Is that updated? As far as I was aware that project stopped back in 2008 or so.. Also, if I am not mistaken, there is a serious limitation with it (or at least WAS), that it only had access to limited framebuffer memory and resources. Not that that has to be a problem necessarily, or even still is, perhaps the move to DRM/KMS have changed something fundamentally for such a project?

The real option is ncurses I suppose and framework/application support for framebuffer. Many frameworks and programs actually do have framebuffer support, including QT and GTK, and things like mplayer and QEMU (curses/nographics etc). An interesting thing to mention also perhaps is that Mageia and draktools (drak as in Mandrake) also have ncurses support, in addition to X.. It's just interesting to mention, because it depends on the program supporting other options than GUI/desktop.

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I could try to add that.. There is absolutely nothing about Wayland on docs.slackware.com . I'll see what I can do.. But, ehm, give me some time, holidays and all.

With KDE6, Wayland will become default btw. And if/whenever Slackware ships with that, it will probably become default for Slackware too. But well, generally speaking, you could try it now with:
or you can try/test any single program in Wayland with: (but you have no interface so you have to kill Wayland manually)

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Linux used to be about freedom and choices. What happened?

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This is what freedom looks like. If there is no other choice, then the only one must be chosen. It is that simple.
And actually this happens, we only have one kind of kernel, one version management system.... But that is another topic.

What happened and why is a fascinating question for the historians to chew over.

Meanwhile, "what will happen?" may be a more immediate question.

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What happened ? The Linux Foundation and freedesktop.org have been taken over by a few fortune 500 Companies. That is why we seem to see many items move slowly to a Windows way of doing things

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According to Daniel Stone, in 2013, at 22:20 in, 105 window managers had been written as X clients to address the X server deficiencies, because Linux is all about choice .

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Just looking at this thread, maybe a little perspective is needed here.

In the 1980s, I spent a while working in the Irish Amdahl Corporation factory. Gene Amdahl was doing cheaper IBM mainframe clones using air cooled ECL logic. They had a pretty identical OS and were the first 'compatibles.' Big companies would have one IBM (to be sure) and 3 or 4 Amdahls. At the time, IBM had gone over to water cooling but Amdahl was holding on to air cooling thanks to manufacturing tricks, which I was propping up. Overall, from starting ahead, Amdahl were losing the technology war. They duly lost it and went belly up in the nineties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Amdahl

It was all runlevel 3 stuff. If you wanted a printer, it was an IBM (or Amdahl) specified printer. Ditto disks, and every other peripheral. Freedom of choice? If you wanted to wire in some new-fangled gizmo, you got the middle finger. Freedom of choice? BTW, the power supply was 5V @ 400Amps!

Is a choice between a great window manager and a buggy insecure one 'freedom of choice?' I don't think so. Freedom of choice as it's being used here implies at least two respectable projects or more at a fairly equal stage of development. When there's just one, it's like the linux kernel - Linus calls the shots. But we're not selling out to M$ or anything. Nobody's bothered to write another kernel. Look at Gnu's micro-kernel if you don't believe me.

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Yes, because you also have the freedom to take that "buggy" code and fix it.

As the current state of our political systems (both UK and US) shows, the freedom to choose between two fixed options often leaves you with absolutely no choice at all.

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Not quite true. We have choices!

There are multiple display servers: it is just that X.org and Wayland are the most complete and general.
Operating from a text/curses interface and using a gui only over network is absolutely an option, but less than optimal for gaming or graphics/video work.

There are multiple kernels: HURD (the GNU kernel) works, but supports less hardware than the Linux kernel. There are also alternate Linux kernels that diverge from the mainstream General and RT Linux kernels.

Version management has choices, and a LOT of them. I remember when Linus created GIT and why. If you have forgotten, perhaps you should look it up: it is an interesting read. I was using/misusing two of the older version managers at the time and it was like and extra Christmas for me!

And CLEARLY on the same topic: it is important to note that we HAVE choices because we CREATE choices! If things do not do what we want we tend to get out our little development tools and go code diving to see why, and then write new things that work the way we WANT them to work. This is HOW FOSS is such an option and freedom rich environment.

Corporate and government enemies of freedom keep TRYING to lock things down, but as long as we can code solutions that we can use and license so that others can use them and they cannot be locked down then we can develop away from the lockin. There are far MORE of us than there are of them, we just have to work together to support FOSS and GNU!

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True, if you're a programmer with time to spare. It's not freedom of choice really if I have to employ someone.

very insightful, thanks.

the track-pad button is actually not working with Wayland on my laptop, it does work with X.

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Yup. My experience with Wayland is it's buggy. And everything it was created to fix like simpler code has been subpar. I'll stick with X. Maybe they'll get Wayland running well in the future though.

Wayland requires applications to be modified to work with it. Hmm - kinda like systemD in some cases. Don't like that. So could it happen that things progress so that we're stuck with Wayland one day? Dunno.

Wayland improves security? Well I've never had a hack come in through X in all my years.

X is just in maintenance mode now so no new features are being added. I can't think of any features I need added however. So let's create something new to fix something that is not broken.

I don't know enough about Wayland to say I know what I'm talking about. However what I do know I don't like what I've seen so far.

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I am running Wayland 1.22.0-1 with XWayland 23.2.3-1 to support pure X/X.org applications and it works just fine, but that is on ARCH and Manjaro.

I am keeping my SLACK stuff on X.org until the Wayland stuff for SLACK catches up.

Some might have to wait until a higher version is available to them, or until all of the improvements are backported.
Or they might have to port for themselves.
Or run in server mode with no GUI.

I am good with any of those options.

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That's the way it's been in Linux for years. Fvwm did just about everything a Window Manager could be expected to do 30 years ago. Gnome and KDE are still trying to catch up. And when they do catch up, when everything in Gnome and KDE is running like the well-oiled machine Fvwm was in the early 90s, someone else will come along to fix the non-existent problem. At this point it's more than just annoying ; it's an obstacle to real progress being made where it's needed. Here we are, nearly in 2024, and people still care about the Linux desktop and what it looks like? Something that is hidden the minute you log in? While Linux applications continue to rot, most of them just 80 percent complete?

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