That's a bold claim. It doesn't tell me there is zero evidence... hardly anything has zero evidence. It just tells me you either reject the evidence or haven't looked. It's not hard to check. For the lazy, Wikipedia provides a nice summary and 82 references to get more details. But that's just a starting point.

> there are suddenly two types of people

This comment is pretty revealing. For almost any trait, there are way more than two types of people. Usually there's a whole spectrum with lots of diversity. It's a beautiful thing. What would be very unusual is if there was only one type of person, or only two types.

Even distinct "types" is a bit of a misleading concept. Instead of distinct types or buckets, most things have more of a cluster or nebula structure. Each individual member of a cluster is different, but has overall similarities, on average, to other members. There will usually be a fairly dense core, and then it gets more sparse with distance. And there will often be several clusters near each other, overlapping, so there is no clear boundary between one cluster and another. That is how descriptive categories work... nebulous clusters in thingspace, where that space is a many-dimensional abstract space with each trait having its own axis, and many degrees of each trait.

For convenience and efficiency, we use labels to refer to these clusters, but when deeper understanding is needed, or more nuanced communication, the labels stop being a useful simplification. It's like trying to dig out a splinter with a shovel; shovels are very useful, but they're way too coarse and blunt for something as precise as a splinter. A deep enough understanding requires us to more explicitly recognize the cluster structure and the multidimensional spectrum of diversity.

Don't mistake the map (the labels, or the "types" of people) for the territory (the rich variety of life).

But what's even more wild to me is the people leaving comments refusing to believe that different people are actually different. Refusing to believe aphantasia or hyperphantasia exists. Refusing to believe that other people are telling the truth when they describe their experiences. Insisting that everyone is the same, actually, and anyone who thinks differences are real must be confused or misunderstanding something.

I guess these are both types of cognitive disability... but I know what aphantasia is called. Not sure what the other thing is called, but I'd imagine it's something which sounds pretty unflattering.

Becoming active on Twitter in 2016: popcorn

Becoming active on Xitter in 2026: red ballcap

It makes a statement. Is it a statement you want to make?

So I keep hearing. But hardly anyone ever talks about what's underneath the tip... and when they do, it turns out to be a big mess under there, not a mountain of advantages.

> just like there is no spoon, there are also no windows, only surfaces

Yes, I understand. That's why programs can't position their own windows, or get or set the mouse position. It doesn't even assume the coordinates are 2-dimensional. It's all very futuristic and makes a lot of interesting things possible, like using Minecraft as a compositor, or a Facebook style Metaverse compositor. But you're not hearing what I'm saying:

Wayland is solving the wrong problems. What it can do is pretty neat, but what it does is not what people need. It's good at party tricks, but bad at solving the real needs of daily life. It largely solves problems that nobody had, and to do this, it breaks major features people need. Much like how Facebook's Metaverse failed, nobody really wants to do their spreadsheets in Minecraft.

> It doesn't do your laundry

Yeah, and that's part of the problem. To use your analogy, it's like removing someone's washer and dryer, and replacing them with a box of tools which don't do laundry. It may be a really fancy foundation for building efficient laundry appliances, but that's not what people need. People may have used it to build an entire ecosystem of laundry appliances, but they couldn't agree on basic things so the ecosystem became fragmented, such that P-brand soap doesn't work in Q-brand washers, and clothes washed in Q-brand washers can't be dried in R-brand dryers, and if you use a P-brand washer you need to take fifteen extra steps to prepare it for a drying cycle, and T-brand dryers can only be used for pants, and ... etc etc. It's a big complex mess which, after 18 years of development, still doesn't let me get my socks clean. And most of it doesn't work at all for people who use a wheelchair.

> when your input and graphics go directly through your compositor ... input directly to the game

When they cut out the middleware, the middleware stops working. And when they make it impossible to add middleware, it stops being possible to do all sorts of useful things. Sure, it may be a millisecond faster, but in exchange, all my keys get mapped wrong, or I can't use my notebook without physically touching it (and causing repetitive strain injury), or my autoclicker stops working, or my accessibility tools become impossible to fix, or my automatic time tracker is treated as a security violation, or the solution which works for me suddenly won't work for my friend who uses a different compositor, or ... etc etc etc.

It architecturally eliminates entire categories of useful things... in order to make the simplest case slightly faster. This provides a more pleasant experience for average able-bodied normal people with no uncommon needs or preferences, while making things worse for everyone else. In particular, the complete lack of accessibility in Wayland is very able-ist and makes it unusuable for anyone with disabilities. That sort of thing needs to be built deep into the core, but it was instead rejected outright and left as an afterthought exercise for Someone Else to solve.

> [this] feature is the job of the compositor. Most compositors already have this feature ... GNOME and KDE have their own solutions, as do most of the others

This really gets at the nature of Wayland's biggest problem. A ton of important things are rejected and declared to be Someone Else's Problem. The compositors have attempted to deal with the aftermath of this mistake, but they all do their own thing and refuse to agree on a lot, so instead of one robust solution, we end up with an entire fragmented ecosystem of partial solutions which aren't compatible with each other.

It's even more of a nightmare for application developers. Instead of needing to support Windows, MacOS, and X11, suddenly they need to support Windows, MacOS, X11, GNOME, KDE, Sway, Weston, Hyprland, Enlightenment, Niri, etc. Every time two compositors disagree on something, it means every application must add support for both of the ways of doing it, like how they are now required to optionally draw their own title bar and window frame, depending on which compositor the user has... and good luck getting two programs from two different developers to draw their frames in the same visual style.

> Wayland really isn't trying to prevent you from doing things

It may not be trying, but it sure is succeeding.

Curiously, people always seem to list the same advantages, and it's a very short list. Fewer (but still non-zero) torn frames are the top of the list pretty much every time, since that was the very first thing its creator listed in his original goals... but that's a pretty small benefit in exchange for breaking entire categories of functionality. Like, it looks smoother when I scroll, but features I rely on heavily every day are forbidden.

As for input latency... that doesn't seem like it was ever a problem. Using X11, I'm able to get 500 to 1000 inputs per second even on a potato PC. That's faster than the frame rate of pretty much any screen, and fast enough even for audio / midi purposes. Reducing input latency from ~1.5ms to ~1.0ms doesn't really matter when the timeslice scheduling has ~6ms of jitter on an average system, a common screen only draws a frame every ~16ms, and many input devices have 50+ ms of their own additional latency.

> if you want to take a screenshot in a generic way, you have to go through the XDG portal API

This is a symptom of what's wrong with Wayland. Wayland doesn't do screenshots. Like many things users need, they decided it was someone else's problem, and threw it over the fence for the fragmented ecosystem of downstream projects to solve. So each downstream project came up with their own workarounds for essential features not existing. The solutions had to be built entirely outside of Wayland, and even after years of development, the solutions are still incomplete, unreliable, complex, and full of caveats. It required (and still requires) everyone except Wayland's core devs to write a lot more code for less functionality than they used to get with a couple of simple API calls. They had to architect entire complex infrastructure layers in order to work around a missing feature in the core protocol, since the core devs stubbornly refused to allow it.

Similar situation for input automation and remote control. It's a common thing people need. I use it every day and can't use the notebook at my desk without it... but the Wayland folks refused to solve it, so it had to be done outside of Wayland. For example, one workaround is to give the user direct access to the kernel so they can create fake input devices at a kernel level, and generate the inputs they need, which Wayland then sees as a local physical keyboard or mouse. So... problem solved, from Wayland's point of view. The user gets what they need, sort of, and it's implemented outside of Wayland, so Wayland doesn't have any security issues. But... and this is a big "but"... the solution involves giving users device-level kernel access. Which seems significantly worse than the issue it was originally trying to solve.

> I understand where you're coming from, but there is no turning back at this point.

A position of "sure it has major problems, but it's too late now" is not a position of progress. Much like the situation with pulseaudio being deployed everywhere then replaced with pipewire, it's almost never too late to fix bad software architecture. As you said, this whole ecosystem is still very much a moving target.

The ideal solution would be the creation of a new system which supports the features, protocols, and APIs of the older system(s), in a way which "just works". But that requires a very different mindset from the people behind it. Instead of "not my problem, someone else can deal with it" like the Wayland policy, a proper solution needs people to adopt a "the buck stops here" approach, and take responsibility for making the entire system work. Things like accessibility, network transparency, automation, and legacy support... need to be built in from the ground up, not rejected or treated as an afterthought for someone else to handle.

BTW, what's the policy on that sort of thing here?

I often still use just ALSA, but pipewire is at least pretty decent and mostly "just works". Unlike pulseaudio, which was kind of a plague on Linux audio for ages.

On that note, for about 15 years, a funny thing kept happening. Any time anything on my Linux boxes broke, I'd trace the issue to its origin (bug hunting was literally my job, after all), and about half, maybe even two thirds of the time... it traced back to Lennart Poettering. That man was singlehandedly responsible for more than half the bugs I encountered for a decade and a half. It became so routine that I started practicing my impression of Severus Snape, so I could shake my fist at the sky and exclaim, "Poettering!!!"

Anyway, Wayland feels like another one of those... where someone has to do it wrong and create a lot of trouble before someone else comes along to do it right. But that second part hasn't happened yet. So it's still in a broken state where half the stuff I do on a daily basis isn't even possible in Wayland.

So he started his own fork.

The ban didn't seem to have any relation to politics or personal behavior. However, he was widely known for being ... how to put it in a way which is acceptable here ... uh, difficult to deal with. Like, after Linus Torvalds made a vow to be nicer, he made an exception just one time... for metux. He was the only person obnoxious enough to get Linus to break his vow. Which, if I recall correctly, was how he ended up focusing on the Xorg project. After getting booted from Linux, he picked a different project.

That's who is in charge of XLibre.

Things didn't get political until he announced the fork. Because, although politics had nothing to do with him getting banned (either time), he framed it as if he was being targeted for political reasons, and used inflammatory political language in the project's documentation. This gained a lot of attention and caused a lot of controversy, and also had the effect of ensuring the contributors all had mostly the same political views.

Anyway, the number of commits doesn't tell much of the story. The content of the commits (especially the reverted ones at Xorg) are far more enlightening.

My theory about the motivation behind the extra security is that it's largely driven by corporations wanting to make desktop Linux less free and less open, and normalize proprietary software instead of open-source. Because profit. Proprietary software is inherently not trustworthy, so the execution environment needs extra security and restrictions, and must be generally less powerful to reduce the damage it can do. Essentially, proprietary software needs the same precautions as malware. So the corps needed to "androidify" desktop Linux. Hence the change from curated distro package repositories to corporate app stores, and the reason why there's so much money pushing to replace X11 with Wayland.

In an open-source ecosystem, users and developers are one and the same, or at least on the same "side", cooperating with each other to make tools which work as well as possible for everyone. Each big program tends to be a collaborative effort where a lot of people contribute to make things better for everyone. Things mostly "just work" and people can typically trust their computers not to do anything weird or hostile.

Very different than a proprietary commercial ecosystem, where users and developers have more of an adversarial relationship. Each program tends to be created in a closed silo by one person or a relatively small team, and is designed primarily to extract money from users, with all other concerns being secondary. It is very common for profit-driven developers to engage in deceptive practices, or do things the user doesn't want, like showing advertisements, collecting and selling data, sabotaging products from competitors, using the device as a node in a botnet or secret compute farm, forcing unwanted updates, microtransactions or subscription fees, etc. So nothing can be trusted, and the entire system needs extensive protections against every type of misbehavior imaginable... even if that means reducing the power and features available to the user.

I've really enjoyed the past few decades of living entirely in the open-source world, where those problems pretty much just don't exist. But with corps pushing the androidification of desktop Linux, I fear those days may be coming to an end.

Wayland is now about 18 years old. So, by Wayland standards, only 3 more years until it, too, will be obsolete and need to be replaced.

That day can't come soon enough. :D

Maybe the next one will actually be able to do the things I need a display system to do. Until then, at least we've still got X11. And Wayland has taught everyone all sorts of things about what not to do.

(spoiler: he's the admin of /r/flashlight, an expert on lighting, a widely respected reviewer, maintainer of the community's quarterly "arbitrary list of popular flashlights", author of "ceilingbounce" for measuring torch brightness over time, and someone who calls himself a "huge nerd" ... so yeah, he knows a thing or two)

The main thing is... it's gotta have open-source firmware. After switching to something like QMK, I wouldn't want to go back. I customize stuff too deeply to go back... like 8 to 12 layers and a bunch of completely custom behavior. And for notebooks, remappers like Kanata help immensely.

Ideally it's nice to have a small touchpad under the space bar, like maybe 4 keys wide, retro style, meaning a high-DPI zero-force touchpad. But that's optional. With good firmware, I don't really need a mouse because MouseKeys and Warp do most of what I need.

The world has a lot of problems, but ... at least we've got a wide selection of awesome keyboards these days, to suit nearly every person's style and taste. Typing has never been better.