this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2024
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X is broken and the people who understand it at a deep level are pretty much all dead. What's worse is that the code base is massive and doesn't follow modern code practices.
Wayland is different as there is no codebase. It is simply a set of standards that allow apps to connect to a desktop.
The X model:
App -> window manager -> X server -> hardware
The Wayland model:
App -> desktop -> hardware
This sounds like it wouldn't be that big of improvement but unlike X Wayland is designed to take advantage of the modern GPU horse power. X was originally designed to run on UNIX mainframes so to make it run like it does took a bunch of Jacky work arounds.
Many of the people that maintain X are the same people working on Wayland implementations. They're pushing people towards the new thing because it makes their lives easier, and that's also the nature of engineer driven product development, it's not going to consider all the edge cases underserved from replacing legacy software because there's nobody to keep them in check.
There are people working on X?