Looking ahead with Mint Linux
- Thread starter Daniel~
- Start date
I'm...really torn on this.
On the one hand, Wayland fixes a number of X11 issues. On the other, there is still a lot of software out there which uses X11. Wayland solves this with an X11 shim (basically a translation layer that translates X11 calls to their Wayland equivalents). That shim both helps and hurts. It helps because it means that legacy X11 apps that may be useful but are no longer under development can still work. It hurts because it means that lazy devs can continue to develop for the lowest common denominator (X11).
On the other side of the coin, there's XLibre, which is basically X11 but fixed, and arguably in a better way than Wayland. The main problem with XLibre is that it is basically (to my understanding) one developer. If he gets hit by a bus, XLibre is dead.
As Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu and Debian, and they are both moving to Wayland, the Linux Mint devs may be having their hands forced here.
I don't actually see this making a difference to me, as the vast majority of my use-cases aren't impacted by the areas that X11 works and Wayland doesn't, I don't think. Time will tell.
On the one hand, Wayland fixes a number of X11 issues. On the other, there is still a lot of software out there which uses X11. Wayland solves this with an X11 shim (basically a translation layer that translates X11 calls to their Wayland equivalents). That shim both helps and hurts. It helps because it means that legacy X11 apps that may be useful but are no longer under development can still work. It hurts because it means that lazy devs can continue to develop for the lowest common denominator (X11).
On the other side of the coin, there's XLibre, which is basically X11 but fixed, and arguably in a better way than Wayland. The main problem with XLibre is that it is basically (to my understanding) one developer. If he gets hit by a bus, XLibre is dead.
As Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu and Debian, and they are both moving to Wayland, the Linux Mint devs may be having their hands forced here.
I don't actually see this making a difference to me, as the vast majority of my use-cases aren't impacted by the areas that X11 works and Wayland doesn't, I don't think. Time will tell.
Kaitain
Active Member
I can't say I've noticed much difference between the two. I initially had some teething troubles with Wayland, but they turned out to be the result of a problem occurring between the keyboard and the back of the chair - people on binary distros where the curators bother to read the manual before installing will probably not be faced with the same quirks I had.
That's more likely to be a reflection of the toolkits and engines that devs use to build their applications. The more common ones for desktop - GTK and Qt are already retooled for Wayland. Game engines are also moving across progressively - though the largest (unity and unreal) are, at the time of writing, a little ropey.
The shim is probably more useful if you want to both use Wayland and still run something truly antique, like Matlab 6...
The XLibre founder is also a man of interesting political views, which makes him radioactive to a lot of developers as well as some distros.
Desktop environments are also pushing the subject: Gnome already dropped X11, KDE will follow in an interation or two... and I can't imagine the Cinnamon devs holding out forever, either.
I think where this impact will be felt most is with the BSDs, as the likes of wayland are unashamedly not cross-platform in the way that X11 was.