this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Duh. But you do understand what purpose the metaphor serves?
Yes. And it's a bad analogy. Nobody is expecting you to be able to take a barge on railways. But existing linux applications are being expected to run on Wayland. As I said - railways didn't replace canals - they're different types of things.
Within the last 10 years and the next 5 years, software using old hacks instead of GUI toolkits are expected to switch, yes.
People can choose to continue to use X11 until KDE Plasma 6 hits Debian stable.
I don't see a problem. Nobody forces Wayland onto anyone yet, except for bleeding edge distributions like Fedora. And unless you've been severely misled, you should know what you signed up for when you installed Fedora.
I didn't say there was a problem. I'm saying it's pretty disingenuous to act like Wayland isn't intended as a replacement for X11. All of which you seem to agree with. As you say "nobody forces Wayland onto anyone yet" (emphasis mine).
Also - I just love how your comment is written like a politician would have written it. "Sure you can use the dirty old X11 if you really want to, or you can use the nice new God-fearing Wayland".
If you bring the two parts of your comment together and dial back the assumptions of bad faith, you'll get a consistent picture:
Wayland is a blank slate replacement for how to do window management on Linux. At some point it'll become the standard for software that's new or maintained. Unmaintained software that doesn't talk to the internet and is therefore safe to run even with security holes will continue to be supported via XWayland. The giant scope and API surface is part of the reason why it's deprecated. Maintainers are expected to target the new way to do things going forward, because there are people able and willing to maintain that support (many of those people former X11 maintainers who are looking forward to stop having to deal with that legacy behemoth)
That's the state of things I wanted to express. Not my opinion, no agenda, just how I understand the situation.
Neat.