@strlcat @davidgerard not to be pedantic but is it really monopolization when the main developers of X11 have since move on to another project deliberately to replace the old?

Like to my understanding, it isn’t about “competition” in this case, but about moving standards from one system to another and making that work happen. Ie. we use computers in 2025, not 1985, and the way graphics for computers work has changed significantly from then til now, and part of the reason Wayland exists is to be able to modernize graphics on anything that uses it. So it’s a shift in standards vs Competition. Especially when it’s all X11 devs who moved on to Wayland and have generally stopped putting much work into X11 as is.

(And that isn’t even touching on most of the code added to base X11 from the founder of XLibre being reverted out due to breaking changes and weird modifications of licenses retroactively as people started looking over the commits and noticing some issues..)

Idk, I think a lot of the arguing around this issue is stemming from a handful of malignant actors that are deliberately throwing chaff into the wind and getting into everyone’s hair about it while fundamentally misunderstanding what is going on and why we have Wayland to begin with. Arguably deliberately misunderstanding for the sake of arguing and causing drama.

Are there technical issues with Wayland? Yeah! But there’s also a fuckload of technical issues with X11 as well, and the decision was made to focus on Wayland and modernizing graphics on Linux rather than maintaining something who’s primary promise of network transparency stopped being true decades ago.

@dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard

Wayland and systemd are both symptoms of the same behaviour, as was PulseAudio:

• Observe that an existing system has flaws.
• Don't engage with users to identify use cases.
• Throw up some half-finished code (with incomplete or nonexistent backwards compatibility) that solves some of the problems of the old system but doesn't address all of its use cases and introduces more problems for other people.
• Declare that the old thing is deprecated and everyone needs to move to the new thing.
• Create a load of work in the rest of the ecosystem that other people have to do.
• Silence all criticism by pointing out that the old thing was imperfect.

And that's the kind of thing that you can only get away with if you're able to act as a monopoly, by employing maintainers at key points across the ecosystem.

The biggest problem with Microsoft was not that their monopoly allowed them to be evil, it was that it allowed them to be stupid. A lot of things in the MS ecosystem are actually bad for Microsoft, but they're pushed out because no one inside MS cares enough to do the right thing and no one outside is able to fix the problems. I, personally, don't want the F/OSS OS ecosystem to end up like that.

@david_chisnall @strlcat @davidgerard

If all the maintainers for Old Thing have moved over to working on New Thing, wouldn't it be incredibly irresponsible of them to not declare Old Thing as deprecated? Is that not the literal definition of Deprecation?

X11 as a fallback option has been supported for well over a decade at this point. The goal being: Push people to the new standard so the new *standard* can be developed more fully and flushed out and fix the majority of the gaps.

*Standards take time to change, with all the presumed growing pains in between*. It's not easy to shift standards, but when the devs have flat out *moved on*, it's not about a competition between the standards. It's that people are moving on to a new Standard to work on.

We did have competing modern display protocols there for a bit. Do you remember Mir? Didn't Mir just flat out lose out in terms of gaining market share and so forth to Wayland?

Suffice to say, framing a standard shift as Monopolization is *really really weird* and fundamentally is at odds at the reality of what the ongoing process actually is. The developers *moved on.* Nobody stood up to take their place and continue developing X11 until recently, and even then the first thing that project did was break from the Standard (lol)

I understand the annoyances and the pain of this process: I've been daily driving Fedora Desktop since Fedora 11. But I also understood, especially in the early days, that Wayland was *heavily* under development and to expect bugs, and I went into it knowing full well that I could revert to X11 Fallback as necessary (which I used a ton in the early days!). We're well into a decade past that at this point and I literally have more issues in X11 than I do with Wayland. It's been like that for about 3 years now, personally.

But again: Calling it a Monopoly when the core maintainers just Moved On is, frankly, weird.

@dvandal @david_chisnall @strlcat @davidgerard@circumstances.run Yeah, I agree no maintainer should be forced to work on xorg, alsa, or sysvinit, no matter how many users it has. And, yes, when the amount of maintenance effort drops it is good to let users and downstream know -- based on some threshold relative of historical effort available or new work needed coming in.

I say this as someone that still uses Xorg.

I do think monopoly / monsopony can definitely be issues, but the solution to that is having enough producers / consumers so that coopetition is the default, not shaming maintainers.

I think this means improving the experience of being a maintainer, and while compensation is part of that, being given a bit more grace by the community when you choose not to do something (like maintain sysvinit support) is important, too.