If “the wheel” is achieved by making literally every application you run a keylogger, I’m very cool with Wayland “reinventing the wheel”. X11’s handling of user input is a fucking embarrassment.

Besides just the Steam Deck and Proton, a big reason people are finally sticking around on Linux is because using X11 feels exactly like what it is: a cobbled-together piece of archaic shit that needs to be left behind.

Wayland by contrast feels fantastic to run, and on my GTX 1070 with proprietary drivers, the only current issue I have with it is how Firefox picture-in-picture popouts don’t stay on top by default.

'tis the wheeland experience :3. At least we can have monitors with different refresh rates tho

As is we do kinda have 2 standards, both equally bad, and you just have to pick your poison

Not sure how this applies when:

• X11 was the only standard prior to Wayland.
• GNOME is dropping X11 in a short time.
• KDE’s telemetry even five months ago showed 80+% of (that portion of) their userbase uses Wayland, and they plan to drop X11 once they have a concrete set of problems worked out.
• Hyprland and Sway run Wayland exclusively.
• Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce are working on Wayland sessions. Cinnamon’s is there but, I think, still experimental.
• Budgie is working to go Wayland-only.
• There’s no sign that Wayland will stop improving from a state that’s arguably already much better than X11.
• X11’s actual maintainers barely want anything to do with it beyond bug fixes, and the only person who wants to “innovate” it via a fork is a bigot and a fucking moron who doesn’t know things you learn in CS 101.
• X11’s maintainers are majorly involved in developing Wayland and have been since the start. This is their idea.

It seems like it went from “Situation: there is one standard” to “Situation: there are two standards developed by largely the same people with one set to replace the other”, and then soon: “Situation: there is one standard and one translation layer kept around for a decade or so for compatibility.”

Not every single time someone tries to make things better is this xkcd relevant; this had nothing to do with unifying standards and everything to do with superseding one.

The init wars!

(There is a comic somewhere here)