by jchw | 2025-06-18 16:04:27+00:00
> I love having to detect at runtime the compositor I'm using (and its version) and have bespoke code paths to work around their various bugs and omissions.

> Definitely a recipe for reliable, usable, maintainable software.

Honestly, tough. I didn't like dealing with Xlib/xcb, the weird error handling, or broken ICCCM implementations, but all of that stuff is typically lower level than most developers need to care about, since most developers are going to be using toolkits. If you need or want to go lower level, Wayland is what you get now. You don't have to do anything, you can always take your stuff and go home; the free desktop, though, is not going to be moving back towards X11. The rest of us will keep working to improve Wayland until it stops hurting.

Modern users have high DPI displays, variable refresh rates, multiple monitors, and panels with HDR color space support. X11 was just never going to work well for this. KDE Plasma 6.3, on the other hand, handles any of these situations quite well and I've been using it on a daily basis.

There are many users who can't even do real work without proper color management; it's so bad that for Blackmagic users the typical workaround is additional hardware. Retrofitting good color management into X11 is just not something anyone wants to try to do, it's not fit for the task. We have to move on, and Wayland is the best path forward for the foreseeable future.

> This reads like a "missing missing reason"[1]. People do understand it, and they explain why it's a dealbreaker. Wayland has had a decade and a half to grow some consensus and make these very basic things that work under X11 work. Instead of doing that, they're now relying on the main distributions just giving up on (the hardware) X11 servers instead of fixing this. I don't care if only one or two compositors that I don't run support the one thing that I need. That doesn't help me because those compositors don't implement other functionality I need. Having a stable, agreed upon, universally consistently implemented base of functionality that application developers and toolkits can rely on is a good thing.

Not a big fan of people throwing out psychology terms half-heartedly, but whatever.

The key misunderstanding is thinking that Wayland stops you from doing anything, but really from an end user's standpoint, the right question is "Can I do x on KDE?" because it is your compositor that really defines what your desktop is capable of in the Wayland world.

Developers have to deal with fragmentation by design. Wayland is not a superset or subset of X11, it's an entirely different thing altogether that happens to also cover the use case of applications talking to a display server. It also covers things like kiosks and embedded systems that X11 could be jammed into but was never a great fit for. Technically you're not guaranteed xdg-shell but that never seems to bother anyone.

This is not an accident at all though, it's an intentional strategic choice. Giving application developers less low level tools was a logical choice when looking at the types of hacks X11 applications did to implement features the desktops did not nominally support. This acts as a forcing function to have desktop systems properly support features that they need so that these features can properly integrate into the system. There's no equivalent to layer-shell in X11.

It is not expected to be a thing application developers are always happy about. People are rarely happy when agency is taken away from them.

> This is a complete clusterfuck, and that's why there's user feedback. Trying to frame it as "people just don't understand" isn't productive. They do, and their criticisms have some validity. It's up to the Wayland devs to see if they care, and historically, they haven't.

This was not a response to user feedback, it was a response to a question that revealed a misunderstanding. It's just that simple.