Re: [gentoo-user] Wayland! Beware of!

[Wol <antlists@youngman.org.uk>]

On 23/09/2024 21:14, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> What on Earth is going on?  I never asked for wayland, and I haven't
> received any news items about it in the last few weeks.  I know little
> about this X substitute, but one thing's vitually certain; that
> installing it as emerge intended would lead to a lot of breakage.

Well, everything is slowly moving to Wayland, or X13 as they didn't call 
it. And while I don't understand the details, X Org is basically dead.

X comes in two halves, the front end (or server, they use the words the 
other way round to normal), which is still maintained. And the back end, 
or client, that drives the hardware - this bit is basically abandonware 
apart from the Wayland compositor or whatever it is.

So put pretty simply, Wayland is fast becoming - if it isn't already - a 
hard dependency of X11. But if you want to run X11 as your sole 
windowing system, that's no problem, just run it over Wayland.

What makes you think that enabling Wayland will cause breakage? It 
shouldn't really do anything much, other than allowing apps to access 
Wayland features if they want. Given that both KDE/Plasma, and Gnome, 
are moving to Wayland (and pretty much hide Wayland from you, just like 
they hide X), I would have thought disabling Wayland was actually MORE 
likely to cause breakage.

Not that your hardware/X combo is going to bitrot, but the apps you rely 
on might start relying on Wayland and won't be happy if they can't find it.

(I'm cursing Plasma 6, but that's not Wayland's fault. afaict it's 
having problems importing/updating the old Plasma 5 settings with the 
result it resets itself every time I log in :-(

Cheers,
Wol