit. But strong command and control-while it may be good for a company-is not going to be how a much broader ecosystem finds the best paths to take.
It's incredibly impressive how much Wayland compositors compete/cooperate for better. Sway/wlroots for one example has a new Vulkan backend. They could just go try and do new things. There's protocols to implement and they made new implementations, and now there's a half dozen Wayland compositors that have new cutting edge tech they are trying out. Innovation at the edge, but working together, is the shit. Yeah it's not a model that helps the corpo's but that's because open source is searching a much wider field of options, looking much better for wins, and the cathedral model isn't going to get you any of that.
I'm still impressed what vacuous say nothing piece of shit useless Fear Uncertainty and Doubt folks can spread. This era has such a virulent pox of hatred, built around such empty words. None of these bitter words actually say anything, this whole discussion is filled with rabid useless disdain. Piss on ye, say something contestable you villainous cowards. What does you are, saying nothing, but trying to dynamite it all. A pox.
The calculus of what some team does is totally different than what open source does.
But let's be honest about Xorg. The overwhelming majority of people who worked on Xorg are now developing Wayland. Why? Because developing Xorg is a massive pain in the butt. It is a 400K LOC behemoth of a project and it has a ridiculous amount of technical debt. I would have to imagine that if the Xorg developers thought they could fix Xorg, they would do that instead of making a new thing.