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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Thoughts on this? (futurology.today)

submitted 1 year ago by dd56@futurology.today to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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[–] 0x0@social.rocketsfall.net 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wayland has mostly positive user reviews because it presents nicely to the user (VRR, scaling, etc.) On the developer front it seems there's a lot of struggle over things that were solved in X11 but for some reason require a lot of debate in Wayland.

There's still no way to universally configure monitors and input devices, so the startup cost to checking out a new "WM" (compositor in Wayland terms) is non-zero - you have to reconfigure everything from the ground up, and for anyone with complex input systems (see: accessibility devices) this will take a lot of time because each compositor insists on using a different format for configuring these things.
Each compositor is tasked with coming up with solutions for all parts of the user experience (hence the last point) and thus anyone who wants to experiment with making their own WM now has to worry about a billion things that wouldn't have had to deal with in X11. Yeah, there's libraries for dealing with that stuff, but it's not as simple as it was and lot of innovative WMs won't ever be able to make the jump.

These are the two biggest issues I can see that are entirely chalked up to its design. Technical issues (like the "load balancer" thing that keeps Firefox from crashing on Wayland) will be solved in time. However, the above points are unlikely to ever be addressed. Should they be? I don't know.

[–] AMDIsOurLord@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago

X11 world is just really as bad. It's just so that Wayland is new and X.Org hacks are so normalized it doesn't register for people how much work you need to put into X to make it work.

Each compositor is tasked with coming up with solutions for all parts of the user experience (hence the last point) and thus anyone who wants to experiment with making their own WM now has to worry about a billion things that wouldn’t have had to deal with in X11

Well, you would be disappointed to know that it's somewhat the same fuckery under XOrg as every usable compositor and window manager needs to carry fixes, hacks, and hardcoded workaround for edge cases in X or features that are unsupported today. If you use a Wayland library like you use X libraries it's not that much harder to make a simple Wayland compositor.

This is one of the most cited "wayland issues" and it's IMO completely and utterly wrong. Go look at how convoluted existing XOrg codebases (mutter, metacity, compton, compiz, etc.) are. It's only "simple" if you wish to draw a rectangle upon the screen ( and even then, wlroots exist)