Actually this has been a core value of Unix design since the 1960s, and will be a valid goal in the 2060s.

Here in the Linux world we follow the principle of "don't break userspace".

Wayland violates this principle by rolling out a new protocol that breaks compatibility with existing applications. Just take the loss man, some people don't want wayland you need to accept that.


I'm not particularly interested in seeing this thread get repeatedly bumped by a non-slackware user who just wants to spout nonsense and argue. Can we get this thread locked, or at least moved to a more appropriate forum? Maybe general?

I like both Xorg and Wayland, but I favour Wayland due to the security implications.. I don't want to run unstable software either, or some kind of beta state software. So, while I've tested Wayland for about 5 years on or off, it was only with Slackware 15 I actually started using Wayland as the main option. Previous attempts (mainly due to KDE) felt unstable and did not fulfill the quality I was looking for, but these days Wayland (and KDE on Wayland) is becoming quite stable and functional.

It's not 100% there, but it's getting very close (as of Slackware 15), and it's mostly ready for everyday use. I expect this to improve further and make Wayland an obvious choice, most likely starting already with KDE 6. With KDE 6, they will use Wayland as the main option, and thus put most of their effort into Wayland improvements and polish, and new features might be prioritized for Wayland as well. But they will keep compatibility with Xorg, so people will be pretty much free to choose, and I think this will be an ideal situation for now.

I started running current with Wayland and plasma recently, and it look great. On the same hardware Manjaro runs better and faster, and the display is sharper (better colors), but that is partly that Manjaro is now running the 6.9 kernel and new versions of everything else. I am betting those new drivers are a big part of the difference.

On Manjaro Wayland is faster than X.org and looks better.
On Slackware Wayland is about the same speed and they look the same.

My conclusion is that Slackware 16 or so we will have reason to jump to Wayland and Plasma 6 (or later). Right now there is no good reason to make that jump.

PS. Current really rocks! There is no question in my mind that this is the best SLACKWARE has ever been.

Looks like unfortunately you compare Manjaro's Plasma6 with Slackware-current's stock Plasma5 .

Trust me that also in Slackware-current the Wayland/Plasma6 is faster than the X11 counterpart and it looks better. ;)

For anyone else who's still barely tried a wayland compositor and is still foggy what it involves and depends on, maybe the perspective of the BSDs would help. Saw this linked from a recent post on the state of X in NetBSD. It's well written and by a serious developer, but also I think seeing what NetBSD needs to do to get a small compositor working helps to understand what a compositor involves in general:
http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/way...bsd_trials_and

It seems to be a larger undertaking than an X window manager.

(If mention of NetBSD comes across as promoting NetBSD among Slackware users I apologize. Part of my initiation to Slackware was a NetBSD user praising it on a BSD forum, so if I were supposing anyone is motivated by a post of mine to try NetBSD I'm assuming "conversion" wouldn't be a parting of ways with Slackware but, er, uh, rather a threesome.)

BUT, we DO NOT use NetBSD, and their rather elitist attitude I find anyway rather silly. Really silly.

And NOPE, for me nothing is foggy about Wayland, as I used it daily since long damned years. On Plasma5 and Gnome4, BTW.

It's NOTHING controversial about Wayland, and even on Slackware it works quite well - both on Plasma5/Plasma6 and Gnome4.

Wake up, people! The Wayland is NOT something like systemd - which you can demonize at your heart content. :p

Wayland is HERE. On Slackware. Right now. And it works well.

I'm not demonizing and not daemonizing it, which is to say I'm not objecting to it nor am I running it. The question for me is only whether I can run what other software I want to run with it. Right now the answer appears to be no. Once I get my X window manager in the shape I want it, though, I am half thinking of trying to write a compositor. Maybe some Common Lisp people will have advanced the state of their Wayland libraries (like wayflan) by then.

I was more addressing those in this thread like me who are curious and puzzled but not ready yet.

Well, that depends on whether you're talking about GTK/Qt based apps, or some other "legacy" X11 software I guess. In any case Xwayland is available to provide some level of compatibility for native X11 applications that are yet to provide Wayland support.

The vast majority of users will be using a desktop environment, not developing one.

Man, you have all my compassion as NetBSD user. BUT, you are kind to express your BSD concerns in their forums? I know, I know, they are in a really nasty situation, but honestly I do NOT care about those elitist guys, who said years and years so many nasty things about Linux. Heck, they live by bashing Linux while they are today just some "parasites" of Linux. That's ridiculous, no matter how you look at.

HOWEVER, to have in the Slackware forum a Wayland-hating thread worth of 21 pages about NOTHING I believe that's beyond absurd.

Yes, it's "predicted" the abandonment of X.org by IBM. As in IBM NOT willing anymore to pay for maintaining this spaghetti code known as X.org. So, what?

Even when the Xorg will be abandoned, NOTHING will change for Slackers. Because a particular guy, who "have the reputation of being asshole" as some people on this forum refers about me, well... this particular guy knows well how to make a fully functional X11 server using a rather useless Wayland compositor. I talk about Weston here.

And being so simple to make that "fully functional X11 server using a rather useless Wayland compositor" I honestly believe that many other Linux users and also Slackers can do the math.

The losers are only the BSDs and they original UNIX operating system. Not the Slackers. Not the Linux users at whole. Only the BSDs.

So, I ask the BSD users present in this thread dissimulated as Slackers, to be kind enough to go on their BSD forums for freaking out as they like. I understand well that they have WHY to freak out, as soon only the console will sport their beloved BSDs. BUT, it's their business, to express on their BSD forums.

Yes, there was that bit of annoyance expressed in the article about Linuxisms. Sorry, I forgot about that part. But what you claim is my motivation really isn't. I did think that a couple others in this thread might find the article interesting and helpful: a way to understand a thing is to try immersing it in different solutions, see what forms it takes in each. But I guess they can read it if so, so I'll leave this discussion at this point.

A part I'm a bit puzzled by is whether Xwayland can run with any compositor or what its demands are. It's only another wayland client, right? So in the article I posted on the alien O/S that no one here should look at, it struck me as curious he included support for X clients among the huge lift that would be needed if the effort was to continue. Mind you, that was 2020. Maybe someone trying today with swc or wlroots instead wouldn't have that problem.

I understand that if you use Gnome and Gtk programs or KDE and Qt ones on Linux (and probably BSD at some point) then switching to Wayland is almost not noticeable. I did that on an old Mac with Slackware 15.0 one time.

But I don't care for those environments, so am curious how things will unfold for the smaller Window managers and compositors. But it seems this will take quite some time to unfold whatever the recent enthusiasm.

(okay, I am done now -- I didn't want to not respond to the more civil of the responses.)

Yes, it is a Wayland client.

Well, the window manager is also the compositor in a Wayland context. It's up to the those who maintain the existing X11-based desktop environments to do the necessary development if they want to support the Wayland protocol.

The wayland leaders are mostly X.org leaders. That's it. We're running out of excuses not to use it.

Personally, I'm just waiting for

1. My preferred Window Managers (Mate, XFCE & maybe Cinnamon) to get compatible.
2. Some how-to on transition & maintenance. Maybe we'll be looking at problems wondering how to solve them.

The docs could well be out there. But then I'd be out there like some newbie, afraid to do anything in case I broke Wayland :p.