Wayland 1.0 Released, Not Yet Ready To Replace X11

An anonymous reader writes "After being talked about for four years, Wayland 1.0 was released today. The Wayland 1.0 release doesn't mark it yet as being ready for Linux desktop usage but just being API/protocol stable for future expansion. Wayland will now maintain backwards compatibility going forward, but how much longer will it take to replace X11 on the Linux desktop? Quite a while seems likely."

Comments

Re:Hopefully another 25 years or more

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, developers are the second worst group for understanding what users need. The only part of X11 that people need is network transparent remote display, but that's the one part that the developers are absolutely hell bent on removing.

Re:How long?

[whoever57]

Every time Wayland comes up, people come out of the woodwork to declare it a failure because it won't run over a network, but that's the only real gripe I've seen. You say there are others, I'm curious to know what they are.

Network transparency is very useful for administering servers. It is very useful to run the various GUI programs that I run on various servers on our office network. Wayland supporters have suggested using VNC for that, but it misses the point, since that implies one VNC session per remote machine, which means multiple VNC sessions, each with its own window manager, issues with copying and pasting, etc..

The other key advantage that X11 has: if the application is mis-behaving the application's window can still be controlled by the window manager. Ever seen windows on a Windows desktop that cannot be minimized? Wayland is bringing that to Linux.

Re:Hopefully another 25 years or more

[tqk]

I guess all of the X11 developers that are the ones developing Wayland don't understand X11 that well.

"Don't understand X11 that well", I don't know (though I'd doubt they don't understand X). As for whether X11 needs replacing; not here, no.

I do worry that they're ignoring the ideals of X, and focusing too much on cellphone/*pad interfaces, as opposed to the original X ideal (any device *should* be able to handle it, regardless of what your particular prejudices might be).

Does Fluxbox run on Wayland? If so, I'll try it.