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> Every time I see the X11 protocol, I realize that the UNIX philosophy (everything is a file) is dead.

Brings back memories of the old days of the late 1990s trying out so many workstations running obscure Linux distros to actual UNIX OSes like IRIX, Solaris and HP-UX.

They all ran some variant of X11 which was part of the UNIX philosophy which I found interesting (X11 forwarding, startx, etc) but as the requirements of the desktop kept evolving over time, X11 just kept on showing its age.

Nowadays, Wayland is showing promise as a successor but I really don't have time to be messing around with these .xinitrc, .Xresources or dotfiles to get HDPI working on my MacBook these days.

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The uncomfortable truth today is that, while having to touch an X config file hasn't been a thing in more than 10 years, it will take you some fiddling with your favourite Wayland compositor (of which only three -- two massive DEs and a tiling compositor -- are anywhere near being useful) just to get it to stop crashing on that one application that you need, or to get things like multiple monitors or middle-click copying and pasting between two particularly misbehaved applications to work. Ironically enough, the least pretentious of them, sway, is by far the most solid.

It's basically all the fun we had with X11 back in 2003, just to get an environment that's about as dependable (though admittedly much faster) as X11 back in 1993.

It's one of those cases where the "release early, release often" mantra kindda seems to work against us. I'm sure ten years from now Wayland will be just as solid as X11 was back in 2013, aka "good enough", but there's a different kind of crowd looking at this stuff today.

Unfortunately, the anti-Wayland buzz propagates easily because the community response is inevitably unsympathetic. Mention things like "I tried Wayland for an afternoon, applications kept crashing" and you'll inevitably get a dozen answers, all of them along the lines of nah bro I'm running Gnome Wayland which is the default in Fedora 67 on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and I'm not getting any crashes. Well, yeah, 90% of the projects that failed to get traction and adoption in the field of graphical systems did so because they couldn't make the transition from "running on its developers' and fans' computers" to "running on everyone's computer". I can run Wayland on my system just fine, too, but I'm the only one in my immediate circle of nerds who can.

Are you saying that Wayland doesn’t not only run on Nvidia, it’s also buggy as hell?

Yeah, I also should have said that the response of the other part of the community isn't exactly sympathetic (or useful), either.

Truth is, a lot of the reason why X11 works so well today is that a bunch of us put up with a lot of X11 crap back in the day. E.g. things like xdotool haven't existed forever, either, and it took a lot of itches (and imperfect way of scratching them) before someone wrote that. X11 wasn't exactly hassle-free for a very long time. And you get to fiddle with config files with Wayland, too, but none of these files are as long as a small section in XF86Config.

That's how free software matures -- in the open. If you want to contribute towards hiring a team of testers, you're welcome, because no one does that as a hobby. And all this is in a context were fewer and fewer developers are interested in desktop development, and fewer and fewer companies are interested in investing in desktop development.

> And all this is in a context were fewer and fewer developers are interested in desktop development, and fewer and fewer companies are interested in investing in desktop development.

Which could make X11 the last linux/unix desktop thing. Anything new would have to come with the whole desktop paradigm shift.

SurfaceFlinger.