lol of course Devuan supports Xlibre https://x.com/DevuanOrg/status/1935307141511794726

@davidgerard

wow. I just learned a whole bunch about devuan governance.

@davidgerard Ah yes, XLibre. I remember that.

@davidgerard

Nitter link: https://x.com/DevuanOrg/status/1935307141511794726

@davidgerard Oh no!

@bthylafh and posts literally world war II Nazi propaganda https://web.archive.org/web/20190404153507/https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20181010.191925.ee1331b6.en.html

@strlcat sure, but the ones who say wayland is a conspiracy to suppress x11 are not only on crack, but wayland was literally started by the remaining x11 devs who were sick of working on unfixable broken shit

@strlcat otoh there's some stuff where you go "ohhhh it's fashtech"

@bthylafh today's word is "fashtech"

@bthylafh like posting literal OG-Nazi propaganda talking points to a tech list

@davidgerard @bthylafh I really really like this phrase and I'm adding it to my vocabulary immediately.

@dvandal @bthylafh i think i got it from @mawhrin ?

@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.

@strlcat oh absolutely

@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 @strlcat @davidgerard

I started writing a long reply, but then I got to the point where you literally did the thing I said in my sixth bullet point, and realised that there's absolutely no point in trying to have a discussion.

@strlcat @dvandal @davidgerard

GNOME has given up all pretence of being cross platform at this point and is happy with hard dependencies on systemd.

KDE has not and the KDE Wayland compositor runs on FreeBSD (I haven't actually tried it on unmodified FreeBSD, but it runs nicely on CheriBSD on Morello, completely memory safe including the drivers!). Most of the new Wayland stuff runs on the same DRI drivers as X.org. It looks as if there are around a dozen other Wayland compositors in FreeBSD ports that use wlroots, I'm not sure if there are others that don't.

@david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard
Oh god yeah. In particular, at msft, my experience was not so much nobody cared but that product groups could push back on other departments ("we're a profit center so fuck you, cost center!") when they got complaints from folks testing. Couple that with the fact that your compensation (esp in the form of stock/stock options) is heavily dependent on being seen to ship shiny new cool stuff. Fixing old stuff is unglamorous and typically doesn't get you the high review scores.

@david_chisnall @strlcat @davidgerard I wanna be super clear on this: I did not mean to come across as putting down the entirety of what you're saying.

I don't understand the monopolistic framing of the argument is the core of what I meant to get at. I didn't discuss X11 nor it's flaws at any extent, nor did I put down the legitimate issues people have had with it. Again: VERY legitimate issues! Nvidea with Wayland has been, as far as I know, effectively impossible until very recently, and even that is still in it's early stages of implementation.

I just don't understand the framing of it as a monopolistic move on the part of the developers when they've more or less abandoned the original project and decided collectively to move on to establishing a new standard.

I don't mean to come across as disrespectful or argumentative, I just don't understand the core framing device that it's a monopolistic move.

I absolutely agree that the processes of adoption could have been much cleaner and handled a lot better. Especially by the Gnome team. I super agree with you on that point.

But the monopolistic angle of it isn't something I'm understanding. It feels like a weird approach to angle and frame the argument that demands a double burden be placed on the maintainers. That very specifically is the part that I intended to get at, while sharing my understanding that the issue is one of Standards changing, not some type of hostile take-over.

Again: I don't meant to be dismissing you outright or to come across as rude. You've developed your opinion for a reason and I'd love to understand it better. But right now it's not making a lot of sense to me and I would very much appreciate more insight into your thoughts on it.

@david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard IMHO they are both wastly superior and user friendly, but it takes time to fill all gaps

@david_chisnall @strlcat @dvandal @davidgerard this! A gazillion times this! 😻

@dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard @david_chisnall oh, this is about Wayland initially (only read the OP (edit: wasn’t the OP but the top of the subthread I could see) now).

Wayland may be nice for some, but several (multiple, plural) ways in which I use computers are inimical to Wayland (i.e. Wayland was designed specifically to make these uses impossible), so I’ll rather not.

(But, since I recently read about a Wayland-only UI toolkit for Linux: is there a way to run single Wayland applications under XFree86/X.org including xrdp/xorgxrdp, with normal X11 WMs and all?)

@david_chisnall @davidgerard @strlcat @dvandal no.

@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.

@strlcat @david_chisnall @BoydStephenSmithJr @dvandal the problem with that is not that the maintainers don’t want to be forced to support sysvinit. The problem is that they actively work against those people who do, even when presented with working patches and an offer of supporting the sysvinit-using users of their package… from a fellow team member, even.

Basically telling users to use the new systemd/fdo/gnome/wayland/pa/pw/whatever thing or get lost and actively working against the mere possibility of supporting it.

@strlcat yeah, totally. I want my X11 maintained by sensible people, not them.

@strlcat @dvandal @david_chisnall @davidgerard

I'm not aware of any BSDs that have made the switch away from X, or their own init and sound systems.

Whether that's stability or eventual obsolescence is not something I'm qualified to say.

@mirabilos @strlcat @david_chisnall @dvandal While I've heard of that happening, I don't see why a "soft" fork is not a suitable solution. Just publish a branch with the "sysvinit support" patches, and kick off the release tarball/build process whenever.

Debian maintains patches on top of upstream sometimes for many, many years. I maintained my own small patches against the kernel to enable a feature that "wasn't ready" but I needed for my hardware for nearly 2 years.

I fully understand a maintainer choosing to reject a patch *for any reason* and I support their rights to do so. If that becomes "censorship", then treat it as "damage and route around" the maintainer. (This does not require attacks, personal or otherwise against said maintainer.)

There are issues around namespace claims, but any resolutions to those issues will be specific to how the namespace is organized (hopefully [but rarely] democratically).

@BoydStephenSmithJr @dvandal @strlcat @david_chisnall I was speaking of Debian packages.

Incidentally I did soft-fork the tomcat9 package, as ${dayjob[-1]} had need, and it ended up being a hard fork. Still available in my own APT repo, still downloaded by several users even… some even contacted me to say thanks.

Only sad I couldn’t bring the improvement into Debian proper as the primary maintainer veto’d it… for use of adduser of all things… back when sysvinit support was still mandatory (and the package therefore rc-buggy).

@mirabilos @dvandal @strlcat @david_chisnall Never had the pleasure of being a Debian Maintainer myself, but I thought the technical committee was there to "encourage" maintainers to follow approved policy and accept patches for such rc-buggy things.

I do know such things rarely work out as well as they are designed to or even appear to from the outside.

I do know Debian is in a bit of a pickle these days because there are several upstreams that have significantly more "person-hours" available and are very difficult to patch. So, in order to make those package available at all ... "compromises" are made. :(

Thank you for maintaining an APT repo with your patched version! Even if I don't use it, it serve to illustrate the power of "bazaar"-style development.

@BoydStephenSmithJr @strlcat @david_chisnall @dvandal I thought so, too, but evidently nobody in power had any tuits left to care about nōn-systemd at that point after years of debate.

Meanwhile the "modernists" took that power vacuum and started removing cronjobs from core packages such as mdadm in favour of systemd timers (even many systemd people use cron instead). The GR only gave the mandate for init scripts, not cronjobs, but nobody cared. And maintainers who unilaterally remove init scripts don’t even coordinate with the orphan-sysvinit-scripts package maintainers to have a handover that doesn’t break existing users.

(Meanwhile o-s-s shipped a buggy tomcat9 init script that could never have worked because all versions of tomcat9 actually in Debian for which the package could have come into effect were uninstallable due to a hard Depends on systemd for its adduser thing, so all it ever did was to break mine, and it took months to get it removed.)

Communication. So important.

@wyatt @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat @mirabilos Wasn't there there a Devuan (or smth) that was supposed to be Debian minus systemd? Did it die?

(Personally, I prefer systemd over sysvinit, so I didn't try it.)

@david_chisnall @dvandal @BoydStephenSmithJr @strlcat @wyatt it attracted the same sort of people X"Libre" did, so it’s not an option.

I also doubt their technical and manpower to keep anything working that is actively desupported in Debian.

I’d rather go with the security-supported option.

@david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard mimimi

@david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard@circumstances.run Wayland at least makes some sense: modern hardware now has process separation, and programs can operate in isolation without context switches until it's time to send the output to the display.

The same can be done in X11, as an extension, so that isn't even too much of a step -- it mostly switches the default to "hardware assisted separation".

That's definitely useful, what is wrong though is fixing more than one problem at the same time: they *also* want to start from a clean slate with the other protocols.

My feeling is that the people doing the GPU work and the people doing the protocol gatekeeping are different groups, so this could be solvable, it's just a lot of tedious, thankless work that has already been done for X11 by some greybeards who understand how software works.

@davidgerard @strlcat lol why do we have to live in a world where certain open source technologies are fetishized by fascists

@BoydStephenSmithJr @wyatt @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat @mirabilos scroll up. all the way up to the top of the thread

@david_chisnall @strlcat @dvandal @davidgerard Now this might be a bit of a controversial question, but why should these desktop environment support the BSDs? I assume they don't support them because not enough developers care or want to do it. Seeing that even TrueNAS is in the process of slowly phasing out FreeBSD, I just thought that the BSDs have just lost a lot of their relevance.

@LariscusObscurus @david_chisnall @strlcat @dvandal @davidgerard@circumstances.run Because non-monoculture has intrinsic value. Because it took us decades of hard social effort to achieve consensus about what things you can rely on being common between different platforms, and making sure those things suffice to write programs that do useful things, and that programs that want to do additional things that aren't common between platforms can easily make those things optional with graceful degredation... and some clowns show up and want to throw that all away because they think they know better and monoculture won't be awful again this time.

Same reason making websites for Chrome rather than web standards is an asshole move.

@dalias @LariscusObscurus @david_chisnall @strlcat @dvandal it's cross platform, fedora amd64 *and* ubuntu amd64

@david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard this is also how we got git. :(

@wyatt @BoydStephenSmithJr @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat weird, I have very few… mostly a package that just Provides: logind aptly called logind-considered-harmful (after having a look at elogind, which changes the system state in unpredictable ways, like lid closing crashes the system as it tries to suspend) and don’t use GNOME, so…

… ah, yes, and prevent-systemd-{installed,running,completely} install apt pinning to enforce it stays off.

All available from the wtf extrepo thanks to @wouter

@david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard

All of that code is produced by Freedesktop[.]org, and it's the sole reason my GNU/Linux machines now crash. I switched to *BSD.

Consider Pulse Audio. It can only be used by _one_ user. And that user *must* be logged in. Thanks for turning my multiuser/multiprogramming OS back into DOS.

Udisks2 ignores /etc/fstab.

Systemd is completely inappropriate for use on servers. And it's impossible to debug boot failures.

@passthejoe @strlcat @dvandal @david_chisnall @davidgerard

On the contrary, they've all done one switch already, about a decade before systemd came along in the Linux-based world.

#NetBSD pioneered a major switch in rc at the turn of the century, with Mewburn rc, which #FreeBSD followed two years later. #OpenBSD has a similar, but incompatible, system that it switched to.

In further contrast, OpenBSD has run with #Xenocara.

#rc

@BoydStephenSmithJr @dvandal @david_chisnall @strlcat yeah, the actual answer to continued X11 development is for someone to pay for X11 developers

if nobody is doing that, then that's your problem

@david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat This response is pretty clearly just dodging the actual point of the reply.

@davidgerard (and of course they express this support on eXtwitter)

@david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard@circumstances.run I have poured most hours of my last 10 years of life into listening to users and pushing things forward on Wayland even if I personally wouldn't need the feature. I really saddens me that someone would think that Wayland developers don't care.

We do care, but we only have a finite amount of time in our volunteer life. Yes, we don't copy-paste solutions from X11: we try to fully understand the problem space and do better. This does mean that coming to us with technical solutions rather than use-cases tends to be met with "please, explain why you need to do this?".

I don't really know what you mean when you say that we silence criticism. I've read enough in the past years to guarantee that it's not silenced. I appreciate constructive criticism better than rants, rants tend to demoralize me.

I am also saddened about the conspiracy that big corp deprecates X11 against the community's will. There is no single company with a monopoly here, please take a bit of time to look at Wayland developers' employers. Personally, I'm ex-SourceHut and now just a volunteer (my day job is unrelated: SNCF Réseau).

I've never said that X11 was deprecated, and I always tell people to use whatever works best for them. The only reason why X11 has less activity nowadays is because X11 lacks volunteers. (We severely lack volunteers on the Wayland side too.)

People, distros, communities move away from X11 if/when they collectively decide that they should. Nobody's pulling the strings here.

@emersion and thanks for your work on Wayland.

@emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat it isn't the devs that we should be taking issue with, it's the corporations telling us how to use Linux that is at issue.

@davidgerard What are Devuan even still doing on Xitter?

@david_chisnall yeah, truly awful that stuff works for more people now with fewer barriers while people can still pick and choose whatever they want of they don’t like the new things.

What a nightmare. I’m so sorry for you’re suffering.

@emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat wayland developers shouldn't have to justify themselves to lunatics, the freedom of open source tolerates lunatics, so let them play with their conspiracy thing. If some people like mold-infested old house (X11) then who care.

@david_chisnall I know of only 1 BSD developer/user who significantly contributes to GNOME, so it’s no surprise that support for it is being dropped when faced with the feature advantages of integrating more tightly with systemd at the user and session management level.

If you want GNOME to stay on BSD, people are going to have to put the work in to maintain it.

The maintainers of these components in GNOME already maintain many modules each. They don’t even want to be maintaining it on Linux.

@emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat

Thank you for your work!

I've been using sway for 7 years, seen it gain features, seen you and other sway/wlroots devs push in wayland-protocols for many features that people missed from X11, and I appreciate all of your effort.

And I also use Xorg on some of my computers, and I agree people should use whatever works for them.

But then I saw 1 or 2 people who seem to say they want to see Xorg dead, and I don't understand why they'd want that...

@ClariNerd @emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat do yourself a favor and don't believe in baseless conspiracy theories.

You are free to ask the vast amount of distribution why they switched and I'm sure you won't get a "because RH said so" ever.

People working at RH are even allowed to make upstream decisions against the company's own interest... it's even publicly documented.

There is nobody pulling the strings, seriously.

@emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat When I was at 37c3 someone set up a "Wayland feedback corner" that was a frontend to a shredder: https://mastodon.social/@0x0@corteximplant.com/111663306720720922

I chuckled yet it also rubbed me the wrong way. Perhaps the people behind it even share your stance, yet they thought this was a useful way to communicate it.

(FWIW for me, WL has been production-viable for years now and it's only getting better, so hopefully everybody will eventually be on the same page. Thanks for your efforts!)

@david_chisnall
That is just misrepresenting the facts in bad faith. Gnome has not "given up" on BSD. They wanted to move forward with features which relied on systemd on Linux and reached out to communities like FreeBSD, trying to work out solutions through with BSD could provide similar capabilities. There was close to zero interest especially by the BSD community.
So the choice was to drop working on these features or drop support for platforms to willing to meet the project half way.
Seems like an obvious choice to me.

@strlcat @dvandal @davidgerard

@davidgerard @BoydStephenSmithJr @dvandal @strlcat

You’re buying into the false dichotomy that the people pushing these things love. The solution space is not old thing with problems vs new thing with overlapping set of problems. Things like Arcan exist and actually solve the problems with X11. It even had a Wayland bridge that let you run Wayland things (though Wayland is such a mess of incompatible extensions because the core protocol didn’t solve most of the problems end users actually have that they gave up trying to support it) which even handles graceful reconnect if the display server dies, and has an X11 compatibility interface (still maintained) that even lets unmodified X11 WMs manage windows with a security model on top. Pretending that the choice is X11 or Wayland is exactly how people push Wayland. Something must be done, this is something, we must do it.

@wonka i guess they just feel it's a very comfortable and welcoming environment

Don't get me wrong, Wayland isn't perfect, and I disagree with the Red Hat / IBM controlling Linux "theory", but there needs to be more protocols adopted in the full spec. Except one certain project has been causing... Issues with that. And its been hurting downstream projects and until very recently, the accessibility push.

@karolherbst @ClariNerd @emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat
I like systemd
And SELinux
And Wayland
I like that they exist. I don't like the implementation (in fact I abhor the way Wayland and SELinux are implemented)
So I am clearly a RedHat agent, right
got rejected when she applied to RedHat
I wish!

@ity @ClariNerd @emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat well.. at least "redhat", more like Wim working at Red Hat, wrote a pulseaudio replacement and that's going great.

Maybe if people start reimplementing systemd or SELinux but in better that could gain traction. But I think pulseaudio was a simple "victim" there 🙃

@karolherbst @ClariNerd @emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat I've been in the FOSS world a good 25+ years, And nobody controls Linux as an ecosystem. Not even RedHat back when it was the only way to get Linux on CD. Closest is Torvalds, but he screams bloody MURDER any time a corporation tells him what to do...and then he goes to another one willing to pay him more for the luxury of saying he's staff. He's done that 3 or 4 times.

@praetor @ClariNerd @emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat

Yeah, but I think the issue is, that most people don't know how it is working for Red Hat.

The years I've been working there, nobody ever told me what I should or shouldn't do as an upstream maintainer and I have full power to decide whatever I want upstream without anybody from RH interfering.

Soo... yeah... it's a shame that a company providing such a job has that kind of reputation.

@karolherbst @ClariNerd @emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat I wanted to try. Essentially flatpak in the kernel, object capabilities, to get another option for security...

@karolherbst @ClariNerd @emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat replacing dbus, and being stricter than SELinux by default, by essentially controlling the comms between apps as the primary thing. More closer to Android.

But idk if fd.o would like stuff to turn fd.o Linux into Android, lmao.

@ity @ClariNerd @emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat Many tried to replace dbus, at least we have dbus-broker now which is kinda an improvement :)

But yeah.. maybe we need another IPC that solves some critical issues.

Permission control is kinda something we do through portals or inside wayland compositors.

There is some accessibility concerns tho, because some people just want to allow everything every time, and that's kinda something userspace needs to decide on anyway.

@karolherbst @ClariNerd @emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat replacing dbus with binder

@emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat

Honestly, the work you and others did on Sway and wlroots is really what should've shipped with the protocol instead of Weston. Then we wouldn't have a dozen different compositors with a variety of incompatible ways to accomplish the same thing.

Thanks for bringing sanity to this stuff. <3

@karolherbst @ClariNerd @emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat I feel like portals do not adequately solve the issue at hand, and Wayland is still inequipped for it.
We'd need something like polkit, but more flexible and user manageable...
Binder is upstream, though.
Though this isn't a convo to have in a fedi thread while I am tired, lol.

@ity @ClariNerd @emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat Heh fair, I don't really have any opinions on portals myself anyway 🙃

@karolherbst @ClariNerd @emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat i didn't realize they have that reputation. All their devs work-semi independently. And light on the semi and heavy on the independent. Most redhat employees get paid for maintaining their own projects redhat uses for its products. I thought that was widely known. Its always been like that.

@praetor @ClariNerd @emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat Yeah dunno. Maybe it's just a "vocal minority" situation here.

@karolherbst @ClariNerd @emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat vocal minority who ain't been in the scene long....

@cameron_bosch Most of us working in the Wayland space have already figured out how to deal with that anyway. That's why we've been making tremendous progress the past few years.

I also lived through the 90s of pre-standardized window managers on X11. We're experiencing exactly the same kind of pain now, and eventually everything gets reconciled.

@neal I wish I could say that I loved the days of TWM, FVWM, WindowMaker etc. Instead, I have to say I wasn't even there...

Glad to see Wayland protocol development happening much faster im the past few years though!

@emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat i did get told to basically not work on xorg because everyone moved on to wayland when i've shown up on IRC a few years ago to improve support for a feature (surprise unplug for GPUs)

@whitequark Probably because you're not a regular contributor and no one has time to review?

Current xserver maintainers believe xserver should be stable and reliable, they focus their limited time on security fixes.

We get a lot of review bandwidth limitations on Wayland too. Maintainers are a scarce resource. The trick is to start small and contribute regularly.

@cameron_bosch I still have nostalgia for fvwm, but that doesn't mean I want to run it in 2025. 😃

@jmtd @cameron_bosch And you get the same flavor of crazy in Wayland today if you wish to look. It's pretty neat. And people are even inventing new workflows on Wayland because it's a new landscape to play with.

@emersion the message i took away from that interaction is that xorg (in any mode except for xwayland) is deprecated because everyone involved moved to wayland. so it surprises me to hear you say it's not. that doesn't seem accurate given what i was told when i tried to contribute a 20 line patch (as far as i recall), which is "starting small" in my book

@emersion more generally, i think "no one has time to review because they work on a replacement" is like the dictionary definition of deprecated

@ity @karolherbst @ClariNerd @emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat Whenever people tell me they hate dbus, I always say "then let's adopt Binder". It's somewhat half-serious, but I do think that a high quality kernel-based IPC that is battle-tested is worth considering for standard Linux too.

@whitequark Most people maintaining X11 right now are not Wayland developers.

@emersion oh, hm. did this change since ~2019?

@neal Yeah, @YaLTeR compositor Niri looks really cool! I actually think it's a really cool tiling Wayland compositor that solves many of the issues I had with tiling WMs and Wayland compositors!

@neal At least we have labwc and Wayfire (the latter for former Compiz users)!

@whitequark I have no idea honestly…

Perhaps some people got enough of WSI shenanigans and moved on to other stuff like the kernel or Mesa.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/project_members?sort=access_level_desc

@david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard seems to me that a much simpler explanation is:

- existing system has entrenched in-group developers who are too toxic to work with newcomers who point out obvious flaws
- gets increasingly grumpy and thinks it's a witch-hunt
- claim the criticisms of their old baby are invalid. DARVO, insist it's the /other thing/ that's imperfect, X11/glibc is perfect
- avoid a code of conduct, avoid enforcing one, "no politics in code"
- refuse to secure things

@risottobias @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat so the actual timeline of events was that literally the X11 developers started Wayland because they knew precisely what was wrong with X and the second system would be so much better

@davidgerard @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat downstream developer: "but I just got my distro/application working with the (very insecure, buggy) x11 implementation. I don't want to move to the secure, improved one. The ikea effect has made me love my X11-distro"

@emersion WSI?

@whitequark Window System Integration, a generic term for interfacing with X11/Wayland/etc

Helpful explainer: https://www.supergoodcode.com/wsi-was-a-mistake/

@whitequark To be clear, "no time/interest to review patches for new features" is definitely not deprecated. I've seen plenty of projects rejecting new features (because they are "done") but still being maintained, and that's completely fine. Even Sway is in this state somewhat: new window management features are almost always rejected because we feel that Sway has completed its core value proposition in this area.

@emersion thank you

@emersion it's specifically the "we, the xorg team, moved on to wayland" (which is what i took away from that interaction) that made me come to that conclusion

@emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat thank you. i mostly don't have to think about wayland despite using it, and i think that's testimony to it working well enough for me :)

@emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat I appreciate the work you've put into Wayland and there is way too much "Escalate my complaint to your manager" energy from rando users to a *volunteer* project that might have some corporate contributors but *isn't* a billion dollar a year of enterprise, It's extra frustrating from FOSS people who should know better

@emersion I’ve been using Wayland almost exclusively since 2018 (or 2019?), and it’s great! Solves a lot of little issues with X11, and I haven’t been able to go back for years. The remaining minor issues all seem like they are in progress albeit slowly.

@whitequark @emersion FYI, I still take the time periodically to review WSI patches in the xserver. I stopped doing it when Enrico started flooding useless refactors with high breakage risks.

I however never got into Wayland development, so maybe this is why? That being said, I would not accept anything but bug fixes or quality of life improvements.

@mupuf @emersion (it was not a WSI patch, i was working on improving hardware driver support for hot-unplug. i don't remember the details anymore)

@wolf480pl @emersion @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat 100% the same here. Sway has been absolutely terrific.

I still use i3/x11 on some older machines not really for any reason other than why not.

In fact I only really use sway on my workstation and gaming PC (with an nvidia card) because the performance is much more reliable and consistent, which is one of the original goals of Wayland.

Thank you for donating your time!

@david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard two of those were made by the same guy, who now works for Microsoft, who has also said he likes the way Microsoft does things.

In Wayland's defense, a system will be stuck with second system syndrome if it waits to be competitive with the existing system.