> NVidia is broken, not Wayland. They refuse to implement the same APIs as everyone other driver does.

I'm extremely sympathetic to this argument, and I actually agree with ddevault's decision not to support NVidia in Sway. I think as an Open Source maintainer you don't have an obligation to burn yourself out solving a problem that is NVidia's fault, and we need real pressure on NVidia to stop being completely awful.

However.

Linux is at the point where I am able to start recommending it to ordinary people, and even technical people who are used to Windows. One the selling points I use is that a lot of hardware "just works" in Linux. NVidia is not ddevault's problem to solve, but people buy NVidia cards, and regardless of who's fault it is, if someone walks up to me and asks about switching to Linux or using a tiling window manager, I am not going to have a conversation with them about graphics cards. I'm going to point them towards X-compatible software that gets good performance regardless of their graphics card.

Doesn't mean it's anyone's fault that I can't recommend Wayland to everyone, but I can't recommend Wayland to everyone.

And I am on the Wayland hype train. I don't like X11, I want to run Wayland. In most cases, I would be defending Wayland right now. But if one of the conditions of switching over is "buy a new graphics card", if it's "redo all of your linux-wacom setup"[0], if it's running an entire embedded X session just to get Emacs working[1], if it's that common applications just don't work right now, then that's not ready for prime time. Those aren't problems that the Wayland devs can fix, but until they get fixed, I just can't in good conscience tell people that the Wayland ecosystem is mature and ready for regular usage.

The moment I have to talk to someone about throwing out hardware, I'm recommending them to stay on X. I don't care who's to blame, people want software that just works, and I don't feel confident that Wayland just works. I'm not going to recommend every i3 NVidia user throw away their graphics card, that's not a real solution. I sympathize with the devs who are being hounded to solve problems that aren't their responsibility[2], but I also sympathize with the users who are just as much not to blame for any of this. It is also not their problem to solve when they can instead just use an existing stack that works today. They have zero obligation to play Where's Waldo with the maintainers of a dozen projects just to build a working system.

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[0]: Do equivalently powerful tools to linux-wacom even exist for Wayland right now? I can't find out. There's basically zero documentation that exists on this that I can find, compared to an extensive Arch guide about rebinding keys under X11, multiple helpful utilities like xsetwacom that are pretty well documented, and dozens of blog posts and forums that are troubleshooting even obscure issues. That's not a narrow use case, my computer is an art station. I need to know before I switch that my Cintiq will work perfectly, and DuckDuckGo doesn't know the answer to that question.

[1]: Emacs is finally working to get rid of its X dependencies, but it's still not part of the main release, I'd still need to switch to compiling Emacs myself, which... no.

[2]: And I'm also sympathetic to arguments that this just takes time, and as people start to switch more utilities will be written and driver support will get better. But it's taking a really long time. And I don't know where NVidia fits on that spectrum, because I'm not confident that they're going to magically stop being awful any time soon. Maybe someone else will write a compatibility layer around the driver or something? Eventually? Waiting for NVidia to go out of business and their hardware to vanish isn't feasible.