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0 pointszeveb5y ago0 comments

It's not fear, it's resentment: the old ways worked, and often worked quite well, and everyone has mostly settled on reasonable ways to work around where the old ways were broken; the new ways quite simply don't work in ways that the old ones continue to work just fine, and we resent being forced to lose functionality we appreciate having.

Systemd does offer some nice functionality, but in return it makes certain unreasonable demands (.ini files everywhere, binary logs, systemd-{resolved,homedir,consoled,all-the-things}. Wayland does offer some nice functionality, but it is not ready for prime time yet. It is nowhere near ready for prime time yet. It cannot replace X11, because it utterly fails to replace key X11 functionality today.

Next year, or the year after, it might be different. It probably will be. I genuinely look forward to adopting Wayland when it upgrades X11. But I would utterly resent being forced to use it today, and I am very worried that I may soon be.

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sergeykish5y ago· 2 in thread

> But I would utterly resent being forced to use it today, and I am very worried that I may soon be.

Imagine world where there is no Wayland, how is it better? I fail to understand who forces you. Maybe default choice of distribution? Or that people don't want to maintain X.Org?

People maintained other init systems in Arch Linux, they are gone now. Too much work probably? People created Duvian [1]. If systemd is such an awful choice it should be amazingly popular.

[1] https://devuan.org/

zevebOP5y ago

> Imagine world where there is no Wayland, how is it better? I fail to understand who forces you.

You answered your own question. It starts with distros defaulting to Wayland, despite it completely missing features I currently rely on in X11. No big deal, I can always manually switch to X. It's only a small pain! Then more and more software starts being Wayland-only, because most people are using it by default. Not a huge deal, I can stick to older versions of software. Then drivers are only released for Wayland, because at this point the only people left running X are me and a few other folks like me. Meanwhile, the features I consider absolutely necessary are still missing, because the primary source of funding is no longer hobbyists but corporate vendors.

I have seen it happen before, with GNOME. A decade or more after the cascade of attention-deficit teenagers started stripping out features it is still missing plenty.

> People created Duvian. If systemd is such an awful choice it should be amazingly popular.

You miss the corrupting influence of money. Money means resources, and resources mean being able to extend tentacles into every project. Resources mean being able to present an offer to other projects that they can't refuse: patches that implement needed functionality and, oh yeah, also mandate systemWaylanD.

sergeykish5y ago

No, without Wayland there would be stagnation. Less users, less corporate sponsorship, less developers.

You and me (I use XOrg too, no xmonad on Wayland) enjoy status quo for free. We consume work that maintainers do not enjoy.

> and I am completely burnt out on that on its own merits [1]

[1] https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server...

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> attention-deficit teenagers

JWZ cliches are worn out, marking group you don't agree with disorder regresses discussion. Someone would call you old whiner and he would be right. I would recommend you join BSD camp.

> You miss the corrupting influence of money.

I missed nothing. Same money brought what we have today. A lot of people work on Open Source for free.

> mandate systemWaylanD.

Straight from ajaxnwnk:

> X11 clients are eternal, there's just way too many of them out there that are line-of-business and will never be ported to anything else [2].

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24925459

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I feel sick seeing such attitude. I would reply anymore.

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