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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).

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The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant (utcc.utoronto.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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In response to Wayland Breaks Your Bad Software

I say that the technical merits are irrelevant because I don't believe that they're a major factor any more in most people moving or not moving to Wayland.

With only a slight amount of generalization, none of these people will be moved by Wayland's technical merits. The energetic people who could be persuaded by technical merits to go through switching desktop environments or in some cases replacing hardware (or accepting limited features) have mostly moved to Wayland already. The people who remain on X are there either because they don't want to rebuild their desktop environment, they don't want to do without features and performance they currently have, or their Linux distribution doesn't think their desktop should switch to Wayland yet.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ok but then how about the developers of X11 who decided it wasn't worth fixing the issues and to start a new project called Wayland where they could start from scratch to fix the issues. Does that change your mind at all?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That would be a "technical merit", which the article author claims is irrelevant to the discussion.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have not had a single X11-related issue in the last decade.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't want to sound rude, but how old is your setup? Are you using a desktop or a laptop computer?

Because I'm daily driving a late 2015 Dell XPS 9350 and X11 just ain't cutting it, even though the laptop is nearly a decade old. On X11, its trackpad would be garbage, GNOME's animations would be stuttery, and fractional scaling would be a mess, because I have a docking station with a 75 Hz ultrawide monitor, meaning that I must utilise both 125% and 100% scaling factors, as well as 60 Hz and 75 Hz refresh rates and different resolutions. Sure, not everyone uses multi monitor setups, but those who do serious office tasks or content production work often cannot imagine their workflow without multiple monitors. Point is, X11 is to ancient to handle such tasks smoothly, reliably and efficiently.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It's not rude - don't worry. My main desktop runs 4 monitors at 1080p. GPU is an RX 580. I have a number of other laptops/tablets/desktops running similar configs, including ones with mixed resolutions and refresh rates. Gaming/video production/programming.

I think people are really discounting the amount of value experience with a certain set of software has to the end-user. Wayland isn't a drop-in replacement. There's a new suite of software and tooling around it that has to be learned, and this is by design. Understandably, many people focus on getting displays working properly on mixed resolutions and refresh rates, but there are concerns for usability/accessibility outside of that.