Wayland Considered Harmful (to GNU/Linux Adoption)
In case it's not already obvious, many people are either not interested in Wayland or don't even know what that is. If they use X, it's not a political statement. If they wish to stay with what works for them, it's not a political statement either.
Only yesterday:
There are almost 100 comments about it, starting with "wAylANd worKs for mE guYs, EverYthiNg wORks FiNe iT doEs not LaCk aNYThinG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Where's all the other stupid clowns who said Wayland is feature complete and has no design imposed limitations? I'm sick of providing links every single time when the same clowns will always ask again in the next topic."
A later comment said: "Could this be the end of Wayland?"
Probably not, as it refuses to die for nearly 2 decades already. In page 2: "Targeting X11 is fine for the time being. WINE/Proton isn't fully ready to support Wayland aswell, so most games have to run through some X11 implementation anyways."
Indeed, and it's not limited to games.
Apropos games, Connor McLaughlin yesterday (shunning a distro because of Wayland):
Maybe next year will be the "year of Wayland". If not, maybe the year after that... or after that.
Wayland would not work for any of our machines at home. We rely on features and tools that Wayland lacks, set aside compatibility.
As Hackaday put it this week: "After more than forty years, everyone knows that it’s time to retire the X Window System – X11 for short – on account of it being old and decrepit. Or at least that’s what the common narrative is, because if you dig into the chatter surrounding the ongoing transition there are some real issues that people have with the 16-year old spring chicken – called Wayland – that’s supposed to replace it. [...] Even if Wayland does end up succeeding X11, the one point that many people seem to agree on is that just because X11 is pretty terrible right now, this doesn’t automatically make Wayland the better option. Maybe in hindsight Mir was the better choice we had before it pivoted to Wayland."
A few days ago in our Geminispace links, but in Gopher protocol, someone wrote:
Anyway, when you don't do sandboxing to begin with, it hardly matters if you're using Wayland or X11. `ping` can read my SSH keys. My terminal can. `ls` can. `jq` can.If Wayland gave me a huge boost in terms of security, it would be worth the sacrifices. We're not there yet.
This whole situation reminds me a lot about my efforts to switch from Windows to Linux some 20 years ago. I tried to switch to 100% Linux many times because it was interesting and supposedly better, but it just wasn't what I *wanted*. There were too many things that caused pain.
Only when I eventually got sold on the philosophical/political/moral idea of Free Software, I was able to think: "Okay, this is worth it, I'm gonna push through. This is what I want now."
Maybe Wayland will be functional for everyone one day. Or maybe not. For now, however, many people have pragmatic reasons to avoid/skip it. Don't try to insult them. It won't work. █