On the contrary, seeing this shows that Wayland is the survivor among many competitors and not something major distributions suddenly pulled out of their asses.
If anything that gives Wayland even more weight as the replacement for Xorg.
There are plenty of examples throughout history where an inferior product won out over the alternatives, usually because of business or politics unrelated to merit.
Of the 7 non-Wayland systems linked in the opening post, two still have a working web page.
KDrive gave me a TLS error (the certificate is misconfigured) but ignoring it brings me to a web page that states the information is obsolete and hasn't been updated in about 7 years according to the page info. Everybody online talks about KDrive in the past tense it seems.
Y-windows.org works, but the homepage only shows two entries written in 2004. It seems to be the product of a thesis that never received any development.
I think it's safe to say from the listed post, only Wayland survived. I think of all the other alternatives, Mir had the best change at succeeding, but that died half a decade ago.
It's not listed in the OP, but Arcan ( www.arcan-fe.com ) is alive and architecturally compares favorably to Wayland. Only problem is that letoram actively avoids bringing popular attention to the project to the point that he deliberately writes his blog posts on it in a very dense style. I think he's just doing it til 1.0 though.
I really hope Arcan takes off; it's a much more elegant system than Wayland's XML-based crap whose main defense is "just use a toolkit!".
The article was written a few years before Canonical announced that they were developing their own display server called Mir.
Back then in 2013 it looked as if it could have become Wayland's biggest rival as a successor to X11.
Apparently, Mir is still being actively developed at Canonical, but with focus towards embedded systems.
The original plan had been to base it on libraries borrowed from Android, but those have been replaced with parts of Wayland. It looks as if it can also be hosted on top of Wayland or X11.
There is a little bit more to that story. Canonical had initially chosen Wayland to be the successor of X11. Then they dropped that plan in favor of the in-house Mir project, citing problems with Wayland. The Wayland developers debunked all of those points, but Canonical just neglected the reply. As I remember it, it was this incident that irked a lot of people and gave Wayland the push to become what it is today. Wayland wasn't as popular before that.
> ~100% of developer effort in the Linux graphical stack is going towards Wayland.
If this is true it's a testament to how poorly designed Wayland must be - for it to have such comprehensive support & still be as limited as it is today is quite the achievement.
> Shutting up and using Wayland is the sensible thing to do.
Sadly, you're probably right here. The network effect has indeed shifted toward Wayland - I'm putting up & shutting up with it in my current system; I should probably switch back to Xorg given how bad it is, but knowing I'll likely be going back to Wayland eventually the effort of two migrations seems futile.
Wayland has struck me for years as being the new IPv6, the tech that the deep technical people tell me needs to come and replace the old thing that "doesn't work any more" and yet never quite takes over.
maybe the year of critical mass switchover will be soon?
Every major distribution has been using Wayland by default with GNOME desktops for years. KDE is finally reaching a state where Wayland can be the default presently, though it took a little longer.
Other desktops are either lagging way behind or are essentially unmaintained and not trying to upgrade.
This is more like Python 2 vs Python 3... Wayland will win because "new is better" to the mob. After it takes over, it'll be worse performance for 4-5 major releases, and you'll never get back all the features.
All the old apps will hobble along with a compatibility layer, because for some reason it's better to remove all the clutter from X11 to write a new clean Wayland, and then re-introduce all the X11 clutter into a shim so that old apps can run.
I mean, insert any "year of linux on the desktop joke here"
In terms of usage numbers, X is very, very dead. Android uses something that looks a lot more like Wayland than X (or arguably Wayland looks a lot more like Android's SurfaceFlinger than X, but whatever), and ChromeOS is Wayland as well. I'm pretty sure Steam Deck is also Wayland.
steam deck is indeed wayland with their own compositor called gamescope[1] for low-latency gaming (they target the fewest buffer copies as possible). Another nice side-effect it has is hdr support on AMD GPUs.
Personally, I'm holding out until I can restart GNOME without logging out/losing my running applications. Previously, there were issues with it and nvidia drivers, but I think that's fixed now.
I'm running it by default on a laptop, and other than it being tricky to set global keyboard shortcuts, it works perfectly fine.
To switch I just need to know one thing: what is the i3 of Wayland? Tiling window managers changed the way I use my computer forever and I can't go back to anything else.
About 20 years ago I used some early version of KDE on Linux as my desktop environment and it was great - comparable and even better than Windows that times. Nowadays I still struggle to use any kind of Linux GUI first of all because of poor fonts rendering. Don't get me wrong - it's pretty OK, but comparing with MacOS or Windows - ah, still to bad. Have been waiting for improvements for decades.
Can you give some specific examples that bother you? I honestly just don't notice much of a difference these days with font rendering in Linux + X11 vs Windows/MacOS.
I do usually select different fonts/sizes instead of relying on distro defaults though.
Anecdotally, I use PopOS as my daily driver and the fonts and DE are beautiful. I prefer it to the Mac workstation I use for work. When I flip my KVM I'm often reminded of the contrast. I use open source ligature enabled FreeType fonts and they are all exceedingly sharp.
I see so many complaints about font rendering on Linux but I don't really understand the issue and what you're experiencing. I use a window manager, no desktop environment and zero configuration for fonts other than what comes with the distributions minimal/server release.
Have I just been using Linux so long that I'm ignorant of what's possible on other systems? What am I missing?
There is a section on font rendering, here is a copy.
Font rendering (which is implemented via high level GUI libraries) issues:
! ClearType fonts are not properly supported out of the box. Even though the ClearType font rendering technology is now supported, you have no means of properly tuning it thus ClearType fonts from Windows look ugly.
Quite often default fonts look ugly, due to missing good (catered to the LCD screen - subpixel RGB full hinting) default fontconfig settings.
Font antialiasing settings cannot be applied on-the-fly under many DEs. This issue is impossible to solve unless there's a common GUI library/API which is shared between all tooklits and desktop environments.
!! The way Wayland works, fonts under Wayland sessions may look blurry.
Edit following worksonmine response:
I pasted the part related to font rendering here for convenience, but note that the article is much more complete and has a page-long preface explaining the context, and answers to the most common objections. The article is not a suggestion that you should use Windows instead, in fact the author also has a "Windows 10 sucks" article.
I very rarely notice it, but this very article to me is displayed in Bitstream Charter (I think because it contains one character somewhere that isn't present in Georgia) and Bitstream Charter is awfully bad for some reason, probably because I have it in PCF format.
My package manager describes it as A serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for low resolution devices.
You are probably blessed with not having this font installed on your system, which prevents your browser from choosing it instead of Georgia.
I rarely encounter this problem though, I suppose there aren't many fonts that are only available as bitmap on most systems, and even fewer of them get used by websites.
KDE 3.5 was its peak for me. KDE 4 changed everything around completely, in a worse way (like no more multiple task bars, no more easy launcher icons, introduction of hard to disable CPU hogging background processes like baloo, less configuration, degradation in contrast of scrollbars in the theme choices, etc...).
If you haven't, try KDE 5 as well. I also found KDE 3.5 to be an amazing desktop and was then very disappointed by KDE 4, one of the worst software released I've used. But it was pretty much abandoned relatively quickly and KDE 5 is once again an excellent environment.
You know what is my pet peeve with Linux guis? Mouse movement. Why is it that despite spending a collective week of work hours on it and testing every single acceleration band speed setting it still feels like my mouse is imprecise and slow at the same time I use windows for a while and then go back to Linux?
Could it be that you have mouse acceleration turned off on Linux? Mouse acceleration makes the mouse pointer move further if you move the mouse faster. It's an option to turn on/off on KDE, and it's the way GNOME is set up unless you install GNOME Tweaks.
I liked Fresco - but CORBA was kind of going the wrong direction it turned out in time.
I'm still not convinced on Wayland. Does it solve X's security issues?
Of the problems in that SO link, I believe only "Isolation between apps" is an ongoing concern; Xorg (at least) hasn't listened to the network by default for a long time (as noted in that answer), but these days it doesn't run the X server as root either. That said, AFAIK yes Wayland does an excellent job of limiting the access that programs have.
Readit News
If anything that gives Wayland even more weight as the replacement for Xorg.
How many of Wayland haters have put the effort to make them happen?
KDrive gave me a TLS error (the certificate is misconfigured) but ignoring it brings me to a web page that states the information is obsolete and hasn't been updated in about 7 years according to the page info. Everybody online talks about KDrive in the past tense it seems.
Y-windows.org works, but the homepage only shows two entries written in 2004. It seems to be the product of a thesis that never received any development.
I think it's safe to say from the listed post, only Wayland survived. I think of all the other alternatives, Mir had the best change at succeeding, but that died half a decade ago.
I really hope Arcan takes off; it's a much more elegant system than Wayland's XML-based crap whose main defense is "just use a toolkit!".
Apparently, Mir is still being actively developed at Canonical, but with focus towards embedded systems. The original plan had been to base it on libraries borrowed from Android, but those have been replaced with parts of Wayland. It looks as if it can also be hosted on top of Wayland or X11.
Official site: https://mir-server.io/
Shutting up and using Wayland is the sensible thing to do.
If this is true it's a testament to how poorly designed Wayland must be - for it to have such comprehensive support & still be as limited as it is today is quite the achievement.
> Shutting up and using Wayland is the sensible thing to do.
Sadly, you're probably right here. The network effect has indeed shifted toward Wayland - I'm putting up & shutting up with it in my current system; I should probably switch back to Xorg given how bad it is, but knowing I'll likely be going back to Wayland eventually the effort of two migrations seems futile.
maybe the year of critical mass switchover will be soon?
Other desktops are either lagging way behind or are essentially unmaintained and not trying to upgrade.
All the old apps will hobble along with a compatibility layer, because for some reason it's better to remove all the clutter from X11 to write a new clean Wayland, and then re-introduce all the X11 clutter into a shim so that old apps can run.
In terms of usage numbers, X is very, very dead. Android uses something that looks a lot more like Wayland than X (or arguably Wayland looks a lot more like Android's SurfaceFlinger than X, but whatever), and ChromeOS is Wayland as well. I'm pretty sure Steam Deck is also Wayland.
1: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope
Thats wishful thinking. Citation needed.
I'm running it by default on a laptop, and other than it being tricky to set global keyboard shortcuts, it works perfectly fine.
I do usually select different fonts/sizes instead of relying on distro defaults though.
Anecdotally, I use PopOS as my daily driver and the fonts and DE are beautiful. I prefer it to the Mac workstation I use for work. When I flip my KVM I'm often reminded of the contrast. I use open source ligature enabled FreeType fonts and they are all exceedingly sharp.
http://freetype.org/
Have I just been using Linux so long that I'm ignorant of what's possible on other systems? What am I missing?
There is a section on font rendering, here is a copy.
Edit following worksonmine response:I pasted the part related to font rendering here for convenience, but note that the article is much more complete and has a page-long preface explaining the context, and answers to the most common objections. The article is not a suggestion that you should use Windows instead, in fact the author also has a "Windows 10 sucks" article.
My package manager describes it as A serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for low resolution devices.
You are probably blessed with not having this font installed on your system, which prevents your browser from choosing it instead of Georgia.
I rarely encounter this problem though, I suppose there aren't many fonts that are only available as bitmap on most systems, and even fewer of them get used by websites.
https://berlin.sourceforge.net/
oh and this for X11 security issues as it's a nice summary : https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/4641/why-are-pe...
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