Mastodawn

Psyhackological Aug 17, 2024

Why Wayland adoption to have official support in programs is so slow?

https://lemmy.ml/post/19267163

Why Wayland adoption to have official support in programs is so slow? - Lemmy

Wayland seems ready to me but the main problem that many programs are not configured / compiled to support it. Why is that? I know it’s not easy as “Wayland support? Yes” (but in many cases adding a flag is enough but maybe it’s not a perfect support). What am I missing? Even Blender says [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/installing/linux_windowing_environment.html] if it fails to use Wayland it will use X11. > When Wayland is detected, it is the preferred system, otherwise X11 will be used Also XWayland has many limitations as X11 does.

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MNByChoice Aug 17, 2024

It is not enough to make a better product.

It is not enough to create all tooling and libraries to seamlessly migrate to the new product, but it helps.

There also needs to be a great big positive reason to make the change. Paying developers, huge user base, the only hardware support, great visuals, etc.

Until I cannot run software on X11, I won’t switch over knowingly.

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nexussapphire Aug 17, 2024

Once the desktops switch to Wayland and all distros ship with Wayland by default, support should slow.

Ideally, developers stop improving xwayland over time and go into maintenance mode for a bit. Once it goes into maintenance mode, developers should naturally fall off as it winds down.

If every desktop makes a very public announcement about the xwayland protocol being put into maintenance mode, actively supported apps should switch over. It’s up to the public how long they want to keep maintaining xwayland (open source etc).

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MNByChoice Aug 18, 2024

But why would the distros do that? It takes effort and has real costs for them.

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nexussapphire

They’re already starting to go that way, in a couple years Linux mint is even going to support Wayland. Ubuntu and fedora has already defaulted to Wayland. Fedora is actually deprecating xorg in a few releases. Budgie wants to have full support next year.

There isn’t much more than the testing they already have to do every release. Infact not having to support legacy code will free up resources for the whole Linux community as well as cutting the time in half for validating packages on distros. Every package that runs on xorg also runs on wayland, they have to test both.

Granted some have custom tools they’ll be working on but it’s going to be a while before every major DE supports Wayland. I’m curious, you think the distros have to implement their own version of Wayland?