this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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First of all, X is not a security nightmare. There were 0 cases of someone getting hacked because of X exploit. It's a FUD.
Now Wayland is a fad (haha). It's not that much better than X and when it was drafted 10 years ago everyone just ignored it. Over the decade it became clear that X is stuck and at some point it will become obsolete so people started looking at alternatives and Wayland started getting some traction. Over time different tools started getting Wayland support, some people started getting exited about it and a kind of new meme developed where using Wayland meant that you're ahead of everyone else (just like using Arch BTW). In the end it's just a nice PR stunt. Ask people what specifically is so great about Wayland and they will mention some obscure features most people don't need and features that it will have 'soon'. In the long term the move will hopefully be a good thing but as of now if you don't specifically need the few features it has you can keep ignoring it.
Well explained 👍.
It is not a 'fad". Major distros have defaulted to Wayland (Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat, Debian, Manjaro etc).
X11 is old and designed for use cases in the 1980s. A lot of features have gradually moved out of X11 into the kernel or into other compositor systems. But the core X11 system is still limited by legacy design decisions and needing work arounds (which are complex to build and maintain).
Wayland is built to be the modern system that is built for current usage and needs. A lot of the benefits are not immediately obvious to the end user - a desktop is a desktop. But desktop interface projects like KDE who build user interfaces are hitting X11s limitations all the time, and a lot of effort goes in to working around X11s limits compared to working with Wayland. Effort spent working to work around X11 is time and work that could have been spent elsewhere on other fixes or new features and innovations.
The push to Wayland is deliberate and necessary, but was not always inevitable. Now that it's being adopted so widely as the default by big distros and projects it is likely inevitable. It has essentially reached critical mass.
I think a lot of people asking "what's the point" are not the ones working to build systems and distros at the back end. It's easy for us as end users to take for granted all the work behind the scenes that make our desktops "just work". But if you're a volunteer building a compositor fit for 2024, I can see why it'd be frustrating working around the limitations of a system built for 1984.
X11 has served us incredibly well and is a hugely important project. But Wayland is the way forward.
Sorry, I used the term "fad" to make a pun on X flaws being a 'FUD' (haha). It's not a fad in the sense that it will soon disappear. What I meant is that the excitement around it is not funded in actual benefits and it just recently became fashionable to support it.