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Wayland Isn't Ready For the Fedora 24 Desktop (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: There was much hope that Fedora 24 would be the first major Linux distribution using Wayland by default in place of an X.Org Server, that didn't pan out with Fedora 24 Workstation developers deciding not to use Wayland by default but it will remain a log-in time option. Fedora Wayland has made a lot of progress but functionality like on-screen keyboard, accessibility, remote displays, USB display hot-plugging, and other functionality is incomplete for the Fedora 24 timeline. At least there are many other Fedora 24 features that made it for this next release due out in June. Wayland will turn eight years old this year.
What unsolved problem does Wayland address?
No one has any difficulty securely running GUIs across networks.
The X protocol is not in line with how modern graphics is handled, this precludes good compression on X over ssh and also forces a lot of unnecessary complexity which is bad for security. Although I would be happier if they had just called it X12 an update that included dumping some of the old stuff in the core of the old protocol was necessary, now that they have decided to include network "transparency" equivalent functionality (single window tunnelling over ssh) and select+middle click paste the rest of it just looks like clean-up.
I've come to see Wayland as one of those open source projects that receives a huge amount of hype and attention, yet never manages to produce anything usable, even after many years.
It's up there with Rust, Servo, Perl 6 and Diaspora. It's like their supporters spend more time writing articles about how great these projects are, and little to no time actually writing code to make them a reality!
Even if they do write code, they never write useful code. They'll implement something, then decide to change up their approach mid-way through, then write more code, then decide to try something else, then write more code, then go back to the first approach but with a twist, and they'll write more code, but then change their philosophy, and they'll repeat this over and over and over and over and over and over. Nothing gets accomplished in the end.
I think if an open source project hasn't had a usable release after 4 years, it should be considered a dead-end project and thrown away. Diaspora clearly falls into this category. Perl 6 fell into it over a decade ago. Servo is well on its way there. Rust is borderline. At least the Rusters have produced something that's kinda minimally usable but it's still rather shitty overall. If Rust 2 doesn't get its shit together, then we can consider Rust a failed project, too. And we can surely include Wayland among this group of failures, too.
Holy fuck Macs are expensive jokes? What the fuck year is this? OS X is free and runs on Intel now dumbass.