On 2025-04-04 Gilbert Detillieux wrote:
RANT: If Wayland is supposed to be the "one true way forward", you'd think they'd consider use cases beyond the standard interactive desktop! Kiosk-mode applications are not that rare that this would be a weird corner case unworthy of developer attention! Why are developers today so insistent on change yet so myopic about real-world use cases?!
You predicted exactly what I was going to say when reading your reply: Wayland, like most modern "redos", is generally pretty good at its common use case. What no one seems to consider anymore is the zillions of alternative use cases or unique needs of picky users. Things that evolved over 40 years of use and mods to X.
Everything Lennart & co & Wayland did was good for a laptop user with common use cases. But so much of it makes no sense on a server or even a power-user workstation. Lennart's idea that home dirs should be encrypted and so sshd can't access user keys is the prime case in point.
So that's why your Chromium is faster on Wayland, because it was designed to basically do just that (and some "security" stuff) and not much else (well, I guess 3D effects wooooo). But if you want unclutter or sawfish-programmable behaviors or remote clients, you're SOL.
(Wayland is faster for Chromium because it removes the entire layer that allows for "remoteness"; it's not faster because it's written better, it's faster by design with specific, known, limitations and "downgrades".)
Don't be so sure X will completely go away, though. All the BSDs use it and can never use Wayland because it's tied to all the Lennart-"kit"-isms and systemd. Therefore there will always be a Devuan-style rebel distro. The only question will be how painful a transition to that type of distro will be.
Or we need the wizards who made all of the uber-programmable sawfish et al to team up and make a compositor (which they say they can't/won't). Or maybe KDE, who did, will be the savior. But they seem to have switched from "infinitely configurable" to "dumb it down" as a mantra. Like we need another GNOME...
I also worry about the phone-ization aspect of Wayland. It was those phone OSes that invented (for Linux) the idea of GUI protection inter-app because they knew they were going to open the stores to zillions of unverified(able) apps. The open-source / rpm economy of (official) distro packages exists at a higher trust level in comparison. Maybe they are setting us up for tightly controlled, *forced* "app stores" on the linux desktop too. Can't have people with too much computational freedom (see also: Secure Boot)!