As soon as an article starts by telling you that Wayland is 18 years old, you know where it is going to go. Yes, the very beginning of the Wayland experiment started long ago but it was not something anybody was expected to use most of that time.

The very first Wayland-only desktop environment ever, COSMIC, launched just last month. Should I write an article about how amazing Wayland is despite being so new?

A more neutral view might be to use Sway itself as a benchmark as it was one of the earliest Wayland compositors. The Sway project is less than 10 years old. The most complete Wayland environment available today, KDE Plasma, started to experiment with Wayland around then as well.

But Wayland has only really come into its own in the last 5 years with remaining edge cases regularly being addressed over the last two.

And we are now in a place where Wayland works for most people. The edge cases that remain are largely more exotic, like this guys 8K monitor. It would be dishonest to pretend Wayland’s evolution has been rapid. It has largely been dysfunctional. And real gaps remain. But it is already superior to X11 in many ways and the list of remaining use cases not well addressed continues to drop.

Yes, Wayland does a lot of stuff better than X11.

A Linux desktop user that started in Wayland a couple of years ago would be able to write a similarly negative article about Xorg if they tried to switch to it. The two systems are different. Neither is absolutely better than the other today. But Wayland is improving and Xorg is not.

And more than half of Linux desktop users run Wayland now. And 4 out of 5 new Linux desktop users start on Wayland and never switch. Linux is a Wayland first OS. So, when articles like this complain about how long it would take to reconfigure their systems for Wayland, they miss an important point. The Wayland way is the “correct” way now, or at least the most common way. The X11 config is the weird one.

And one of the things Wayland does better is run Wayland apps. The foot terminal mentioned in this article cannot be run on X11 at all. It is Wayland only. All of the apps an X user tries on Wayland will at least run. Not so the other way around.

When GNOME and KDE shed their X11 compatibility, they will be able to more freely innovate Wayland only features. As that starts to happen, it will become more normal to create Wayland only applications. This won’t be a problem as 80 percent or more of Linux desktop uses will be using Wayland-only desktop environments.

And that is what will ultimately doom X11. It will become impractical to run and X server instead of Wayland due to the important Wayland apps that cannot run on such a desktop.

Anyway, it was a well written article and mostly fair. It will be very interesting to see how the set of requirements fares 1 - 2 years from now. GNOME and KDE will be Wayland only. COSMIC will have matured. Wayland compositors will have standardized a bit.

I suspect that things will be looking very nice.

So much this. Just 100% stop all trade with the United States. All of it. And zero travel. Then ban US travel to your country. Give them the isolation they crave.

Because it is less trouble.

I read comments here all the time. People say Linux does not work with the Wifi on their Macs. Works with mine I say. Wayland does not work and lacks this feature or this and this. What software versions are you using I wonder, it has been fixed for me for ages.

Or how about missing software. Am I downloading tarballs to compile myself? No. Am I finding some random PPA? No. Is that PPA conflicting with a PPA I installed last year? No. Am I fighting the sandboxing on Flatpak? No. M I install everything on my system through the package manager.

Am I trying to do development and discovering that I need newer libraries than my distro ships? No. Am I installing newer software and breaking my package manager? No.

Is my system an unstable house of cards because of all the ways I have had to work around the limitations of my distro? No.

When I read about new software with new features, am I trying it out on my system in a couple days. Yes.

After using Arch, everything else just seems so complicated, limited, and frankly unstable.

I have no idea why people think it is harder. To install maybe. If that is your issue, use EndeavourOS.

Almost entirely misinformation. Saying that Xorg only used one protocol is amazing. X11 has a billion extensions. It is unusable without them.

Saying that X11 had feature parity with other desktop operating systems is delusional.

But the craziest argument is fragmentation.

Wayland is already on over 50% of Linux desktops. The two most popular desktop environments default to it. The most popular desktop environment is about to remove support for X11. The most popular desktop Linux distribution is dropping support for Xorg in October.

The only popular distro that does not default to Wayland is Mint as Cinnamon is not ready. But it too will default to Wayland within a year at most.

Even Debian Stable defaults to Wayland now.

If you want to minimize fragmentation on Linux, use Wayland.

[edit: I had not read far enough. The absolute craziest argument is “enterprise adoption”. The most successful enterprise distro is Red Hat by a country mile. Number two is SUSE. Number three is Ubuntu. Red Hat and SUSE have both stopped shipping Xorg entirely. Ubuntu is removing it in October. The idea that enterprises want us to adopt Xlibre is next level detached and deranged.]

I am going to say this every comment.

Stop sending the US oil. Stop sending natural gas. Stop sending electricity. Stop sending steel and aluminum. Stop sending them rare earths. Stop sending them wood. Do it immediately. Do it now.

We will see who needs who.

Yes, this would cause economic pain in Canada. So will not doing it.

Everything above is in demand all over the world.

Frankly, every other county should attend a summit next month where we ALL agree to stop sending the US anything and stop buying anything from the US.

If America wants to isolate themselves, I say let’s go!!

Triumph of visual design over interactive design. These days, most “designers” only care about graphics visually. The much deeper science of how people use and understand things is beyond them. Worse, they think the problem is that everybody else does not “get” visual design.

Style over substance.

I actually do not like Discord and wish they did not use it. That said “absolutely no reason not to use Matrix” is clearly an objectively untrue statement.

Andreas has always been very pragmatic. He will choose the tools he likes best.

The creator here buys hardware designed to run Linux ( from Tuxedo ) and uses the distro designed to run on that hardware. So no big surprise he thought all hardware problems were solved.

Probably a similar issue with office apps. He is not trying to share an Outlook calendars with coworkers or deal with complex spreadsheets sent from colleagues. He is probably not sending many PowerPoints to his boss.

Good on him for reaching out to his community to ensure his opinions are backed by evidence.

Linux does this all the time.

ALSA -> Pulse -> Pipewire

Xorg -> Wayland

GNOME 2 -> GNOME 3

Every window manager, compositor, and DE

GIMP 2 -> GIMP 3

SysV init -> SystemD

OpenSSL -> BoringSSL

Twenty different kinds of package manager

Many shifts in popular software

The reason this is a first is because AlmaLinux recently decided to stop being a bug for bug clone of RHEL. Good for them. As this shows, they are now actually free to add value.

Rocky Linux cannot ship this patch unless RHEL does. Rocky cannot contribute anything by definition.

The article says this will be “based on Ubuntu” but it will probably actually just be Ubuntu with custom defaults, pre-installed software, and maybe repositories.

This just makes sense in my view. The cost relative to the number of machines they must deploy will be miniscule. If they do not mess with the core system too much, they can outsource almost all the admin and expertise to Canonical in terms of security and packaging. People saying this will blow up. Why? It does not sound like they are really creating a full distro from scratch. Is Ubuntu not viable?

In terms of why crating a custom version instead of just using actual Ubuntu. Again, the cost of customizing a distro can be dramatically less than making even simple configurations on every system after the fact. They can standardize what the desktop will look like and set key defaults. They can choose what applications are installed by default. They can remove applications from the repository that they do not want to be installed. The can ensure that localization is done well, etc.

Except that they are not expecting to merge this into RHEL. They are sending it to CentOS Stream.