There's a "Wayland set the Linux desktop back" blog going around now and ... it just makes me so tired.

That take is so amazingly wrong, but so persistent and popular. It is the "immigrants took mah job!" of takes for software. It is so flawed in so many different ways, and utterly ignores the host of actual reasons that Linux has stalled on the desktop.

It is apparently seductive, too, because it offloads the blame entirely on the crew developing Wayland without the person casting the blame considering for even a second the actual complexity of the problems. I could literally write a book on the reasons that the Linux desktop hasn't caught on; and I would, too, if I thought people would actually buy it and read it (a lot of people, I mean - enough to justify writing a book...)

But it boils down to this: Linux desktop development doesn't have more than a tiny, tiny fraction of the funding per year that Microsoft or Apple spend on marketing a single product line. Much less the kind of funds that go into R&D.

Vendors, mostly, are disinterested in supporting an OS that has less than 10% market share. At times they have even been actively dissuaded from doing so by certain other companies...

Users are, by and large, not willing to deal with inconvenience or having to learn new things in order to adopt the Linux desktop, even though the two main vendors are constantly making the user experience worse and continually taking away control of our own devices.

Wayland? It's a convenient scapegoat.

I'm not, by the way, arguing that Wayland is perfect, or that the community behind it has executed everything perfectly. And I'm certainly not arguing that people haven't had bad experiences with Wayland; that hasn't been _my_ experience, but I also have been using Linux for 30 years now -- and I choose hardware based on its Linux compatibility. I also have different expectations from a desktop than someone who has used Windows or macOS most of their life.

OK. Rant over. Be nicer to the Wayland folks. Stop blaming them for everything. In fact, let's maybe consider that what would really be useful is constructive takes on how we can succeed from here.

@jzb the problem is not Wayland, just like it is not systemd. The problem is trying to force people to adopt it or die.

I have use cases that are inimical to the fundamental assumptions Wayland has, and pretty much no 3D-accelerated hardware across my machine park, so it’s never going to be an option for me. So don’t make me "use it or die". Just keep X11 working and we’re good.

@mirabilos @jzb You can run most if not all Wayland compositors without 3D acceleration provided your Linux kernel is new enough to provide SimpleDRM. But, given your profile picture maybe you don't use Linux?

@newbyte @mirabilos @jzb

You've entirely missed the point, or built a strawman here. Problem isn't (lack of) 3D acceleration, but that the whole conceptual design of Wayland has been broken from day 0. People were pointing out the shortcomings all the time and mostly ignored.

Wayland's design breaks things.

Certain applications, like KiCAD will not support Wayland anytime soon, because it breaks the way KiCAD cooperates with window managers.

In Wayland-land there's no such cooperation.

@datenwolf @newbyte @mirabilos @jzb I have used KiCad and created projects in it under Wayland with no troubles whatsoever.

You know that Xwayland exists and isn't going anywhere, right? It's not some temporary glue to ease the migration, it's the main still maintained X11 implementation these days and it's here to stay.

@dos @newbyte @mirabilos @jzb

Also Xwayland… yay, let's just glue some broken thing (Xorg implementation of X11) to another broken thing (the Wayland protocol.

What the Phoenix devs are doing is much, much better. Also more resource efficient, since the Wayland design already is testing memory bottlenecks with regard to 4k or 8k display resolutions.

@datenwolf @newbyte @mirabilos @jzb Maybe in your world dma-buf passing weights more with higher resolutions, but in the real world when you want high performance you end up with things like Gamescope.

@dos @newbyte @mirabilos @jzb

That's not what I was hinting at.

Socratic question: What's the memory requirements for a 2 image swap chain of a fullscreen window at an 8k UHD ( = 7680 × 4320) display resolution in R10G10B10A2 pixel format?

How many clients running (and compositing) at that resolution do fit in your typical GPU's VRAM?

@datenwolf @dos @jzb @newbyte 8k? So about 100x80 pixels? That’s not a large screen.

@mirabilos @dos @jzb @newbyte

You know what I mean:
8k UHD = 7680 × 4320

@dos @jzb @newbyte @datenwolf no, I don’t. I do not use "entertainment/consumer TV" sizes. I use computer monitors, in which the resolution is given by width and height. (And, ideally, dpi. All three* are relevant.)

*) Yes, I know dpi is strictly two values, but on all practical monitors at the moment they are sufficiently close.