Question about the future of Xorg

[Carsten Haitzler]

On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 11:27:58 -0500 Vasily <vasil_tik at yahoo.com> said:

> 
> 
> On 09.06.2025 09:52, Carsten Haitzler wrote:
> 
> > the idea for wayland is that there will be competing compositors like there
> > are competing wm's(/compositors/desktops) based on x11. this competition
> > allows for innovation but there is still agreement on the "bounds" between
> > regular apps and these - so an app can display and work in all desktops
> > pretty much the same (unless it starts to enter the domains of what each
> > desktop does and assume things it shoudln't). wayland is the same. it
> > doesn't cay a lot of x11 baggage.
> 
> This is not a progress for my opinion - this some sort of regression
> Instead of one high experienced X11 team - there will be a lot of small teams
> which will try to show off and crate a different wm/compositors But

You already have this with every WM/DE/whatever in X11. the amount of people
at this level is far larger than the core xorg team ever was. nothing new.

in return wayland as a protocol does a lot less than x11 ever did so it has to
deal with less. it's far closer to being like what a WM does with ICCCM, NETWM
and so on than it is to full x11 protocol - by a long margin.

> wm/compositors is not a application or widget that can be de-installed. It is

what????? in what universe do you live? i have spent a lifetime switching
wm's ... and it's about as easy to start up another wayland compositor as it is
to run/start another x11 wm. in fact switching wm (these days desktop) was one
of the first things i did on unix... as i was thrust into mwm and it was
horrible. it took me maybe a week or less before i was on twm (and then ctwm
and so on)... and i barely knew how to write shell scripts yet. the internet
was non-existent. i had yet to even see a web browser so i did this entirely
with manual pages and exploration...

these days, changing is so easy... install compositor Y - then log out and on
log in select it as your session from your login manager. that easy. there is a
standard place to put wayland session .desktop files... i can't imagine it being
any easier. once you logged into the new one you CAN save space by uninstalling
the old - or just leave it there. up to you.

> the most important part of the Linux desktop Part that attract users, part
> that creates positive/negative experience on ALL Linux distribution at all.
> And if it fails - people say - Linux suck. Desktop team may not have such
> developers at all. For example XFCE.

so wait.. are you saying there should be one and only one desktop because
giving people a choice is bad?

> This all will create a lot of different wm/compositors without one solid
> direction of development.

nothing new.. unless what you want is one and onkly one. in which case i
suggest you go over to the kde team and tell them to quit. tell sway devs to
quit. off you go. tell everyone to use gnome and enjoy themselves. (or i could
just change this to tell everyone to use kde and gnome devs to quit ... and so
on).

in which case .. if you believe this - i invite you to find the nearest lake
and go jump right into it. i started enlightenment before gnome existed. i
suggest gnome should not exist. everyone should use enlightenment. i got there
first (kde didn't count- it was based on a proprietary binary-only qt toolkit
at the time thus was not viable for oss)...oh wait - maybe the window maker
people should tell me to have never even tried building enlightenment - they
were there first. no.. wait.. fvwm.. wait.. no twm.. wait...

see that lake over there? i invite you to take a nice swim. :)

> Issue is not that wayland needs some maturity, but wm/compositors need to be
> developed. But who is going to do it? Gnome team? KDE team? XFCE team?

they all are. enlightenment has wl support too (tho recent changes broke it -
not sure if it was kernel or mesa...). there's sway and several other
compositors. there's wlroots to kind of help out as a general framework to
build compositors with that's a shared bit of code.

> Do you think they are happy to re-write code and create unique GNOME/KDE/XFCE
> approach for GNOME/KDE/XFCE wm/compositors? Take a look on browser engines
> history. When developers refused to support windows browsers or firefox. That
> is very similar what wayland is doing.

they all are doing it. the thing is what is specifically wayland protocol is
already wrapped in wayland client and server libraries. so you call an api call.
so that's already handled. 80% of the rest is actually unique to each
compositor like it is to each x11 wm/de - how they choose to do backgrounds,
virtual desktops, focus policies, animations and effects, other window
management polices, plugins etc. are all unique to each of these as they
already are in x11.

-- 
------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------
Carsten Haitzler - raster at rasterman.com