Jamie Zawinski Complained About Wayland, Then Decided to Give It a Go, Now Complains Again About Wayland
Jamie Zawinski is known for all sorts of things, including Mozilla and XScreenSaver. Zawinski is generally regarded as an important person in the Free software community, even an historic figure at a relatively young age. I spoke to him a few months ago.
So several weeks ago we cited his rants about Wayland. He has since then attempted to explore it and this is what he's saying now: "Welp, I got crickets in answer to my question, "How do I find the wl_surface backing an Xwayland X11 Window?" and that does not bode well for XScreenSaver ever being able to lock your screen on Wayland."
Wayland isn't meant work to and Xwayland is meant to pretend that it can work, even if just barely.
As someone told me today in private: "Wayland messes up several assistive technology features I may need which ChromeOS has. To be honest, X11 window managers usually had them too. GNOME put a lot of effort into being ADA compliant at one point. Even public libraries used GNOME sometimes. Now they can't. If they go to use GNOME and it's not ADA compliant, anyone who has trouble using that computer because of this can sue the library. So they end up using Windows. It's sad that in 20 years, GNOME has taken so many steps backwards."
Ask IBM (Red Hat) why it's worth throwing so much away just for Wayland fanaticism. █
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