Reply to post: Re: A nit but not a nit...

More than three years after last release, X.Org Server 21.1.0 RC1 appears

thx1111

Re: A nit but not a nit...

People still seem to misunderstand what "Wayland" claims to be, that it is *just* "a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a C library implementation of that protocol.", and *not* actually any kind of functional "implementation", as is, in contrast, X11, "an open source implementation of the X Window System".

Any "want'a be" X11 replacement would seem to initially have only one simple requirement, to "copy existing X11 functionality". That's all, a Wayland Client providing full X11 Server functionality to existing X11 applications. Instead, now, after 13 years of Wayland "development", that has totally failed to happen. Basic hardware configuration, with xrandr, does not work. X11 client-server networking, does not work. Often, copy-paste does not even work.

In practice, the term "Wayland Server", means something quite different from the common meaning of "X11 Server". It is claimed that "Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X", insinuating that it necessarily provides all of: Networking, Compositing, Display Management, Window Management, Color Management, and Security. So far, in actuality, "Wayland" is nothing more than a new compositor hack with a better security model. There is no networking, no display management, no color management, and I think people still argue over how to perform window decorations in the window management.

I can only hope that, some day, some talented young developer, ambitious enough to "rush in where angels fear to tread", might swap-out the "compositor" part of X11 with some Wayland innards, to provide a satisfactory X11 evolution.

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