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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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40 years later, X Window System is far more relevant than anyone could guess (arstechnica.com)

submitted 5 months ago by jaypatelani@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I argue that X11 would have hyperactive development, if we did not have Wayland

Wayland was started by the X developers because they were sick and tired of hysterical raisins. Noone else volunteered to take over X, either, wayland devs are thus still stuck with maintaining XWayland themselves. I'm sure that at least a portion of the people shouting "but X just needs some work" at least had a look at the codebase, but then noped out of it -- and subsequently stopped whining about the switch to Wayland.

What's been a bit disappointing is DEs getting on the wayland train so late. A lot of the kinks could have been worked out way earlier if they had given their 2ct of feedback right from the start, instead of waiting 10 years to even start thinking about migrating.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

What’s been a bit disappointing is DEs getting on the wayland train so late. A lot of the kinks could have been worked out way earlier if they had given their 2ct of feedback right from the start, instead of waiting 10 years to even start thinking about migrating.

That's the real issue. And its worse with Gnome, as Gnome doesn't want support "all of" Wayland and its protocols. That means Wayland will be broken on Gnome, despite Gnome being the most used DE (at the moment). People complain about the problems in Wayland, but not all problems are caused by Wayland itself.

However there were or are two big reasons I can think of why Wayland wasn't adopted early and for some may never: a) its much harder to be Wayland conform, because the window manager/DE has to do much more work, b) Wayland was just not ready before, as many important aspects were missing (in example some basic protocols, Nvidia) or broken. I don't blame them. For the record, I am not a Wayland chill, just talking about this, because there are many misconceptions (me included, I'm not perfect) and switched to Wayland just end of last year. Before that Wayland did just not work for me. I even switched from Qtile to KDE, because KDE has probably the best Wayland support (I hate manual window management).

Edit: I just remembered another reason why Wayland wasn't probably adopted early. Canonical/Ubuntu started a Wayland alternative called Mir (that was before Mir transformed into a Wayland compositor). And devs probably didn't want set on Wayland or Mir before knowing what will be around in the future.